Amery’s text – for deepening the understanding of the temporal dimension of a traumatic experience.

Considering traumatic event from retrospective POV. Text written 20 years after.

Very candid author tries to deal with the situation of a mismatch between his feelings ad the surrounding
world.

(Nietche identifies the healthy with a very specific sense of time. Adresses the problem of promise and says
how it’s difficult for human be trained for keeping promises)

We discussed the notion of intentionality, which means the correlation between the subject and the object.
When I perceive a visible object there is always a correlation between act and object of perception. It is a
synchronic correlation between act and object.

It is very interesting that some specific strong experiences escape the intentional paradigm: one of them is
traumatic experience – here there’s no synchronic correlation between the past (or present) overwhelming
event and the subjective act. There is a diachrony which is very interesting from phen perspective

We have addressed the notion of traumatic event in order to understand terror, and we have seen how
anxiety could be seen as a way to avoid the eruption of terror (that was Freud’s idea in his account of
anxiety)

We have also considered the role of language – blumemberg – he was radical enough to consider language
as such as linked to terror and kind of creating distance from radical anxiety.

Then – political dimension of terror. Sociological perspective with Arendt and Sofsky. We have discovered
that camp was designed specifically to create a constant state of terror.

Now it’s interesting to see an intellectual figue, who was very intellectually engaged with Auschwitz and
actively opposed to Nazi regime – his perspective on traumatic event after 20 years.

Also, the problem of DIGNITY. We have seen how it was difficult to keep dignity and human responsibility
the room for freedom was so limited. We have seen different strategies in this regard.

Amery’s text – also can be seen as a way to keep dignity after camp. It is going against the simplistic self
evident act of blaming the victims. That is something you can see – there is a kind of victimization, blaming,
the past victim for disturbing the healing process. We have to move on, cannot be stuck to the past.

Amery’s voice is a disturbance in this “moving on”. (someone else: it is unforgivable. Thus you cannot move
on, from a juridical point of view and also moral point of view).

This reflection on TIME CONSCIOUSNESS has immediate consequences for a legal system and for moral
questions.

“Not much is said when someone who has never been beaten makes the ethical and pathetic statement
that upon the first blow the prisoner loses his human dignity. I must confess that I don't know exactly what
that is: human dignity. One person thinks he loses it when he finds himself in circumstances that make it
impossible for him to take a daily bath. Another believes he loses it when he must speak to an official in
something other than his native language. In one instance human dignity is bound to a certain physical
convenience, in the other to the right of free speech, in still another perhaps to the availability of erotic
partners of the same sex. I don't know if the person who is beaten by the police loses human dignity. . Yet I
am certain that with the very first blow that descends on him he loses something we will perhaps
temporarily call "trust in the world." Trust in the world includes all sorts of things: the irrational and
logically unjustifiable belief in absolute causality perhaps, or the likewise blind belief in the validity of the
inductive inference. But more important as an element of trust in the world, and in our context what is
solely relevant, is the certainty that by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person
will spare me - more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical,
being. The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of my self. My skin surface shields me against the
external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel. At the first blow, however,
this trust in the world breaks down. The other person, opposite whom I exist physically in the world and with
whom I can exist only as long as he does not touch my skin surface as border, forces his own corporeality on
me with the first blow. He is on me and thereby destroys me. (Jean Amery)”

This notion is relevant for our text because Amery had to deal with two criticisms:

1) Negative assessment of resentment from a moral point of view

2) He cannot judge fairly because he’s traumatized – that is, sick, in a way.

Here you can see that there iis really a kind of a radical change of the personal experiences. It’s really
important to focus on the idea of “trust in the world”

Notion of “basic trust” in developmental studies: one very essential role of the parents is to give a child a
basic trust.

And here it is an act of active erasement of the basic trust. True violence eradicates this basic trust in the
world. The point is that it is very very hard to gain it again. We can see that in that persons who have
described Auschwitz very lucidly and without anger, they committed suicide after thirty/forty years (Levi,
Amery). Of course it is singular, but it’s possible to say that the fact that the trust in the world has vanished
plays a major role in the lives of the survivors.

There was also a tendency in victims to repress the experience, not to talk about it. But repression doesn’t
eliminate the trauma, of course.

Something methodologically relevant: traumatic events or depression or any mental disease are RELEVANT
for understanding human feelings or human condition (some claim the opposite). In mental disease there is
a kind of coherent transformation of all existential dimensions and through this transformation we can
actually understand our condition better. It is very likely that a traumatized person has a different feeling of
TIME, but difference doesn’t mean that it’s not valid. In strong experiences the experience world changes,
but it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong or irrelevant.

“What matters to me is the description of the subjective state of the victim. What I can contribute is the
analysis of the resentments, gained from introspection. My personal task is to justify a psychic condition
that has been condemned by moralists and psychologists alike. The former regard it as a taint, the latter as
a kind of sickness. I must acknowledge it, bear the social taint, and first accept the sickness as an
integrating part of my personality and then legitimize it. A less rewarding business of confession cannot be
imagined, and in addition it will subject my readers to an unusual test of patience. Resentments as the
existential dominant of people like myself are the result of a long personal and historical development.”

-That is very important: these resentments are not only an individual problem, it is also historical.

In this text there are huge issues about collective guilt. He reports his first person experience and affirms
that he couldn’t make a distinction between Nazism and Germany. He doesn’t want to affirm a rasistic
thesis according to which all german people are guilty. Amery also reports several good people he met
during his time in Germany. So, his position cannot be seen as racist. But he has difficulties to deal with this
generous attitude at the time that Nazism belongs to the past and doesn’t belong to the present.
He felt this mismatch between his feeling and the world around him which wants to move on. He has to
deal with social pressure. There was a tacit agreement that we should be silent, to keep the silence.

It’s also interesting that people in the 60’s, some of the Raf members – people who will be engaged in
terroristic attacks in Germany in the 70’s were among the first people who wanted to address the problem
of Shoah. Radical individuals who will be terrorists.

“Those who had tortured me and turned me into a bug, as dark '. " powers had once done to the
protagonist of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, were themselves an abomination to the victorious camp. Not
only National Socialism, Germany was the object of a general feeling that before our eyes crystallized from
hate into contempt. Never again would this land "endanger world peace," as they said in those days. Let it
live, but no more than that. As the potato field of Europe, let it serve this continent with its diligence, but
with nothing other than that. There was much talk about the collective guilt of the Germans. It would be an
outright distortion of the truth if I did not confess here without any concealment that this was fine with
me.”

It was very difficult for the victims of the national socialism to go to Germany. Levinas never toutched the
German soil again. The soil becomes contaminated by the past.

It is also important to point out that Amery, but most of the survivors, that german guilt was COLLECTIVE,
because it implied such a big extent of coordination. Was very hard to make a separation between the
Germany and Regime.

The moralistic objection: you are narrow minded, a poor spirit, without any generosity. Nietche’s role is
very relevant in this sense. In his Geneology of Morals there is this idea that Christianity and esp Jews were
able to introduce a new paradigm which, on the one hand, was a wor of genious, but on the orther, very
miserable, because this new paradigm inverted a Greek hierarchy according to which the daring,
explorative person will be submitted to the order established by the crowds, by mass mentality.

Nietche:

Nothing that has been done on earth against ‘the noble’, ‘the mighty’, ‘the masters’ and ‘the rulers’, is
worth mentioning compared with what the Jews have done against them: the Jews, that priestly people,
which in the last resort was able to gain satisfaction from its enemies and conquerors only through a radical
revaluation of their values, that is, through an act of the most deliberate revenge [durch einen Akt der
geistigsten Rache]. Only this was fitting for a priestly people with the most entrenched priestly
vengefulness. It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful =
beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured, with awe-inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it
in the teeth of the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying: ‘Only those who suffer
are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly,
are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and
powerful, you are eternally wicked, cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will also be eternally wretched,
cursed and damned!’…We know who became heir to this Jewish “a revolt which has two thousand years of
history behind it and which has only been lost sight of because – it was victorious…” (Nietzsche)

The man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive, nor honest and direct with himself. His soul squints .
His spirit loves hiding places, secret paths, and back doors. Everything furtive attracts him as his world, his
security, his refreshment. He understands about remaining silent, not forgetting, waiting, temporarily
diminishing himself, humiliating himself. A race of such men of ressentiment will inevitably end up cleverer
than any noble race.

So, the idea is that jewish and Christian mentality was able to enact a radical re-evaluation of all values and
transformation means a kind of internalization of anger against oneself and thus also against the other.
(Freud said he can’t read nietche because he was too close to him). In nyce, personal resentment hates
himself, internalizes his anger, and hates everyone who ries to establish himself. It is a guardian of
established order in a very not ambitious form.

It is the way how Nietches idea of resentment is received.

Forgetfulness is not just a vis inertiae, as superficial people believe, but is rather an active ability to
suppress, positive in the strongest sense of the word, to which we owe the fact that what we simply live
through, experience, take in, no more enters our consciousness during digestion (one could call it spiritual
ingestion) than does the thousand-fold process which takes place with our physical consumption of food,
our so-called ingestion. To shut the doors and windows of consciousness for a while; not to be bothered by
the noise and battle with which our underworld of serviceable organs work with and against each other; a
little peace, a little tabula rasa of consciousness to make room for something new, above all for the nobler
functions and functionaries, for ruling, predicting, predetermining (our organism runs along oligarchic lines,
you see) – that, as I said, is the benefit of active forgetfulness, like a doorkeeper or guardian of mental
order, rest and etiquette: from which we can immediately see how there could be no happiness,
cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness.

The person in whom this apparatus of suppression is damaged, so that it stops working, can be compare to
a dyspeptic; he cannot ‘cope’ with anything…And precisely this necessarily forgetful animal, in whom
forgetting is a strength, representing a form of robust health, has bred for himself a counter-device,
memory, with the help of which forgetfulness can be suspended in certain cases, – namely in those cases
where a promise is to be made:

Human being is capable of keeping the promise under constraints, under violence, only if the suffering
makes us recollect the past, because suffering is triggering, in a way, suffering makes us capable of
memory.

The positive evaluation of forgetfulness: it is conceived as active and healthy function which makes the
novelty possible. Only because we forget the past, we can be open to the future. This is also interesting
from psychological perspective, there’s so-called flow experiences, where you’re really in sync with your
environment. Really focused and totally open to what happens to you.

That is the opposite account of Morality than Amery’s. For Amery, morality means being able to stay in the
past, to be loyal to the past, not to forget, keep the past alive.

Opposition of time consciousness: forgetfulness vs remembrance.

In pondering this question, it did not escape me that resentment is not only an unnatural but also a logically
inconsistent condition. It nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past. Absurdly, it demands that
the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone. Resentment blocks the exit to the genuine
human dimension, the future. I know that the time-sense of the person trapped in resentment is twisted
around, dis-ordered, if you wish, for it desires two impossible things: regression into the past and
nullification of what happened. (Amery)
There is a clear awareness that the resentment is doomed to failure. There is no chance to realize the
demands if the resentment. But still we have to be loyal to these impossible demands.

There is a distinction that Amery makes between the private and public resentment. That becomes very
clear when he refers to this SS man from Antwerp, Vajs.

The that is very dense and requires careful consideration. On the one hand, you can see that there’s clearly
a resentment in Nietche’s terms. In this case he will be satisfied because the other person experienced total
powerless experience.

At the same time, it’s interesting that he tries to see a proximity with other. This extremely negative
experience of Vajs is considered in the light of the possible proximity between them. The telos of all the
reflection is to reestablish a bound between me and the perpetrators, reestablishement of the human
order. The means are violent but the end is human proximity.

And the human proximity expresses itself in the desire to go back in time and to undo what had been done.
Human proximity is a kind of common realization that what happened shouldn’t have happened.

Common human ground can be realized only under the condition that both the victim and perpetrator long
for the undoing of the past, share this impossible desire for vanishing the past. That makes the enemy
human again.

So, the whole project is doomed to fail, but it is an expression of morality. It is a human demand which
cannot be realized but it doesn’t mean that it’s not justified from a moral point of view.

As political praxis it’s unrealizable. So, this text is not relevant for social praxis, for implementing this kind of
social policy at all. It’s also not possible to force anybody to feel guilty in these terms.

This irrational element has a very important function of keeping the memory of the victims alive.

I think what is crucial here is the relationship between time and morality. To which extent is it moral to
forget and to which extent do we have to think of time in intersubjective terms, in political, in social terms:
how are we on the same side? To which extent should we force other to feel responsible for what he did?
What does this responsibility mean? It doesn’t mean reparations, not revenge. Only the common wish to
undo what is done.

The idea is to reestablish a social bound and it can be established only under the condition that both sides
want to turn back time and undo.

On implementation:

In two decades of contemplating what happened to me, I believe to have recognized that a forgiving and
forgetting induced by social pressure is immoral. Whoever lazily and cheaply forgives, subjugates himself to
the social and biological time-sense which is also called the "natural" one. Natural consciousness of time
actually is rooted in the physiological process of wound-healing and became part of the social conception of
reality. But precisely for this reason it is not only extramoral, but also antimoral in character. Man has the
right and the privilege to declare himself to be in disagreement, with every natural occurrence, including the
biological healing that time brings about. What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is
hostile to morals and intellect. The moral power to resist contains the protest, the revolt against reality,
which is rational only as long as it is moral. The moral person demands annulment of time - in the particular
case under question, by nailing the criminal to his deed. Thereby: and through a moral turning-back of the
clock, the latter can join his victim as a fellow human being. (Amery)

But if, in the midst of the world's silence, our resentment holds its finger raised, then Germany, as a whole
and also in its future generations, would retain the knowledge that it was not Germans who did away with
the dominion of baseness. It would then, as I sometimes hope, learn to comprehend its past acquiescence in
the Third Reich as the total negation not only of the world that it plagued with war and death but also of its
own better origins; it would no longer repress or hush up the twelve years that for us others really were a
thou- sand, but claim them as its realized negation of the world and its self, as its own negative possession.
On the field of history there would occur what I hypothetically described earlier for the limited, individual
circle: two groups of people, the overpowered and those who overpowered them, would be joined in the
desire that time be turned back and, with it, that history become moral. If this demand were raised by the
German people, who as a matter of fact have been victorious and already rehabilitated by time, it would
have tremendous weight, enough so that by this alone it would already be fulfilled.

This desire can be also seen as the expression of losing the basic trust in the world. Desire for the
annulement of time would be a way to regain this basic trust.