Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 11:00:33 +0900
From: Guy Yasko <guyy-AT-aqu.bekkoame.or.jp>
Subject: Benjamin and Remembering


In  the context of the recent flap over Mitterand's participation in French 
fascism, I think it's difficult to claim that Europeans, and the French in 
particular, have handled the problems of mourning and remembrance any better 
than others.  Without the shroud of silence that covers the subject, I doubt 
that such a controversy could have risen.  The Enola Gay controversy has been 
truly disgusting, but its structure has not been that different from the 
Historian's debate in Germany in the 1980s.  In either case, national identity 
has come to face with its horrific past, with conservatives choosing  to ignore 
the past for the sake of preserving national identity, despite the fact that it 
is the past which makes such an identification impossible.  Public debates 
within the great powers has an international circularity: one nation's citizens 
point to another's as having done or not done the work of remembering and 
mourning, and these point to a third nation's debates, and so on.  Looking at 
the US-Japan case, the suffering and death of Asians on the mainland falls out 
of equations like Pearl Harbor = Hiroshima (which is ridiculous enough in 
itself; one need not be an Imperial Fascist to question the equivalence between 
an attack on a military institution on territory that even US politicians 
considered to be illegally held and the total destruction of a city.  And in any
case, how does one then explain the destruction of Nagasaki?).  I think the same
has happened in Europe, where neo-conservatives of all stripes have made the 
destruction of the Jews a secondary issue.

Unlike Jon, I think "Lyotard" is more of a problem than a solution.  In his 
_Heidegger and the "jews"_, (sic) he does his best to obliterate the specificity
of the Holocaust by equating it with a number of other horrors.  Lyotard 
transforms the wretched of the earth into what he calls  "jews," in a stroke of 
a pen obliterating the specificity of both the Holocaust and other oppressions. 
Jews died precisely because they were Jews.  There are contexts in which it is 
possible to make such an equivalence, as say, an expression of solidarity.  For 
example, in response to anti-Semitic attacks on Daniel Cohn-Bendit, French 
students responded that "we are all German Jews."  Obviously, such a response 
would have been appropriate inside Nazi Germany as well.  In the context of the 
French Heidegger debate however, Lyotard's dubious orthography does not confront
a problem with solidarity so much as it retreats from history with dubious 
generalizations.

Since this is a list about Marxism and not a Lyotard list, I'll bring in 
Benjamin.  I have noticed that  neo-conservative revisionism has often used 
Walter Benjamin for it's dubious ends.  I'm thinking of the Syberberg (I'm not 
sure if I've spelled that correctly) film "Our Hitler" in particular.  Here 
Benjamin's "Work of Art..." gets pressed in sevice to mourn not the Jews, but 
German national identity.  Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe also uses Benjamin's ideas 
on aesthetics and politics to obscure the issues in his otherwise forgettable 
_Heidegger, Art, and Politics_.  LL finds an aestheticization of politics at the
origin of the West which culminates in Auschwitz.  LL sounds profound and 
serious, but he has dissolved the problem; he cannot explain why the West should
have culminated at Auschwitz and not somewhere else at some other time.  

The question here is whether the fault originates in Benjamin or a misuse of 
Benjamin.  I suspect that Benjamin's ambiguity allows the misuse.  If one 
considers that Nazis themselves emphasized the political dimension of art in 
their exhibition of "degenerate painting" or if one looks at Jesse Helm's 
career, it seems that Benjamin's formula doesn't really separate fascists from 
their opponents in any consistent way, hence his popularity among those who 
would rather obscure the issues.




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