Fleming-The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised

Mimesis, Movies, and Media

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Violence, Desire, and the Sacred

Series Editors: Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge

Volumes in the series:

Violence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 1: Girard’s Mimetic Theory Across the Disciplines

edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel HodgeViolence, Desire, and the Sacred, Volume 2:

René Girard and Sacrifice in Life, Love and Literatureedited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge

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Mimesis, Movies, and Media

Violence, Desire, and the Sacred

Volume 3

Edited by Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, and Joel Hodge

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Bloomsbury AcademicAn imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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First published 2015

© Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming, Joel Hodge, and Contributors, 2015

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3

The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised 1Chris Fleming

There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

We are as gods and have to get good at it.—Stewart Brand

Being good at being God: even the capacity to contemplate such an imperative is irreducibly modern, and so—living as we do, in “modern times”—bears on our self-understanding. Unlike many gods, however, we moderns remain decidedly mortal, and so are subject to our own deaths, even if those deaths can only appear to us as such through our witnessing of the deaths of others and by the morbid contortions of our own imagination. (The already-dead, we might say, are not here to represent it for us.) Recalling in some ways Epicurus’ letter to Menoeceus, in which the philos-opher famously announced Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo [“I was not; I was; I am not; I don’t care”], Jacques Derrida once made the infamous claim in his essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” that nuclear war is “fabulously textual”—“something that one can only talk about.”2 Where some predictably read this statement as further proof of the French philosopher’s idealism and textual relativism, Derrida’s point was anything but: that nuclear annihilation can only be represented because its actualization would leave no one—and perhaps nothing—to represent. Be that as it may, we are obliged to ask a question Derrida himself does not. Is this absolute horizon of ad nihilum, utter nothingness, the only way in which apocalypse can “appear?” Might it be possible, for instance, to claim that some have witnessed apocalypse and lived to say something about it? And if they have, can the actuality of that experience really be articulated, or articulated in a way that is adequate to the signified? We will begin at least with these questions.

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34 Mimesis, Movies, and Media

Improper nouns: Auschwitz and “Auschwitz”

In Henry Leroy Finch’s book, Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace, we find the following claim:

Two names symbolize this century: Hiroshima, in which we brought the powers of the sun down to earth for the purposes of war destruction, turning 50 thousand people into radiation in three seconds; and Auschwitz, where categories of men, women, and children were treated as utterly worthless, no better than vermin, and fit only to die or be worked to death.3

The assertion is an interesting one, not least for the many questions it leaves hanging. In what way or ways do these names “symbolize”? Why these two? And why is it that Finch thinks that the twentieth century can be symbolized by mass killings? If we preserve the classical definition of the sign—aliquid stat pro aliquo—“something stands for something else,” then what is the something else that is stood for in the act of symbolization?4 If the sign is a proxy, then what is the that in whose place it stands? Despite the largeness of Finch’s claim, it is one that the author simply makes and then leaves. Of course, that is in itself a significant datum; in a book which otherwise gathers its theses via a kind of neo-scholastic philosophical labor, the point here is simply assumed. But why? Is it because Finch considers the claim to be a clear and distinct idea or a Foucault-style historical a priori?5 In the tone of Finch’s remark there is perhaps an ethical taboo at play, a far-from-neutral language concerning the horrors signified by the two places. That is, the lack of further analysis or qualification itself suggests that beyond the minimal designation offered, all attempts at the repre-sentation of these events or their paradigmatic status will commence, stutter, falter, and then fail. Whatever the case, Finch’s claim appears suddenly at the front door and then leaves through the back just as rapidly. Yet despite this, or perhaps even because of it, what Finch alludes to here contains an interesting possibility: that even if we cannot represent apocalypse (and, as I’ve noted, he makes no effort to do so beyond the minimal) perhaps the inverse is conceivable: that the specter of apocalypse itself can represent something—and what it represents is nothing other than the very age in which we live.

But we are now in danger of moving too quickly over uncertain ground. Any claim that certain signal events of modernity—as disastrous as they may be—are somehow “unrepresentable” in themselves poses obvious problems, not least for anyone who claims even the vaguest allegiance to cultural empiricism. To take the case of the Holocaust, it is represented all the time. In many respects, surely I am doing it now, in this very essay, just as Finch did in his book on Weil; else about what might we be either trying or (inconsistently) refusing to represent? Of course, the claim—posed thus—is difficult to gainsay; our world is indeed awash with talk of Nazis, the Holocaust, and nuclear annihilation, and the most banal of this talk is, in many respects, the most salient to understanding the world in which we live. One case: The Washington Post recorded that in his first 18 months on air, the Fox News television and radio host, Glenn Beck—who averaged about two million viewers on

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The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised 35

his television show nightly—managed to invoke Hitler 147 times, the Nazis a further 202 times, fascism 193 times, the Holocaust 76 times, and the proper-noun “Goebbels” 24 times.6 The majority of these references were employed to furnish analogies of Hitler to Barack Obama and, less commonly, Hitler or Goebbels to Woodrow Wilson. Sometimes these came with denials of the soundness of the analogies which provided a slight fig leaf for Beck’s rhetorical strategy. For instance, in 2009, Beck’s editorial on Obama’s “single-payer” health-care system involved a stunningly convoluted series of assertions and retractions: “I am not comparing him to this, but please, read Mein Kampf for this reason,” he told his listeners. “You see that Hitler told you what he was going to do. He told the Germans.”7 Further elaboration was seemingly unnecessary. When the Obama administration injected capital into GM and Chrysler, Beck said, less ambiguously, “This is fascism!” He then went on to echo, and not for the first time, Martin Niemöller’s famous lines:8 “You know what … keeps going through my mind is ‘First They Came for the Jews.’” Once he had started, Beck saw parallels everywhere: Al Gore’s goal of a global carbon tax pursues a different goal, he said, but “the same tactic” as “rounding up the Jews and exterminating them.”9 Moreover, the United Nations for Beck was the modern incarnation of National Socialism. And in Obama’s 2008 campaign speech, which called for an expansion of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and the Foreign Service, Beck again saw unmistakable echoes: “This is what Hitler did with the SS. He had his own people. He had the brown shirts …”10

As illuminating—and as sobering—as we may find Beck’s rhetoric there is an obvious difficulty in maintaining that the issue of representability can be answered simply through an accurate count of a pre-specified range of words or phrases in the mainstream media. Indeed, one might say that what happens when Beck invokes the Holocaust is little else than a kind of semantic bullying; his technique relies on the moral freight of the terms he employs, and yet his own use of them is so opportunistic and counterfeit that if we conceded that this counted as evidence for adequate signifi-cation of the referents he invokes, it would henceforth be hard to draw any meaningful distinction between what we call “representation” and misrepresentation. Yet if we admit that Beck fails—and surely he does—then who, if anyone, succeeds? Who can or has succeeded?—and when?

Some have answered such questions “nobody and never,” claiming that the Holocaust itself has fractured the very possibility of its own representation. To gain access to this argument, we need to probe in a somewhat different, self-avowedly “postmodern” direction. Here what we encounter is a depiction of not just a world in ruins, but the correlative claim that our concepts have met a parallel fate. In what he doubtless regarded as a devastating critique, Jean-François Lyotard attempted to skewer Jürgen Habermas’s vision of modernity as an “incomplete project” thus:

I would argue that the project of modernity (the realization of universality) has not been forsaken or forgotten but destroyed, “liquidated.” There are several modes of destruction, several names which are symbols for them. “Auschwitz” can be taken as the paradigmatic name for the tragic “incompletion” of modernity … At “Auschwitz,” a modern sovereign, a whole people was destroyed. The attempt

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was made to destroy it. It is the crime opening postmodernity … how could the grand narratives of legitimation still have credibility in these circumstances?11

Lyotard is perhaps the best-known advocate of the inadequacy of representation of Auschwitz and events like it (although even here we are left to ask: If an event can be given no representation, then how can we compare other events with it?). In a number of places, notably in The Differend, he suggests that Auschwitz calls for representation at the same time that it confounds the attempts which respond to that call. In the passage above, the inverted commas indicate Lyotard’s own questioning even of the adequacy of its naming. Part of his argument consists in the claim that our narrative recollections of this event, whatever these amount to, operate beyond the purview of philosophical conceptuality—outside of what he calls ‘litigation.’12 Another dimension to Lyotard’s argument is more generic: the claim that no representation can do justice to the event it seeks to capture—even if the event stood for is banal and quotidian. To be sure, Lyotard later somewhat qualified his views,13 but his thesis nonetheless remained that there was something both epistemologically and ethically untenable in acts of representation, especially esthetic representation, of events like Auschwitz. This thesis was one of the mainstays of his argument against the kind of “rational consensus” philosophy that Frankfurt School thinkers like Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel have advocated.

It is not the place here to attempt to adjudicate this “debate” between Lyotard and the (late) Frankfurt School—an adjudication that Lyotard may, perhaps too conveni-ently, have seen as impossible in any case. Yet there are good reasons to believe that Lyotard’s impulse towards what we now call a “postmodern ethics” should be seen as merely that: an impulse. It allows us at once to use a word like “Auschwitz,” under erasure as it were, to see its yield, to witness what happens when it is deployed; and, to be sure, when we witness usages such as Glenn Beck’s, both the ethical and historical standards are at every turn found wanting. Yet if we shrink Lyotard’s thesis to this size, it cannot and clearly does not mean that nothing can be said about these events, or subsequent representations of them.14 Indeed, to make an obvious if necessary point, Lyotard’s claim—the most striking perhaps of its kind—is itself a representation of that which he would prohibit representing. An odd feature of his prescribed proscription is that it appears itself to be an attempt to signify something for the last time, to have, if I may put it so, the last word.15 Lyotard seeks to invoke the limits of representation while he himself engages in a representational activity about the supposed event or apocalyptic scene, not just for the sake of somehow depicting and then refusing to depict that scene, but in order to use it to make a claim about modernity, and moder-nity’s “failure.” Yet, the cogency of this broader ambition, ethical in orientation—and perhaps ultimately cogent—certainly isn’t self-evident. Indeed, writers like Primo Levi have made it their business to represent this event precisely as one which must not be forgotten, which must indeed be continually re-represented so that nothing like it ever happens again.

The fact that representation itself can be traumatic does, of course, raise its own challenges; to represent an event is not an exclusively cognitive affair, like some neutral

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act of communicating what analytical philosophers call “propositional content.” The mere thought of nuclear annihilation, of extermination, or of catastrophic climate change, can itself be threatening. And there can also emerge metonymic chains which are also placed under suspicion in a kind of guilt-by-association. Hence the questioning of German music after the war (especially the music of Richard Wagner, whose compositions had to be carefully calibrated until, finally, they were played in full form in Israel itself for the first time in 2000, and not without considerable protest). But there now appears before us a possible danger: that, like Don Quixote, we will turn mere windmills into foes, or source tragedy in order to produce uninten-tional farce. In the 1950s, Leo Strauss, a European émigré Jew, wrote in his discussion of Weber of the dangers of what he calls “reductio ad Hitlerum”:

Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.16

This seems no more than common sense, but it again raises—at least in part—the question of the potential gap between representation and that which is ostensibly represented. But it also highlights an economy of desire at stake in the very act of representing. What is it that drives us to invoke horror where there is no apparent need? If the spectacle of the death camp, say, is so horrendous and rare, why do we return to it so tirelessly, and often with so little care with respect to context?

The deeply troubling joy of the deeply troubling image

Apart from the Big Bang—the origin of space-time—what we think of as “events” are time and space bound. We see this in the very names cited in this chapter as the key examples. That is, these words—Hiroshima and Auschwitz—are place names. Further, even as places, they do not refer to just any time at all, but rather to a defined moment or series of moments in history. We should pause over that fact, considering that in their very naming they remind us of a political and ethical concreteness by virtue of the fact that these acts of naming specify locations, towns, and implicitly, times; perhaps general talk of “genocide” or “atomic attack” is always risking us being overly abstract in our discussions of mass violence. The fact that the talk here is of place names offers us an opportunity to avoid the kind of distancing that might otherwise take effect in attempts to look at these horrors squarely. But the important word here is “may”—the fact of these being place names and not abstract nouns does not, of course, prevent them from being signs. Indeed, the fact of the force of their signification makes them very attractive to rhetorical opportunists who understand their power without neces-sarily comprehending their concreteness. But if Beck’s tireless and indeed tiresome incantations of “Nazi!” fail to hit their mark, they still seem to be aiming at something beyond themselves—to certain historical realities, however ludicrously invoked. Yet in the world in which we live there exists a circulation of images whose relation to their

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referents is altogether more ambiguous. If the Internet is teaching us anything with its collection of so-called “fails”17—of dashboard camera footage of maimings, miscel-laneous humiliations, and accidental deaths—it’s that our relationship to suffering, or at least to its representation, is wildly ambivalent.

Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation offers some insight into our relationship to representation in this context. Although much attention has been devoted to his ideas about “the order of signs” and “simulacra”—and this is certainly not irrel-evant here18—his work contains another suggestion, far less often remarked upon. For Baudrillard indeed, like for Girard and Eric Gans, humans are a representing species. Yet he does not mean by this that we are what some linguists and neurosci-entists call the “symbolic species.” Rather, Baudrillard has strived to show that the human consists above all in its fascination with images; we are the species with an unbreakable attachment to l’imaginaire. In his best-known essay on precession and of simulation, he offers his now well-known analysis of the orders of signs. Before he does so though, he argues in little-noticed words that humans take a “kind of primal pleasure, of anthropological joy in images, a kind of brute fascination unencumbered by aesthetic, moral, social or political judgements.”19 The act of representation, he suggests, ultimately defies morality. This, for Baudrillard, is not a normative claim; indeed, his own work is, in some ways, even avowedly against itself, an attempt to problematize this, to put into question this anthropological joy, this primal—and problematic—pleasure. Baudrillard’s claim here is that we look first, and seek to explain afterwards—whether it be the execution of Saddam Hussein, the beheading of a Briton, or in the cases of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the images of starvation, of piled-up corpses and emaciated prisoners of war, of the atomic mushroom cloud, of decimated cities, and charred bodies. In endorsing these arguments of Baudrillard, as suggestive as they are, we are admittedly no closer to seeing why any one kind of sign would be more or less proscribed than another or why many, like Finch, have selected the two events—Auschwitz and Hiroshima—as intrinsically significant, even if not ultimately signifiable. In this context, I take up the two events in terms of the anthro-pologies that frame them in an attempt, no doubt inadequate, to sketch something of our sense of what it means to be a human with respect of—and in light of—these epochal occurrences.

The Holocaust and victimary culture

For Girard, as is well known, a Judeo-Christian anthropology (and as a consequence, ethos) of the victim is what allows victimage itself to be understood precisely as victimage. That is, the crowd about to throw the first stone do not see themselves as persecutors and the woman as a victim until it is pointed out to them (Jn 7:53–8:11). More salient still, it is the murder of Jesus on the cross that disturbs the crowd, for the usual scapegoat mechanisms have failed simply because he made them aware that while they were able to kill him, they were doing so in the knowledge that he was guiltless. As that famous utilitarian Caiaphas would say, “it is expedient for us, that

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one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.”20 Thereafter, all victimage, including the Holocaust, becomes thinkable in these terms—as acts of scapegoating of innocents, or at least of the unexceptionably guilty. If Girard’s work has shown us anything, it is surely that we can commune with the dead—or at least we can see the cover-up beyond the tomb. Yet as to what that this communing means in the cases under examination, we need to turn to one of Girard’s closest critics, Eric Gans.

In one of the most perceptive analyses of the fate of modern culture that the academy has produced in the last couple of decades, Eric Gans—in “The Holocaust and the Victimary Revolution”—has offered an account that bears consideration.21 In this essay Gans contends that the Holocaust is foundational of the postmodern cultural idiom which is now so pervasive in contemporary thought. For Gans, the effect of the Holocaust has been to trigger a return of what Hitler sought to annihilate—an orien-tation towards the victim; although what emerges in this post-Auschwitz space is in some ways a self-serving burlesque of a genuine ethics of Otherness. Gans names this strange admixture of the ethical and the self-serving as “victimary thinking.” Here we witness an intensification of ‘victimhood’ as a frame in which culture and history are viewed, but one in which a mixture of a concern for victims and the competitive striving for claiming victim status often becomes difficult to tease apart.

In giving rise to victimary thought, Gans contends, the Holocaust “is the beginning of postmodernity.”22 By this deceptively simple term, Gans means to capture what he goes on to call “an infinite victimary bavardage … Victimary discourse has proliferated like a life-form whose natural predators have been removed. Western civilization, having created the Holocaust, now indicts itself for the totality of its other creations.”23 That is, postmodernity also defines the cultural space in which the West engages in a form of self-critique indistinguishable from narcissistic self-castigation. For him, the only acceptable riposte to this new situation is recourse—through an ever-renewed adherence—to the market, something he sees as a second Judaic invention.24 Gans’ prescription for the future is perhaps less compelling than his diagnosis. Put differ-ently, though, his diagnosis of postmodernity as an ethical opening out from the horror of the Holocaust is in line with many, including Lyotard himself, even if his scathing assessment of the inadequacy of victimary thinking is different in its evalu-ation of the shape and efficacy of this opening. Like Lyotard, Gans undoubtedly figures the Holocaust as an event-sequence which disturbed the very foundations of Western modernity. But if this is true—and there can be little doubt that it is—it is not the only site at which modernity was brought to face itself in the starkest possible terms.

Hiroshima: Back to the future

Both Auschwitz and Hiroshima show us forms of violence whose structure of asymmetry is part of their very horror. In the former, the asymmetry is that of an unarmed population facing an army whose weaponry was not only modern in the sense of “militarily advanced,” but Fordist in its industrial scale. In the latter,

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the asymmetry is primarily that of the scale of the nuclear attack compared to the conventional warfare that preceded it.25 In taking up the case of the atomic bomb, the problem of representation is no longer of the same type as what concerns us with the Holocaust, although it too offers its own challenges. Its imaginings—and threatened reality—are those of a science that can destroy humanity in toto. Despite the radicalness of the actual assault on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the kind of Promethean science in evidence in the nuclear attacks on Japan has been fictionalized since Mary Shelley’s two works, Frankenstein on science, and The Last Man on extinction; and there have been any number of works since which imagine the end of the world. But we are concerned here with one particular imagined end of the world: the atomic bomb, its first usage, and the worlds it destroyed and engendered. To be sure, there was enormous cultural interest in Hiroshima almost immediately after it was dropped—and certainly by the 1950s. It became something that needed to be justified and hence emerged as a troubling sign for pacifists and communists alike. Its event and sign-like nature was something acknowledged from the start, and not—at first—by cultural or political theorists. Indeed, in the notes of the presidential interim committee from May 31, 1945,

It was pointed out that one atomic bomb on an arsenal would not be much different from the effect caused by any Air Corps strike of present dimensions. However, Dr Oppenheimer stated that the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet.26

What is so unsettling about this observation is the way the value of the attack renders a civilian population mere collateral damage—simply a “means” expended in the gener-ation of a spectacular “message.” In terms of representing the “truth” of Hiroshima—as hinted at by the presidential interim committee—we are confronted with the fact it was not the most deadly aspect of the Second World War—even in the Pacific—but rather, had signifying force that made it seem so. For instance, more Japanese people had died in Tokyo in the fire bombings from those that were victims of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And so here we see perhaps an originary moment with respect to the symbiotic relationship between the media and spectacular acts of violence. In many respects, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center were as much for the media as they were reported by it.27 And the semiotic power of Hiroshima has been used—and perhaps, like Auschwitz, misused—repeatedly.

In the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, “He” asks “What did Hiroshima mean to you?”28 The wording of the question points to something important—certain things assumed. Both Hiroshima and the weight of its significance are taken for granted. The question was not “Do you know about Hiroshima?” or “Is Hiroshima meaningful to you?” but what did it mean to you. The question points in two directions simultane-ously. In the first, it asserts the meaningfulness of Hiroshima; in the second, it asserts that this meaning is indeterminate.29 Neither character was actually in Hiroshima for the bombing; they are as far removed from a wartime sensibility as could be imagined. And yet, the significance hangs there, for them, assumed.

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And yet, whatever meaning may be ascribed to Hiroshima, the range of possibilities is distinct from that of Auschwitz, meanings which are determined by their respective places in the cultural imaginary. The signifier “Hiroshima” specifically ended up being a stand-in for Cold War threats and was present in various forms until 1989. But this is only the beginning of meanings engendered by the nuclear assaults; the seeming ideological fecundity of the mushroom cloud gave rise to a vast range of “applications.” Once again, the ease with which these images were deployed is remarkable, as is the fluidity of their contexts of representation. The images of Hiroshima were used often in the argument that the US, as the only state to use nuclear weapons on a civilian population, had a special guilt vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. At the same time, the notion of mutually assured destruction was used against both powers under its well-known acronym, M.A.D. Hiroshima also came to stand not just for the dangers of atomic weapons, but for big science in general. It stood also for those critiquing US foreign policy. It stood for peace in those who critiqued the arms race. It stood for the dangers to the environment of especially, but not only, nuclear pollution. And in one of the more touching scenes of representation (Sadako Sasaki’s paper cranes), it stood for a capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation. In other words, unlike the Holocaust with its ethical strictures (howsoever abused), Hiroshima has been made to stand for many things. But how, we may ask, do they stand in relation to each other?

The join

One thing that joins our two events is their framing within World War II. This war was, at least in the West’s self-perception, the last one in which it involved itself and about which it has, at least now, no moral misgivings in going to war; it was, in other words, the last morally “legitimate” war, one in which suspicions about colonial ambitions, ideological imperialism, and conflicts engendered by cultural paranoia do not generally arise. Or this, it is thought, is mostly true. This is what makes Hiroshima stand out in this particular context: the bombing of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) remains a troubling feature in the Western imaginary. Indeed, so-called “revisionist” historians, following in the trail of Gar Alperovitz’s influential book Atomic Diplomacy, argue that the decision to use the bomb was the result of political rather than military decisions; a devastating sign, the thesis goes, that was a message to Russia about the power of the US and the folly of trying to confront it militarily.30 And here is a central difference between Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Hitler’s ambition was that the Jews and his annihilation of them be part of a cultural amnesia that he observed had already occurred with respect to the Armenian genocide. The “spectacle” of Nazism was oratory and propaganda, not the act of the annihilation of the Jews. Indeed, the aim of the Nazis precisely was to de-spectacularize the killing of the Jews, to avoid the sacralizing effects of their extermination by carrying it out as efficiently and surrepti-tiously as possible.

Another way of saying this is to assert that the Holocaust wasn’t originally a hyper-bolic sign, although it has now become one. That is, the visible part of the Holocaust

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at the time was the propaganda, not the mass killing. The killing took place in secluded locations and was meant to be un-dramatic—or rather, all the drama was to take a back seat to ruthless function and deathly efficiency. The Nazis did not want, in other words, the Jews to be seen as scapegoats. In this sense, and only of course with historical hindsight, can we say that Nazism not only failed in this, but failed as dramatically as it possibly could have: Auschwitz now has assumed almost paradig-matic status as a site of victimhood. Hiroshima, on the other hand, was more explicitly a sign—both intended and received—where a cataclysmic “message” was delivered, and the killing, as profoundly devastating as it was, was subservient to that message, in a kind of application of a reductio ad absurdum of consequentialist logic.31 (The conventional bombings of Japan took more lives, although—semiotically speaking—“signified” less at the time and to us now.) Of Hiroshima, both the sign and the victims are now visible, although its hyperbolic garishness as sign—as well as the infliction of this weapon on an Axis power—often threatens to make the victims of this atrocity less visible. This is surely a tendency to be resisted.

And here I’ll admit some unease with looking at Hiroshima and Auschwitz as “cultural configurations”—as themselves symptoms or signs or metonyms of the end of an age or the start of another. Indeed, this is how we began: with Henry Leroy Finch’s claim that Hiroshima and Auschwitz are “uniquely symbolic.” Surely, one danger in treating certain historical cataclysms as “symptomatic” or symbolic of broader cultural anxieties or preoccupations is that the events themselves may start to seem secondary. One possible defense of the approach adopted in this chapter is that our obligation to think of these events as not only singular and historically distant is that such an approach lessens the risk that we will fabricate a screen for ourselves in which they pose no current threat. But as Derrida reminds us, a nuclear war, and not simply the dropping of a bomb, is an end in an absolute sense—we will not be here to discuss it; the idea “we no longer exist” cannot be consistently thought—except now, through the use of future perfect tense. So perhaps, as such, we might think it appro-priate—even urgent—to discuss it now.

The issue of temporality is surely relevant here. By necessity too simple a claim in terms of the cultural imaginary, Auschwitz and Hiroshima have different temporal orientations: where both engage forms of memorialization, our relation to these events involves us looking in different directions. Auschwitz’s rallying call is “never again,” although most attempts to suggest that it is about to happen again—or in the case of internet invective or Glen Beck’s political commentaries—strike as a rhetorical ploys that become less convincing with each use. Hiroshima, however, prompts the imagi-nation to look forwards. Hiroshima has been associated with futurity—with what might happen. This is not a normative claim: that we should not engage in remembrance of the nuclear attacks on Japan. It is a recognition that, for instance—from On the Beach (1959) through to Unthinkable (2010)—our filmic fascination with nuclear war has been seemingly unquenchable.32 The nature of Hiroshima and the potential threat it still represents engages the imagination. Perhaps one of the key reasons here is that we can fictionalize nuclear war because of its potential for disengagement from historical specificity; for example, the bombing of Japan has been seen as simply “getting over

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the line first,” with the Americans beating the Germans in the race to develop and use the weapon. Thus, the bombings have slowly been disengaged from their context and treated as merely a manifestation of necessity, a contingent encounter between the United States and historical destiny. However, there is also a deeper reason for the portrayal: the realization that resentment and rivalry now have the capacity to achieve aims that had previously been constrained by inadequate means. “Hiroshima” thus names the site where the technology of war became so overwhelming that the intolerability of using it again has become a fixation of culture, a way of representing it as a proxy for carrying it out. If, as Eric Gans contends, culture is the deferral of violence through representation,33 then our obsessions with apocalypse, manifest in our capacity to rehearse it symbolically and narratively, may be one of the ways we can keep it before us without allowing us to become it; or so I would hope.

Conclusion

The Second World War announced for us something we ourselves were incapable of articulating: the inconceivability of total war—the realization that a global war worthy of the name that would come in its wake would incarnate a kind of cataclysm in which any conventional sense of “victory” would be nonsensical. This threat has surely been as foundational to a sense of a “global community” as any communica-tional innovation. If destruction is “mutually assured” as the acronym would have us believe, then it is truly global. But beyond the entirely pragmatic issue of human self-preservation stands the ideational legacy of the two paradigmatically apocalyptic acts of World War II: both are revelations of the fact that humanity’s technological capacity is now finally equal to its resentment—where the means to express hatred has caught up to hatred itself; and both incarnate the principle, increasingly common during modernity, that “non-combatant” isn’t equivalent to “non-target.”

Perhaps we are left with a conclusion that, although theoretically inescapable, is untidy, veering away as it does from the recurrent philosophical orientation to produce some kind of algorithm or filter to sort good from bad, wise from unwise. What needs to be countenanced is the idea that the adequacy or appropriateness of representation cannot be decided a priori. Representation is, above all, a labor, an effort, something that does not or simply cannot fail on the basis of a single attempt. Here surely the burden is not to produce ever more rigorous demonstrations of the conceivability or (alternatively) the impossibility of representing apocalypse, but sensitize ourselves to the demands and the purpose of representing apocalypse itself, even when we find such representations wanting. To simultaneously demand that a single representation capture everything about an event and then reject it for not doing so is surely to damn something by imposing an absurd criterion upon it.

The fact is—whether we would proscribe all attempts—representations do go on. What might need to be considered is perhaps one of the reasons that we find it so difficult to represent apocalyptic events is not because of their distance, but their extraordinary proximity; they are less objects of thought than the irreducible means by

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which we see, the lenses through which our historical and cultural vision is mediated. In other words, we look back to Auschwitz and Hiroshima as historical catastrophes that we are forced not so much to think about but to think from: these are now unavoidable departure points for thinking and less objects of thought. As such, we need to think that apocalypse is not merely something we are forced to think about, but a condition that we are obliged to think from. The responsibility therefore is not whether we represent these, but how, and to what end. Where human violence had previously been configured by its occurrence within delimited scenes of representation and interaction, both Hiroshima and Auschwitz are unique in the sense that they stage a violence that annihilates that very configuration, destroying or effacing the very scenes in which the violence occurs, albeit in different ways. There is good reason to believe that more hangs in the balance here than historical accuracy or right depiction. This is perhaps not merely about the possible shape of our human future, but the very possi-bility of any future whatsoever.

Notes

1 This chapter is a revised version of the Keynote Address I gave at the joint conference of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion and Generative Anthropology Society and Conference in Tokyo, Japan in 2012, entitled Apocalypse Revisited. I’d like to thank Jeremiah Alberg for the invitation to present as well as here express my gratitude to those who gave invaluable feedback on the paper at the time—and subsequently—including Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Eric Gans, Andrew Bartlett, Talia Morag, and Sandy Goodhart.

2 Derrida, Jacques, “No Apocalypse, not now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives.),” trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 23. Epicurus’s (materialist) point—and counsel—was that we should not fear death, because death is not an event we experience or “live”; it is precisely the event par excellence which precludes experience.

3 Henry Leroy Finch, Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace (New York: Continuum, 1999), 94.

4 Cf. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine. Book I, Chapter II: “No one uses words except as signs of something else; and hence may be understood what I call signs: those things, to wit, which are used to indicate something else” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine. Bk. I. Ch. II).

5 For Foucault, the historical a priori in general consists of exactly such positivities as these, as the following description makes clear: they define “a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations of concepts, and polemical interchanges may be deployed.” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Tavistock, 1972), 127.

6 Dana Milbank, 2010. “Glenn Beck is Obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson,” The Washington Post. October 3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/30/AR2010093005267.html.

7 Ibid.8 Martin Niemöller is best remembered for the following lines: “First they came for

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the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me,” “Martin Niemöller: ‘First they came for the socialists.’” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392.

9 Dana Milbank, 2010. “Glenn Beck is Obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson.” The Washington Post. October 3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/30/AR2010093005267.html.

10 Ibid. If Beck wanted to see the terrifying proximity of Nazism to the contemporary age, some chose another rhetorical strategy: ontological distance. In a self-conscious reference to St John’s Apocalypse, Bertolt Brecht called fascism “the filthy beast” (cited in Elisabeth Roudinesco, Our Dark Side: A History of Perversion, trans. David Macey [Cambridge: Polity, 2009] 119). Gideon Hausner, during the course of the Jerusalem trial of Eichmann, labeled the Nazi as “inhuman” on the basis that he had sunk to the level of animality (cited in Roudinesco, 119). But ontological distance here is bridged through historical proximity; the beast apparently walks among us. This, in itself, is both a morally and ontologically troubling claim—in the first instance because to label Eichmann as “inhuman” effectively doubles Eichmann’s reasoning; and second, because only humans behave like Eichmann—not animals. If anything, Eichmann was profoundly human, not in an honorific sense, but in the sense Girard would maintain: the being who demands sacrificial victims. In other words, the Nazis were the most modern of national leaders, and the Holocaust is one of the hallmarks of late modernity—and there is a need therefore to explore its representations, then and now, in order to better understand its nature and its continuities.

11 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 30–1. Lyotard’s linking here of modernity and “universality” refers to a contention of Habermas’s theory of “discourse ethics,” which entails—among other things—that all participants in a dispute adopt a principle of considering all other participants’ perspectives and interests. See Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 43–115, esp. 65. There are obvious problems applying this imperative equally to both Jews and Nazis.

12 Lyotard, The Differend, 55–7, 86–91, 104; Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 45, 81. Cf. Karyn Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 95–147. To explain: Lyotard’s idea of “the differend” names a dispute which can find no neutral language in which a contest of views can take place, an inability to “subject[ing] them to a single law” (The Differend, 128). Unlike what he calls a “litigation,” a differend cannot be accommodated within a single and determinate semiotic regime in which the adjudication of a dispute could take place, because the arguments of each side inhere in the very language in which they choose to represent their views and experience (The Differend, xi, 128). The frame of Lyotard’s book is Auschwitz. He begins, in fact, with Robert Faurisson’s denial of the reality of the gas chambers, and Faurisson’s criterion that the only evidence he would accept would be an eyewitness account of being inside a working gas chamber; the

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overlooked fact is that anyone who attains this is thereby denied the capacity to express it: they are dead (5–8).

13 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. D. Barry et al. (Sydney: Power Press, 1992), 31.

14 Interweaving with Lyotard’s somewhat oblique and extreme claims about the representation of Auschwitz may be discerned an argument which suggests that it is the traumatic import of the event that cannot be reproduced. Trauma, in the Freudian account, consists precisely of a kind of affective excess, a “too much,” which is manifested through inarticulacy. Articulation, then—in other words, representation—is assumed to change the affective experience after-the-fact. Almost all forms of psychodynamic therapy are themselves bound to this conception of trauma and the transformative potential of its articulation.

15 Of course, having the “last word” is a very common philosophical ambition. Although he certainly did not intend his remark to be taken in this way, what Ludwig Wittgenstein says in Culture and Value is nonetheless apt: “In philosophy, the winner of the race is the one …who gets there last.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 34e.

16 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 42–3.

17 A “fail” (sometimes “epic fail”) in web-speak is a meme often superimposed over an image or appended to a GIF or video sequence, where it labels something falling short of expectations or otherwise failing. It includes, as part of its remit, a wide variety of accidents, dangerous mishaps, and public humiliations.

18 Baudrillard’s work on the Gulf War raised the question of that “event” even as it was unfolding. Before the war “happened,” he wrote the essay, “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place,” while it was happening, he wrote the essay, “The Gulf War: Is It Really Taking Place?” and eventually published it all under the title, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). At stake, he says, is a war that “makes its way by speculation and promotion,” not by war per se (30). The point is brutally simple, and it concerns the disjunction between the representations of war and what was happening on the ground—with the greatest significance being the “war” waged on television. For him, in this situation, the representation has overtaken the event, has perhaps itself, become the event. The troops on the ground’s view of the war comes to them, in part, by virtue of CBS and CBS gets its view from the soldiers on the ground. But this very fact does not mean that he—or we—should cease to represent at all. To the contrary, his book called attention to representation as a problem, by analyzing it, indeed by representing it anew, not by avoiding it.

19 Jean Baudrillard, “The Evil Demon of Images and the Precession of Simulacra.” Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Harvester, Wheatsheaf, 1993), 194.

20 John 11:50. Cf. 18:14.21 Eric Gans, “The Holocaust and the Victimary Revolution.” In Poetics of the Americas:

Race, Founding, and Textuality (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 123–39. John O’Carroll and I have taken up some of these issues raised in this essay previously. See especially, Chris Fleming and John O’Carroll. “Towards a New Cultural Studies.” Anthropoetics 13.1 (2007). http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1301/1301fleming.htm.

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22 Ibid., 136.23 Ibid., 137.24 Ibid.25 “Primarily” because it is also worth stressing that the vast majority of those killed in

the nuclear attacks were—like the Jewish population—“non-combatants.”26 “Notes of the Interim Committee Meeting, May 31, 1945. 10am–1.15pm/2.15pm–

4.14pm.” http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/large/documents/fulltext.php?fulltextid=7.

27 Although in the latter case, the semiotic power on show was demonstrative of a dearth of the terrorist’s genuine politico-military power, not a representative of it.

28 Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press 1961), 33.

29 See Lindsay Barrett. “The Shadow.” Cultural Studies Review. 17.2 (2011): 183–97.30 See Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (New York: Simon

and Schuster, 1965) and The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). Implicit in much of the cultural criticism that has emerged since the appearance of Alperovitz’s work is the contention—sometimes implicit, sometimes not—that where the victims of the Holocaust have become in some sense exemplary and visible, the victims of Hiroshima have become erased, casualties of some kind of implicit racism, or else a form of neglect owing to a certain problematic bias resulting from a privileging of Western interests and narratives. This raises an enormous number of complex issues that this chapter cannot deal with in any substantive way. However, what complicates this thesis, at least in its most reductive forms, is that the rehabilitations of Japan—figurations of it as a victim nation and not as an aggressor—come quite early. Surely one of the notable aspects of Hiroshima Mon Amour is that it contains no suggestion that the Japanese are anything but victims—and even the German soldier that appears in the film (through recollections of “Her”) is a fundamentally benign figure. Further, such views are reinforced by certain strains of current nationalist Japanese historiography and its preservation of a de-contextualized sense of Japan as a mere victim of American aggression. There is, of course, no doubt that the use of the bomb was a historical and ethical cataclysm—but it is because of this significance, rather than despite it, that certain distortions concerning Japan’s role in the war can be more easily sustained. By the same token, although the Holocaust has undoubtedly become iconic in how it represents victims, it has also undoubtedly given rise to new and virulent forms of anti-Semitism, ones predicated on a resentment of the Jews for having exemplary victim status and against whom they engage in sickeningly competitive struggles over this (“Oh the Jews! They think they’re so special! We suffered far more than them, and nobody notices!”). I point this out not to attempt to somehow settle the issue, but to highlight the fact that cultural criticism tagging Western figurations of Hiroshima as inherently ethnocentric requires at least some supplementation.

31 See previous note on the claim about the paradigmatic status of the Holocaust.32 Although nowhere near a complete list, other well-known films dealing with nuclear

war and atomic threat include: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959); Fail Safe (1964); Dr Strangelove (1964); A Boy and His Dog (1975); Hadashi No Gen (1983); The Day After (1983); Testament (1983); Threads (1984); When the Wind Blows (1986); The Fourth Protocol (1987); Miracle Mile (1988); By Dawn’s Early Light (1990);

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Terminator 2 (1991); Crimson Tide (1995); The Sum of All Fears (2002); and A Clean Escape (2007).

33 Eric Gans, “Originary Narrative.” Anthropoetics 3.2 (Fall 1997/Winter 1998) http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0302/narrative.htm.

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Fleming-The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised

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