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4. Poethics of Disappearing Traces: Levinas, Literary Testimony, and Holocaust Art
- University of Washington Press
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134 c h a p t e r fou r Poethics of Disappearing Traces Levinas, Literary Testimony, and Holocaust Art A face is a trace of itself, given over to my responsibility, but to which I am wanting and faulty. It is as though I were responsible for his mortality, and guilty for surviving. —e m m a n u e l l e v i n a s (1998b, 91) Pas de trace, pas de nom. Pas de trace de pas. Pas de trace, de trace de pas. [No trace, no name. No trace of the (no) step. No trace, the trace of the (no) step] —r é g i n e ro b i n (2002, 146) erasures In one of the interviews about his film Shoah, Claude Lanzmann commented that he had to work with “the disappearance of traces. . . , with traces of traces of traces” (quoted in Robbins 1987, 252). The motif of traces structures one of the film’s opening episodes, in which Simon Srebrnik, a survivor of Chełmno extermination camp, returns to the site of murder many years later. We see him walking through a serene, rural landscape flanked by a forest, his eyes trained on a sight that remains invisible to the viewer. Suddenly, Srebrnik nods his head in a gesture of recognition, points to a large field covered with grass, and says, “Ja, das ist das Platz” (Yes, this is the place). This unremarkable scenery is now unscathed by the signs of the violence to which it was witness. For Srebrnik, however, it bears the imprint of the crime, the traces of which only his description in front of Lanzmann’s camera can etch in the viewer’s imagination. “The place” is an image of absence: it withholds the signs, draws them into itself. Indeed, even Srebrnik’s voice seems to retreat from das Platz: as he says, he cannot describe what happened there. In an attempt to bring forth an image, Poethics of Disappearing Traces 135 the survivor walks away from the camera, stepping along a concrete ledge overgrown with grass, outlining what must remain invisible. With his footsteps, Srebrnik traces a figure of what he previously described as the ovens in which many people were had been burned. Walking around the perimeter of the death camp, Srebrnik traverses as well the immense distance that separates his present account from the time of his past experience. While ostensibly the landscape does not change in front of the camera, Srebrnik’s footsteps transform the place and return it to the viewer re-marked with the absolute difference of that past. Even the tranquil chirruping of birds suddenly sounds jarring against the survivor’s recollection that, in that place, two thousand bodies were burned every day. To recall a phrase coined by Israeli poet Irit Amiel, this is indeed “a double landscape.”1 Srebrnik offers little more than a silhouette of a forgotten outline. But his footsteps have initiated a journey of memory, releasing the traces of the past from under the landscape covered with thick grass. In one of his essays, Levinas (1986) reminds us, “We must not conceive of a work as an apparent agitation of a ground which afterwards remains identical with itself” (348). The survivor’s work of recollection does not perceptibly transform the landscape, yet “the agitation of the ground” wrought by traumatic memory radically distorts the site, rendering it unfamiliar, unheimlich. While Srebrnik’s footsteps stake out the circumference of what neither his words nor his gestures can conjure, the entire scene seems to suddenly shift into a different dimension, collapsing into the invisible horror that his words have summoned. By registering this imperceptible shock, the tectonic shift between the two worlds that Srebrnik’s footsteps are straddling, the viewer becomes implicated in the ethical task of bearing witness. In this way, as Robbins (1987) argues, the film’s way of “‘letting us know’ is to render us responsible” (256). The motif of the trace functions in Levinas’s work on many levels . Levinas’s biographer Salomon Malka points out that the trace is a privileged trope in the philosopher’s work, and the title of his own account of the philosopher’s life is Emmanuel Levinas: La Vie et la trace (translated into English as Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy; 2006). According to Malka, the trace stands both for the invisible presence of the other, which is the cornerstone of Levinas’s ethics , and for the...