In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

4. Goethe after Lanzmann: Literature Represents ‘‘X’’

4. Goethe after Lanzmann: Literature Represents ‘‘X’’ lanzmann’s ‘‘‘inside’’’ and ‘‘‘outside the camp’’’ refer to nonextant places that separated the living from the dead, and, as much as the eradication of architecture entails the eradication of the referent —not its necessary exclusion by way of linguistic systematization, nor its metaphoric and conceptual positing and transformation, but its material erasure, as if it is not and had never been—so architecture constitutes the referents, the grounds, to which historical life and language adhere. This study is not, like Lanzmann’s great cinematic work, about methods of destruction applied in reality to affect the course of empirical history, methods engineered not out of any empirical, physical necessity but to make history itself conform at all costs to a certain idea of history. This real history of history enacted to embody an idea, and so destroy, as efficiently and rapidly as the practicalities of engineering such destruction allowed, as many bodies pertaining to a privative definition of spirit as could be found, is one whose own reality, however, continues to be brought into question, despite (or is it precisely in still lethal response to) the continuing efforts to retrieve, not those lost forever, but, rather, some knowledge of them, to link ‘‘who,’’ across the abyss of how, with ‘‘where.’’28 28. Those efforts have recently been individualized in Daniel Mendelsohn ’s The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million, a work whose demonstrated tenacity of purpose and scrutiny of detail are reflected in the sinuousness, the unmuted self-reflexivity of its own prose style. In attending to the infinite quality of research as to that of any individual consciousness, Mendelsohn’s project and its discursive record offer an at once modest (‘‘six’’) and thus appropriately immodest (‘‘of the six million’’) rejoinder to the absolutist negation of the particular experience of living, itself supposedly abstractable by sover24 goethe after lanzmann ‡ 25 The enormity of these efforts is only commensurate with the destruction they document. Yet, like ‘‘facts on the ground’’—pieces of earth set aside for the purpose of transforming the arbitrariness of life into all-purpose, absolutely determined death—the indication (‘‘‘here’’’) of referents signified by the words (‘‘‘inside’’’ and ‘‘‘outside ’’’) that the separation of the multiform processes of living from repetitive, methodical murder requires, seems, as Lanzmann at once demonstrates and strives to prevent, always poised on the verge of disappearing. That the referent is necessary to history and occluded by history is the reality of history, and no fiction. In making the last turn in the course of a long study of the interrelationship of noncognitive, architectural form and literary and philosophical forms of discursive cognition, the current study finally approaches the referent and the reality of history through their representation in fiction. For, in fiction, in which nothing is extant, Lanzmann’s eerie insistence upon indicating a referent that, all-important historically, no longer exists, even as the earth that once bore its marks, and still bears the act of indicating, materially persists—in fiction, such a moment of pure reference is not the exception but the rule, the grounds upon which monuments to prevent historical oblivion are built. Goethe’s marking of his own fictions by building—the construction, to fatal effect, of a ‘‘new’’ ground for ‘‘free human beings’’ to ‘‘stand on’’ in Faust, a drama whose ‘‘restless’’ action springs from the flat refusal of ‘‘dead’’ language and time; and the exposure, beneath a ‘‘free and open sky,’’ of the ‘‘secret’’ ‘‘buried,’’ like the dead, beneath all building, the ‘‘hidden ground’’ underlying the ubiquitous architectural activity preceding, accompanying, and succeeding the constitution of Wahlverwandtschaften throughout his novel—are literary entailments of the architectural that represent what Lanzmann’s at once real and phantom ‘‘‘here’’’ reveals: the coeval faces, or functions , of architectural activity viewed historically. These are, on the one hand, the eradication, by way of buildings erected on the ground, of the very basis of life, the given vitality of eign rule from life, whenever that negation is indicated as a (if not the) positive intellectual good under the deathly nomenclature, ‘‘biopolitics.’’ 26 ‡ introduction transient, destructible bodies, and, on the other, the founding, by building into the ground, of the referents of not any but specifically human life, of lives lived with language, in whatever sensuous form and through whatever system of cognitive signs language...