This is where I put on my professor hat and try to explain how film director Jonathan Glazer makes a worthy attempt at making some links.
Many years ago, when I was a professor, I taught courses on literature and film from and about the Holocaust. I was also interested — as a scholar — in the ways that the Holocaust was referenced directly or indirectly in films like the first Terminator movie, and particular story-lines emerging in the X-Men comics. I could write a whole entry on the incredible work done by students in those classes — classes which seemed to self-select people passionately concerned with social justice, racism, bigotry and violence. These students ranged in age and experience and included students from all sorts of backgrounds and religions.
But that’s another story.
What I want to share about now is writing that I came across during my time researching problems related to representing the Holocaust. There was a particularly difficult lecture given in 1980 by Jean François Lyotard called “Discussions or phrasing ‘after Auschwitz.'” After the lecture, there was a response by Jacques Derrida which Lyotard transcribed himself.
These days a lot of people, smart and very educated people even, roll their eyes at the mention of Derrida, a famous French Jewish philosopher, who was notorious for his tortured sentences and strangely infuriating, elliptical sentences. These sentences and this style were copied by innumerable academics, until postmodern scholarship blew up into a return to historicism, and to more straightforward kind of writing. It was probably a good thing, since very few people can write the way Derrida could.
Personally, I have always found Derrida fascinating. He was — in his way — a creative writer, a genius who meshed the most difficult philosophical ideas with a style of writing that continually encapsulated what the Russian Formalists said art should do. Art should, in their opinion, slow down perception by making things “strange.” Derrida certainly did that over and over again.
What has stuck in my mind in the years since reading Derrida and Lyotard is a particular remark that Derrida makes. He says:
“If there is today an ethical, or political question and if there is somewhere a One must, it must link up with a one must make links with Auschwitz. (il faut enchaîner sur Auschwitz). Perhaps Auschwitz prescribes — and the other proper names of analagous tragedies (in their irreducible dispersion) prescribe — that we make links. It does not prescribe that we overcome the un-linkable, but rather: because it is unlinkable, we are enjoined to make links. . .” If Lyotard was able to move us, it is because the presupposition shared by all is that Auschwitz is intolerable, and therefore that one must say and do something, so that it does not, for instance, start over again . . (The Lyotard Reader 387)
Il faut enchaîner sur Auschwitz.…. That phrase has stayed with me for 30 years and I want to attempt to unpack this phrase with you a little, or at least tell you how I understand it. I don’t just want to. I feel that I must.
What is Derrida saying? Well, in a manner typical of him, he’s using a play on words. “Enchaîner” is French for “to link up or string together,” but it also means to “enchain” or “to chain up.” To connect but also to constrain. And of course when we hear chains and Auschwitz we think of the chain link fences at the death camps, and I, and you too, if you’re familiar with American history, think of the chains worn by enslaved people here in the US. I think of chain gangs too. And the chain link fences at the detention centers in the southern part of the US, and the chain link fences that are part of the border wall. There are a lot of chain links to think about in American history.
I think Derrida means for those various associations to happen in the mind of his reader, which is why he uses this verb.
See? We’re already doing in our imaginations, what he’s asking us to do in the rest of the comment. But the verb gets us going in that multivalent direction.
The obligation (il faut) to chain up (on) Auschwitz is to make it so the camps can never happen again, I think Derrida is saying. To wall them up, so to speak, to use another loaded metaphor. But as Derrida speaks (and Lyotard transcribes) there is already the suggestion that the past cannot be walled off exactly. It remains part of our history and a continual challenge to us here in the present. We live “on top of” it after all (the meaning of the preposition “sur”). So, we must endeavor to find the connections between disparate and unique tragedies, even as we endeavor NOT to repeat the past. Again, typical of Derrida, he concludes offhandedly “so that it does not, for instance, start over again.” “It” refers to “Auschwitz” and the assemblage of horrifying associations that the place-name brings up. But it also refers to the totality of other atrocities. . .
Why not just say that, M. Derrida?
Read on.
I am writing about Derrida’s comment, because there has been a severe critique of the director Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars 2024 ceremony when he and his team won the award for best international feature for the film Zone of Interest. Smart people got very mad at his phrasing. You can look online and on facebook for the criticisms.
You can read reports of the actual speech here and here.
You can read a transcription of the speech here. But I’ll quote the section that really got to people:
“Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the — [Applause.] Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? “
Why wasn’t Glazer more clear in his remarks?
Well, I think that Glazer — unconsciously perhaps — is grasping what Derrida is continually trying to remind us of and get us to think about. When it comes to the unspeakable, the atrocity, the catastrophe, language can’t exactly rise to the occasion to represent it. Language fails. On the other hand, language is all we’ve got to discuss it. So, in order to remind us of this, and to try to trick language itself into touching on these deadly serious matters, Derrida twists and doubles it, making us think about at least two things at once. Like I said, he’s an artist, really.
Glazer intuits this problem somehow, which is why he wrote down his remarks and struggles through them. He gets the “stringing together” part of Derrida’s comments too, and that’s the part of his speech that is really upsetting and disturbing. He links Auschwitz — the subject of the film and the place where his film was shot — with the October 7th 2024 attack on Israel by Hamas AND the mass killing in Gaza by the Israeli military and the government that commands it AND he links all of these to the Israeli occupation. One could make many more linkages. as I did a couple of paragraphs ago. It was also a difficult moment, particularly, because it was hard for US audience members in the theater and at home to hear about those linkages and at the same time, also — by association — link Glazer’s remarks with the history of mass deaths of Native Americans, particularly after we all watched a moving musical performance by members of the Osage Tribe on the Oscars stage.
Parsing these linkages is extremely painful and difficult, and our usual words and grammatical construction can’t really do it, Derrida reminds us. So Glazer struggles through his written remarks, attaching to them a question. “How do we resist?”
Derrida is posing the same problem, when he says “one must say and do something.”
We are left with the painful and difficult reality that “it, for instance [is] start[ing] over again.”
But that’s the point.
Finally, as Jewish people*, Glazer is suggesting that we have perhaps a special responsibility to make links with/on top of Auschwitz, and that we cannot allow ourselves or others to forget, until the world — and we as inhabitants of it — stops repeating*** the atrocious past.
We must make links.** Il le faut.
*Glazer uses the phrase “as men” in his speech which is meant to reflect (I think) that his speech is a group statement, but still it is quite striking in its “refutation” of a certain kind of Jewish masculinity (I’m thinking of the current Israeli government), which is why I imagine he chooses that particular verb.
** Making links does not mean making the linked things the same. I think that Derrida is at pains in this regard; he does not want to reduce tragedies to a common denominator. I sense the same struggle in Glazer’s speech. To make links is not to simplify, but rather to connect.
*** “Repeat” is not really an accurate word. A better word might be “replicate” or even “imitate.”
Stephanie Barbé Hammer Writing (Un) Real 