So it goes, that many assert that if man is to be truly free,then he must be free to make his own moral decisions, accepting or rejecting a given absolute moral standard, or else he is neither free nor even human. But does freedom lie in a capacity to define what is right and wrong? Auschwitz was a horror but only by a certain definition. If a man made definition, and that of Adolf Eichmann’s happen to disagree, what is there to make our definition more compelling than his?
Obviously, there are problems that exceed or ability to deal with. Auschwitz never taught the world anything about god, but it told us everything about man, and the infinite depths to which he could sink. Though it seems incredible in a civilized world, man’s reliance on himself as the measure of all things could have remained intact except for Auschwitz; humanity was pretty convinced it had outgrown barbarism until Auschwitz, that there was a core human good which would always prevail which was quickly swept away as fantasy and illusion which exposed the shaky foundation of moral relativism.
How can the world of the human represent the world of the inhuman?
An early indication of the latter question is found in Adorno’s partly revisionary essay ‘After Auschwitz’. Commenting that ‘in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died but a specimen’, Adorno draws our attention to the dehumanization of the individual before conceding that ‘perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream’ (Adorno, 1973, 362). Reflecting on the pertinence this comment has to autobiographical and biographical representations, it is evident that the need to reassert one’s humanity in the face of inhumanity becomes paramount, and is inextricably linked with individuation against deindividuation. Read More:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/opticon1826/archive/issue9/articles/A_H_Copley.pdf
Adorno’s dictum of not representing the holocaust is not far-fetched. Especially with regard to art there is something of a Gresham’s Law at work where the bad drives out the good; more often than not fiddling around with something not really understood and hence treated superficially, or using the holocaust as a pretext for an ideological grudge such as anti-capitalism , human rights in Gaza etc. such that we end up with a discourse of offense to memory, a memory that is uniquely owned by the victims and the ruthless logic that was the death camps become banalized within mass market idioms. Norman Finkelstein was only partially incorrect about his holocaust industry theory, but between the polarity of the Jew as the demon or the divine more people grasp, however vaguely the crucual issue of “chosenness.”
ADDENDUM:
YY Jacobson: It’s hard to sense the sheer scale of the destruction. On Sept. 11, 2001, history was changed by a terrorist attack in which 3,000 people died. During the Holocaust, on average, 3,000 Jews were killed every day of every week for five-and-a-half years. And the killing didn’t stop with just Jews: the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, gypsies and gays were murdered because they were different.
The Holocaust was exceptional in the scientific precision with which it was carried out. It was unprecedented in the sheer scale on which it was conceived. But what made it different from other mass murders was that it served no interest. At the height of the slaughter, the Nazis diverted trains from the Russian front to transport victims to the exterm
ion camps. As Emil Fackenheim once put it, the Holocaust was evil for evil’s sake.——————————–
Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death…. Absolute negativity is in plain sight and has ceased to surprise anyone…. What the sadists in the camps foretold their victims, “Tomorrow you’ll be wiggling Skyward as smoke from the chimney,” bespeaks the indifference of each individual life that is the direction of history. Even in his formal freedom, the individual is as fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators’ boots.
… Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living….
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics