Naming the Disaster?

“There is no reaching the disaster”
(Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 1)

In the vigilance against identity thinking, an impasse emerges: by refusing to identify and subsume the disaster under a general concept, where does the name of that disaster belong? Auschwitz, the Holocaust, Shoah, ‘The Final Solution’: names which seem complicit with a totality that referential identity implies. Already an aporia is met in the retreat from these terms by referring to the ambiguity of ‘disaster’. With that ambiguity, detachment is afforded so that the event can be written about ‘freely’. At the same time, it is a collective secret which is already exposed: hence the conceit of a term which refers to an event but veers in the opposite direction through the imposition of convention alone. No doubt, an aspect of bad conscience is involved in supposing the term ‘disaster’ to be a bridge between certainty (i.e. what is tacitly spoken) and the necessity of a term which remains conceptually incomplete (i.e. by being ambiguous). So long as identity thinking is mantained, then concepts which hover in between the name and its antithesis thus “comes to be designated” writes Adorno, “as a contradiction” (Negative Dialectics: 1973, 5).

In his Interrupting Auschwitz, Josh Cohen (along with Adorno) opts for the name ‘Auschwitz’ on account of its “explicitly synecdochic character {and} necessary inadequacy” (2003, 146). The term ‘Auschwitz’ does not claim to be conceptually complete. For Cohen, it contradicts (or interrupts) referential totality by being specific. If the particularity of the term ‘Auschwitz’, both as a spatial site (Oświęcim) and as a temporal event, makes it less susceptible to conceptual absolutism, then where is it conceptually located?

The Particular Disaster

Either the particular gains its identity through being an instance of the universal; or, through being neither identical with a general concept (nor non-identical with a concept) it falls into the category of “excluded middle” and so becomes “lazy Existenz” (8). In the first case: forcing the particular to be an instance of a universal in effect, means subordinating that particular to a set of already existing conventions. In that conditioning, the particular loses the validity of its name for the sake of acquiring an identity. A sacrifice is made which confers the property of ‘idea’ upon the name. Thereafter, disaster becomes the disaster, abstract and universal.

In his essay on Beckett’s Endgame, Adorno highlights the philosophical dilution of existentialism in its attempt to generalize ‘absurdity’ by linking “it to the Western pathos of the universal and lasting” (259). Beckett counters this act of self-preservation by “surrendering to absurdity without preconceived intentions” (259). As a result of this, language does not play into the dialectics of identity thinking either by committing itself to an instance of the universal or by striving towards simple negation of the universal. Negation already entails what is being negated to affirm its identity. This is why art risks subordination, cliché or false grandeur in its attempt to name the disaster: “it would become inadequate to its substance and be degraded to a clattering machinery for the demonstration of worldviews”, writes Adorno correctly (260).

If language is to be guarded against its inclination to construct a false bond between the event and its name, then deferring this commitment is one method of negotiating the impasse. When Kierkegaard adopted ‘indirect communication’ as a means of disclosing truth through deception, then he implicated an ironic mode of epistemology which aligns itself with act of naming the disaster by not naming it: “…direct communication presupposes that the receiver's ability to receive is undisturbed. But here such is not the case; an illusion stands in the way. That is to say, one must first of all use the caustic fluid. But this caustic means is negativity, and negativity understood in relation to the communication of truth is precisely the same as deception” (41). An undisturbed communication is one which already presupposes the response. This is why Kierkegaard cannot afford a direct confrontation: the defences against uncertainty and disproval are too rigid.

The Infinite Disaster

A philosophy which considers itself above illusion and inflexibility risks mistaking a concept as being a priori. Adorno: “Such a semblance of being-in-itself is conferred upon it by the motion that exempts it from reality” (11). Instead of being a term which defers a definite presence, ‘disaster’ becomes a concept in itself no longer critical of its own relationship with the event it purports to mediate. Until this continuous unity between the name and its event is “disenchanted”, then the concept remains exposed to illusion of “the idea of the infinite” (13).

Claiming that the disaster is infinite would mean providing it with a set of narrative conventions. The disaster would be already set and its representation would translate as rendering the structure of that representation explicit. In such an instance, aesthetic resolution would be afforded by obeying the mythic conventions of the disaster. Having been deemed infinite, continuity is also implicated in this staging of disaster. Blanchot’s unreachable disaster loses its distance and becomes redefined as an aesthetic artefact entirely absolved of Kierkegaard’s “caustic fluid”.

The Rational Disaster

An infinite concept annihilates alterity through its entrenchment in homogeneity for the sake of preserving its very infinity. Indeed, if it was to wholly admit alterity, then the eternal quality of the disaster would be reduced to a disrupted infinite, and a disrupted infinite bears the mark of a contingent particular. The particular infinite presents a problem of rational coherence, not least because it deviates it from a foundational conception of epistemology as both static and defined by a narrative, Adorno: “No matter how dynamically a system may be conceived, if it is in fact to be a closed system, to tolerate nothing outside of its domain, it will becomes a positive infinity – in other words, finite and static” (27).

It is for this reason also, that the rational disaster binds itself to the notion of redemption. The false becoming which Adorno alludes to in his discussion of Hegel’s dialectic (27), already foresees a temporal moment in which alterity is brought to understanding through the unfolding of the Absolute. Likewise, the term ‘disaster’ can be admitted if it is able to situate itself in a process of understanding which has already secured a placeholder for it. By dint of this foresight, negation only ever reaches a limited point. What is held back is enough of the concept to preserve its identity in the context of a rational narrative.

The Uncanny Disaster

If rational discourse determines the disaster to a false end, then eradicating rationality by opposing it only enforces the strength of rationality in the first place. In the rebellion, a new end would be forged in which deliberate inadequacy would be annulled by a definite (and false) conclusion. For Adorno, negating an existing system only to replace it with another system thus results in a bureaucratic mode of thought (32). On the other hand, thought escapes this oscillation by advocating “the shock of inconclusiveness, the negative as which it cannot help appearing in the frame-covered, never-changing realm {which} is true for untruth only” (33).

Adorno’s imperative which states that “the premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again” (Education after Auschwitz, 19), and in a different configuration: “to arrange…thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen again” (ND, 465), such an imperative can never be fulfilled lest thinking ‘through’ Auschwitz appears to have fulfilled its task and so disarms its critical capacity. The future of the past would no longer be a problem because the imperative would have already been resolved in a previous temporal moment. For Adorno, in the scheme of negative dialectics, the only form of redemption possible is its refusal. As such, philosophy itself must orientate itself to the continuous discontinuity of the event. “Perspectives”, he writes in Minima Moralia, “must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light” (MM, 247).

From “the standpoint of redemption”, the disaster is uncanny. It stands outside of the world, is disrupted from the smoothness of being to the extent that it is now “estranged”. Adorno’s “messianic light” does not then, claim to be possible. The striving for the impossible and the constantly disrupted entrenchment of Auschwitz means that the disaster remains out of reach. “The shock of inconclusiveness” demands not an attempt to identify the openness with a sealed concept, nor to establish a “new and non-identificatory kind of thinking, but a demonstration of the insufficiency of identification” (Jarvis, 167).