On not being on the train to Auschwitz

Imagine me sitting in a train towards you. As I fondly think of you and our future meeting, I stare out the window and see another train standing still on the adjacent track. Suddenly I feel myself thrust forward, ever so slightly but unmistakebly forward. “Here we go,” I mumble… But no, wait! It is not me who is moving but the other train departing in the opposite direction… Apparently I am the victim of an opticomotor illusion, as my brain interprets the perceived backward motion of the other train as my own forward motion. I thought I was finally coming towards you, but here I am, still idling at the station, not one inch closer to my destination. Meanwhile the other train is moving further and futher away from us. Pretty soon it will be forever out if sight. How infinitely sad.


The illusion of progress 

I don’t know eactly why I find this such a deeply disturbing experience. Thinking about it fills my head with an explosive mixture of various reasons, images and emotions. I think the main thing that disturbs me is what this ‘train experience’ suggests about the forward motion of modern civilization as such: all the advances we have made in science, technology, economy, democracy, medicin, human rights, emancipation, freedom… What if our progression here is likewise nothing but an illusion created by the counter movement of something else, something withdrawing from us, moving away in the opposite direction? What if all the things we moderns have lost, all the so-called ‘victims of progress’ – uncorrupted nature, substantial community, true humanity, a living God – what if they are in fact leaving us behind, whereas we are still idling at the station? What if the forward motion of the train called “modernity” is an illusion created by the counter movement of that other train – the train to Auschwitz? And for “Auschwitz” we might substitute any of the other man-made disasters that have paved the way to our present world. “Auschwitz” names the unnameable because unthinkable skeleton in our closet.

Unresolved guilt
And if this is bad enough, what disturbs me even further is the idea that we are still idling at the station, doing nothing while that ‘other train’ is forever moving away from us. Of course we might be excused by insisting on the illusion we were in. “It is not our fault,” we might say. And yet once we have seen through that illusion, once we have recognized the progress of modernity for what it is – namely, a passive farewell to the other train as it leaves the station – don’t we have a moral obligation to finally do something, to achieve some real progress this time, if only to prevent still other trains from leaving the station in the opposite direction? Shouldn’t we lie down on the tracks, like activists in front of a nuclear transport, forming a human blockade, a human chain, chained to the tracks, chained to each other, finally solidarious, finally together? Shouldn’t we have interpreted that first illusion – the illusion of our coming together, caused by the departure of the other train – as an impulse, an incentive to really get together, a nudge in the back pushing us in the right direction, namely, toward each other, to solidarity, to joint action in name of that other train to Auschwitz? Sure, we gather regularly at official state memorials where we hold hands and solemnly swear: “Never again!” But then we go home and it’s business as usual…

To finally make an omelette
One of the things that disturb me, then, in the ‘train experience’ is the unresolved guilt we have towards that other train, our failure to answer its call to solidarious action. But intimately connected with this feeling of guilt is a philosophical confusion about the nature of human subjectivity and autonomy. Just consider the illusion of forward motion caused by the counter movement of that other train which takes the “victims of modernity” to their destinity. Shouldn’t we say that modernity bought into that illusion and that this credulity was its basic mistake? Modernity sees those victims as its victims, as the ‘collateral damage’ of its forward and autonomous activity – like Lenin said: “If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs.” Modernity sees its train as moving forward, leaving the other train behind at the station, immobile in its suposedly premodern ahistoricity. But the ‘train experience’ suggests otherwise: the other train is leaving modernity behind, leaving it stagnant in its illusion of progressive history. One would think, then, that the modern idea of autonomous subjectivity is an illusion as well, as part and parcel of this broader illusion of progress. This is no doubt partly true. Yet at the same time the idea of autonomy is also redeemed by the other train, as it calls us to shared responsibility, to solidarious action in name of those others who are no longer among us. The Other Train is also the Train of the Other, departing from us, leaving us behind, forcing us to stand on our own two feet, responsible, in charge of the world. Thus our autonomy – our self-legislation – is also the real effect of the retreat of the heteronomous ‘Law of the Other’. As if Lenin’s eggs broke from their own accord – like Humpty Dumpty falling to pieces – saying to us: “Now you make an omelette! Hic Rhodus, hic salta!” Perhaps that was the deeper meaning of the Bolshevik who replied: “Comrade, I see the broken eggs everywhere. But where, oh where, is the omelette?” Autonomy, then, is the responsibility to finally make an omelette in order to give some justificatory sense to all the broken eggs… 

The originary moment of Humpty’s death
Of course, in the meantime so many eggs have been broken that no omelette – no matter how wonderful – could ever redeem them. There is no theodicy for Auschwitz, no ruse of reason able to sublate this absolute negativity. Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again, not by “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men”. And still we owe it to Humpty to save others from a similar fate. Perhaps that is the omelette we are called upon to make by all the broken eggs: the omelette of our own responsibility, our solidarious autonomy. In a sense, then, the yolk inside Humpty was simply our own being: we ourselves were freed from the shells imprisoning us when Humpty fell and broke. The yolk was our essence in its state of immediate heteronomy, our substantial community with otherness in the womb of nature where the borders between beings are not yet clear-cut. Humpty’s death was our birth – a double birth, since we were not only freed from our fusion with the Other but were also made responsible for the Other as the first victim of our coming to autonomy. A birth, then, which was both factual (freedom from the Other) and moral (responsibility for the Other). Here, one could say, the poet Jaromil from Kundera’s novel Life is elsewhere goes wrong when he writes:

He is free who is unaware of his origin.
He is free who is born of an egg dropped in the woods.
He is free who is spat out from the sky and touches
the earth without a pang of gratitude.

What he forgets is the egg that has to be broken for this freedom to be possible – a breach which makes our freedom guilty from the start.  


Milan Kundera (1986), Life is elsewhere. New York: Penguin Books, p.121.

“God is not dead, He just smells funny” – Reflections on the Syrian Massacre of the Innocents

Jean-Hyppolite Flandrin - "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem"

“Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a tank…” This paradoxical paraphrase of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Mt 21:5, Jn 12:15) went through my head when I tried to ‘digest’ the news about the latest UN report on the status of children in situations of armed conflict (www.un.org/children/conflict/english/index.html). The report expressed special concern about the deteriorating situation in Syria, where a growing number of children are among the casualties of what is by now a very bloody civil war. Apparently, militia’s are killing indiscriminately, women and children no less than men. Children whose parents are suspected rebels are tortured or simply executed. Some children have been found with their heads caved in. Also there are reports about children being used as human shields, positioned on top of tanks in order to discourage enemy fire.

The need to rewrite Holy Scripture
It was this image of a child on top of a tank that reminded me of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a donkey […]. And most of the crowd spread their garments in the road; and others cut branches from the trees, and spread them in the road. And the crowds that went before him, and that followed, cried out, saying, ‘Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.’” (Mt 21:5-11)

Doesn’t the image of a child used as a ‘human shield’ on top of tank force us to rewrite Holy Scripture, as if Christ is again entering the city where his crucifixion will take place? Only this time that Holy City is not Jerusalem but the Syrian city of Hama. And the road is not strewn with garments and palm leaves but with enemy fire, with bullets singing: “Hosanna to the son or daughter of whomever!” And if we are thus rewriting Holy Scripture, we might as well rewrite the passage about the murder of the children under Herod, such that it is now not in Rama but in Hama where “a voice [was] heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they are not!” (Mt. 2:17-18; Jer. 31:15)

Giotto - "The Massacre of the Innocents"

“If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke”
This is what a father says about his son in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) – turned into a film by John Hillcoat. The narrative is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where due to some global disaster – whether natural, man-made or divinely ordained remains unclear – all civilization has crumbled and nature is dying. Those who are still alive are reduced to a sub-human existence of daily struggle for food and the realistic fear of cannibalism. In this world, where all hope and value is lost, this father has made it his sacred mission to protect his son: “the child was his warrant,” McCarthy writes. “What if I said that he's a god?” the father says about his boy to an old man who is amazed to see a child still being alive in the disaster zone the world has become: “When I saw that boy I thought that I had died […]. I never thought to see a child again.”

In this godforsaken world, where all faith has died, where God himself is “dead”, this father finds a superhuman faith through his son, who has for him become a divine being, indeed, Christ himself, the Incarnate Word of God. The grimness of McCarthy’s dystopian vision, however, is such that besides the father no one believes anymore. Not even the old man puts any faith in the divinity of the child: “Where men cant live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true. Things will be better when everybody's gone.” Even the living, walking and talking Word of God carries no weight anymore: the world of The Road is too far gone, too godforsaken for that. The father’s task to protect his child against rape, murder and cannibalism is indeed a superhuman task, a more or less impossible mission.

The Road

Optimistic dystopia?
In comparison the film Children of Men (2006) – based on the novel by P.D. James – offers an almost optimistic vision of post-apocalyptic dystopia. Here too the story revolves around the divinity of childhood in a seemingly godforsaken world. The premise is that due to some unknown cause – a virus or divine intervention? – mankind has become infertile and faces extinction in several decades. When the youngest person on the planet – celebrity Baby Diego, aged 18 – is killed by a disappointed fan over a refused autograph, people lose their last ounce of hope and give in to despair and nihilism, epitomized by the government-issued suicide drug Quietus. For why take care of the planet, indeed why take care of oneself if there is no future? The future after all is what a child is: the future beyond oneself. Then, miraculously, one black girl becomes pregnant, giving birth to a healthy baby amidst the brutal civil war into which the world is falling apart. Bullets are flying, bombs are exploding, people are dying on the spot, but when the mother and her newborn infant appear all falls silent, the fighting stops abruptly, people stand in awe, soldiers fall on their knees before this epiphany which can only be described as religious – underscored by correspondingly dramatic music. It’s a beautiful scene and arguably the high point of the film, far surpassing its dramatic ending when mother and baby are finally aboard the Tomorrow, the ship that will bring them to the utopian community of the Human Project.

Children of Men

“Everything of value is defenseless”
So where do we stand now, what is the status of our own world when children are used as ‘human shields’ on top of tanks? Are we closer to the ‘optimistic dystopia’ of Children of Men? Or are we in the truly hellish world of The Road where faith in the divinity of childhood has all but disappeared? Apparently we are right in between, since the sanctity of childhood is both recognized – for otherwise children would be worthless as ‘shields’ – and violated, since they are used as shields. As the Dutch poet Lucebert wrote: “Everything of value is defenseless.” The supreme value and defenselessness of the child is apparently also the supreme armor, not impenetrable for bullets, no not quite, but almost impenetrable for considerations that rationalize the killing of another human being. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described the “Face of the Other” as that ultimate instance of vulnerability which calls the spontaneity of our violence into question. But what has become clear now is that this Face is first and foremost the face of a child. It is the ideal mask to hide behind. What has also become clear is that post-apocalyptic dystopia is not just a Hollywood genre, some entertaining vision of horrors predicated on the hypothetical question: “What if…?” No, dystopia is here and now: it is this-topia so to speak. The apocalypse is taking place again and again, each time an innocent child is brutally murdered, abused, raped. How can we believe in a God who lets such things happen? But then again, how can we stop believing in God if this means giving up the divinity of the child? We must have faith, then, simply for the sake of the children. This is the great strength of McCarthy’s line “If he is not the word of God God never spoke”. And therefore I say: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a tank…”

"After Auschwitz" – On regurgitating clichés
Obviously this ‘Christological’ reading of the Syrian ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ is meant to be abysmally cynical rather than as an expression of faith in the redeeming power of (forced) imitatio Christi. Confronted with such horrors, faith crumbles in despair. To repeat: How can one believe in a God who lets such things happen? This, of course, is an age old question, a powerless cliché nowadays, incapable of causing serious religious doubt. Why? Because we have already stopped believing in the goodness of God a long time ago. Auschwitz cured us of that, to use another cliché. This is the way the world is, we sigh, and then we look away and think about something else, lest we would have bad dreams at night. And we can’t have that, can we? No, we must be rested and fresh in the morning for another productive day.

But still… Doesn’t a feeling of sacrilege encroach on us when we hear the invocation of Auschwitz being reduced to a mere cliché? Who dares to say such a thing? True, some people – especially in academia – use it as a cliché when they unthinkingly repeat claims like “After Auschwitz there can be no more poetry” (Adorno) in order to please their professors and further a nice academic career. Such claims have become clichés all right, but they are all the more painful in light of the horrors of Auschwitz. And for Auschwitz we might as well substitute any of the other disasters that constitute the history of the modern world (as Joyce wrote in Ulysses: “History […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”). I won’t go into particulars – that is to say: I don’t want to ‘regurgitate more clichés’ – but just think about that child on top of a Syrian tank, that instance of supreme (in)vulnerability. Don’t we encounter here, despite all clichés, something sacred and divine? Something that suggests the image of Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey and perhaps even requires the rewriting of Holy Scripture in the indicated way?

Christianity and transcendental violence
Levinas spoke of a metaphysical and even religious dimension coming to paradoxical presence in the anti-phenomenon of the Face of the Other, who questions us from beyond the sphere of being and makes us responsible to the Platonic “Good beyond being”. Levinas, of course, was a Jewish thinker, who took his lead from the dialogical nature of the Judaic relation to God, who speaks to the individual through the personality (the “Face”) of the other human being – hence Levinas’ fondness of the Jewish proverb “the other’s material needs are my spiritual needs”. Yet one wonders if the metaphysical dimension he discovered – the supreme ethical authority of supreme vulnerability – isn’t more amenable to a Christian interpretation rather than a Jewish one, given the apparent necessity of sacrifice in order to bring this dimension to manifestation.

Isn’t this the gist of Derrida’s essay “Violence and Metaphysics” where he criticizes Levinas for ignoring the fact that the otherness of the Other – and hence his ethical authority – can only become manifest through the violence perpetrated against her? Thus Derrida spoke of a transcendental and pre-ethical violence as the condition of possibility of the ethical relation to the Other: “For this transcendental origin, as the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other.” (Derrida 2002: 160) Hence the intimate relation – which is more than etymological – between sacrality and sacrifice: only through the violence of the latter is the former truly revealed. But this transcendental violence as the precondition for the sacred authority of the Other – isn’t this first and foremost the crucifixion, as the violence that reveals the divinity of Christ? Derrida himself does not investigate this suggestion, despite the fact that “Violence and Metaphysics” shows a strong Christian undercurrent in the reciprocity envisaged by Derrida between (the transcendental violence of) Greek logocentrism and (the ethical authority of) Jewish heteronomy. For isn’t it clear that Christianity is this reciprocity as a historical ‘synthesis’ of Hellenism and Hebraism? Derrida suggests as much when he writes: “Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek […].” (Idem: 191) For this, of course, is not just an allusion to Joyce’s Ulysses (“Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.”), but ultimately refers to St. Paul’s statement that “There is neither Jew nor Greek […], for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

The divine emptiness of God's grave

The presence of divine absence
Paul’s meaning, of course, is that such parochial distinctions are no longer relevant in light of the universality of the Christian revelation, which addresses humanity as such (see Badiou 1997). Yet we might also interpret his statement more creatively as pointing to the special nature of Christianity as being between Greek philosophy and Jewish religiosity: it is “neither Greek nor Jew” since it is both, as the impossible excluded middle between these contradictories. Christ as the incarnation of God is both ‘Greek’ insofar as He is the veracious presence of the divine logos, yet He is also ‘Jewish’ in that this presence manifests a constitutive absence of the divine, of God as “wholly Other” who as such cannot be made present – and the attempt to do so can only kill him. Hence the Incarnation of God is only truly fulfilled in the Crucifixion: the moment when God dies – that is the moment when He is truly present/absent, when his absolute authority is truly manifested in his absolute (in)vulnerability. As I said, Derrida doesn’t investigate these suggestions, although they are clearly implicit in “Violence and Metaphysics”. One wonders why he remained silent…

Be that as it may, the suggestion with which I want to end is that the Syrian child – put as a ‘human shield’ on top of a tank – manifests this Christological dimension of sacrifice. Doesn’t this child force us to rethink our (post-)modern disbelief vis-à-vis the divine? “God is dead,” we say following Nietzsche, and we say so especially “after Auschwitz”. But doesn’t God die again in that Syrian child? And how can He die again if He was already dead? Shouldn’t we say then that God is not (yet) dead but rather dying, continually dying in all the innocent victims of human violence? To paraphrase Zappa’s famous statement on the status of rock music: God isn’t dead, He just smells funny… And it would indeed almost be funny if it wouldn’t be so horrific.

-Alain Badiou (1997), Saint Paul et la foundation de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris.

-Jacques Derrida (2002 [1964]), “Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas”, in: Derrida, Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge, pp.97-192.