The unspeakable

[Phillip P. Muth]

"Language is the expression of the world in the immediacy of
the mind, and a sick discourse is a sick mind in a sick world
(see Rorty). Bad discourse is a bad consciousness, and that is
why changing the economy of discourse is revolutionary" Stephen
Tyler The Unspeakable

"What the Nazis did to the Jews was unspeakable: language has
no word for it, since even mass murder would have sounded, in
face of its planned, systematic totality, like something from
the good old days of the serial killer, And yet a term needed
to be found if the victims--in any case too many for their
names to be recalled--were to be spared the curse of having no
thoughts turned unto them.  So in English the concept of
genocide was coined.  But by being codified, as set down in the
INternational Declaration of Human Rights, the unspeakable was
made, for the sake of protest, commensurable.  By its elevation
to a concept, its possibility is virtually recognized:  an
institution to be forbidden, rejected, discussed.  One day
negotiations may take place in the forum of the United Nations
on whether some new atrocity comes under the heading of
genocide, whether nations have a right to intervene that they do
not want to exercise in any case, and whether, in view of the
unforeseen difficulty of applying it in practice, the whole
concept of genocide should be removed from the statutes.  Soon
afterwards there are inside-page headlines in journalese:  East
Turkestan genocide programme nears completion."  Adorno

And yet.  Why the intellectual snobbism about Spielberg?  Are
we intent on providing the cannon/canon of 10 best works on the
genocide? For whom and for what purpose?  Why does everyone move so quickly away from context
and specific images (both in this film and in comments
throughout the list).

I could write a long interpretation of the importance of the
red thread in SL.  The scopic pleasure of it, the thread that
finds us in the middle of the labyrinth, the thread that ties
the ghetto and the camp, childhood and holocaust, the 
beauty which we can therefore say must be obscene.  I could. So
could you.  A film, an image, is not monolithic, and cannot be
read as such, and yet each of you are so anxious to trash or recuperate or...

"The Modern version of the story of the fall is not a fable of
the fall into being in time, it is a traveller's tale of the
upward journey into the immortal nothingness of space" Tyler

Parke Muth