The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Notes on Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah"

Abstract

If we recall the debates that have revolved for several decades, with greater or lesser intensity, around the question of an aesthetics after Auschwitz, we find that they divide along the lines of a moral and a material question. The moral question would be whether, after all hope for the stability of the human foundation of civilization had been destroyed, the utopia of the beautiful illusion of art had not finally dissolved into false metaphysicswhether, generally, art is still possible at all. The second, material question concerns whether and how Auschwitz can and has been inscribed in aesthetic representation and the imagination. In his Meditations on Metaphysics, which conclude his Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adorno provides a succinct response to those who tried to construct a normative moral taboo upon his earlier apercu that, after Auschwitz, poetry could no longer be written. Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.I But, Adorno continues, the question that arises after Auschwitz is not only that of the survival of art, but also the survival of those marked by the guilt of having survived: [Their] mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle