{"id":34615,"date":"2024-10-04T11:54:32","date_gmt":"2024-10-04T09:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=34615"},"modified":"2024-10-04T11:54:32","modified_gmt":"2024-10-04T09:54:32","slug":"depictions-of-genocide-the-un-imaginable-visibility-of-extermination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/depictions-of-genocide-the-un-imaginable-visibility-of-extermination\/","title":{"rendered":"Depictions of Genocide: The Un-Imaginable Visibility of Extermination"},"content":{"rendered":"
One must ask whether \u201cvisualizations\u201d of the unspeakable in the current context of Israel’s war on Gaza have managed to render the viewer numb and disengaged, for what does it mean when we are shown daily evidence of atrocities and war crimes, and yet Israel’s greatest defender, the nation providing the bombs and cover for its commission of war crimes, denies that war crimes are taking place?\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

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Viola Shafik<\/span><\/h4>\n

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In his book <\/span>Images malgr\u00e9 tout <\/span><\/i>(2004) the French Jewish art historian Georges Didi-Huberman took upon himself the analysis of four remarkable though hardly decipherable black and white photographs. These \u201cimages despite everything,\u201d as Didi-Huberman described them, had been taken by prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp at the risk of their lives. For an uninformed viewer, they depict little else besides some trees, a few naked people and a fire burning (for incinerating bodies in fact). Yet, in his discussion of these images Didi-Huberman sought to qualify the opinion of other writers and intellectuals who argued that the horrific murders committed in the Nazi concentration camps were cases of the unspeakable, the unimaginable per se. For him, in contrast, the four images represented recognizable \u201ctraces,\u201d or signs, of resistance.<\/span><\/p>\n

The opposite point of view was deployed by Claude Lanzmann, the director of <\/span>Shoah<\/span><\/i> (1985). In his over nine-hour long documentary,<\/span> the filmmaker deliberately refrained from showing the rare historical visual documentation of the camps, relying instead on the heartbreaking narrative accounts of eyewitnesses in combination with contemporary images of the camps\u2019 remnants and the railways leading to them. This admittedly strong audiovisual strategy of representing the \u201cunimaginable\u201d or unspeakable relies on an extreme reduction of the visual, i.e. a minimum of images and a maximum of sonic evidence.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\"Images
Images malgr\u00e9 tout<\/em> (\u00a9 Georges Didi-Huberman 2004).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The same strategy has been occasionally re-adopted and recycled in theory and practice, just to name a very recent British fiction film, <\/span>The Zone of Interest<\/span><\/i><\/a> (2023). While the action of the entire film unfolds in the home of the then-Auschwitz commander Rudolf H\u00f6ss, directly adjoining the walls of the camp, the terror of industrialized extermination seeps in periodically via remote sound effects, thus leaving death and suffering entirely to the viewers\u2019 (un-)imagination.<\/span><\/p>\n

It goes without saying that during the last decades the horrors of the Nazi genocide have neither remained totally unimaginable nor visually undocumented, given the immense number of films of all formats produced on the topic, ranging from Alain Resnais\u2019 film essay <\/span>Night and Fog<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>Nuit et brouillard<\/span><\/i>, 1956), packed with visual evidence, up to Steven Spielberg\u2019s box office hit, <\/span>Schindler\u2019s List<\/span><\/i> (1993), to mention only two of the most canonical. Hence, by means of the audiovisual, the Holocaust has been rendered aesthetic, narratively dramatized and mainstreamed internationally. In Germany, this has certainly helped to raise awareness, at least among the younger generations including myself who were born after the war, yet the basic dilemma between cruelty that exceeds any form of possible expression, and the attempt to make it visually tangible and herewith risk profanity has not been resolved.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is ever more urgent to ask if these \u201cvisualizations\u201d of the \u201cunspeakable\u201d have indeed managed to dissect the complex nature of so-called antisemitism, or to call this child by its real name, of <\/span>racism<\/span><\/i> and xenophobia? Did they really help to elucidate the multifaceted mechanisms of social exclusion in Germany and elsewhere and pave the way for their dissolution? To put it differently: Were they able to exemplify the widespread modern productions of the \u201chomo sacer\u201d or \u201cbare life,\u201d to use Giorgio Agamben\u2019s term; that is, a life that is pushed outside the common legal system and hence declared outlawed and erasable? For this latter process has not been confined to Auschwitz but, in the case of Germany, had started already in Namibia in the early 20th century, with the incarceration and extermination of the Herero and Nama, a fact that had been repressed for many decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the conquest of the Americas, genocides have been reported from almost every corner of the world, and more often than not, linked to the capitalist extraction of resources, forced labor and violent exclusive nation-formation. In addition, some of the most democratically labeled political systems have been involved in the unlawful production of \u201cbare life,\u201d such as the United States when it used Guant\u00e1namo Bay, a no-man\u2019s land for human ostracization, combining ideological and religious labeling with a complete deprivation of civil rights, not unlike what is being practiced in Gaza and in the West Bank on the Palestinians.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShame on us,\u201d exclaimed Noura Erakat, a US-based Palestinian scholar, lawyer and activist during the online <\/span>Palestine Congress Tribunal<\/span><\/a> on April 15, 2024. In the aftermath of the Palestine Congress in Berlin, which was raided and shut down by the German federal police on April 14 under the erroneous pretext of demagogy, she made a short but concise statement on the nature of the counter-attacks on Gaza. The fact that governments in the Global North had only protested loudly after the killing of seven international aid workers, while \u201c30,000 Palestinian victims\u201d had not been enough for them to express words of criticism against Israel was described by <\/span>Erakat<\/span><\/a> as racism. For her it was evident from the very first week of the war on Gaza that the Israeli backlash after October 7 was going to become a genocide. She asked how many more images of dead bodies and destruction the world needed to see until we would be ready to intervene.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a similar vein, Palestinian activist <\/span>Omar Barghouti<\/span><\/a> described the events in Gaza as \u201cthe world\u2019s first livestreamed genocide.\u201d What we see in this case indeed is no longer a \u201ctrace\u201d that reveals signs of resistance. What\u2019s coming out of Gaza today is an overwhelming amount of visual evidence. Gaza\u2019s reporters and photographers have provided a surplus of audiovisual documentation of bombardments, massacres, captures and starvation. What has been locally recorded, gets copied, televised and shared online on a global scale. Yet, this fact has not led the warmongers to show mercy nor the spectators abroad to stand up in larger numbers against the cruelty of ruling elites in Germany, France, UK and the US. Their governments have equipped Israel \u2014 and are still supplying it \u2014 with military technology ostensibly meant to \u201cdefend\u201d against Hamas\u2019s armed resistance, but is actually attacking an estimated two million civilians who are trapped and starving between the sea and three almost impermeable borders.<\/span><\/p>\n

Amidst all this havoc, the mass-mediated Speakable and Imaginable have reached another unprecedented level. Particularly on the social media platform TikTok, where Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza have made innumerable posts intensifying the general trend in Israel of <\/span>\u201cimages that reframe disproportionate violence as proof of victory.\u201d<\/span><\/a> Many of these posts remind one of war trophies, pairing a thoroughly cynical playfulness with blatant cruelty, at least according to my reading.<\/span><\/p>\n

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