16 - Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and the Aesthetics of Ohnmacht

Summary

The “aesthetics of non-power” of the title is a reference to the idea and discourse of an aesthetic or poetic theory of human trauma, a theory that pursues the idea of the purely aesthetic manifestation of a new radical humanism. This process necessitates investigating the aesthetic means available to the human subject to survive the attacks on, or indeed annihilation of, its cultural, intellectual, and physical existence.

As the subject of Ohnmacht (non-power), it escapes the violent grip of power, including the power of knowledge, and asserts and re-affirms itself through an aesthetic reflection upon the experience of trauma and the reality of death, to which power and knowledge themselves must eventually succumb. It configures itself aesthetically, for example in syncopic structures, not as a knowing subject, but as a survivor. The subject of non-power is able to realize the moment of annihilation, of death, by leaping over it. It re-affirms itself by producing elliptical figures: figures of its own absence or failure, and of elision, caesura, and reduplication, that is in tropological structures of citing and translating, in gestures of hymnic dedication, of prosopopoeia and mask play, through the dynamics of tragic accident and erotic mania, in utterances of moaning and screaming.

Poststructuralist discourses of the human subject treat it as an aesthetic subject focused on the phenomena of its disappearance, one which investigates the vague forms of a receding subjectivity. But the disappearing subject, it seems, persistently haunts the discourse of its dissolution and remains effective in a subversive way.