“Today is history” Amon Göth’s limping chiasmus and overcoming of the stylistics

Abstract

We have tried to open some new and possibly undisclosed vistas on the famous scene in the movie Schindler?s List, by Steven Spielberg, by probing the famous question: can and should the Holocaust be represented. To the best of my knowledge, the famous speech of the main antagonist of the movie, Amon Goeth, ?Today is history?, has not to this moment been treated in this manner, as the bearer of the insightful theories of style and philosophy. This is what we tried to remedy in this paper. We try to accomplish this by broadening the conceptual frames of the classical stylistics coming from structuralism of De Saussure, and by applying Mikhail Bakhtin?s philosophy of the speech genre, to this particular scene. Starting hypothesis, relating to the gap between Western and Russian semioses, was that classical semiosis, best represented by Peirce and Umberto Eco, would not tolerate this broadening of the diegetic script towards the biblical levels of the meaning, which are absent in this capacities of Western semiosis. We assumed that this was the subconscious plan of the director, namely, to represent the German plan: to make Holocaust not only reach the biblical proportions, but biblical style and meaning as well, and thus to immortalize itself. During the analysis we have encountered certain similarities in the distribution and the behavior of the figure of speech asyndeton, in the diegetic script of the movie, and the attitudes of the modernity, as they are represented in Catherine Pickstock?s book After Writing: Liturgical Consummation of the Philosophy. Together with Bakhtins? work, Pickstocks? analyses served as our guiding and starting point of the observation and manipulation of the deigetic text. After having discovered the aborted patterns of the stylistic reconfiguration, towards which nazi propaganda unsuccesufully aimed at, in order to accomplish the paschal rite de passage through controlling of the historical necessity, we moved toward the pictures of history, harboured in the depos of the Nazi understanding of what Jews and Germans are. We have found essential contradictions in this respect with the Nazis, stemming from the serious ontological error of confusing ancient Roman ancestral history and very deformed and reduced Judeo-Christian perspectives, which represent the only possible epistemological interface which can manouvre the Holocaust into description. Thus, we conclude, that this description is not only possible, but it is neccessary, just like its counterpart, representation.