Reflections on The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1: From Neuronal Power to Vita Activa)

Stanford University Press (2015)

 

 

I. 

 

Many years ago, I wrote a short novel that dealt with existential themes of boredom, fatigue, world-weariness, etc. It was called Exhaustion and the first line read:  'Ours is essentially a fagged-out age, so ... Oh fuck it, who cares? I can't be bothered to write any more.' 

 

As a matter of fact, that was also the last line.    

 

Anyway, this is only coincidently relevant to Byung-Chul Han's essay The Burnout Society [a] and it's his work which I would like to discuss here ... 

II.

 

Neuronal Power

 

"Every age has its signature afflictions." [1] 

 

That's a great opening line, I think. Unfortunately, what follows now seems amusingly naive and dated: 

 

"Despite fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind. From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons." [1]

 

I suppose, writing in 2010, Han wasn't to know what 2019 would bring; although some might say that as a theorist and commentator who draws on literature, philosophy, and both the social and natural sciences, it's his job to anticipate possibilities in the foreseeable future and not just rehash ideas from the past.

 

That seems a bit harsh, however, so let's just overlook the above and concede that neurological conditions - including depression, personality disorder, and burnout syndrome - also play a significant role in life today. 

 

These are not viral infections, but infarctions, says Han, that result from "an excess of positivity" [1]. He continues: "The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts."

 

We have, if you like, been sent mad with fatigue by our own 24/7 lifestyles (lived increasingly online), in which all Otherness is exorcised. And because Otherness is disappearing, "we live in a time that is poor in negativity" [4] - even if rich in difference (the form by which the Same likes to disguise itself).    

Beyond Disciplinary Society

Like Baudrillard, Han wants us to forget Foucault - or, at any rate, agree that today's society is no longer the one that Foucault described fifty-years ago. The prisons, asylums, and workhouses, of old have been replaced by fitness studios, fast-food outlets, and shopping malls:

 

"Twenty-first century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]. Also its inhabitants are no longer 'obedience-subjects' but 'achievement-subjects'. They are entrepreneurs of themselves." [8]    

Foucault's theory of power simply cannot account for how things are now, says Han. 

 

However, whilst I agree that the world has changed, it's simply mistaken to say that Foucault's cratology is tied to a negative (or repressive) model of power; the power to prohibit and say No. Foucault explicitly rejects this model and challenges traditional representations in which power is characterised in an exclusively restrictive manner; "poor in resources, sparing of its methods, monotonous in the tactics it utilizes, incapable of invention, and seemingly doomed always to repeat itself" [b]. 

 

Contrary to the above, Foucault offers us a gay, energy-based model of power outside of accepted values and beyond the "negative and emaciated form of prohibition" [c]. This model allows power to produce things - including forms of knowledge - as well as induce pleasures. And so, it explains very well why - as Han later notes - despite there being a paradigm shift from disciplinary society to achievement society, there has been a level of continuity and no real break exists between the modal verbs Should and Can. 

 

In other words, achievement society still has the same network of power running through it as disciplinary society. It's just that whereas the latter required our obedience to authority, the former requires us to show some initiative and be self-motivated and self-expressive - and, above all, achieve - to the point of exhaustion and depression [d].   

 

The contemporary subject is voluntarily self-exploitative; the perfect worker, determined to have a nice day and always wear that happy face (until the crack-up and break down comes due to excessive positivity and compulsive freedom).  

 

 

Profound Boredom

 

"Excessive positivity also expresses iself as an excess of stimuli, information, and impulses. It radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered." [12]

 

Perhaps this is why Han chooses to publish his work in essay form and to favour short sentences; he's making a somewhat patronising assumption about his reader's ability to concentrate and follow complex arguments at length. 

 

Of course, he might have a point: I know that my own ability to think has flattened over recent years, even as it has broadened and, indeed, accelerated. For Han, this shows regression to animality. For wild animals, he says, are "incapable of contemplative immersion" [12]; they are always alert to what's going on around them and easily distracted [e].               

  

For Han, human regression of this nature is a bad thing. Why? Because we owe the cultural achievements of humanity "to deep, contemplative attention" [13]. Scatty individuals may by good at multitasking and playing video games (not things Han approves of), but they'll never produce great works of art or philosophy. Having a low boredom threshold, makes one incapable of "the profound idleness that benefits the creative process" [13].

Unfortunately, this simply sounds like bourgeois snobbery (even when you call upon Walter Benjamin and Nietzsche for support).

And so, whilst I can certainly see the attractions of the vita contemplativa, I'm not going to knock those for whom such a life would be intolerable, nor denigrate the cognitive abilities (and dancing skills) of animals.      

 

 

Vita Activa

 

One philosopher who wasn't prepared to simply dismiss the via activa as mere restless stupidity, was Hannah Arendt [f]. Particularly if action results in the birth of something new. 

 

Unfortunately, Arendt thinks that modern society - as a society of perfected slavery - "nullifies any possibility for action when it degrades the human being into an animal laborans, a beast of burden" [17], subsumed within the herd. 

 

Byung-Chul Han doesn't buy into this argument, however, and doesn't think Arendt has much to tell us about today's world:

"Arendt's descriptions of the modern animal laborans do not correspond to what we can observe in today's achievement society. The late-modern animal laborans does not give up its individuality or ego in order to merge, through the work it performs, with the anonymous life of the species. Rather, contemporary labour society [...] fosters individuality ... The late-modern animal laborans is equipped with an ego just short of bursting. And it is anything but passive [...] It is hyperactive and hyperneurotic." [17-18]  

 

I suppose that's why Frank Costanza's cry of Serenity now! continues to resonate so powerfully; we all desire a little peace and quiet in our lives [g]. And that perhaps requires learning how to live a little more slowly; Han argues that everything seems sped up and transient today:   

 

"The general denarrativization of the world [following the death of God] is reinforcing the feeling of fleetingness. It makes life bare." [18]

 

Indeed, it makes life so bare, that it's even barer "than the life of homo sacer" [18] [h] - which is really bare! Almost unbearable in its bareness: and yet we seek to preserve ourselves and keep going as long as possible. Han says we are like the Muselmänner, "albeit well fed and probably obese" [19]. 

 

An unpleasant remark on which to close the first part of this post, but Byung-Chul said it, not me ...

Notes

 

[a] I'm reading the English translation by Erik Butler, published by Stanford University Press in 2015, and all page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

      The original German work, entitled Müdigkeitsgesellschaft, was published in Berlin by Matthes & Seitz Verlag, in 2010. Readers will note that the title literally translates as 'Fatigue Society', but I suppose the term burnout - coined in 1970 by the German-born American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger - has greater contemporary resonance. Freudenberger defined burnout as a state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by overwork amongst professionals. See his book Burn Out: The High Cost of High Achievement (1980). 

 

[b] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998), p. 85.

 

[c] Ibid., p. 86.

 

[d] It should be noted that unlike French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, Han doesn't think that depression is simply the pathological expression of an individual's failure to become themselves. He also thinks that it also arises from a lack of attachment [Bindungsarmut] to others within an increasingly fragmented and atomised society: 

      "Ehrenberg lends no attention to this aspect of depression. He also overlooks the systemic violence inhabiting achievement society, which provokes psychic infarctions. It is not the imperative only to belong to oneself, but the pressure to achieve that causes exhaustive depression. Seen in this light, burnout syndrome does not express the exhausted self so much as the exhausted, burnt-out soul. According to Ehrenberg, depression spreads when the commandments and prohibitions of disciplinary society yield to self-responsibility and initiative. In reality, it is not the excess of responsibility and initiative that makes one sick, but the imperative to achieve: the new commandment of late-modern labour society." [10]

      To be fair, I've not read Ehrenberg's work, so can't say if Han's criticism is justified. Readers who wish to make up their own minds should see The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, trans. Enrico Caouette et al, (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010).   

[e] I'm not sure about this. It's true, perhaps, that monkey's don't meditate, but I've watched my cat sit for hours staring at the same spot having heard a sound that suggests to her the presence of a small rodent and it seems to me that this might legitimately be described as a form of contemplative immersion. One suspects that Han is guilty of anthropocentric conceit to suggest otherwise and it's worth noting that later in this chapter he writes: "Only human beings can dance" [14], which seems palpably untrue. However, it's also worth noting that - somewhat paradoxically - in the chapter Vita Activa Han refers to the serenity [Gelassenheit] of animals [18], which, he argues, man has lost. 

[f] See The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998). This work was first published in 1958, so the fact that parts of its sociological analysis are dated is hardly surprising. 

 

[g] I have written on this desire for serenity in an earlier post on Torpedo the Ark: click here. 

[h] Homo sacer, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, refers to an accursed figure, excluded from society because of some trespass, whom any citizen may kill without incurring punishment. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben developed the term within his work, using it to stand for an absolutely expendable life (such as the life of a Jewish inmate in a Nazi concentration camp, for example). See Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford University Press, 1998). 

 

 

To read part two of this post on The Burnout Society, click here. 

If We Could Talk to the Animals

Sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus)

  

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains 

the hottest blood of all ... [1]

 

 

As far as I recall, even Doctor Doolittle - who, famously, abandoned his human patients in favour of treating animals, with whom he could communicate in their various languages - never spoke to a sperm whale. But, apparently, an interdisciplinary group of scientists may now be close to so doing, with help from AI technology ...

 

The Cetacean Translation Initiative aims to decode the astonishing variety of clicks and whistles made by sperm whales. If successful, the project would be the first time (outside of fiction) that humans will be able to understand - and presumably employ - the language of another species (if, that is, animal utterances can legitimately be described as a language) [2].   

 

Of course, learning to decipher and communicate in whale-speech isn't going to be easy, even with the most advanced systems of artificial intelligence. But it's an intriguing project and one wonders what Moby Dick might have to tell us ... 

 

Alas, I fear it won't be anything very pleasing to human ears; for I suspect that these huge, intelligent mammals will, like elephants, have long memories and will thus recall the industrial scale slaughter of their kind by man during the last 300 years [3]. 

 

Maybe, to paraphrase Nietzsche, they'll accuse us not only of being the most absurd and unfortunate of all animals, but also the cruellest [4]. 

 

But maybe, if we're lucky, they'll also teach us something about love ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Whales weep not!', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 607-08. 

      This poem can be found online at poets.org: click here. Some readers might recall that the opening two lines were quoted by Capt. Kirk in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (dir. Leonard Nimoy, 1986), which features a pair of humpback whales. 

 

[2] Scientists and linguists are still uncertain whether or not animals can be said to truly possess language. For vocalisations can only be called a language if it can be shown that they possess fixed meanings and structures (i.e., without semantics and grammar, you just have a lot of clicks, grunts, squeaks, and squawks).   

 

[3] Although sperm whales are now a protected species and remaining populations are large enough that their conservation status is rated as vulnerable rather than endangered, the recovery from centuries of commercial whaling will be a slow process and it's doubtful the number of whales inhabiting the world's oceans will ever be what it once was. 

 

[4] See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III. 224. 

 

 

Musical bonus: 'Talk to the Animals', written by Leslie Bricusse for the film Doctor Dolittle (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1967). Performed by Rex Harrison (as Doolittle), it won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and has been recorded by numerous artists, including Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, and Sammy Davis Jr. 

      Click here to listen to Bobby Darin's take on the song, from the album Bobby Darin Sings Doctor Doolittle, (Atlantic Records, 1967). 

Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 2: From Porn to The End of Theory)

Byung-Chul Han

 

IV. 

 

Whilst philosophe du moment Byung-Chul Han gives reference to the four great Bs of 20th-century French philosophy - Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, and Baudrillard - it's clear that The Agony of Eros (2017) is primarily written under the influence of Alain Badiou. 

 

Which means his defence of love is really just an excuse to stage a neo-Marxist assault upon techno-capitalism, developing his argument that the latter is responsible for creating a burned-out society in which an obscene (pornographic) ideal of transparency and self-disclosure is the cultural norm, compromising other values, including secrecy, silence, and shame, upon which eros (and mental health) depend.    

 

Writing in The Burnout Society (2015), Han describes a pathological landscape shaped by depression, attention defecit disorder, and exhaustion, all thanks to a 24/7 lifestyle of continuous positivity - a form of violence in his view - in which we are all expected to become entrepreneurs of the self. This leads not only to ever greater levels of self-exploitation, but to narcissism, and thus the extermination of Otherness, which, once more, is crucial for love and, indeed, society. 

 

For when subjects are concerned exclusively with themselves, then relationship with others becomes impossible - as does thought - and we end up living in l'enfer du même ruled over by the kind of painfully inferior and deeply stupid politicians presently posturing (and virtue signalling) on the global stage. 

 

Anyway, let's return to The Agony of Eros (2017). I remind readers that the titles given in bold are Han's own and that page numbers given refer to the English edition of the text, translated by Erik Butler and published by the MIT Press. 

 

 

V.

 

Porn

Han opens his fourth chapter with the kind of concise statement that readers will either love or loathe: "Porn is a matter of bare life on display." [29] 

 

It's an attempt, I suppose, to distill Baudrillard's rather complex idea of porn as the hyperreality of sex (i.e. the more sexual than sex) into a kind of pithy observation that some will find profound and others see as a piece of shallow sloganeering. Of course, it could be both ... 

Si vous aimez l'amour, vous aimerez le surréalisme, said André Breton [a]. But if you love Love, you're also going to hate porn, which, according to Han, is antagonistic to eros and spells the end of sexuality as he would have it; i.e., something authentic, something natural, something sacred. 

 

The pornographication of the world is, he says, "unfolding as the profanation of the world" [29] - and this is a very bad thing; presumably because some things, like love, should be reserved only for the gods and not made freely available for misuse and commercial exploitation by mortals. 

 

Men might be encouraged to play with love - one possible definition of erotics. But should not be allowed to debase love - one possible definition of porn, in which there is nothing playful, nothing sanctified, nothing mysterious: "In contrast, the erotic is never free of secrecy." [32]             

 

Again, all this interests, but it does seem to be going over old ground; do we really want to resurrect the tired opposition between eroticism on the one side and porn on the other? One recalls D. H. Lawrence's axiom: "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another." [b]  

 

 

Fantasy

 

In Why Love Hurts (Polity, 2012), Eva Illouz makes the fascinating claim that, thanks to dating apps like Tinder, desire is no longer determined by the unconscious mind, so much as conscious selection. 

 

What's more, she argues, we have had our imagination heightened by all the faces and bodies we encounter online, with the result that we are more often disappointed with those we meet in the real world; the flesh never shapes up.  

 

Han doesn't quite buy this though: 

 

"Counter to what Illouz assumes, desire is not 'rationalized' today by increasing opportunities for, and criteria of, choice. Instead, unchecked freedom of choice is threatening to bring about the end of desire. [...] Today's ego [...] does not desire. To be sure, consumer culture is constantly producing new wants and needs by means of media images and narratives. But desire is something different from both wanting and needing. Illouz does not take the libido-economical particularity of desire into account." [37]

For Han, fantasy survives because it inhabits an undefined space that is outside the network of information-technology: 

 

"It is not heightened fantasy, but - if anything - higher expectations that are responsible for the mounting disappointment experienced in contemporary society." [ 38]

 

The high information density of social media is not conducive to the imagination. That's why, says Han, "pornography which maximizes visual information [...] destroys erotic fantasy" [38]. The secret of eroticism is that it forever withdraws the object of one's desire from view; it provides a glimpse, but never reveals all. Love - like horror - takes place in the shadows. Indeed, at its most extreme, love is blind and makes blind; a retreat into the "twilight space of dreams and desire" [40].        

 

Unfortunately, today, "faced with the sheer volume of hypervisible images, we can no longer shut our eyes" [40]. Compulsive (and compulsory) hypervigilance certainly makes it extremely difficult to do so and hypervisibility might be thought the "telos of the society of transparency" [40-41].  

 

The agony of eros thus involves not only a crisis of fantasy, but being forced like Alex in A Clockwork Orange to have our eyelids clamped open, so that we might see everything all of the time. 

 

The Politics of Eros

 

Oh dear, Byung-Chul Han and I are forced to part company once more; too much talk, right from the off, concerning the universal nature of love (Badiou) and beautiful souls guided by Eros (Plato) ... 

 

As for contemporary politics within a burnout society, well, according to Han, it's founded on pleasure-based desire (epithumia) and has no interest in either eros or thumos - the latter being something I have written about on Torpedo the Ark: click here and/or here, for example [c].

 

Whilst acknowledging that "a politics of love will never exist" [44], that doesn't stop Han dreaming of love stories unfolding against a background of political events and of a secret resonance existing between politics and love. For political action is "mutual desire for another way of living - a more just world aligned with eros on every register" [44]. 

 

Is it? That's news to me. I mean it could be that, but it could be something entirely different; a politics of evil, for example, which understands love to be an eternal part of life, but only a part: "And when it is treated as if it were a whole, it becomes a disease [...]" [d].      

 

That, in a nutshell, is my concern with Byung-Chul Han: that he turns a once healthy process of the human soul (love) into a diseased ideal and I suggest he read Lawrence's hugely important novels Aaron's Rod (1922) and Kangaroo (1923) to get an astonishing insight into this. Or some Nietzsche.      

 

 

The End of Theory

 

When not inspired by the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism, Heidegger was moved by the beating wings of the god of love; it was Eros who encouraged him as a thinker to venture along previously untrodden paths into the incalculable. At least that's what he told his wife. And Han believes him, because he also believes that:

 

"Without seduction by the atopic Other, which sparks erotic desire, thinking withers into mere work, which always reproduces the Same." [47] 

 

Thinking not only becomes more powerful, but also more uncanny, when it's eroticised. Without erotic inspiration it just becomes dreary and repetitive: "Likewise, love without eros and the spiritual lift it provides deteriorates into mere 'sensuality'." [48] 

 

This is why an artificial intelligence will never be able to produce a beautiful philosophical concept and why genuine thinking "transcends the positivity of given facts" [49] and data-analysis. Confronted with the "pullulating mass of information and data" [50], says Han, we need theoretical thinking more than ever. For theories, like ceremonies and rituals, "confer form on the world" [50] and keep things from breaking down into sprawling chaos.

 

In other words, information overload "massively heightens the entropy of the world; it raises the level of noise" [50]. And that's a problem, because thinking "as an expedition into quietness" [50] demands calm. We are faced with a spiritual crisis at top volume: "Rampant, massive information - an excess of positivity - makes a racket." [50] 

    

And just as we can't close our eyes, neither can we block up ears. Philosophy might be the "translation of eros into logos" [52], but when it speaks it does so in a seductive whisper, it doesn't shout or issue commands. And it still respects the importance of silence. 

 

And on that note, I'll shut up ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] No surprise that Byung-Chul Han eventually calls on André Breton for support, describing the surrealist reinvention of love as "an artistic, existential, and political gesture" which "ascribes a universal power to eros"; the power of poetic revolution and renewal. See chapter 6, 'The Politics of Eros', in The Agony of Eros. The lines quoted are on p. 46. 

 

[b] D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236. 

      Having said this, Lawrence does then go on to call for rigorous censorship of genuine pornography, which he says you can recognise "by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit" [241]. Where Lawrence and Byung-Chul Han appear to significantly differ is on the question of secrecy. Whereas the latter thinks it fundamental to eroticism, Lawrence writes:

      "The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved." [243]

      Of course, Lawrence was writing in a different time. Today, pornography is not underworld or under the counter, it's freely and openly available online and the styles, values, and norms of the sex industry have been largely determine mainstream culture (this is what is meant by pornification). Still, what he writes in this essay is something that the author of The Agony of Eros might like to consider.   

 

[c] Whilst I don't expect Han to have read either of the above posts, I'm surprised he didn't refer to Peter Sloterdijk's work on thumos in his psycho-political study Zorn und Zeit (2006). 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 328.

      See also Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010) in which I discuss the politics of evil (as well as the politics of style, the politics of cruelty, and the politics of desire), with reference to the work of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence. 

 

 

To read part one of this post - Melancholia to Bare Life - click here.       

 

 

Reflections on The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han (Part 1: From Melancholia to Bare Life)

The MIT Press (2017)

 

 

I. 

 

Neue deutsche Denke are a bit like buses; you wait ages for one to come along, then two or three arrive on the scene. Byung-Chul Han is one such thinker; part of a generation that also includes, for example, Markus Gabriel [a] and Armen Avanessian [b]. 

 

Han is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin and is (according to his publishers) one of the most widely read theorists writing today, both inside and outside the Academy; the author of over twenty books, including (in English) The Burnout Society (2015), Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (2017), and The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering (2017).

 

But the text I wish to discuss here is an essay on love entitled The Agony of Eros (2017), in which he argues that to be dead to love is to be dead to thought itself ...

II. 

 

The Agony of Eros comes with a foreword by Alain Badiou, whom, readers will recall, published his own little book on love - Éloge de l'amour - in 2009, in which he argued (after Rimbaud) that love needs re-inventing as an opportunity - not for pleasure, so much as for a new form of self and (communist) society; for love provides one possible source of resistance to the obscenity of the market. [c]   

 

I have to say, for me, attaching this foreword is mistaken. Han doesn't need a formal blessing from Badiou, the old man of French philosophy, and doesn't need his text to be vouched for by someone who uses the phrase true love three times in the space of a single page and insists that this authentic form of experience is an affirmation of alterity and a radical refusal of the norms of globalised capitalism. 

 

I mean, come on ...! Reading this almost makes me immediately put the book down. I'm sure Badiou sincerely clings to such fantasy, but I'm hoping Han is going to offer a slightly more sophisticated take on the topic - though I already have my doubts, if, indeed, it's true that he essentially offers a strong reading of the former's own political thesis concerning the revolutionary potential of love.  

 

Anyway, let's find out ... Note that the chapter titles given in bold are Han's own.

 

 

III.

 

Melancholia

 

The crisis of love - taken as a given - is not due, argues Han, to greater freedom and unlimited possibilities, but to an "erosion of the Other [...] occurring in all spheres of life", along with its corollary, the increasing "narcissification of the Self" [d].

 

Now, that might be so, but it's hardly a new or original observation. D. H. Lawrence was saying much the same thing a hundred years ago [e]. And, without referring directly to his work, Han acknowledges his indebtedness to Jean Baudrillard by adopting the phrase l'enfer du même to describe the situation we now find ourselves in [f].        

 

We need to escape from this hell of the same and encounter the atopic Other in all their negativity, otherwise we are are heading for depression, says Han. But this escape might not be a particularly pleasant experience; for it seems that "only an apocalypse can liberate - indeed, redeem - us from the hell of the same, and lead us toward the Other." [3] 

 

To which one might ask: Is it really worth it?  

 

All this talk of healing and cleansing via a disastrous event, a terrible experience, or a sacrifice of the self, makes one wonder whether Han's been watching too many films by Lars von Trier and listening to too many operas by Richard Wagner [g].

 

Do we really want to reinvoke "the proximity of eros and death" [5] in order to liberate ourselves from narcissistic captivity? Does it really require courage to dream of the lovely Ophelia, surrounded by fallen flowers, "drifting in the water with her mouth half open - her gaze lost in the beyond, like a saint or a lover" [6], or is it not simply plunging back into the same old Romantic (and Christian moral) idealism whose formula reads: salvation via catastrophic fatality ...? 

 

Over to you on this one Síomón ... 

 

   

Being Able Not to Be Able

 

Han says we are living in a neoliberal achievement society dominated by the can-do frame of mind; one in which citizens are self-motivated and self-exploiting. Foucault thought this an improvement upon disciplinary society and in his later work adopted a sympathetic attitude towards neoliberalism and the civil liberty it allows. 

 

But Han disagrees and thinks Foucault naive in his uncritical assumptions and failure to notice "the structure of violence and coercion underwriting the neoliberal dictum of freedom" [10]. Neoliberal freedom is the freedom of auto-exploitation and the will to achieve ends with the subject wearing themselves out.     

 

Han wants people to recognise their limitations; to see that love is a relationship "situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability" and ultimately finds expression "as a kind of failure" [11] and certainly not as sexual success. Indeed, Han seems to look to a time that is after the orgy when we revalue "dignity, decency, and propriety" [13] as methods of maintaining distance and thus preserving otherness. 

 

A time that is also post social media. For by means of social media, "we seek to bring the Other as near as possible, to close any distance [...] to create proximity" [13]. But this simply results in "making the Other disappear" [13]. In other words - and in words that Heidegger might have approved of - the total abolition of remoteness "does not produce nearness so much as it abolishes it" [13] [h]. 

 

So, the best thing lovers can do is keep apart - in every sense - and realise that love is not about enjoyment or the generation of pleasant feelings; nor is it about "inconsequential emotion and arousal" [13]. It is, rather,  "something that wounds or incites passion" [14] and often ends with injury.

 

I have to admit, I rather admire this model of love with built in negativity; "nourished by what doesn't yet exist" [16]. I'm all for secrecy, silence, and seduction rather than the guarateed satisfaction of needs. Indeed, I've been writing in favour of delayed gratification and the deferral of pleasure for years: click here, for example.        

 

Bare Life

 

The negative model of love, conceived in terms of injury and transformation, is, says Han, in danger of disappearing completely thanks to love's "increasing positivization and domestication" [18]. We no longer fall in love and risk madness, but enter into a relationship of mutual consent in which we are allowed to stay the same and seek only "the confirmation of oneself in the Other" [18].

 

Love has become a mixture of hedonistic calculation and stress relief; lacking all transcendence and transgression, there is nothing fatal (or even dangerous) in it. The modern day lover prefers bourgeois good health over "sovereignty and freedom" [19]. For Han, this is not the good life as the ancient Greeks conceived of it, but threadbare existence; life of comfort and convenience; the sort of life longed for by the Letzter Mensch who invented happiness. 

 

Again, I smile at all this as it reminds me of what I was writing a decade ago - in the essays collected in Erotomania (2010), for example. But I don't believe I ever arrived at the (neo-Hegelian) conclusion that "Love is an absolute end unto itself." [22] Probably that's because I always remember Lawrence saying that whilst in love one must give, one must never give oneself away and that it was all too easy to die for love - the hard thing being to live for it. 

 

Of course, Han is talking of death in a psycho-symbolic rather than a biological sense and he is thinking of Bataille when he insists that "The negativity of death is essential to erotic experience" [25]. Which, again, might be the case, but it all seems so overblown and old hat - as Houellebecq would say: "We're a long way from Wuthering Heights ..." [i]  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] Markus Gabriel is a German philosopher and writer based at the University of Bonn. He regards himself as a thinker in the post-Kantian tradition concerned with metaontology and metametaphysics. Gabriel has spoken out against government measures taken in Europe during the coronavirus pandemic, believing them to be unjustified and a step on the road towards a cyber dictatorship (or virocracy). 

      See: Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism, (Bloomsbury, 2013).

 

[b] Armen Avanessian is an Austrian philosopher, artist, and theorist who has held fellowships in the German departments of Columbia and Yale University. His work on speculative realism and accelerationism in art and philosophy has found a wide audience beyond academia. His concept of hyperstition also designates a method for the actualization in the present of ideas or fictions from the future. 

      See: Hyperstition (2015) a documentary film on time, narrative, philosophy and theory by Christopher Roth in collaboration with Armen Avanessian: click here for a trailer on Vimeo.   

 

[c] See In Praise of Love, by Alain Badiou (with Nicholas Truong), trans. Peter Bush, (Serpent's Tail, 2012). 

[d] Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Love, trans. Erik Butler, (The MIT Press, 2017), p. 3. All future page references to this work will be given directly in the main text. 

[e] See for example what Lawrence writes in his 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 329-336. 

      These lines give a good idea of how Lawrence anticipates Byung-Chul Han and the French theory he relies upon:

      "Humanity, society has a picture of itself, and lives accordingly. The individual likewise has a private picture of himself, which fits into the big picture. In this picture he is a little absolute [...]

      Even sex, today, is only part of the picture. Men and women alike, when they are being sexual, are only acting up. They are living according to the picture. If there is any dynamic, it is that of self-interest. [...] It is inevitable  when you live according to the picture, that you seek only yourself in sex. Because the picture is your own image of yourself: your idea of yourself. [...] The true self, in sex, would seek a meeting, would seek to meet the other. This would be the true flow [...] what I would call the human consciousness, in contrast to the social, or image consciousness. 

      But today, all is image consciousness. Sex does not exist, there is only sexuality. And sexuality is merely a greedy, blind self-seeking. Self-seeking is the real motive of sexuality. And therefore, since the thing sought is the same, the self, the mode of seeking is not very important. Heterosexual, homosexual, narcistic, normal, or incest, it is all the same thing." [335]     

 

[f] L'enfer du même is poorly translated by Erik Butler as 'inferno of the same', which - apart from sounding like some cheesy disco - thereby misses the fact that Baudrillard was explicitly playing on Sartre's famous phrase L'enfer, c'est les autres, commonly translated into English as 'Hell is other people'. I have therefore modified Butler's translation in this post. 

      Those interested to know more, should see Baudrillard's essay 'The Hell of the Same', in The Transparency of Evil, trans. James Benedict, (Verso, 1993).  

[g] Han's first chapter is essentially an interpretation of von Trier's Melancholia (2011); a film inspired by a depressive episode which prominently features music from the prelude to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.  

[h] See my post of 22 September, 2021: On the Question of Distance and Proximity. 

[i] Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond, (Serpent's Tail, 1998). 

      With this brilliant line, from his debut novel, Houellebecq refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and a kind of vital exhaustion which characterizes the early 21st century. And he does so twenty years before Byung-Chul Han picks up the idea and runs with it. 

 

This post continues in part two - from Porn to The End of Theory - which can be read by clicking here. 

Reflections Beneath an Old Tree at Halloween

Halloween Tree (SA/2021)

 

 

It's amusing how, at Halloween, everyday objects can take on a slightly spooky aspect (and I'm not just talking about the cat). 

 

Indeed, some things, like the tree at the end of my road, actually possess a sinister quality; the naked, twisted branches reaching upwards remind one of Lawrence's description of bare almond trees sticking grimly out of the earth like iron implements and feeling the air for strange currents [1].

Faceless and silent, trees terrify in their primeval beauty and the manner in which they combine natural, supernatural, and even unnatural elements - just ask the Roman soldiers as they entered the German forests:

 

"Brave as they were, the veterans were filled with mysterious fear when they found themselves in the dark, cold gloom of [...] the northern, savage land." [2]     

 

The ancient Germans practised Baumanbetung and would nail the skulls of their enemies to sacred trees. For tree-worship always entails human sacrifice and even the Tree of Life is dark and terrible and its roots, thrust deep into the soil where dead men rot in darkness, feed on blood.      

 

Again, this naturally enough horrified the Romans, despite the fact that they were no shrinking violets themselves when it came to acts of atrocious violence:

 

"And the soldiers shrank: shrank before the trees that had no faces [...] A vast array of non-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitable energy. [...]

      No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No wonder they thrilled with horror when, deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of their dead comrades upon the trees. The trees had devoured them: silently, in mouthfuls, and left the white bones." [3]  

 

Happy Halloween!  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Bare Almond Trees', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 253  The poem can be read on allpoetry.com by clicking here.

      See also the related verse, 'Almond Blossom', in which Lawrence develops his gothic-industrial dendrophilia, asserting that "Even iron can put forth, / Even iron." Poems, pp. 259-262. It can be found on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 44.  

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 87. 

Holocaust Impiety: Notes on Belsen Was a Gas

Sex Pistols Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten on stage at the 

Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas, Texas (Jan 10, 1978)

 

Belsen was a gas I heard the other day / In the open graves where the Jews all lay

Life is fun and I wish you were here / They wrote on postcards to those held dear. [1]

 

 

I. 

 

The term Holocaust piety - coined by British philosopher Gillian Rose [2] - is now commonly used to describe sentimental and/or sanctimonious approaches to the Nazi genocide. 

 

For Rose, films such as Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), provide a straightforward narrative that enables (and encourages) the audience to identify solely with the victims, thereby making them feel virtuous and protecting them from the thought that they might actually have more in common with the perpetrators. 

 

This allows for moral complacency even amongst those who are genuinely horrified by the extermination of the Jews. Our tears help to wash away our complicity in the crimes carried out by the Nazis and ultimately leave us emotionally and politically intact; we fail to discover and confront the micro-fascism within our own hearts [3].

 

Rose calls for works in which the representation of Fascism engages with the fascism of representation: 

 

"A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him, wanting him to get what he wants." [4]        

 

Or a book, such as Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (1967), which Rose compares favourably with the work of Primo Levi [5]. 

 

Or a song, such as 'Belsen Was a Gas', by the Sex Pistols ...

 

 

II. 

 

'Belsen Was a Gas' - which seems to be Sid's one and only contribution to the Sex Pistols' repertoire [6] - is, arguably, more disturbing than any of their other songs and goes beyond being darkly humorous just as it transcends bad taste [7].

 

As the American music critic Lester Bangs wrote: 

 

"It's one of the most frightening things I've ever heard. You wonder exactly what you might be affirming by listening to this over and over again. On one level Johnny Rotten [...] is an insect buzzing atop the massed ruins of a civilization leveled by itself [...] on another level he's just another trafficker in cheap nihilism with all that it includes [...]" [8]

 

Someone else who fully appreciates the power and significance of the song is Matthew Boswell, who examines the complex relationship between punk nihilism and Nazi genocide in his essay 'Holocaust Impiety in Punk and Post-punk' (2009). 

 

Developing a reading of the song first put forward by Jon Stratton [9], Boswell concedes that whilst there's a level of sarcastic (and even callous) indifference contained in the lyrics - Oh dear - suggesting that Rotten, as vocalist, is not too bothered by the events that he's describing, it should also be noted that "the first line of the song actually opens a critical distance separating the speaker from the sentiment expressed in the title, through the fact that the line 'Belsen was a gas' is a reported statement" [10]. 

 

Thus, importantly, there's a distinction between the singer of the song on the one hand and the person whose speech is being reported on the other. Boswell continues: 

 

"And much as the sentence 'Belsen was a gas' is something the speaker has heard from a third party, the equally ironic line 'life is fun and I wish you were here' explicitly refers to words written on the postcards sent by the Jews to their families, referencing the historical fact that for the purposes of Nazi propaganda, concentration camp prisoners were compelled to write letters that portrayed their conditions in an unfeasibly favourable light. The song seems to satirise the acceptance of these falsehoods by Jewish families who were only too ready to believe that conditions in the camp were not as bad as they had heard. It is unclear whether the speaker understands or condones the element of coercion; it is equally unclear whether it is the cruelty of the Nazis that the caustic humour of the song exposes to ridicule, or the victimhood of the Jews. This song is high-risk, employing deliberate and potentially offensive ambiguities in the representation of charged subject matter; much therefore rests on the tone taken in performance." [11] 

 

That's true, which is why watching Rotten sing the song live on stage during the ill-fated US tour is so crucial: click  here for a performance at the Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas, Texas, (10 Jan 1978), or here, for a performance at the Winterland, San Francisco (14 Jan 1978) - the band's final show.  

 

Boswell writes:

 

"In this live version, Rotten enunciates the words clearly; but as the song draws to an end he stops singing and gives a sarcastic, demonic laugh that transforms into a horrific choking sound, before launching into a manic riff on the phrases 'be a man, kill someone, kill yourself'." [12] 

 

The song closes abruptly with a final repetition of the line 'kill yourself', which Boswell thinks could be directed at the Jews from a Nazi perspective, or could be an attack on this casually self-exculpating Nazi point of view: "Taking issue with the homicidal bravado of the Nazis, Rotten's sentiment seems to be: if killing makes you such a man, then be a real man and kill yourself." [13]    

 

Such moral and lyrical ambiguity is, of course, what gives the song its brilliance.

 

Notes

 

[1] Sex Pistols, 'Belsen Was a Gas' (Jones, Cook, Rotten, Vicious). Lyrics © Warner Chappell Music, Inc., / Universal Music Publishing Group. Although this song was never recorded for release by the band, a demo recorded at their Denmark Steet rehearsal room in 1977 was included on the 35th anniversary box set edition of Never Mind the Bollocks in 2012: click here. Rotten's very faint, reverbed vocals give it a slightly chilling effect.

 

[2] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, (Cambridge University Press, 1996). See chapter two, 'Beginnings of the Day: Fascism and Representation', pp. 41-62.

      Rose provocatively challenges thinkers from Adorno to Habermas who would have us view the Holocaust as ineffable (i.e., as an extreme event of such uniqueness that it can never adequately or legitimately be given expression). She writes: "To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge [...] is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are - human, all too human." [43]

 

[3] In an article in The Guardian entitled 'The dry eyes of deep grief' (9 April 2004), Giles Fraser writes:

 

"The desire to inhabit a cultural space that is unblemished is a dangerous fantasy that cooperates with the desire to avoid facing one's own capacity for brutality. Dr Jekyll's fundamental flaw is his refusal to acknowledge the existence of Mr Hyde. Hyde can only operate in the dark, in the unexamined spaces brought about by Jekyll's pious avoidance of his own darker motivations. Rose's attack upon those narratives which place us tearfully alongside the victim is an attack upon the refusal of Jekyll to admit to Hyde. For Jekyll and Hyde are not two people but one. Tenderness, intelligence and brutality easily co-exist in the same person. Our own cruelties and prejudices are given ideal conditions to grow when we refuse to admit to them. This is not simply a meditation for the religious. For the cultural space that often has little sense of its own complicity in the horrors of the world is that of secular modernity." 

 

[4] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 50. 

 

[5] Rose finds Levi's writings too humane and too restrained in comparison to Borowski's account of being a prisoner in Auschwitz: "Above all," she notes, "Borowski represents himself, a deputy Kapo, as both executioner and victim [...] While Browski never denies his ethical presupposition [...] he makes you witness brutality in the most distubing way, for it is not clear - Levi always is - from what position, as whom, you are reading. You emerge shaking in horror at yourself, with yourself in question, not in admiration for the author's Olympian serenity (Levi)." [50]   

 

[6] Although all band members of the Sex Pistols are credited as the songwriters, Vicious is generally accepted to have written the original version of the track - in collaboration with guitarist Keith Levene - whilst in his earlier punk band the Flowers of Romance. 

 

[7] Somewhat disappointingly, even Jon Savage and Greil Marcus fail to see the importance of 'Belsen Was a Gas', or accept the challenge it throws down. In England's Dreaming (1991) the former dismisses the song as a "one-line, very sick joke" (p. 458) and in Lipstick Traces (1989) the latter describes it as "a crude, cheesy, stupid number" (p. 116).

 

[8] Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, ed. Greil Marcus, (Anchor Books, 1988). See 'Notes on PIL's Metal Box', (1980). 

      Rotten himself disavowed the track in a 1996 interview with Q magazine, describing it as a 'very nasty, silly little thing [...] that should've ended up on the cutting room floor'. Of course, that didn't stop the Sex Pistols from continuing to perform the song in later years.

  

[9] See Jon Stratton, 'Punk, Jews, and the Holocaust - The English Story', Shofar Vol. 25, No. 4 (Summer 2007), pp. 124-149. Click here to access on JSTOR.  

      This is an interesting essay, though one with several factual errors: for example, 'God Save the Queen' was not the Sex Pistols' first single (it was their second); and The Flowers of Romance was not the first album by Public Image Ltd., it was the fourth (released April 1981). 

      In brief, Stratton argues that punk in England was driven by two Jewish managers, Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, but, more important, punk's general politics of nihilism express in a cultural context the shock and trauma of the Holocaust: 

      "After almost three decades of near-silence, by the late 1970s the Holocaust was beginning to be named and talked about. The horror of this event on not just Jews but Western society more generally, as the acknowledgment of the genocide began to undermine the historical acceptance of Enlightenment assumptions about progress, science, and the moral righteousness of Western civilization, led to an existential crisis best expressed in punk."  

  

[10] M. J. Boswell, 'Holocaust Impiety in Punk and Post-punk', (2009), p. 8. This paper was presented at the Imperial War Museum and can be accessed at http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/23153/ 

      Boswell expands upon his theme in the book Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music and Film, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 

 

[11] Ibid. 

 

[12] Ibid., p. 10.

 

[13] Ibid. 

 

 

Always Be Kind to Cats!

Φοῖβος [Phoîbos] the Cat

 

 

When the Little Greek found a kitten trapped in the engine of an old car abandoned on the streets of Athens, she had no choice but to rescue him, take him home, clean him up, feed him, and generally provide him with care. 

I say she had no choice, but, of course, she could have just walked on by, ignored his cries, and left him to perish. But that wouldn't have been very kind. Nor would it have been the Christian thing to do - one is reminded of this teaching from St. Francis:

 

All things of creation are children of the Father and thus brothers of man. God wants us to help animals if they need help. Every creature in distress has the same right to be protected. 

 

Not that the patron saint of animals is much cared for in the Orthodox tradition in which the Little Greek was raised as a child [1]; in fact, some within this tradition view Francesco as a rather suspect character, given to a model of spirituality that veers towards a form of humanistic paganism. 

 

And even an animal-loving Quaker friend of mine found something objectionable in the above quotation, suggesting that this, from the American writer and naturalist Henry Beston, is preferable, as it recognises and respects the otherness of the animal:

"For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not bretheren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." [2]

Ultimately, with or without scripture or other textual support, we need to rethink our relation to animals - and always be kind to cats! 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] As far as I know, the only Orthodox church which venerates St. Francis of Assisi is the monastery at New Skete (Cambridge, NY).   

[2] Henry Beston, The Outermost House, (Doubleday/Doran, 1928).  

Auschwitz-Geschichten 3: All Caught Up in Barbed Wire Love

Helena Citrónová 💘 Franz Wunsch

 

 

I. 

 

In the early spring of 1942, 19-year-old Helena Citrónová was one of a thousand women and girls from Slovakia deported by rail to Auschwitz.  

 

One day, she was chosen to sing at the birthday party for a young good-looking (but low-ranking) SS officer from Austria called Franz Wunsch, who was working as a guard at the camp. He was immeditely smitten with Helena and had her transferred to work in the section he oversaw; the storage facilities known as Kanada [1]. 

 

Over time, Franz and Helena grew increasingly fond of one another - depite the fact that she was Jewish and he was a Nazi and thus, one would have imagined, committed to upholding the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans. 

 

Initially, the idea of loving an SS officer was inconceivable to Helena. But, gradually, romantic feelings grew as they exchanged glances, spoke a few words, and furtively slipped billets-doux to each other. The fact that Franz managed to save Helena's older sister (Rožinka) from the gas chamber, also helped him to win her heart.     

After the War, Franz spent several years searching for Helena, but to no avail [2]. However, they were reunited in 1972 when he was arrested and put on trial for war crimes. Helena came forward to speak on his behalf and Franz was cleared of all charges against him (despite evidence of his brutality and role in sending innocent people to their deaths) [3].

 

II. 

 

So, what does this tale - recently made into a film by Maya Sarfaty [4] - tell us: that love conquers all ...? Not quite. 

 

For we would do well to remember that above the gates of Auschwitz was a sign reading Geschaffen von ewigen Liebe [5] and that the Nazis committed their atrocities out of love for their Fatherland, their Führer, and their Volk. 

 

What it tells us, rather, is why the Thousand Year Reich and all similar idealistic fantasies of stability, purity, and perfect order are doomed to fail. For all it takes is a serpent's whisper or a smile on the face of a pretty Jewish girl and chaos ensues.  

 

We owe our freedom - and, indeed, what is best in us - not to love, but to the fact that we can resist everything except temptation and possess an inherent will to disobedience; sin is the paradoxical secret of salvation.           

Notes 

 

[1] The Effektenlager - usually referred to as Kanada - were the warehouses where the belongings of prisoners who had been sent to the gas chamber on arrival were sorted and stored. Prisoners who worked there were known as the Aufräumungskommando. It was viewed as one of the best jobs in Auschwitz, because prisoners could procure goods for themselves and other inmates.

 

[2] After her liberation from Auschwitz, Helena returned with her sister to Slovakia, before eventually emigrating to Israel. Wunsch had been dispatched to the front when the camp was evacuated in 1945.

 

[3] Wunsch may have fallen in love Helena, but he was still an SS officer who sometimes served on the Judenrampe selecting new arrivals at Auschwitz into those who would live and those to be sent directly to their deaths. At his war crimes trial in Vienna in 1972, witnesses spoke about his often violent behavior.

 

[4] See Love It Was Not (2020), a documentary dir. by Maya Sarfaty: click here to view the official trailer. And click here for a panel discussion of the film, ft. Sarfaty, and co-presented by the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and the Israel Office of Cultural Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York. 

 

[5] This phrase - created by eternal Love - is actually part of an inscription on a sign hanging not above Auschwitz, but above the gates of Hell, according to Dante. See Inferno, III, 5-6. 

      Note that Nietzsche famously describes this as a naive error on Dante's part, however, and says that it would have been more telling if he'd placed a sign above the Christian Paradise reading: 'Eternal hate created me as well'. See On the Genealogy of Morality, I. 15.  

 

 

Musical bonus: the song that Helena sang on Franz's birthday was a popular German Lied with music by Fred Markush and lyrics by Fritz Rotter, called Liebe war es nie (released 1932): click here to listen to a version performed by the Lewis Ruth Band. The title of the song, borrowed for Sarfaty's film, is more usually translated in English as 'It was never love'.    

To read other tales from Auschwitz, click here and here. 

Auschwitz-Geschichten 2: Block 24 (The Dolls House)

Block 24 - just go through the big iron gates that read Arbeit Macht Frei and it's the first building on your left - was the Auschwitz brothel, commonly referred to as a Dolls House. 

 

It was one of several such institutions established by the Nazis within their network of camps in order to reward and incentivise prisoners and, Himmler hoped, reorientate the sexuality of those wearing pink triangles [1].

 

The (non-Jewish) women obliged to work in these brothels came mainly from Ravensbrück, although Auschwitz recruited sex slaves from among its own inmate population [2]. Usually aged in their 20s, the women had sex with an average of six or seven men every evening between 8 and 10pm. They also had to work on Sunday afternoons. Some of the women underwent forced sterilization; those who didn't and became pregnant were forced to have abortions.  

 

The (non-Jewish) male prisoners had to pay two Reichsmarks for a fifteen-minute session with a girl who was chosen for them. They were first examined to ensure they were (relatively) clean and healthy and were instructed that only vaginal intercourse in the missionary position was permitted (the doors of the girls' rooms had peepholes so that SS guards could keep an eye on proceedings and ensure there were no perverse or violent acts committed).  

 

As might be imagined, there was a fairly high turnover of women, who were fucked until either too exhausted or too ill to continue, at which point their services - and sometimes their lives - were terminated [3].

 

Despite this, there were other women desperate to take their place, as they at least got to have a small room of their own within the brothel, wear clean clothes, and be given additional food from the SS kitchen. They were even given rudimentary medical care. Naturally, this caused anger and resentment amongst other female inmates, but it did make surviving the camp significantly easier - and survival was ultimately the name of the game. 

After the War, the women rarely spoke of their experiences and they were not awarded any compensation - indeed, their existence was scarcely even acknowledged [4].

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Himmler conceived the idea of establishing concentration camp brothels in October 1941. The first Dolls House was set up a year later, at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Ultimately, the Lagerbordell did not produce any noticeable increase in prisoner productivity levels and I very much doubt they provided an effective form of gay conversion therapy. What they did do was further demonstrate the depth of Nazi corruption and depravity.   

[2] It is worth noting that some of the women had previously worked as prostitutes; indeed, it was this anti-social activity that had got them arrested and put in the camps in the first place. The SS reasoned that it would help with the establishment of their own brothels if they recruited professionals at least to begin with. Of course, the fact that some of the women had already been involved in the sex industry doesn't in any way mitigate the cynical cruelty of Nazi sexual exploitation. 

[3] After finishing their time in the brothels, some of the women were made camp functionaries and, according to recent research, those who withstood the hardship of brothel life did have an increased chance of escaping death in the camps. Indeed, almost all the women in forced prostitution survived. 

      Those interested in knowing more on this topic (and who read German) should see Robert Sommer, Das KZ-Bordell: Sexuelle Zwangsarbeit in nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern (Schöningh Verlag, 2009). A review of the book, by Thomas Kühne, can be found in Central European History Vol. 45, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 593-595. Click here to read on JSTOR.  

[4] There are some notable exceptions to this silence, first and foremost among them the French documentary Nuit et brouillard (dir. Alain Resnais, 1956), which acknowledged the existence of concentration camp brothels based on interviews with survivors. 

      Mention might also be made of The House of Dolls (1953), a novella by the Jewish writer (and former Auschwitz inmate) Ka-Tsetnik 135633 (Yehiel De-Nur), which concerns the women who were kept for the sexual pleasure of German soldiers during World War II and known as the 'Joy Division' [Freudenabteilung]. 

    Written in Hebrew, De-Nur's work tends to blur the line between fact and fiction and has been described as pornographic by some critics, who see it as paving the way for later Nazi-themed sexploitation movies such as Love Camp 7 (dir. Lee Frost, 1969) and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, (dir. Don Edmonds, 1975). 

 

 

To read other tales from Auschwitz, click here and here.   

 

 

Auschwitz-Geschichten 1: In Memory of Prisoner 26947 (Czesława Kwoka)

Czesława Kwoka (1942/43)

Photo by Wilhelm Brasse 

Auschwitz-Birkenhau State Museum

 

 

I. 

 

Most people find it extremely difficult to look at the heaps of emaciated bodies left to rot in the Nazi death camps once the system of extermination began to break down.      

 

And, of course, such unparalleled scenes of atrocity are horrific; no one likes to think of human beings reduced to base matter or witness mounds of anonymous corpses showing signs of advanced decomposition or still marked by traces of suffering [1].   

 

But is it any easier to look at this photo of a young Polish girl taken shortly before her death in Auschwitz ...?

 

 

II.

 

Czesława Kwoka was born in a small village in Poland, on 15 August, 1928. 

 

Along with her mother, Katarzyna Kwoka, she was deported shortly before Christmas 1942 and then sent to Auschwitz. She died on 12 March, 1943, aged fourteen, less than a month after her mother; just one of many Polish children murdered by the Nazis [2]. 

 

Czesia is among those memorialized in the permanent Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum exhibition The Life of the Prisoners. Her picture was taken by Wilhelm Brasse, a talented Polish inmate whom the Nazis pressed into service upon discovering that he had trained as a professional photographer prior to the German invasion of his homeland [3].       

 

Along with Anne Frank, Czesława Kwoka has become representative of all child victims of the Nazi killing machine.    

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Having said this, it's worth recalling Nick Land's argument that it's the corpse that wasn't cleanly and efficiently incinerated which functions as a sign of impersonal resistance to the final solution and that the real horror of the death camp comes when the system is in full operation and producing lamp-shades made from human skin and bars of soap from the body fat of the exterminated. See The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), p. 139.

 

[2] Although details of her death are not known for certain, it's likely that Czesława was killed with a lethal injection of phenol - a favoured method amongst SS physicians. However she died, Czesia was just one of approximately 230,000 children and young people aged under 18 deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945. As might be expected, the vast majority - over 90% - were of Jewish descent; the others had ethnic backgrounds including Polish, Russian, Ukranian, and Romani. Most arrived as part of families and were not listed in camp records. Less than 1000 survived to be liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. 

 

[3] Although he survived the War and still owned a camera, Brasse was was unable to return to his profession because, as he confessed, when he looked through the lens all he could see were the faces of the dead. A 50-minute television documentary about his life and work, The Portraitist [Portrecista], was made in 2005, dir. Irek Dobrowolski. A trailer, with English subtitles, can be viewed on YouTube: click here. 

 

 

To read other tales from Auschwitz, click here and here.