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July 18, 2006
Is a major problem both of contemporary public life and of psychoanalysis is that the Holocaust has not been understood? And thus, remains an omnipresent dimension for understanding what goes on in the Middle East today, the West's complex relations to the Islamic world, and the on-going "wars on terrorism"? Have we come to terms with the fact that, nonetheless, it did happen—how to assess its sheer facticity without recourse to the denial which has arguably been the most widely practiced response to the event.
It is argued in Psychoanalysis After Auschwitz?: The "Deported Knowledge" of Anne-Lise Stern by Michael Dorland that:
So from the indifference that those who did return from the camps experienced in immediate postwar societies, and so powerfully written about in the literary works of Primo Levi, Robert Anthelme, or Charlotte Delbo, through to the present-day, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that many, many millions of people can be blithely slaughtered and, except for those immediately concerned, it really does not seem to matter very much at all. That is what it means to live in the After-Auschwitz, a moment in time where human life attains a nadir of worth.
How then to "think" about Auschwitz without "papering" it over? What role here can psychoanalysis perform, if any? These are the questions Anne-Lise Stern asks.
Stern gives her answer in terms of savoir-deporte deported-knowledge is, knowledge about what it means to be refuse, a 'loque'. the garbage can of the camps is a precise historical formation of the unconscious---the "anus mundi" and the task of the psychoanalyst is to attempt to decode, through the analysis of word-play, symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, etc.—how it is structured "like" a language,
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hi,
my two cents worth:
The Evil, not just of the holocaust, but all evil, cannot be understood. And it remains as the Evil as long as it is not understood.
The Evil must always be the Other, and to humanize it makes it less evil (and wrong, which is why some think it is wrong to humanize Hitlet). The dilemma of the act of understanding Evil is that it always defeats it purpose, because the movement of understanding which intends towards the truth of Evil is alo the movement away from it.