by Apostolis Artinos
There is a dark event in the course of 20thcentury, a black hole which disseminated the unspeakable, the non disposable in language. It is Auschwitz - if it has to be called by that name - a solitary and unique name, the name of a trauma that makes the intangible of its trace, these cinders that it left behind, withdraw to the unnamed. The cinders that extinguished the trace which is testimony’s ultimate possibility.“A testimony without a witness” (Derrida) and consequently, a testimony that is unable to name, to represent in language, the trace of this memory. Auschwitz remained thus the un-depicted and the unspeakable of the 20thcentury, an event always withdrawing and dedicated solely to the creation of its own dissemination. A grievous loss that turns forms, their materiality, the possibility of representing and narrating of the trace, into vapor. Auschwitz left nothing behind but its cinders and it constitutes for this reason alone the perfect crime. As Gerard Wajcman points out: “the piles of corpses in Auschwitz photographs had not been those of the gas chambers; the large Nazist industry does not produce piles of corpses but cinders, nothing that is visible”. The uniqueness of this trauma lies exactly on that impossibility to provide a testimony.It is an event consumed in its withdrawing singularity, in its enclosed and un -disposable being. It is not only Holocaust’s victims that have been reduced to ashes; the same happened to any kind of archive material which might produce the slightest evidence.Here, there is not so much concern on the efficiency of this operation, the operation of Holocaust concealment but on its intention, the elimination of evidence.Even survivors’ testimony will be, after all, a weak testimony an un-believable narration of horror. Survivors, who lie beyond mortality but also beyond their testimony. The witness of an event which became one exactly when it was committed to the flames, at the moment of its burning down to ashes, to this dead silence of the ash.The “ash” says Derrida “annihilates or threatens to annihilate even the possibility for someone to give evidence of the annihilation itself”. Thus, a traumatic event which has been registered for ever to the ugliness of history, to the everlasting crypt of its martyrdom.
The event of the genocide yet existed; and it took place on its own unique stage. An event that, like any unique event also reveals its insufferable trace of its registration, the integrity of its Reality.The ashes are the event of history, the negative trace of the thing, what is not possible to historicise, the discontinuity that gives continuity to the things. The vacuum of the Real which yet becomes the originating vacuum of the world itself, its keystone, its mournful waiting. The ashes delineate their historical surroundings for the sake of an aniconic glory, «a glory made from ashes»as Paul Celan will write. The trace of an annihilated Being deprived of its historical meaning. The event of the genocide, although it haunts Paul Celan’s poetry of martyrdom, is not given a name in any of his verses, it is only demonstrated in the direction of its endurance, of its secret crypt that becomes its apocalyptical horizon, its messianic perspective. «We were digging a tomb in the air, there lies nobody in its narrow passages». Verses of a dark origin which convey a meaning that cannot be transmitted, verses beyond the confines of testimony and interpretation. A witness that bears witness to nothing given that «nobody bears witness for the witness». Just an elusive trace that rescues its untraceable nature, its extralinguistic institution, its secret and impossible origin.This no-place of the event does not necessarily constitute its inexistence but it is its mystical dimension, a pending form. The artistic gesture thus placed within this expectation of the world is an apocalyptic gesture. A gesture that rescues, like a mute reminder, the event of the dead; it stimulates it, in the same way that it raises the rise of this unnamed other, an otherwho will always lie beyond any dialectic view. After Auschwitz no poetry can be written, maintained Adorno but it is precisely after Auschwitz that poetry can indeed be written. The art draws its potentiality precisely from this weakness, from the impossibility of registration, from the erased trace, from the impossible representation; it becomes thus itself this impossible representation, the uniconic and untold trace of the other. A negative labor dictated by this very impossibility of the other, by his place that cannot be localized within our world. The more his image falls back, the better the Real dimension of the image emerges; the more his meaning weakens, the better the linguistic range of the meaning is restored. Art is dedicated to the absence because of this reality of the other, his Real absence. The subject after all always emerges within the horizon of the other’s absence and not in the communion of his presence.
The opacity thus of this dark event of the 20thcentury is able to welcome the event of the art itself. Art is the silence of the world, the world’s return, the return of the image to its original zero point. Its various names do not announce, do not bear witness, they just reveal. The historic, through its symbolic and imaginary annulment, regains its Real dimension, the finality of its realization. Here, the signifiers of history fall back, withdraw from their historical stage and regain their core destiny. They become by way of their absence, mystical symbols, dark expectations.
In Boltanski’s respective imagery martyrs’ faces do not regain their testimony but the silence of their testimony, they bring nothing to light. They only endure the length of silence and bewilderment. They levitate in this status of evanescence which leaves behind only cinders. That’s why theirs is a unique testimony precisely because it does not bring anything, it does not narrate the event, but becomes itself a mystical and subtle event, an indisposed other. What took place in the silence and in the un –avowed of its horror is not worded within the horizon of language but in the reversal of language. That’s why the witnesses remain in the end without voice because only this way can they bear witness to the untold, the product of the ashes.
In the Jewish Museum of Berlin it is the horrible architecture of the museum’s silence that manages to transmit something despite the few exhibits of its collections. The whole building is an installation haunted by this nightmare as it sinks abandoned into its horror. The building’s geometry narrates this story that is taken by death, hems its discomfort, it gives it back uninterruptedly and it imposes it as a contemporary (lived) experience. Nevertheless, the above refers to the silence of the building, its emptiness and only that.Without a disruption of the event’s silence, the artistic oeuvre comes within its own silence to show towards the area of the unspeakable, to open up in this status of loss the possibility of another stage , the creation of a spectrum where the image does not represent but makes present this impossible and withdrawn «other», its impossibility to find the other’s equivalent. An image which lies thus beyond comprehension, a new signifier that is yet ready to welcome all the reflections of this nameless other.An artistic oeuvre that takes in the substance of its primary cause modifying this very cause towards the direction of loss, rendering its original event a distant (ksenos) event, distant even from its own self. Because the event is, even in this anti-Badiou version, something not diagnosed. It is a being beyond any commitment. A desperate singularity, a calling that impinges nowhere. Because of that it turns to a waiting, this very waiting of the world, the empty spot of its core. In the vacuum of this spot the artistic oeuvre comes together with its entire hoarded weakness. It is not, as a consequence, the oeuvre that represents the event rather the event identifies with the oeuvre, its one and only way of expression from this world of silence. The artistic oeuvre, however will never confirm its origin, it will even immerse it in a deeper silence. «The genuine language of the art»commented Adorno «is voiceless; its voiceless substance takes priority versus its declaratory-significative language». The weakness to represent the event thus corresponds to the representational indisposition of this artistic oeuvre, opens up to this inconceivable away that dictated it and keeps surrounding it.
In Boltanski’s respective imagery martyrs’ faces do not regain their testimony but the silence of their testimony, they bring nothing to light. They only endure the length of silence and bewilderment. They levitate in this status of evanescence which leaves behind only cinders. That’s why theirs is a unique testimony precisely because it does not bring anything, it does not narrate the event, but becomes itself a mystical and subtle event, an indisposed other. What took place in the silence and in the un –avowed of its horror is not worded within the horizon of language but in the reversal of language. That’s why the witnesses remain in the end without voice because only this way can they bear witness to the untold, the product of the ashes.
In the Jewish Museum of Berlin it is the horrible architecture of the museum’s silence that manages to transmit something despite the few exhibits of its collections. The whole building is an installation haunted by this nightmare as it sinks abandoned into its horror. The building’s geometry narrates this story that is taken by death, hems its discomfort, it gives it back uninterruptedly and it imposes it as a contemporary (lived) experience. Nevertheless, the above refers to the silence of the building, its emptiness and only that.Without a disruption of the event’s silence, the artistic oeuvre comes within its own silence to show towards the area of the unspeakable, to open up in this status of loss the possibility of another stage , the creation of a spectrum where the image does not represent but makes present this impossible and withdrawn «other», its impossibility to find the other’s equivalent. An image which lies thus beyond comprehension, a new signifier that is yet ready to welcome all the reflections of this nameless other.An artistic oeuvre that takes in the substance of its primary cause modifying this very cause towards the direction of loss, rendering its original event a distant (ksenos) event, distant even from its own self. Because the event is, even in this anti-Badiou version, something not diagnosed. It is a being beyond any commitment. A desperate singularity, a calling that impinges nowhere. Because of that it turns to a waiting, this very waiting of the world, the empty spot of its core. In the vacuum of this spot the artistic oeuvre comes together with its entire hoarded weakness. It is not, as a consequence, the oeuvre that represents the event rather the event identifies with the oeuvre, its one and only way of expression from this world of silence. The artistic oeuvre, however will never confirm its origin, it will even immerse it in a deeper silence. «The genuine language of the art»commented Adorno «is voiceless; its voiceless substance takes priority versus its declaratory-significative language». The weakness to represent the event thus corresponds to the representational indisposition of this artistic oeuvre, opens up to this inconceivable away that dictated it and keeps surrounding it.
Artwork: Cy Twombly