Lacoue-Labarthe on the Holocaust...

[Ian J. Evans]

In his book Heidegger, Art and Politics, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe outlines
why, exactly, the Holocaust is different from the any of the long chain of
massacres that make up the history of humans. This is in response to
Heidegger equating mechanized agriculture to 'production of corpses' in the
gas chambers and extermination camps, in blockades, and in the production
of nuclear weapons. Lacoue-Labarthe finds this scandalous.

"These examples [Lacoue-Lebarthe previously mentioned the Inquisition,
revolutionary France, the slave trade, American ethnocide among others],
none the less, all have this in common: in each case, the massacre is
linked to a situation of war or civil strife; there is a genuinely
political, economic or military issue at stake; the means employed are
those of armed struggle, police or judicial repression; and the operation
is directed by some belief or rationality. And this is still true, whatever
the scale or enormity of the facts, of the Stalinist form of the same
operation, including Cambodia.

"In the case of Auschwitz, things are quite different--despite appearances
(powerful ideology, state of war, police terror, totalitarian organization
of politics, extensive technological capacity, etc.). For two reasons: the
Jews as Jews were not in 1933 agents of social dissension (except of course
in phantasy); they did not represent any kind of homogenous political or
religious force; they did not even appear to have any particular social
cohesion. At most, one might say, greatly simpifying the problem of
assimilation, they formed a religious or historico-cultural minority. But
they did not threaten Germany as Melians threatened the Athenian
Confederation or as the Christian heretics or Protestants threatened the
State based on divine right, as the Girondins threatened the French
Revolution or the Kulaks the establishment of socialism. They were a threat
as people *decreed to be* Jews, that is to say as a hetergeneous element,
only for a nation that was painfully lacking an identity or existence of
its own and which was, in fact, also facing very real threats both internal
and external. But it is already sufficiently well-known, I think, that the
'Jewish threat' is something that belongs to the realm of projection.

"The second reason is as follows: the means employed in the Extermination
were, in the last instance, neither industrial, military, nor those of a
police force (this is why Heidegger's statement is absolutely correct).
Certainly the police and the army were indispensable: for seeking people
out, transporting them, administering the camps and even carrying out some
of the killings. But in its 'final' aspect, the annihilation no longer had
about it any of the features of the classical or modern figure of
systematic oppression. None of the 'machines' invented to extract
confessions or remorse or to mount the edifying spectacle of terror, was of
any use. The Jews were treated in the same way as industrial waste or the
proliferation of parasites is 'treated' (whence no doubt the sick joke of
'revisionism' about the Zyklon B; and yet to say that the Zyklon B  served
as a de-louser is the best possible 'proof' of the gas-chambers: chemical
methods and cremation). That is why the machines used to this end or
'adapted' (but not invented like the Virgin of Nuremberg, the wheel or the
guillotine), were the--banal--machines--of our industrial plants. As Kafka
had long since understood, the 'final solution' consisted of taking
literally the centuries-old metaphors of insult and contempt--*vermin,
filth*--and providing oneself with the technological means for such an
effective literalization.

"This purely hygenic or sanitary operation (which was not only social,
political, cultural and racial etc., but also *symbolic*) has no parallel
in history. Nowhere else, and in no other age, has such a will to clean and
totally eradicate a 'stain' been seen so compulsively, without the least
ritual. To speak of a 'Holocaust' is self-serving misinterpretation, as is
any reference to an archaic scapegoating mechanism. There was not the least
'sacrificial' aspect in this *operation*, in which what was calculated
coldly and with the maximum efficiency and economy (and never for a moment
hysterically or deliriously) was a pure and simple *elimination*. Without
trace or residue. And if it is true that the age is that of the
accomplishment of nihilism, then it is at Auschwitz that the accomplishment
took place in the purest formless form. God in fact died at Auschwitz--the
God of the Judaeo-Christian West at least. And it was not at all by chance
that the victims of that annihilation were the witnesses in that West of
another origin of the God who was venerated and thought there--if not
indeed, perhaps, of another God--one who had evaded capture by the
Hellenistic and Roman traditions and who thereby stood in the way of the
programme of accomplishment.

"That is why this event--the Extermination--is for the West the terrible
revelation of its essense."

Regards,
-Ian J. Evans   ievans at earthlink.net
The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, 
depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.