To disorient, to induce disbelief. This is the stated intent of Saul Friedlander's book The Years of Extermination. It deviates barely a word from the declared intent of Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre, which sought, via the device of the Verfremdungseffekt, to make spectators conscious of being an audience as such and maintain their detached skepticism instead of being sent upon rapturous transports in the psyche of a Hamlet or an Othello.
It is superficially interesting, and somewhat jolting, to note that the same device employed by the extreme left in order to promote its ideology is the same one that is deployed in order to recapture the unimaginable consequences of the extreme right.
But upon revisitation, perhaps this observation has something more to it. For, despite the fact that both Friedlander and Brecht intended to establish a similar relationship between the work and its audience by employing comparable narrative techniques, there is still something of a distinction between the manner in which epic theatre and Friedlander's writing is each meant to be received. Brecht sought to create an emotional distance between the story and the viewer so that the spectators would not be given over to catharsis: to watch The Caucasian Chalk Circle is to engage with the ethical/political issues depicted therein, to be consciously critical, and to be able to walk away from the performance with specific opinions and judgments. The key to Brecht's theory was the notion that the audience would be empowered by such a "distanced" viewing, that they would become active moral and political agents. In other words, Brecht's art was meant to give rise to self-assured converts, confident citizens who maneuver themselves with precision and poise in order to concretize their world view. In comparison to this scheme, Friedlander's reader is allowed much less self-composure when confronted with the text. In what direction could one possible hope to be led in such a torturous labyrinth of bad intentions, what could one possibly be persuaded of when all coherent semantic units are rendered pale, irrelevant compared to the experience that gave rise to such harrowing testimonials? What could one hope to be converted into, after reading The Years of Extermination? The very thought seems vulgar, inappropriate. Indeed, Friedlander may have explicit designs to appeal to the reader's ethical processes rather than douse them in sentimentalized accounts of terror and grief, but by no means can one declare that his book give rise to uncomplicated, simple courses of action that follow from clear moral principles.
Why have we lost the ability to decide for ourselves the people we want to be, or become, in the gap of time between Brecht and Friedlander?
Could it be that Friedlander's subject matter treats a period of the time during which morality itself became farcical, as the concept that underpins ethics--universal right to selfhood and autonomous personal identity--became negligible? Extermination implies that personhood is no longer a consideration; it was no longer the case that a human was a human was a human. Some humans just had the semblance of being human: really they were not people, they were fodder. Even if we see ourselves as somebody--sentient, biped, with emotions and a unique personality--it did not guarantee that we were free to be seen as people. It is this assurance that we have lost in the time that Friedlander chooses to address, and it is this notion that propels the notion that, beginning with the Holocaust, ethics had to be rebuilt from scratch, and it would never resemble the glorious façade it had once been.

I want, very much, to be convinced by the more uplifting interpretations of "Hiroshima, Mon Amour"... Those that outline an optimistic view of the power of communication and the roseate prospects for mutual empathy. These are cogent points of view that are supported by filmic evidence, and yet I sense that there is something fundamentally unsatisfying about the conclusion that "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" is a mollifying agent in the dialogue on personal and historical memory.

Indeed, I view the gauzy, bittersweet quality of the film as a cinematic equivalent of the half-full/half-empty glass. It invites interpretation rather than dictating a single diapositive.

So I still propose that there is a note of profound lament and resignation conveyed throughout the film, particularly in the last scene of the film where they name, each the other, Hiroshima and Nevers. For Hiroshima, Nevers was a place and phenomenon that he sought to understand but, ultimately, it is as mysterious to him as Nevers the woman--aloof and elusive. Nevers, too, sought out the monuments and museums of Hiroshima (and even acted out the part of a nurse caught in the midst of the blast)--but ultimately, she understands nothing, as the man reassures her repeatedly. I believe that this reassurance is not a patronizing comment: rather, it points profoundly the fact that it is the time-dimension of the event that is important in his memory, rather than the space-dimension--and time passes, can never be reclaimed. That is to say, for both the man and the woman, what they really want to retain in their memory are the intimate details and the minute unfoldings of a past time: the day, the week, the month during which this memory was made (and the emotional immediacy experienced therein) is what they fear to forget. They dread to forget who they were during this specific point in the past, because the event was so formative and scarring that it would be act act of self-betrayal to forget. During moments that we have marked out as pivotal in our lives, we all promise ourselves that, no matter what happens, we'll remember this, because it's made us who we are. And what inevitably happens is that, as time passes inexorably away, an impenetrable distance comes between the us (in the now) and the us (in the past), and the fresh vivid sentiments of chagrin or anger cannot be become fainter and fainter. This process of disintegration is somewhat shameful, as we have failed our past selves and reneged on the promise we made ourselves.

We come to realize that the place, the physical space that supports the flow of time, is the only thing that remains. Thus the place becomes sacrosanct (Hiroshima mushroomed with museums commorating the city's sufferings, and Ground Zero becomes a place of remembrance) and we revisit it repeatedly, vainly trying to capture an experience that coincides spatially but not temporally. Collective memory resides in the spatial realm; individual memory sets itself up for the impossible task of preserving a bygone time. We can remember how significant the event to us, but never in the immediate and immersive way that we really want to.

The manner in which Agnes devotes herself to the task of slowly, methodically, killing herself and her unborn child seems similar to the way in which the dreams of fright-trauma victims always return to the scene of terror, the source of all their neuroses. Freud introduces this fact as a means of exemplifying the masochistic instincts of the ego, but it also paves the way to something he calls the "compulsion for repetition" (an instinct that is beyond the pleasure principle as such, and serves as an autonomous psychic drive from both the pleasure principle and the reality principle). Just as shell-shocked veterans dream each night of the battleground on which they fought, Agnes systematically gorges herself on fish (having vowed to never again eat fish, in light of a traumatic incident involving eels and a horse cadaver). Her recent pregnancy must have been a source of profound anxiety, as the dilemma of fatherhood hung heavy in the air, and in this environment of heavy stress a certain decisive masochism seems appropriate: in addition to being an act of revenge against her husband for having tried to make her eat eel, it is also an active course of action (one that gives her a sense of purpose), chosen for lack of more plausible actions. One may think that killing oneself is the most difficult thing to do, but perhaps for Agnes, it was the easiest choice to make among the other vague worries that she failed to confront. In this repeated act of eating, she could at least derive a sense of stability, of continuity, and perhaps even a kind of perverse delight at the twisted logic of eating herself to death with a food that she despised.

Bosch and atrocities.

It seems to me that, in 2012, to create a work of art that portrays the same kind of depravity and suffering captured by Bosch in his Garden of Earthly Delights would inspire no small furor. Indignant people from all over the world would scream "anathema!" (or the atheist equivalent of such) and its general reception would probably be one of disgust and utter contempt. The artist would be dismissed as simply attention-seeking, willing to go to any lengths to become notorious. Such a "sick" imagination would likely not be perceived as something marvelous, something ingeniously obscene. The scenes depicted would likely not be seen as valuable, as capturing something difficult to confront but ultimately fundamental to the way human beings negotiate their existence in the world.
In a sense, such violent imagery of human suffering was a way to re-enchant ourselves with life: it was a way of being brutally faced with what was at stake if one did not live correctly, and to see that the heavens and earth were indeed governed by an omnipotent divinity that left no mortal unrewarded or unpunished. No-one feels exempt, detached, when confronted by the Garden of Earthly Delights.

By falling in love with the idea of human rights--the inalienable right of every human being to live a self-determined life--we have deprived ourselves of this kind of beautiful terror. The terror of being unable to escape the terrifying judgment of a greater authority is no longer something that preoccupies us; therefore, when we are faced with images of human suffering, more often than not the feeling that sweeps over us is not fear--instead, we are indignant. We are indignant, because our Human Rights have been violated. But all the same, is there not a certain assurance that this suffering will not befall us (being, as we are, autonomous and subject to nobody's will except our own)? Is there not a kind of complacence, a kind of detachedness in the way we approach atrocities? For all our foot-stamping and lamentations ("how could such a thing possibly have happened?) what we tend to feel is an objective fury, an anger based on the violation of an abstract principle. It is not our own lives that are in danger, for the very same abstract principle makes us unable to believe anything other than that we alone can determine the course of our lives. The powerful people who are perpetrating such horrors cannot really have any influence over us, because any notion of natural laws (of authority and power structures) has been banished from our world view. They just happen to be powerful, and so they will soon drift out of the picture and all will be right again.
The idea that each and every person ought to be a free individual with unlimited volition has reduced humans to equal ground, but it is a soil on which we care less about what happens to other people. The theoretical right to walk about freely, unhindered, has been construed as the necessity of walking single-mindedly in the direction that we alone have forged, without concern for what other people on the street are up to. Power and authority are no longer relegated to deities (so passé) and so become somewhat incidental. Even the president of the united states is just another guy, right? He drinks beer like the rest of us and walks his dogs like everybody, so he just so happened to get elected. He is only in power because you want him to be in power.
Power has been radically democratized: everyone is supposed to have the power to change the world (by buying a certain product or attending a certain school). And of course we know that we all can save the planet, just by recycling our glass bottles and driving Priuses.

...All this may not be directly related to the class discussion, but it spiralled off a thought along the following lines: how is it that we are so callous and how is it that there is so much inertia, given that we know more than ever about what horrible things are being perpetrated by who, which horrific wars are unfolding in which regions, etc.?