This Monday I gave a presentation on Sarah Kofman's 'Smothered Words'. She was a French Philosopher of Derridean ilk and committed suicide in 1994. She instigates a very interesting blurring of the boundaries between philosophy and biography.
For me, most engaging, was her attempt to rescue Humanism from the all-devouring jaws of Deconstructive theory. I have long thought myself a humanist, but to avoid a totalising account that disregards the real differences that do exist between people, on what can I say this shared Humanity is based?
It is by no means polished, but perhaps the open-ended ( rough-edged), is more to Kofman's taste:
After her death, Jean Luc Nancy observed that it had been Sarah Kofman's philosophical project to eke out 'truth that returns to life'. In 'Smothered Words', Kofman confronts the sheer inadequacy of language to depict the unspeakable inhumanities of the Nazi concentration camps. She argues that writers must repudiate idyllic aesthetic techniques that render this experience palatable in favour of the more truthful, 'sublime' aesthetics epitomised by Robert Antelme's book 'The Human Race'. According to Antelme, the detainee’s defiance of that core totalitarian ambition: to divide and transform the human is a truth that rings across the gaping lacuna of fraught post-holocaust expression. Finally, Kofman does return this truth to life, uncovering a tentative humanism founded in her dawning recognition of a human unity that lies not in essences but in choice.
Theodore Adorno famously proclaimed that 'after Auschwitz poetry is barbarous'. Traditional aesthetics cannot neatly describe a historical experience whose unimaginable horror defies words. However he was to go on to acknowledge that a numbing silence about the Holocaust is no alternative but rather enfeebles our capacity to ward off Auschwitz's recurrence. In selections from 'Smothered Words' Kofman confronts Adorno’s double bind: how to communicate the incommunicable. Auschwitz buried the possibility of the beautiful story. The soothing empathy encouraged by idyllic narrative is dangerous: it suggests that with just a few words we can 'grasp' the unknowable. Nonetheless, she emphasises the duty to speak 'infinitely'. Antelme’s The Human Race provides Kofman’s writerly alternative: it is sublime. Romantic literary norms typically conceive the sublime as a transcendent beyond conceptualisation, overreaching the possible. It provides then the only truth befitting post-holocaust writing. Antelme’s sublime aesthetic derives its truth from horror and the unbeautiful: 'eating peelings' revealed as the exemplary 'great' defiant act.
According to Hannah Arendt the totalitarian project seeks to extend its total domination beyond exterminating people. The camps serve as a ghastly experiment in the transformation of human nature itself, the destruction of spontaneity and conversion of the human into the thing. Kofman confirms Arendt’s diagnosis, describing this will to total power as the “demented interpretation of some Nietzschean aphorism” p. 58. For her, the truth that Antelme’s book evinces is the failure of the Totalitarian ambition to transform the human. The detainees, whilst degraded from particular humanity to bare humanity, cut adrift from conventional conceptions of selfhood, nonetheless remain men and women. Humanness proves the most encompassing category that subsumes all lesser divisions and differences.
But of what does this shared humanness consist? Antelme’s unbeautiful aesthetic portrays a humanity brutally dehumanised yet persisting nonetheless. Death, rather than the gate to Christian everlasting life is absolute evil. The most basic acts of survival, pissing and eating scraps, become heroic demonstrations of resistance. Mere biological need is a radical affirmation of common humanity shared with others. Language itself remains another unifying factor despite the ideologically imposed divisions of camp life. Kofman celebrates the subversive, that which escapes the power of the regime and allows detainees not to compete with the SS but to laugh at it. Derision deflates the totalitarian megalomania that “everything is possible”.
For Kofman, common humanity is explicitly revealed in men and women’s universal capacity to make a choice: the decision either to kill or act ethically. In the camps, detached from his/her former identity and rendered the Other to themselves, ethics have nothing to do with conventional norms positing the ideal dignity of the self. Ethical behaviour is expressed in the most basic of decencies; in sharing scraps with the Other. To not be indifferent to the Other’s survival is the highest value because it justifies all others. This is the most authentic “revaluation of all values”. In this nexus, even the terrible power of the executioner is but a human power; one of our choices. Impinged upon by this limitation, the SS’s ideology of aryan superiority falls drastically short. They too are human. Even at our most polarised, when the distance between the master race and their detainee slaves is an abyss, there remains still one race and everything that tries to assert the contrary is an abominable lie.
Nietzsche’s assertion that man is an indeterminate “bridge” to the ‘Übermenschen” betrays his refutation of a traditional Humanist faith in a common self-determining subjectivity. For the post-holocaust thinker however, indeterminacy is rendered in more complex shades. It does not mean that human nature can be transformed but it does indicate that the human has multiple potentials of killing and of promising. Antelme’s sublime ‘truth’ offers two affirmations, indissoluble and beyond explanation: the first being the unity of all humans, and the second our singularity and choice. The dehumanisation of the camps is the affirmation of the uniqueness of each inhabitant: that everyone must choose for themself.
Confounding modish critiques that posit humanism as a crude doctrine of universal self-mastery, Kofman deploys a ‘sublime’ aesthetics to fashion a post-deconstructive humanism that retains difference, while advocating the vital community of those without community. Her open-ended humanism is founded neither on difference nor shared essence (as in traditional humanism) but on the freedom of all humans to chose. These powers are not independent of historical conditions but, similarly, they are not reducible to them. Kofman insists that Auschwitz is no historical aberration but an ever-present potential. Both the SS and detainees, despite the lack of a relation, had a relation; an expansive common choice that proves humanity both infinitely indestructible and destructible.I look forward to reading more, when my horrific exam period is at end.
