Volume 16

Potabilities: Post-Violence Literature and its Limits

30 July 202430 July 2024By Raul Carrillo

Tyler M. Williams
Midwestern State University

Volume 16, 2024

There are people who say, “I’m thirsty.” They step into a café and order a beer.

Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After (145)

Language is Fascist

In his inaugural lecture upon being appointed in 1977 to the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes famously stated that language “is quite simply fascist” (5). Barthes does not say that language is like fascism; nor does he say that language might possibly become fascist, or that it can be used by fascists. He makes a declaration of essence: language is fascist.

Why fascist? Because language is inherently classificatory and restrictive, Barthes says; my speech compels me to address others a particular way and thus always ensnares us—speakers and listeners—within a domain of power. For example, when I speak, “I am obliged to posit myself first as subject before stating the action which will henceforth be no more than my attribute.” This basic subject-verb-object grammatical structure requires, Barthes argues, that “what I do is merely the consequence and consecution of what I am” (5). “What I am” is further delimited by the fact that (keeping in mind Barthes is lecturing in French to a French-speaking audience) “I must always choose between masculine and feminine, for the neuter and dual are forbidden me” (5). Furthermore, my relation to others is restricted to the tu (informal singular) or vous (plural or formal singular) form of address, thus denying me “social or affective suspension” (5). As Barthes puts it in his 1978 lecture course, The Neutral, “a dramatic existence comes to me” through grammar, a determinative existence over which I have very little control (52). Every time I speak, I am the docile servant of a speech-system that compels me to qualify my existence in various ways: via my actions, within a pre-established gender binarism, with adherence to formalized affect, and in an already specified relation to a social milieu. As a result, speech pertains less to communication per se than to the various modes of subjugation that discipline my existence: “a speech-system is defined less by what it permits us to say than by what it compels us to say,” Barthes writes. And, after all, he adds, “fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech” (“Lecture in Inauguration” 5). Language’s requisite servility to power, to a “will-to-possess” (4), makes it essentially fascist.1

It is important to note that this interweaving of power, language, and fascist subjugation does not happen only in the outward presentation of the speaking subject—as if language’s fascism pertains only to those instances in which a vocalized utterance steps innocently upon a terrain of violence. Rather, Barthes specifies that “speech enters the service of power” even “in the subject’s deepest privacy” (“Lecture in Inauguration” 5). In other words, “power” does not intervene upon language from outside but instead constitutes its most intimate spaces, even its very communicability. The rules of language serve as laws that “permit communication […] but in exchange (or on the other hand) impose a way of being, a subjecthood, a subjectivity” (The Neutral 41). In this sense, the “categories of language” ultimately behave as “coercive laws, which force one to speak” a certain way, according to certain rules that mediate communicability, and under the weight of a certain regime of power (41-42). When I speak, Barthes says that I “can speak only by picking up what loiters around in speech” (“Lecture in Inauguration” 5), which means that when I speak, I am compelled by the laws of communicability to voice what already loiters in speech. When I speak, I am bound to speak in recognizable, repeatable, shareable—in short, communicable—signs, which spreads the singularity of my speech across a plane of anticipatable convention. Consequently, within my speech always loiters servility to the comforts of “stereotype” (5), that is, a conformism to the superficialities of recognition and repetition that makes my speech homogenous with and comprehensible to others.

For Barthes, this unavoidable conformism to comprehensibility presents a tremendous limit to language, a limit always subjugated by an ineradicable servility to power. But this also means that every time I speak, I say more than I mean, since my speech always gives voice to the power that loiters within speech. If “there is no exit” from language, and if human language remains conditioned by its conformist servility to “fascist” power and subjugation, what avenues remain open for freedom? For Barthes, “freedom” entails “not only the capacity to escape power but also and especially the capacity to subjugate no one” (6). Given his characterization of language’s essential fascism, it appears as though there is no freedom except, impossibly, “outside language” (6). Language’s fascism appears to be totalitarian.

Barthes does not clarify exactly why this compulsion to speak what loiters in speech is decidedly fascist. After all, when he initially introduces this relation between language and power to his audience at the Collège de France, Barthes points out that the ubiquity of power in human affairs should not be restricted to “[man’s] political, historical history.” Instead, power’s inscription within language pertains “for all of human eternity” (4). So, exactly why Barthes identifies this “eternal” inscription with a historically determined twentieth-century political phenomenon remains unclear. Although Barthes’s 1977 declaration that language “is quite simply fascist” looms over his 1978 lecture course on the Neutral,2 this detail about fascism’s political and historical particularity remains unaddressed. One might therefore be tempted to accuse Barthes of hyperbole, or at least of anachronistically conflating “fascism” with a more general and quasi-transcendental sense of “violence.” Unless something of fascism’s politically and historically violent relation to language clarifies ex post facto language’s more general and structural entanglement with power. 

Victor Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich is instructive on this point. Klemperer’s philological project, first published in 1947 and drawn from diaries as early as 1933, analyzes the contortions of the German language during the Hitler era. By detailing how everyday German words grew to incorporate and insinuate fascist ideologies of blood, nation, militarism, rhetoric, fanaticism, industrial production, and so on, Klemperer argues that these linguistic clichés “compel” (to use Barthes’s terminology) the German speaker to speak, and thus to remain at least minimally complicit with, the Nazism that loiters within this language. Throughout his book, Klemperer thus describes the language of the Third Reich as a “poison,” and he targets in particular “the cliché” as “language which writes and thinks for you” (27). Fascism’s intimate embrace of cliché, of speech that replaces thinking, should be considered consistent with fascism’s generalized attack on rationality, its replacement of reason with devotional belief, its exaltation of fanaticism, its hypertrophied nostalgia for a mythologized past, and its subordination of the individual to the administrative ranks and hierarchies of the nation and its Volk. Perhaps what Barthes calls “stereotype,” which designates the comfortable shallowness that grounds the accessibility of communication and identification, might be more adequately expressed via Klemperer as “cliché.” (After all, the French verb clicher means “to stereotype.”)

Klemperer’s definition of cliché is consistent with Hannah Arendt’s portrayal of the banal thoughtlessness of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi functionary responsible for organizing the logistics for the mass deportation of European Jews to concentration and extermination camps during the Holocaust. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt famously observes that Eichmann speaks during his trial almost entirely in clichés, hackneyed stock phrases, and routinized administrative jargon, which for Arendt exemplifies linguistically the conformist behavior central to the mechanics of Nazi atrocity.3 In this sense, Klemperer provides a philological account for what Arendt calls, in moral and political terms, the Third Reich’s “organized guilt and universal responsibility” of the German people. Cliché—that is, “language which writes and thinks for you”—exemplifies the ideal subject of fascist rule because in its ventriloquy loiters an unavoidable servility to power. Language is fascist because it is always at least minimally cliché and, as Klemperer’s analysis of the lexical emergences of Nazism within the German language show, fascism is the rhetorical and ideological elevation of cliché par excellence. In this sense, language is not the innocent victim of fascist violence, as if fascism invades from outside an otherwise peacefully uncontaminated German (or any other) language. Language is fascist, as Barthes says. That is, the cliché comprises language’s constitutive opening to abuse, contortion, and weaponization from the start—an opening that, as the murderous history of the twentieth century demonstrates, enables the specific historical and political machinations of European fascism.4

Barthes only mentions fascism twice in a single sentence early in his 1977 address and, in both cases, he refers to fascism only to characterize a trait of language. One might therefore be inclined to assume that fascism plays a very small role in Barthes’s text. However, the provocation of his statement outweighs its brevity. Barthes identifies language as essentially “fascist” to ask what could possibly resist language’s communicative bondage to cliché. Freedom from the power and subjugation inscribed within language would require an exit outside language. Yet Barthes acknowledges that this exit remains impossible: “human language has no exterior: there is no exit.” So, if language is essentially fascist because it compels a speaker to speak in the readymade clichés that loiter in speech, and if no outside to this economy of conformism exists, if there is no escape from the prison-house of language, then what antifascist resistance might language mobilize from within itself? 

Barthes’s answer to this question is literature.

Literature is the “outside” of language within language: an outside to the clichéd proximity of language to power. Literature comprises the bafflement, drifting, and derailment of language’s fascist will-to-possess—a neutrality, as he puts it, that does not dialectically oppose one paradigm to another, that does not cancel one paradigm with the assertion of another, but rather comprises the “freedom” that displaces language’s totalitarianism (The Neutral 137, 190). Noting that “it is within speech that speech must be fought” (since “human language has no exterior”), literature thus retains for Barthes a redemptive capacity that “displaces” the totalitarian fascism embedded within language (“Lecture in Inauguration” 6). Literature as such does not assert anything; it merely “stages” language and thus retains what Barthes calls an “infinite reflexivity” (7), or a “form with no antecedents” (Writing Degree Zero 5), which allows it to evade the simple classification of concepts and the binarism that forms the discourse of power (“Lecture in Inauguration” 12).5 This is not to say that literature stands permanently immunized against violence, as if there is no violence where there is literature, and vice versa. Instead, Barthes argues that the “power” that literature baffles within language “is present in the most delicate mechanisms of social exchange […] and even in the liberating impulses which attempt to counteract it” (4, emphasis added). In short, if literature names a liberation from power within language, its opposition to power always remains vulnerable to the power it resists. Literature’s antifascism—if there is any—appears to be circumstantial and in each case unique rather than a permanently fixed and transcendentally essentialized trait.

In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Barthes does not elaborate exactly how literature rescues language from fascism. That is not the purpose of his address. But it is worth asking whether Barthes’s characterization of literature as a displacement of language within language, as an exteriorization at work inside language, makes its nonconformity to cliché decidedly antifascist. If language is “quite simply fascist” because of its complicity with the power that loiters within speech, then is literature, as a name for language’s distancing from itself, from its communicative imperatives, essentially antifascist? As an “outside,” is literature constitutionally opposed to violence, a violence accelerated by fascism’s weaponization of language? Does literature vanquish the cliché once and for all? 

Although he admits that even literature’s “liberating impulses” against power remain vulnerable to power’s reach, Barthes does not take this vulnerability to express a fundamental undecidability between violence and nonviolence. If he did, Barthes would admit that literature’s antifascism is never a guarantee. But for Barthes, literature always appears decidedly opposed to power, even in moments of its susceptibility; it remains inherently antifascist in its essential evasion of the superficialities of fascist cliché. The contradiction here is obvious. On the one hand, literature does not and cannot fully immunize itself against violence. And yet, on the other hand, literature always appears to take the form of an unconditional transcendence of violence.

Rather than retain this contradiction as a productive formation (wherein “literature” is the name for what takes shape at the meeting of this contradiction), Barthes seeks a way out: he identifies an idiomaticity within language that would escape language’s fascist mechanics of cliché. Barthes calls this idiomaticity the “freedom” of literature: an outside to language that, at work within language, essentially rescues language from itself. Yet, as Catherine Malabou argues, Barthes grants to this literary freedom an “almost religious transcendence” because he “idealizes” literature’s “revolution” as a “way of finding […] salvation from within the prison of reality” (Plasticity 139). This idealization, a kind of “transcendence in immanence” (136), happens as a flight from the very conditions of its formation. This flight grants to literature an ethic of salvation, as if its essence lies and lives elsewhere. 

What follows challenges this salvific sense of literature and the faith it places in a transcendent structure of primordial peace. The phrase “post-violence literature” refers to the desire for a reclaimable origin (the primacy of “peace”) that propels literature’s ethical resistance to violence. This essay critiques post-violence literature’s impulse by arguing that its transcendental reclamation of a lost origin, its teleological ethic of nonviolence, attempts to flee the contradiction that makes it possible. By tracing this contradiction that, on the one hand, posits literature as always proximate to violence and, on the other hand, also asserts literature as fundamentally nonviolent, what follows will elaborate a sense of literature as an encounter, a shape formed not by the idealized preference of one hand over the other but rather by the clasping of these two hands. Insofar as “any transcendental instance necessarily finds itself in a position of exteriority in relation to that which it organizes” (Malabou, Plasticity 204), a critique of post-violence literature’s ethic of transcendence amounts to thinking literature between immanence and transcendence. Literature’s challenge to fascist violence cannot happen by asserting a transcendent post-violence that aligns literature with an essential, primordial peace. It happens within a general economy of violence, at the encounter and passage between literature’s possibility and impossibility.

There Is No, Ever So Little, Post-Violence Literature

Literature’s “freedom” would presumably, in the name of this “outside” and its “neutrality,” reclaim and liberate a primordial peace from within language’s violence. This attachment to an original peace describes the most basic desire for “post-violence literature.” Post-violence literature not only writes from a vantage of later nonviolence (post-violence as the retrospective chronology that bears witness to a prior violence) but also, and more importantly, takes nonviolence as literature’s idiomatic project. In this sense, the affirmation of post-violence literature amounts to a defense of literature’s inherent nonviolence; it names a desire for literature to redeem language from violence by rescuing an original peace. The ethic of literature as post-violence thus amounts to situating literature within a transcendentally redemptive position of peace. Clearly, Barthes does not situate first a primordial peace that language then comes to ruin. In this sense, Barthes would deny that literature obeys a chronological reclamation of a primary peace. However, Barthes often treats literature as essentially determined by a certain nonviolence, insofar as “literature” is the name Barthes gives to the neutrality of language outside the binarism, conflict, and opposition of discourse. Although he never says so outright, Barthes seems to agree that a literature that commits violence is not literature. In short, if the literarity of literature amounts to language’s transcendence of itself, and language is quite simply fascist, then, despite his sometimes insinuations to the contrary, it appears as though a Barthesian sense of literature must remain permanently and essentially “antifascist” in its absolute opposition to and transcendence of power’s violence.

A recent defender of this literary nonviolence is philosopher Marc Crépon, who argues that nonviolence so determines the “vocation” of writing that any literature that violently instrumentalizes language, generates racism, or indulges in anti-Semitism, ultimately renounces literature altogether (The Vocation of Writing 132). Throughout his work, Crépon wants to develop an ethic of literature tasked with a fundamental resistance to violence. As Crépon puts it, anti-Semitism and racism are “provocations” that “breach the contract” that the responsibility for the “care, help, and attention that the vulnerability and mortality of the other demands” (131). Literature sustains this contract by giving voice to the singularity of the other, the idiom of his or her address, in the face of the homogeneity (the erasure of singularity) that persecutory violence mobilizes. In this sense, Crépon treats violence and literature as mutually exclusive—so much so that, in Crépon’s framework, nonviolence seems to behave as the very essence of literature. Literature’s “law,” as Crépon calls it, is in this sense quintessentially “post-violent” because, for Crépon, literature names the reclamation or return of language, or at the very least the faith in the possibility of this reclamation or return of language, to a nonviolence.

Treated this way, violence would only amount to an invasion upon or perversion of an original, primary peace, and literature, its idiom, its rescue of the singularity of the victim from the homogenizing forces of violence, would name this redemptive ethics of peace, of nonviolence. According to this framework, literature is not just one ethical tool among others. It is “ethics itself” (The Vocation of Writing 133). According to Crépon, any ethics worthy of the name recognizes the singularity of the other as singular and as other rather than as an instrument or means toward some ulterior end. Crépon thus frequently aligns literature’s inherent ethical responsibility with a necessary attention to the “vulnerability and mortality” of the other as other. As he frames it, literature’s intractable ethical responsibility affirms and relies upon the presumption of a “post-violence.” Barthes and Crépon position themselves differently in relation to the primacy of “peace,” but they both present an idealized form of literature’s “revolutionary” capacity within language contra fascism. Even if Crépon goes further than Barthes to rid literature of any trace of violence, both remain committed to the idea of literature’s ability to revolutionize language within itself and, in doing so, redeem language from the fascism that loiters within.

Crépon develops this sense of literature from Derrida, but he acknowledges that Derrida emphasizes that an idiom “is never pure” because “its iterability opens it up to others” (Acts of Literature 62). Moreover, since Derrida expresses this inherent contamination of the idiom, and thus the impossibility of an originary peace, in an interview about the very possibility of literature, it is also clear that, for Derrida, literature finds itself in the irresolvable balance between the singularity of the idiom and the homogeneity of the legible. For this reason, Derrida will frequently express incredulity about the ability to identify “something” even as “literature.” The poetics of witnessing that Derrida enumerates in Sovereignties in Question follows a similar trajectory: the witnessed experience is absolutely singular, and yet to testify on behalf of this exclusive singularity requires that the witness render that experience articulable, communicable, and comprehensible to and for others. Others who, by definition, are outside, and thus unfamiliar with, the experience being communicated. Not only does this mean that we receive testimony largely on faith; it also means that, as a singular experience rendered communicable, the veracity of the testimony always and unavoidably remains at least minimally indiscernible from a fiction. In short, the iterability of the idiom denies the idiom its idiomaticity. 

If literature retains its ethical commitments from its idiomatic concern for singularity, as Crépon frequently argues, but if Derrida points out that the idiom can never be absolutely immunized from the impurity that makes it communicable as such, then it seems as though this aspirational faith in a “post-violence literature” will always be conditioned by the violence it “posts.” If literature acquires its ethic of nonviolence because it stands on the side of the idiom and thus counters the homogeneity of violence, then the idiom, even to be recognized as an idiom, must unavoidably traffic in the very homogeneity it resists. In short, there is no, or at least very little, post-violence literature. Violence, it appears, has no “after” or “outside”—even in the name of being literature, of being ethical, of being post-violent. To this point, Rodolphe Gasché adds that the ability to commit violence against language, which comprises the bulk of Crépon’s focus in The Vocation of Writing, already assumes a more originary violence at work within language. In his reading of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, specifically the section Derrida devotes to Levi-Strauss on the “violence of the letter,” Gasché argues that the violence “that befalls spoken language from without is made possible from within speech by [an] originary violence” (Storytelling 62-63). In these pages Derrida accuses Levi-Strauss of conceiving violence in a strictly empirical sense, as if violence behaves as an “accident” that imposes itself exteriorly “upon a terrain of innocence” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 112). To treat violence as something imposed, as something that intervenes, as something that comes one day from outside, assumes a prior peace or nonviolence that this violence will have destroyed. However, as Gasché points out, Derrida shows that an empirical intervention of violence is itself the result of a more constitutive “arche-violence,” which for Derrida means “the loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 112). In short, arche-violence names the very chance of relation, and thus of communication, and even of ethics, since arche-violence accounts for the phenomenological exposure to alterity but also closes the possibility of an absolutely pure idiom.6

An originary structure of arche-violence, which Derrida also calls in Of Grammatology  a “first violence,” calls into question the possibility of “post-violence literature” because the position and operation of this “after” remains conditioned by the time of survival to which it testifies. If literature resists violence by rescuing singularity from violence’s homogenizing grip, then literature’s supposedly inherent nonviolence also commits violence—and cannot help but do so—because an idiom that remains absolutely idiomatic would destroy the ground of iterability as such. In the name of nonviolence, a uniquely idiomatic idiom would be the most violent. If the idiom is both impossible and necessary, this is because, to be even potentially comprehensible, every utterance must be distinguishably unique and at least minimally uniform (or, as Celan says, “addressable”) … and therefore, in short, violent. Derrida calls “literature” a “strange institution” precisely on account of the impossibility of a uniquely idiomatic idiom. Literature never appears as such, it is “strange” or “foreign” to itself, always estranged from itself, impure. It loses itself in the phenomenality of its appearance, which is never “literature” pure and simple. Therefore, Derrida will frequently prefer to discuss the literariness or the literarity of literature and will almost always express reluctance or reservation about treating “literature” as a self-evident phenomenon. In short, for there “to be” literature, for there to be this reclamation of the singularity of the idiom, there “is” no literature (or, as Derrida puts it in Dissemination, “there is no or hardly any, ever so little literature” [223]) because this reclamation must traffic in the very homogeneity, and thus the very violence, the erasure of singularity, that “literature” is supposed to resist. Derrida will have shown that, if there is no outside to language, then there is no post-violence literature that would essentially oppose violence from the idealized position of a primary, reclaimable peace. 

Potability

A major distinction between the forms of “post-violence” articulated by Crépon and Barthes comes down to the fact that, for Barthes, literature’s redemption from violence is never as absolute as Crépon suggests. As already mentioned, for Barthes literature remains vulnerable to the very servility it resists (“Lecture in Inauguration” 4), which is what gives literature its ethic of “persistence” and “shifting ground” (9). Even if this shifting/persistence appears to support an “almost religious transcendence” of language, as Malabou claims, what Barthes calls literature’s “linguistic anarchy” poses a challenge to language’s fascism, and this challenge is structurally necessary but never absolute or guaranteed (“Lecture in Inauguration” 10). To defend this shifting anarchy of language without collapsing it into a transcendental peace amounts to thinking literature as an encounter, a form that takes shape.

Rather than a chronology or a topic, a before or an after, “post-violence literature” names a conceptual problem within the logic of literature’s addressability. Considering the enormous field of Holocaust Studies, emphasizing this economy sidesteps the problem of simply reducing the antinomies of testimony to a kind of reverential obeisance to the “unknowable” or “unsayable.” As both Charlotte Delbo and Imre Kertész will point out, the problem is not just that the horrors of atrocity exceed the realm of the communicable. For Delbo and Kertész, the problem is more directly that the incommunicable horror of the camps calls for communication (Antelme says the same at the beginning of The Human Race), and yet to communicate the experience of the camps already requires that a communicable, and thus never purely idiomatic, and thus always insufficient or unsatisfactory, language gives voice—impossibly—to the singularity of this experience. The idiom that rescues the singularity of experience from the homogeneity of violence is unavoidably and constitutively complicit in the violence it resists. Delbo calls this constitutive failure “cliché” and Kertész calls it “kitsch.” Both writers are aware that this risk, which ruins the purity of literature’s ethically redemptive project, nonetheless constitutes its only chance.  

Delbo provides a very quick but incisive example of this economy in her book, Auschwitz and After. Arrested by French police for her participation in the Resistance, yet before deportation to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbrück, Delbo was given a chance to visit her husband, Georges Dudach, on the evening before his execution in May 1942 for his Resistance activities. Recalling to her reader the love she shared with her husband, Delbo describes the difficulty of putting this love into words. She retracts every attempt to articulate the love she felt for her husband, concluding each short stanza with a declaration of its inadequacy:


I loved him
because he was good looking
a trifling reason

I loved him
because he loved me
a selfish reason

Recognizing each time that the utterance of this love betrays the love itself, and yet fully aware that this love is in some sense constituted by this ineffability, Delbo states to the reader: 

Yet
it’s for your sake
I look for reasons
for me I had none
I loved him as a woman loves a man
without words to say so.

Absent the “reasons” and “words” that would make Delbo’s love for Dudach articulable, relatable, and communicable to others, Delbo describes her vain attempts to render this love comprehensible as a desperate kind of searching—for reasons, for relatable explanations, all of which she seeks for the sake of others. Delbo is “without words to say” her love for Dudach not only because of love’s general ineffability but, moreover, because this particular absence of descriptive words reflects the inseparability of Delbo’s love from Dudach’s death. The singularity of Dudach’s death, which also singularizes the love Delbo seeks to describe, can be shared with others only insofar as it remains withheld. Hence Delbo’s repeated frustrations with the inadequacies of her various attempts to account for this love, which give only superficialities, stock phrases, and conventions.

He died
since to be beautiful
a love story requires
a tragic ending

For this reason, for its tragic fatefulness, which is a perspective that could only come after the event, explained ex post facto via pre-existing, reliable conventions of narration for “our” sake, Delbo describes the love cultivated between herself and Dudach as “magnificent.” Yet, as soon as Delbo acknowledges this magnificence, or even tries to explain what it might mean or how it might look to us, tied as it is to the death and memory of her husband, she states (because it is not a question—her stanza ends with a period rather than a question mark), again in frustration:

Why must your clichés
always triumph
in the end.

(128)

Phrased as a question but punctuated as a constative, Delbo’s question reads like its own answer. The “your” is clearly the impersonal, general reader, the same “you” Delbo addresses throughout her book. We, as Delbo’s readers, who did not endure her unique set of experiences, who want to understand what she cannot communicate, demand of her only what she can give: clichés. Her choice to describe her love for Dudach by evoking his death fulfills our expectation of what constitutes “a love story.” It must be tragic, fated, doomed if it is going to be “magnificent.” But merely fulfilling uniform expectations of what “counts” as a “magnificent” love fails to capture the singular experience Delbo wants to describe. This is her frustration: the only way to vocalize the depths of the love she shared with her husband is either via cliché, or “trifling” or “selfish” insincerity, or both. This, she recognizes, is inevitable when compelled to communicate her love to others, to render it comprehensible, articulable. Precisely because we readers “never listened / to the heartbeat / of one about to die” (127), and thus “cannot understand” the tormented proximity of love to death that Delbo describes, we are bound to share the recognizable, the cliché.

However, here is the double-bind for which Delbo is perhaps most well-known: for all its frustrations, the cliché is nonetheless true and our frustrations with cliché would not be so frustrating if the cliché was not at least minimally truthful and thus, as Delbo says, triumphant. Our clichés, the communicability we demand and the expectations we harbor, “triumph in the end” because, without them, we would not be addressable. (This addressability is precisely what Klemperer argues gets exploited in the clichéd language of the Third Reich.) The cliché’s diminishment of this range of experience is also the possibility of its communicability, insofar as the communicability of the idiomatically singular experience requires that the idiom be at least minimally commonplace, not idiomatic. In short, the chance is also the risk. If to speak is to speak the clichés that loiter in speech, then the frustration that Delbo voices speaks to the constitutive relation between language and violence rather than to a temporary obstruction of a recoverable nonviolence. Indeed, this frustration, which is not limited to this one scene, is the animating force of Delbo’s entire book and applies just as much to expressing the love of her husband as it does to the extreme brutality she endured in the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück camps.

For example, while attempting to describe the incomparable thirst experienced during her forced labor in the Ravensbrück marsh fields, Delbo begins with the following:

Thirst is an explorer’s tale, you know, in the books we read as children. It takes place in the desert. Those who see mirages and walk in the direction of an elusive oasis suffer from thirst for three whole days. This is the pathetic chapter of the book. At the end of that chapter, a caravan bringing provisions appears; it has lost its way on trails erased by sand storms. The explorers pierce the goatskin bottles and they drink. They drink and their thirst is quenched. This is the thirst experienced in the sun, the drying wind. The desert. It is accompanied by the image of a palm tree profiled in filigree against russet sand.

(70)

Delbo asks how she—or anyone—can communicate an incommunicable thirst to readers whose thirst is always satiated and whose vision of thirst always coincides with the vision of satiation. How to account for an interminable thirst to those who know thirst always within a horizon of its rescue? When the comprehensibility of extreme thirst is clouded by clichés of sandy lips in the orange sun, oasis mirages that emerge from the haze of the desert heat, and finally the crescendo in which the explorer gorges on long-awaited water, water that always finally arrives—how to explain thirst without also speaking these clichés?

We could here rearticulate the entire problem of post-violence literature as a problem of potability. The language that communicates the immeasurably singular experience of the camps must do so measurably, must render the Holocaust in some sense potable for it to be communicated in the least. And yet, the triumph of this potability violates the singularity of the experience being communicated. The triumph of the cliché, the potability of the experience of the other, both constitutes and frustrates Delbo’s entire book: Auschwitz and After comprises a series of starts and stops, continual attempts to make “you” understand, see, look at what defies communication, what has no potability, falling short and starting again.

After the liberation of the camps, Delbo frequently remarked that she had “returned” from a “world beyond knowledge” (230), from “another world” (224), a world in which the boundary between life and death—a division that constitutes the potability of this, our world—does not hold. Delbo’s return from this “other world” with this knowledge “beyond knowledge” renders her account fascinating yet entirely incomprehensible to “us,” to those of us who believe we are alive and for whom this knowledge beyond knowledge—the only knowledge worthy of the name—amounts to what she calls a “useless knowledge” (225). Useful, serviceable, potable knowledge, the type of knowledge those of us who believe we are alive believe ourselves to have, to be able to have, is but cliché. Because we think we want to know (because we think we can know), we await with thirstily parched lips for the satiation we expect to come, not knowing that we are only waiting for what is already digestible, potable.

and we don’t know how to answer
not with the words you use

(275)

Conformist Hell

After his liberation from the camps and his return to his native Budapest, Gyorgy Köves, the main character of Imre Kertész’s novel Fatelessness, is confronted by a journalist who, after a few initial pleasantries, wants desperately to record Gyorgy’s account of the camps for his “progressive” newspaper. Their conversation becomes tense when the journalist learns that Köves is unwilling to indulge his expectations of the “hell” the camps must have been. At each turn in their conversation, the journalist insists that he is only interested in the litany of horrors and abuses endured and, moreover, he anticipates this litany because his only horizon for conceiving the camps is as a “hell.” Köves tries to explain to the journalist the peculiar monotony in the camps, describing how, moment to moment, the structural passage of time acclimates the prisoner to the “natural” condition of the camp—an acclimation that could have never happened if time were not successive, if all the violence of the camp befell the victim in one pure present moment. In this sense, he says, the violence of the camps was natural: not natural to the already unnatural context of the camp, as the journalist wants to insist, but natural in general. Natural as the passage of time. With his upright sense of justice offended, the journalist leaves Köves hastily. At the journalist’s clear incomprehension, Köves can only respond, “I suppose this is why they only want to call it a hell.”

“Hell,” like other codified and stylized titles such as “the Holocaust” or the synecdoche “Auschwitz,” behaves as a circumscribed concept that, as Gasché argues in Storytelling (2019), works to give “meaning” to what otherwise defies meaning. In short, the extreme violence of the concentration camps extended to the organized destruction of any ability to make sense of it. (As Primo Levi hears from a camp guard: Hier is kein Warum.) As a result, to homogenize this senselessness into a signifying concept—“Auschwitz,” “the Holocaust,” “Hell,” etc.— is either to make sense of senselessness or else to turn senselessness into a form of sense itself.

When we speak of the holocaust, we do so in general by way of categories (or images) that thoroughly miss the nature of the event, categories that we use in the average to orient ourselves in the world, and to make sense of it. But in the case of an event as abnormal as the holocaust, these categories are simply inadequate, if not even inappropriate. It should therefore also be clear that I am talking here of an incomprehensibility and senselessness that is not simply beyond everyday experience, or even beyond the grasp of rational thought. To associate it with irrationality is to still approach this senselessness from within the horizon of reason. But as Arendt’s observations on the complete disregard of the planed final solution for all economic and military considerations demonstrate, the senselessness is rather one of utter a-rationality: it is a senselessness for its own sake. Hence, the high degree of calculation that characterizes it and that makes of it an intolerable and revolting senselessness.

(Gasché, Storytelling 8-9)

The guiding question of Gasché’s book is: “How then to conceive of the horrific senselessness of Auschwitz without its sense effacing its senselessness?” (Storytelling 10). Put otherwise: how do we avoid the triumph of the cliché in the face of our thirst for understanding? This circumscription of meaning is what I have been calling its potability. But, as Kertész and Delbo make clear, this problem of meaning and iterability does not only describe a limit to what can be factually communicated. It also describes a generalizable problem that names the point of and (exemplified by the journalist in Fatelessness) desire for post-violence literature. Returning to the journalist’s expectation for a potable rendering of Köves’s experiences of the camps, Gasché describes this scene as follows: “by his interlocutor’s preference to speak about the camps as hell, or as a place where atrocities however unspeakable were committed, the survivor is invited to respond to clichés by way of other clichés” (31-32). 

This inability to communicate the singularity of experience to others fundamentally unable to receive it is why Kertész claims that “the concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality” (“Who owns Auschwitz?” 268). Literature retains this exclusivity because of its attunement to the problems of its own formation. In other words, literature seems keenly aware of the impossibility of post-violence literature. Asserting the factual meaning of the camps misses the singular experience of the camps (as Agamben also points out in Remnants of Auschwitz), which is why, despite his frequent acknowledgement that everything in his autobiographical novel Fatelessness is factually “true,” Kertész claims that the novel is still fundamentally a work of fiction, a work of what he calls the “aesthetic imagination.” Kertész knows that this dilemma of rendering the experience of the camps potable not only relies on structures of cliché (like “hell”) but also, in the interest of appealing merely to factual accuracy, always risks collapsing into kitsch. In his essay, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” Kertész argues that the consistent failure of post-violence cinema and literature to grapple with the “wide-ranging ethical consequences of Auschwitz” is not only the fundamental consequence of the potable but also constitutes what he calls “kitsch.”

Kertész defines kitsch in two stages. These two stages are, of course, related. First, in the widest sense, “kitsch” describes the preference for pleasant aesthetics over quality, the “debased popularization” of culture, a “decadent model” of alluring art that remains inoffensively accessible, the use of “tried and tested techniques” without innovation or artistic risk. “Predigested,” as Clement Greenberg puts it (“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” 15)—or, one could just as easily say desalinated, purified, detoxified, distilled, or otherwise rendered potable. In this sense, the first stage of Kertész’s definition of kitsch appears to be remarkably consistent with Greenberg’s well-known account: kitsch names the exoteric, potable, homogeneity of “low” cultural consumption against which the esoteric avant-garde of “high” art singularly asserts itself. While Greenberg famously emphasizes how kitsch’s formulaic stupidity ends up satisfying the populist demands of European fascism (“kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the ‘soul’ of his people”), particularly its elevation of a mass culture set against the dangers and degeneracies of elitism (“Hitler is a bitter enemy of the avant-garde”), Kertész adds that the Soviets in his native Hungary placed a high priority on homogenizing a moral uniformity—through the use of what Kertész calls “conformist euphemisms” (The Holocaust 71)— regarding Holocaust narratives, which always reaffirmed clichés of communism’s military and humanitarian triumph over fascist monstrosity.  

The second, as Denys Riout points out in Dictionary of Untranslatables, is kitsch’s aesthetic link “to an ethics whose political consequences are obvious” (“Kitsch” 538). These obvious political and ethical consequences, already mentioned above, comprise the focus of Kertész’s essay. Any art that fails to account for the “organic connection” between normalcy and atrocity, any preference to regard the Holocaust as an aberration of “human nature” rather than an intrinsic capability of modern human beings; any visualization of the Holocaust that depicts survivors as more or less healthy and unharmed; any conclusion that leaves the human, the person, humanity unblemished; any failure to acknowledge the universality of the event (treating it instead as locally German and Jewish problems) is guilty, by Kertész’s assessment, of kitsch. Kitschy films about the Holocaust (Kertész’s example is Spielberg’s Schindler’s List) not only fail to take seriously the criteria Kertész enumerates; they are also guilty of appealing to the institutions and consensuses of what Kertész calls, with its Barthesian resonances, “Holocaust conformism.” 

Kertész does not extend his description of kitsch this far, but his point can be extended to argue that even a work of art that avoids these specific definitions of kitsch—a film, for example, that by Kertész’s estimation does all the right things, captures the “authentic experiences” or “spirit” of the Holocaust—remains vulnerable to a more constitutive sense of “kitsch.” In “Who Owns Auschwitz?”, Kertész appears to treat kitsch as something finally avoidable, even though, in his other works (specifically his pseudo-memoir, Dossier K.), kitsch operates as a more general and constitutive risk. Every individual story is an example of kitsch because, as Kertész argues in Dossier K., the story of an individual life follows a teleological structure of events that brought us to where we are now. This teleology, this retrospective position of an after that subsumes all “individual stories,” reinscribes a recognizable and anticipatable pattern of meaning. Kertész calls the recognizability of these patterns “kitsch” and Delbo calls it “cliché.”

It seems like Kertész indulges a classically elitist (à la Greenberg) distinction between the superficialities of mass-produced low-brow kitsch on the one hand, and the more authentic work of singularly high-brow literature on the other hand (Schindler’s List versus Auschwitz and After). But this distinction remains untenable. It is not clear exactly how a work escapes the type of kitsch Kertész describes, if indeed it does, just as it is not clear exactly how literature finally accomplishes, if it can, the type of “neutrality” Barthes describes. After all, Barthes points out that an articulation of the Neutral, as what evades the binarism and power that constitutes language, would require words that do not exist (The Neutral 73). For Barthes, this is the problem of the idiom: the idiom’s displacement of language’s communicability can only be communicated in the clichéd language inadequate to what demands communication. Thus, the idiom is ruined from the start; a purely idiomatic idiom would annihilate the ground for communication. Likewise, a work completely devoid of kitsch or redeemed of cliché would be unrecognizable as such. While thinkers like Lyotard will argue that literature entails finding an idiom for differends (i.e., the “unstable state and instance of language” in which what ought or must be said cannot), for both Delbo and Kertész (even if the latter never says so explicitly), the vulnerability of literature to cliché and kitsch ultimately constitutes the very chance of literature. In other words, the irresolvable contradictoriness and indistinction, indeed the oscillation, is the point. As Kertész puts it: “but then I take delight in contradictions” (Dossier 210). 

To make it go down easy, to make it digestible, potable, cliché and kitsch are always part of the risk and, in a sense, even the possibility of literature, despite the tendency (exemplified in various ways by Barthes, Crépon, and even Kertész) to disavow the intractability of this risk in the name of the “almost religious transcendence” of a “post-violence” literature. Kertész’s concern that opens his essay is a concern of inheritance: as the last of the Holocaust survivors pass away, the possibility of a first-hand memory of the camps dies with them. As a result, our knowledge of the Holocaust will rest entirely on the generational inheritance of testimony. The risks Kertész laments—such as the inevitable distortion of these experiences, or even the hagiographic treatment of the witness—tarnish the singular experiences they communicate. But these risks also indelibly form their task because the generational dilemmas Kertész describes already point out the essential fact of the idiom: its rendering always commits itself, as its possibility, to this betrayal or contamination. For this reason, “survival” is not limited merely to the temporal problems of remaining after the liberation of the camps. As Kertész claims in his speech “The Holocaust as Culture,” we can talk about “the survival of survival” even for those who, like Améry, Tadeuz Borowski, or Primo Levi, took their own lives.  

The “survival of survival,” rather than being simply “the personal problem of those who remained,” or even the mere fact of remaining, is the project, the burden of facing these challenges of post-violence literature in the face of the “dread” of forgetting. And this dread is itself contradictory—the same type of contradiction in which Kertész says he “takes delight”—because it names the oscillations between the cultural mechanisms of remembrance and the risk that these very mechanisms might erase memory. If culture is subject to power (just as Barthes argues about language), then there is always the risk that the culture that remembers the Holocaust and the language in which its memory gets communicated distorts it, erases it, or fails to maintain what Kertész calls its “moral demands.” Or, as Barthes puts it, there is always the risk that the communicability of the language that speaks this memory, that speaks what loiters in speech, will say more than it says and thus, in a sense, say nothing. In another sense (again reminiscent of Barthes’s intertwining of language and power), if, as Jean Améry argues, the intellectual in Auschwitz is a particularly sorry figure because his cultured intellectualism—his very identity and appreciation of the world—is now restricted to the ownership of his oppressors, then his only recourse to make sense of his experiences and to communicate them to others is precisely through this German language and culture.  

If these political consequences of kitsch seem to animate the possibility of post-violence literature, and if this literature, to return to Crépon, gains its ethical dimension from its aspiration to reclaim the singularity of the victim from the homogeneity of violence, then this exposure to cliché and kitsch mobilizes the infinite task of literature from the start. The aspiration of post-violence literature would thus seem to announce its impossibility. But where does this leave one other cliché, not mentioned in the above considerations—the philosophical cliché? Doesn’t the philosophical insistence against cliché assume a kind of authenticity that itself remains cliché? Or, at least, is it not—this late after the advent of deconstruction—a philosophical cliché merely to insist on the intractability of a violence? To oppose this cliché must not itself produce another reactionary conformism predicated on the founding of yet another outside to cliché. Such an opposition, if opposition is even the right word, would require thinking a morphology of cliché, a space between its program and promise, a new space of literature.

Notes

  1. Barthes demonstrates this same point about fascism’s compulsory speech when, in different terms and from a different direction, he comments in his lecture course, The Neutral, as follows: “in every ‘totalitarian’ or ‘totalizing’ society, the implicit is a crime, because the implicit is a thought that escapes power” (24). Throughout this lecture course, Barthes seeks a neutrality that “baffles” the paradigm’s predication on binarism and the will-to-possess. Two prominent examples to which Barthes returns frequently are the Taoist concept of nonpurposive action (wu-wei) and the Zen concept of profitless sitting (Shikantaza). ↩︎
  2. Barthes comments on the notoriety of this phrase in his lecture on June 3, 1978, with a tone of amused remove: “people made a fuss about it” (The Neutral 189). ↩︎
  3. For an analysis of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem that foregrounds the figure of the cliché, see Norberg “The Political Theory of the Cliché: Hannah Arendt Reading Adolph Eichmann.”.  ↩︎
  4. Anticipating a critique that he conflates “language” and “discourse” in his assertion of language’s fascism, Barthes comments: “I believe, indeed, that today, within the pertinence chosen here, language and discourse are undivided, for they move along the same axis of power” (“Lecture in Inauguration” 11). ↩︎
  5. Barthes is not the sole owner and proprietor of these ideas. Instead, they appear across the constellation of twentieth-century French philosophy’s major names. For instance, few thinkers attend as closely to “neutrality” as Blanchot in The Space of Literature; Lyotard also posits literature as a resistance to language within language in The Differend; and Foucault articulates a sense of literature as the infinite reflexivity of language in The Thought from Outside. As will be made clearer further on, the decision to focus this essay on Barthes is because his “Inaugural Address” makes explicit the problems of redemption and idiomatic resistance that work implicitly in this wider politics of literature. And, later still, Derrida’s confrontation with these ideas also draws explicit attention to the paradoxicality that makes this politics possible in its impossibility. ↩︎
  6. On the relevance of Derrida’s articulation of a “first violence” to the economy of violence Crépon outlines in The Vocation of Writing, see Williams “First Violence: Marc Crépon’s Faith in Literature (‘if there is any’).”. ↩︎

Works Cited

  • Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.
  • Barthes, Roland. “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977,” trans. Richard Howard. October 8, 1979, 3-16.   
  • —. The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
  • —. Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.
  • Cooper, Thomas. “Imre Kertész and the Post-Auschwitz Condition.” The Holocaust as Culture by Imre Kertész, trans. Thomas Cooper. London: Seagull. 1-26, 2018.
  • Crépon, Marc. The Vocation of Writing: Literature, Philosophy, and the Test of Violence, trans. D.J.S. Cross and Tyler M. Williams. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018.
  • Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After, second edition, trans. Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
  • Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
  • —. “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge. 33-75, 1992.
  • —. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
  • —. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
  • Gasché, Rodolphe. Storytelling: The Destruction of the Inalienable in the Age of the Holocaust. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018.
  • Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon. 3-21, 1989.
  • Kertész, Imre. “Who Owns Auschwitz?” trans. John MacKay. Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1, 2001, 267-272. 
     
  • —. Fatelessness, trans. Tim Wilkinson. New York: Vintage, 2004.
  • —. Dossier K, trans. Tim Wilkinson. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2013.
  • —. The Holocaust as Culture, trans. Thomas Cooper. London: Seagull, 2018.
  • Klemperer, Victor. The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
  • Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, ed. Tyler M. Williams. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.
  • Norberg, Jakob. “The Political Theory of the Cliché: Hannah Arendt Reading Adolph Eichmann.” Cultural Critique no. 76, 2010, 74-97.  
  • Riout, Denys. “Kitsch.” Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin et. al, trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski. Princeton: Princeton Univeresity Press, 2014, 538-539.  
  • Williams, Tyler M. “First Violence: Marc Crépon’s Faith in Literature (‘if there is any’).” CR: The New Centennial Review 18, no. 1, 2018, 47-70.