Keeping our appointment with the past in the name of the future: thoughts on Holocaust Remembrance Day (with suggested philosophical readings)

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. In its honor and that of the many victims, I propose one brief statement and a list of some readings.

First, the "Holocaust" is not an event of interest only to the Jews. This is not only because it was a crime against humanity and against the Jews as people, and did not seek merely (or even primarily) to abolish or discredit their religion (as Christianity long sought to do, though its largest branches including the Catholic church no longer do).

There were other victims, too: the Gipsies; political opponents of the regime, of course; and the physically "handicapped" and "mentally ill". For it was regime not only of ethnic cleansing, but health and normality.

So one thing I want to point out (as readers of my blog know by now) is that the mental health ideology has a history of uses by fascist ant totalitarian regimes (including Nazism and Stalinism) that not coincidentally also murdered lots of people with various rationales offered for doing so.

Opposition to blatant right-wing fascisms of every kind surely is entailed and required by any consistent opposition to the Holocaust and what it represents as a continuing possibility in our world today. Even if clearly, it is not enough to oppose this. There were "left-wing" exterminations of whole classes and categories of people, also.

Indeed, the anti-capitalist left as we know it is not always innocent of contributing to political tendencies that Jews and others have every reason to oppose on their own behalf. The left has been and still is a field of both positive potentialities and serious mistakes. People often contribute to harmful political and social trends unwittingly, despite what they consider their better intentions. I have argued this recently more fully elsewhere.

A short reading list relevant to understanding the Holocaust in philosophy and theory:
(Suggested additions are very welcome).

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Roberto Esposito, Community, Immunity, Biopolitics
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend
Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust

It will be noted that these thinkers are all more or less in the tradition stemming from the work of Martin Heidegger. More broadly, I believe that there are exactly two intellectual traditions in modern philosophy that are directly useful for understanding the Holocaust: that of Marx and that of Heidegger. (In the Marxist tradition, I would mention several of the works of the historian Enzo Traverso.) A critique of modernity can be a critique of ideas or of social forms.

With no such critique, it might seem that the dominant capitalist liberalism with its representative democracies, limits on power, and freedom to criticize anyone for corruption or faults, is either all we can hope for or all we need. I don’t see that either socialism (how will it be different from populist nationalism?) or liberalism with its dependence on Realpolitik and tolerance of the global civil war of capitalist debt regimes, and its limit of criticism to excesses of regimes of violent power and the moral faults that reduce to them, is in itself sufficient to prevent either Holocausts or those global instances of barbarism that are the stuff of our regular news feeds, though some kind of democratic socialism or social democracy is undoubtedly better than leaving the field to runaway neoliberal neofascism.

To be sure, we should want to maximize real liberty (and not just that of capital and the kind that is tied inevitably to the self-management of precarious indebted citizens) and real democracy (which has the advantage of depending on the real and not simulated use of rational discourse instead of mere regulation by markets and authority to solve problems to the satisfaction of the stakeholders admitted to the discussion). There is also the question of how to do these things. The infotech world has given us all seeming liberty and autonomy managed by a surveillance apparatus that is kept in place partly by profitability. It also makes possible a new global public sphere, with not only information but ideas, discussions, and at least mechanically reproduced artworks available in quantities approaching infinity and direct cost approaching zero. The possibilities for meaningful personal and public life that this technology has made possible is now limited by their forms of ownership and control. A different world becomes possible if technology is advanced enough that most desired commodities are available at close to zero cost, as that will free use from property and its constraints of economization, or management of scarcity through the disciplining of subjectivity.

I am well aware that the thought of Martin Heidegger is now widely thought tainted by the man's personal association with Nazism. Only I have no interest in trying to ascertain who among dead thinkers is a scoundrel as a person who should be prosecuted, or have all his statues torn down. I am only interested in which writings and artworks I can learn from.

Not only do people I respect believe that those who are guilty of crimes should be judged, we also think that those who would burn books are complicit in injustices they surely would oppose, even while supposing that their opposition to those they manage to speak of both absolves them and is all that matters. It is not all that matters. Politics is not reducible to crime.

Heidegger's intellectual complicity is an interesting question if it can be established. His personal complicity may rightly be taken as reason to pose the question of that of his ideas, but this question is only a question and not one that can be presumed already answered. Unless you believe that books by scoundrels should just be burned so that no one reads them. I think that is a very bad policy for all who claim to the moral values they think they are acting on behalf of.

The interesting claim made by some liberals is that Heidegger's critique of modernity entails his anti-semitism. A similar claim can be made about Marx. But ad hominem attacks and short-circuited arguments that must assume what is to be proven in order to effectuate their calls for book burning, which is what they are, always get in the way. Of course, it's also pretty obvious. What is obstructed here, deliberately, is the very idea of any critique of modernity.

My intuition is that Heidegger’s thought is to receptive and “pious.” Levinas’s “Jewish” ethics of servile admiration of the Other is a form of it adapted to an ethics of self-denial that strikes me as closer to Christian mysticism than a Jewish ethics, which is more “political” in its morality because it holds self and other to be equal. Levinas in this respect can be compared with the Christian Jewish thinker Simone Weil. Judaism has never really favored self-abnegation. Levinas is too close to both Heidegger and French Catholicism. All this is to say that Heidegger and others like him are too “religious” and not enough political. Politics involves social antagonisms and their mediation, through discussion and concerted action, and failure to allow for or affirm it will surely lead to forms of totalitarianism, either focused on the sacred character of an aesthetics or on a communitarianism common sense whose denial of individual liberty might be as much symptom as consequence.

But affirming the democratic or republican polity’s tolerance of and dependence on pluralism and antagonism in itself may not be enough either. The Holocaust was not only a consequence of totalitarian sameness and lack of liberty, if it was that; bureaucracy played a major role and so did the particular ideals that drove the totalitarian communitarianism, including that of health, which is a dubious figure of the good even if it is one of its qualities, as is evidenced by every redemptive ethics including all such themes in our religions (Buddhism and Taoism, Christianity and Judaism itself among them). The Jewish Torah does not say “Be healthy, for I am healthy”; nor was it only social Darwinism’s legitimation of colonialist elitism that made Nazism’s use of it so damaging; health is the norm of medicine and it is a biopolitical norm of human persons and collectivities considered as bodily or animal life. Certainly, health is a personal ideal, however little it might serve as a useful moral or political one. Nazism was not just an ethnic cleansing that sought to sweep up different social groups, aided by the determination of them, and their presumptive undesirable traits, as genetically determined biological ones (the Jews as a race, which they had never been, and of course the recycling of European colonialism in the new continental imperialism and its warfare against peoples to be conquered in the territories to be made available). It was also a governmentality of being healthy. This is not of course to say that health is not a good and we should not have doctors, or even perhaps doctors who examine people’s minds, attitudes, or souls, though the ascendence of this tendency today in a way that far eclipses the extensive (in fact) Nazi uses of psychiatry both as a scientific medical practice and arsenal of metaphors, in company with others of medical and biological provenance, is something that should give us pause. One problem with this is related to the fact that a medicine of the mind, soul, or person, will always reduce minds to bodies, as in fact psychiatry has recently massively done; it also removes from the mind its social character, which has to do with language. Psychiatry cannot do justice to this fact by declaring its paradigm as it now does to be “bio-psycho-social.” This is because the social aspect of the lives of persons is both linguistic and political. The political is a feature of the social life of the animals with language that we are that because and as it thinks, is inventive and problematizing. And obviously one of the things always readily problematized has to do with the fact that language not only involves statements that have objects which are worked with or upon and can be interrogated, but also has positions of enunciation and address. When “I” speak to “you” about “this” or “it” or any named thing, it is always possible to understand that I am placing into question, and recognizing that you might, what “this” or “it” is (or what it means) or what we do with or about it, but also the “how,” if not “what,” of who you and I are. How do you and I relate to each other? To see that this is easily placed in question, note simply that we reply to and correct each other not only with regard to the true character of the things and events or actions in our world, but also whether you have spoken correctly, and so your “moral” state. That we question anything is “political” at least in the sense that we do so as participants, so that what we are questioning or understanding is there “for us” and not just “for” another in authority observing and managing us. But of course medicine reduces to that, and in a way that involves, beyond the mere authority of masters who command our action and observe and manage our behavior, it also asks us to understand ourselves basically as behaving but not thinking subjects, who are given to understand that they may only think about what they are doing within a framework that they cannot also act upon. Psychological medicine is the management of the behavior of persons by way of norms of proper comportment. But the use of language in social situations is able to question any norm or purpose, and this means that we “are a question for ourselves,” as Augustine said, and do not “have” a given purpose or task that is proper to being a human person. That in turn means that the human being because we have language is not securely manageable; lacking a purpose, it can question every purpose, and democracy in a way is just the institution of the ideal of calling into question everything. That we cannot call into question everything at once, nor anything that we have not noticed (or questioned), perhaps that is not failed, if we suppose that life outside the posing of such questions and problematizations is going on in some given project behavior, or task (but there is no reason to suppose this, and every reason not to), does not change this practically. Health is a norm of the body, and if it is primary, it reduces social life to an aggrandized animality. (We would be, for instance, the animal species with the largest brains and so technical capacity to do and make things.). Health is not not a norm, since its failure always reveals we prefer the more and not less of it, and it is linked to (if not identical by definition) that well-being that we call happiness. But a society devoted to technology in the interest of the maximized happiness of its members would not be a good society. This would be directly visible if that society had an outside that were interior to the larger world of persons. What this boundary would then demarcate is a space for either war or the kind that is waged against an internal externality, such as a subject population. We have this today, still.

Such reflections owe much to the work of Heidegger and scholars pursuing related lines of thinking. (The reader will recognize I am not claiming here originality.). The problem with rejecting Heidegger’s supposed rejection of modernity (if it is that: there are of course Catholic, Hasidic, and other forms of anti-modernity that favor a neo-medieval sensibility, perhaps both communitarian and diligently pious and clinging to holiness; Buber’s antinomian Judaism comes to mind) is that the Holocaust clearly is an event in European and "Western" modernity. It is an event in capitalist modernity, or, if you prefer, the modernity of industrial and bureaucratic societies organized around markets and states.

That some critiques of modernity and what may be supposed wrong with it may be found complicit intellectually in that very modernity, and the same or some other thing credibly or rightly said to be wrong with it, this should not be a surprise.

It should be presumed the consequence of bad thinking rather than just an evil will. This is a good heuristic assumption to make in the study of intellectual history. Because without it, we might well be reduced to assuming that unfortunate events result only from evil will. Which amounts to supposing that the fate and destiny of the world's people, which is all of us, depends only on the outcome of a conflict between God and the Devil. The problem with that is not that there is not good and evil, but that if those are our only operative categories, then we will not advance in our understanding of anything. While this is obvious, it must be pointed out that those "liberals" whose intellectual and social criticisms are essentially moral are indeed falling into this trap.

Yesterday's modernity (that of Christian and modern colonialist and bourgeois Europe) was criticized for being too "rational." One consequence is American liberal culture today. It is driven by the market (and so whatever likes or wants) and by authoritarian state power backing and shoring it up, though the latter is most often concealed from recognition, often until it is too late, for the individual or even more broadly.

Today's modernity is not "rational," though it is "moral." It is liberal and relies on the market.

Political liberalism is not dead, just as democratic politics is not. Though certainly in their traditional forms, as developed and articulated up to and including today, they now appear insufficient for understanding our current world problems and imagining, inventing, theorizing, and pursuing in action, any alternatives.

That political liberalism is insufficient for understanding what made possible the Holocaust. So is traditional Marxism theory of capitalism.

The need to explore new ways of theorizing what happened is acute. It is at least as great a need as avoiding new mistakes, or reiterations of old ones. Both needs are served best by thoughtful and rigorous inquiry.

Our present organized social life, including its organization and management by the new Internet media, largely excludes such inquiry. It is largely excluded from public discussion and debate. It certainly must be kept out of most discussions taking place in the oral culture of discussions of any kind among strangers in public spaces. Those discussions generally have only real social function: to manage social life so that everyone behaves properly. It is as if there is one great enterprise of production and management of the economy of social life, including the life of thinking and the "feeling" that is managed by therapeutic discourses and practices, that all of all the time are engaged in.

Liberal moralism is mostly about that. There perhaps is no better response to its evocations than to say, "I It is unfortunate that ordinary citizens who are not experts on a topic of discussion, if they are liberals and so moralists in the liberal way, confuse the real discussions they want to be part of and sometimes think they are from this everyday practical management of social life that is so very American. In this way, moralistic capitalist liberalism (which is what it is best called) is part of the broad infamous anti-intellectualism in American social and public life.

This capitalist liberalism did fight against Nazism (it accepted and even promoted other forms of fascism) as did Stalinist socialism. But of course they were also participants in the same world broadly, complicit in it, and helped to make it possible. This would be only a moral claim if I were making it for only rhetorical purposes, hoping thereby to inspire some actions and condemnation or desistance from others. Politics does and must exist. We want some things and don't want others, and we act accordingly, and must do so if we do not wish to be either ineffective fools or abet evil by failing to oppose it, two outcomes that are effectively equivalent even if the motives are not. But I think Marx should be reversed in part on this point:

The activists have sought to change the world. It remains to better understand it.

Everyone knows the Holocaust was an evil. Some people think it still matters to care about it. Many of them (us) engage in practices of remembrance. But remembrance alone is not enough, if we think we understand what went wrong and why these things happened and do not, entirely. It will always be easy to speak of the devil. But we have not only aesthetic practices of cultivating our piety, but also the duty to study, to labor to understand. Most people think the good guys (the Americans and British, with some help from resistance fighters all over Europe, and a greater part played by the (rightly) discredited Soviet Union). I recall a Holocaust exhibit at the D-Day memorial site to American soldiers who died in the cause of this nation's war that, fought for its various purposes, did play a role in ending the massacres. It did so too late for millions of people. More could have been done. A curator dutifully recorded that Hitler was a man who never took responsibility for his crimes. But responsibility to avoid evil and promote justice, happiness, liberty, or whatever good is not only a moral matter of right motives and conscientious attitudes. Nor is it only a matter of good people contributing because they did not do enough to stop it. The Holocaust was both an evil and a tragedy, because there are aspects of modern society that in themselves seem (and may well be) innocent of injustice, dark passions, or criminality. You could wish that all we need to do is love God and do the right thing, and eventually, evil will vanish from the world. That might be true, but it is not so simple.

Which is also to say this: the overwhelming response of Jews in recent decades to will to be Jewish so as to "not give Hitler posthumous victories" (Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim's famous "614th commandment") is not enough. It is important, but it's not enough.The evidence that it is not enough is that, quite apart from the questions about the justice or injustice of the present manner of existence of the state of Israel today, which is raised with regard to the people displaced, and now, made objects of policing and war, by it, the existence of any one or more enclaves of even the most rigorously ethical life that today can be lived by this people or anyone, is obviously no guarantee. If you look around you almost anywhere in the world today, that things suck is pretty obvious. There are wars being carried out against migrants and poor people, and there are even camps of concentration. That they are less horrible than Auschwitz, as America's prisons are, is, it seems rather obvious to me, some kind of not very desirable defense.

And what is it a defense of? Innocence? This does actually bear on morality, but in a way slightly more complex than the liberal moralism that is always only denouncing other people's evil.

Innocence is a lie, and denial of evil is engaged in as a desperate measure to defend this fundamental lie. Two things that result from wanting to be innocent are: (1) those seeking to preserve their innocence claim to be good because someone else is so evil. (This someone else may even be their enemy or oppressor.) (2) Those who are innocent of all moral problems have no need to think.

Those who like to accuse the many guilty people they can observe will think they have "gotcha" if you say something that shows you are vulnerable morally. In our time of near-universal precarization, moral vulnerability surely is bound to increase with the material kind. But everyone is vulnerable to being criticized, and that fact (which means you might be guilty of something, though it does not mean you are guilty of what you are accused of) is something good people not only recognize but invite, at least when it is safe to do so. One difference between good and bad people is that good people always worry that they are guilty and bad, while really bad people usually have no such scrupules. People of an adult moral disposition know that we must always be willing to both criticize and be criticized. Both are morally compelling. It would be wrong to suppose, as Christianity often drives people to do, that the moral problems you may encounter are only a matter of you and God, and the world of other people presumptively on the side of God, since he created the world as perfect and rules over it in absolute domination (Jews believe neither of these things: God's power is not absolute and what happens to you and others may therefore be unjust; and the world is not perfect, and it is the human task to make it more so). It is wrong morally to only worry about your own sins and never criticize those of others, or worry about the world's evils and problems. Good people invite criticism. This also means that they want to better understand -- the world and its problems, what is to be done. What is to be done will always be a question, even if it is not only a question, since otherwise it would only be something to understand and not something to be done. That the world is imperfect and that action is important, and not only contemplation, are a priori truths that go together.

I believe that if it was widely understand how and why the Holocaust could happen (which is implied in the fact it did: that is, things that happen reveal possibilities of existence, and they may be recognizable as problems; further, what did happen reveals possibilities of existence whose scope may well be larger than it, even if, God willing, the other things are lesser. Is today's world happier than it was in 1942? Perhaps, but is that the question? As to the question, is it unhappy in many ways, we know the answer to that. And so I return to my partial reversal of Marx. Indeed, I believe we must both want to understand the world and change it; these two imperatives do not conflict. But it must be reiterated on this sacred day of remembrance:

The Holocausts of the modern world are not over. This is a problem. Then again, this is part of the nature of time itself: we only remember traumas because they are in some sense happening now. The present time has an appointment with its past in the name of its future. This appointment must be kept.