Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance

By Debarati Sanyal

“A sophisticated, nuanced, and beautifully written account of the intersecting legacies of genocide and colonialism in postwar France.” —Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization

Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of violence, namely that of colonialism. These works produced what Debarati Sanyal calls a “memory-in-complicity” attuned to the gray zones that implicate different regimes of violence across history as well as those of different subject positions such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator.

Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity develops an inquiry into the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than affect-based discourses of trauma, shame, and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work?

As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9780823265497

Book preview

Memory and Complicity

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America

17 16 15      5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

1.   A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies

2.   Concentrationary Migrations in and around Albert Camus

3.   Auschwitz as Allegory: From Night and Fog to Guantánamo Bay

4.   Crabwalk History: Torture, Allegory, and Memory in Sartre

5.   Reading Nazi Memory in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

6.   Holocaust and Colonial Memory in the Age of Terror: Assia Djebar and Boualem Sansal

Afterword

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have found its way to completion without the support and complicité of colleagues, friends, and family. I am continually inspired and engaged by the intellectual community at Berkeley. Special thanks go to Karl Britto, Rob Kaufman, and Ann Smock for their feedback on earlier versions of these pages, and to Tim Hampton and Michael Lucey for their sound professional advice. I’ve richly benefited from conversations with Vanessa Brutsche, Églantine Colon, Mary Ann Doane, David Hult, Mia Fuller, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Dan O’Neill, Miryam Sas, Jiwon Shin, Alan Tansman, Soraya Tlatli, Estelle Tarica, Maria Vendetti, and Damon Young.

A wider circle of friends and colleagues have sustained me through the writing of this book: Lynne Huffer read an early draft of the manuscript during a retreat in Big Sur and wisely urged me to articulate the bigger picture. Vilashini Cooppan commented on each chapter of the final version with extraordinary care and insight. Michael Rothberg has been an invaluable interlocutor, collaborator, and reader over the past years; Ross Chambers was a treasured intellectual presence throughout. Many colleagues generously engaged with this project at workshops, conferences, and invited lectures. I’m especially grateful to Marianne Hirsch, Thomas Trezise, Maurie Samuels, Max Silverman, Nina Fischer, Noah Guynn, Jack Halberstam, Joe Golsan, Dan Edelstein, Judah Pollack, Christophe Wall-Romana, and Brett Ashley Kaplan. I’m also fortunate to have the daily company and encouragement of a virtual community of writers. A recurring Mellon Research Grant allowed me to conduct initial research in Paris, and a Townsend Fellowship in Spring 2013 helped me finish the book. My thanks to Sharron Wood and Teresa Jesionowski for their skilled copy editing. I’m grateful to the late Helen Tartar at Fordham University Press for taking on this book, and to Thomas Lay and Eric Newman for seeing it to completion with such care during a difficult transition.

Sections of this book have appeared in different form elsewhere. An early version of Chapter 1 was published as A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism, Representations Vol. 79, No. 1 (Summer 2002). Chapter 3 draws from Auschwitz as Allegory, published in Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog,’ ed. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (New York: Berghahn, 2011). An initial draft of Chapter 4 appeared in "Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture," ed. Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal, and Max Silverman, Yale French Studies, No. 118/199 (2010). An early version of Chapter 5 was published in Vichy 2010, ed. Richard J. Golsan, L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 50:4 (Winter 2010).

Like Baudelaire’s poet, whose recollection of past itineraries conjures up this or that person and finally trails off (I think / Of captives, of the vanquished, and many others still!), my list of intellectual, affective, and imaginative debts could be endless.… My final thanks are to my parents and brother, who in their own ways have forged an art of memory in migration, and to Michael Iarocci, my untiring reader and accomplice in all things.

Memory and Complicity

INTRODUCTION

Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

This book is about how literature and film can bear witness to violence and atrocity by bringing together ostensibly different histories through a reflection on complicity. Complicity is a word typically used to mean participation in wrongdoing, or collaboration with evil, and yet it is also an engagement with the complexity of the world we inhabit. The Latin root of complicity, complicare, to fold together, conveys the gathering of subject positions, histories, and memories that are the subject of this investigation. In a time of unprecedented connection with other peoples and histories, complicity and solidarity may be two sides of the same coin. The recognition of complicity—of our place in a historical fold, but also of the folds that bring diverse histories into contact—is a challenging task. It requires us to consider our sometimes contradictory position within the political fabric of a given moment, as victims, perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders, witnesses, or spectators. It demands an awareness of the past’s reverberations in the present, an attunement to the unpredictable affinities between disparate legacies of violence and loss. Such recognitions can spark affiliations between various identity groups in the collective pursuit of recognition and justice. Memory’s entanglement of distinctive and asymmetrical sites of trauma (slavery, the Holocaust, colonialism, or terror) can shake up established traditions of remembrance and belonging, allowing new ones to emerge. Yet it can also drive us to dangerous intersections, where difference is eclipsed into sameness, where identification leads to appropriation, or where political uses of memory collide with the ethical obligations of testimony. The recognition of proximity and connection between different histories can function as both a structure of engagement and an alibi for abdication; the awareness of complicity can awaken responsibility but also foster resignation or disavowal. The works that form this book’s corpus are so many case studies of this more complex understanding of complicity. They illustrate the unpredictable power and peril of this terrible desire to establish contact¹ across traumatic pasts and ethnocultural difference.

Memory and Complicity focuses on the uses of Holocaust memory in French and francophone culture, from the postwar years to contemporary times, taking up a distinctive intellectual tradition that foregrounds complicity rather than trauma in conceptualizing and representing readers’ relationships to the Shoah. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, literature and film from the French-speaking world repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma, but rather to connect its memory with other memories of atrocity, often through a focus on the complicities between distinctive regimes of violence. This tradition has also highlighted complicity as a mode of reception and engagement with multiple histories. Works by Alain Resnais, Jean Cayrol, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus that appeared to be about the wartime experience of occupation, deportation, and extermination simultaneously invoked the racial violence of late-colonial France. Such comparative or metaphoric uses of Holocaust memory were largely forgotten or suppressed from the 1960s to the 1990s, when the Shoah was reconceptualized as a singular, incomparable event. Since the 1990s, however, a number of French and francophone writers have begun to pursue the transnational reverberations of Holocaust memory to illuminate France’s entanglement with other sites of violence, displacement, and loss. Contemporary fiction by Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, and Boualem Sansal complicates the boundaries of national memory by entwining distinctive histories and offering complex models for thinking about the ethics and politics of cultural remembrance. In a different vein, philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben have turned to Auschwitz as the paradigm for a state of exception at work in different sites and times. In the chapters that follow I engage this corpus, guided by a series of fundamental questions: What are the political stakes of bringing together seemingly disparate memories of violence within an artwork? What are the risks and benefits of invoking the memory of one historical atrocity in relation to another? When does the cross-pollination of memorial legacies spur productive dialogue? When are other histories or dialogues foreclosed or suppressed? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of memory work?

The Holocaust is now a paradigm for memory in historiography, juridico-political discourse, philosophy, theory, and cultural production. Its status has shifted from exception to exemplum.² Susan Suleiman notes the increasingly global presence of the Holocaust as a site of memory, which has become a template for collective memory in areas of the world that had nothing to do with those events but that have known other collective traumas.³ The emergence of the Holocaust as a paradigm for genocide, human rights violations, historical trauma, and collective remembrance lead some cultural critics to envision it as a universal ‘container’ for memories of myriad victims that promises unprecedented opportunities for ethnic, racial, and religious justice, for mutual recognition, and for global conflicts becoming regulated in a more civil way.⁴ The Holocaust’s unmooring from its historical occurrence, its movement across space and time, is the condition of its relevance for other histories of violation and victimization. In other words, its transformation into a figure is what ensures this mobility and pertinence. Andreas Huyssen observes, In the transnational movement of memory discourses, the Holocaust lost its quality as index of the specific historical event and begins to function as a metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories. The Holocaust as a universal trope is a prerequisite for its decentering and its use as a powerful prism through which we look at other instances of genocide. Yet if the Holocaust is currently a transposable site of memory that can serve a range of political causes and ethical investments, Huyssen warns that this movement should be approached with caution: While the comparison with the Holocaust may rhetorically energize some discourses of traumatic memory, it may also serve as a screen memory or simply block insight into specific local histories.⁵ To what extent does the universalization of the Holocaust illuminate or block engagements with other histories, memories, and identities? Is there a distinction to be made between the current transformation of the Holocaust into exemplum or paradigm and more supple uses of its memory through aesthetic devices? And what do we mean by memory’s movement in the first place?

Huyssen’s allusion to the transnational movement of memory discourses reflects a profound shift in the conceptualization of cultural memory, from spatial models to figures of process and motion that capture the fluidity of remembrance in a postcolonial age of globalization and mass migration. Memory is on the move, and literary scholars, sociologists, political philosophers, and historians are seeking to conceptualize its proliferating itineraries and representations. Richard Crownshaw describes this shift from centripetal models of memory, where group or national identity coalesces around collective memories of events, to a centrifugal movement scattering memories beyond national borders.⁶ In Maurice Halbwachs’s foundational analysis, collective memory was contained within social frames of memory (les cadres sociaux de la mémoire) that include family, class, and religion.⁷ The containment of collective remembrance within social, ethnic, or national frames characterizes Pierre Nora’s groundbreaking Les Lieux de mémoire as well, for if its kaleidoscopic array of sites, from the Eiffel Tower to the Marseillaise, does not necessarily add up to a unified sense of France’s past, its commemorative significance remains firmly contained within the nation’s hexagonal borders. Alternate sites and chronologies such as the longue durée of colonialism are significantly absent ("What are the lieux de mémoire that fail to include Dien Bien Phu? exclaims Perry Anderson).⁸ Nora’s project can thus be situated within a centripetal model of collective memory insofar as it remains embedded within the container-culture of the French nation-state and the assumption of isomorphy between territory, social formation, mentalities and memories."⁹

By contrast, the centrifugal impetus of current memory studies portrays the nation-state as a container cracked open by globalization, releasing memory from ethnic, territorial, and national particularism into transnational flows and cosmopolitan contents. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider observe that if the conventional concept of ‘collective memory’ is firmly embedded within what we call the container of the nation-state … this container is in the process of slowly being cracked."¹⁰ The shift we witnessed in the past decade, from memory contained to memory unbound, from national frames to worldwide itineraries, has led to memory’s reconceptualization as a process and movement, rather than as a phenomenon that is fixed in time and space, as a multidimensional motion and a global memoryscape that reflects transnational circuits of technology, migration, and globalization.¹¹ Of course, the notion of a homogeneous national container culture is always heuristic. Memories have always been in motion and traveled beyond the nation-state in itineraries of trade, war, slavery, colonialism, and migration. The concept of memoires croisées, or intersectional memory, developed by Françoise Vergès and others maps such forgotten or minoritized transnational itineraries of remembrance and collective action.¹² But transformations in media technologies from the nineteenth century onward have accelerated such global pathways, ushering in what Andrew Hoskins calls a connective turn in the age of digital technologies and information networks.¹³ Technology and mass media diffuse memories across cultures and identities, producing psychic, imaginative, and social formations that can be unmoored from actual experience and travel across generations and memory groups.¹⁴

Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory is now indispensable for conceptualizing memory’s movement across generations, subjectivities, and sites of trauma. Initially formulated to convey the belated, fluid, and mediated forms of traumatic memory inherited by children of Holocaust survivors, Hirsch’s account of postmemory travels beyond the familial structure to encompass cultural forms of retrospective witnessing by adoption.¹⁵ Hirsch has further expanded postmemory’s reach to illuminate how its motion can reconstitute the self across generational, cultural, subjective, and geopolitical lines. Connective histories is the term she proposes for such memorial crossings and affiliative structures of transmission. The concept of connective histories places pasts into contact with one another in a conceptual touching that is reparative rather than comparative. Hirsch is invested in thinking different historical experiences in relation to one another to see what vantage points they might share or offer each other for confronting the past through a practice of "feminist, connective reading that moves between global and intimate concerns by attending precisely to the intimate details, the connective tissues and membranes, that animate each case even while enabling the discovering of shared motivations and shared tropes."¹⁶ The allusion to folds, tissues, and membranes in Hirsch’s methodology returns us to the image of complicity as a folding or pleating of histories and identities that brings them into contact without merging them altogether. Her readings of the overlay of memory traces in photographic montages of the Holocaust suggest that the palimpsest is a central figure for considering the complex layering of transcultural memory.

The figure of the palimpsest is also at the heart of Max Silverman’s capacious study of the relations between colonialism and Holocaust memory in postwar French cultural production. In Palimpsestic Memory (2013), Silverman adapts concepts such as the Freudian writing pad and memory-trace, David Rousset’s and Jean Cayrol’s view of the concentrationary (the concentration camp as a recurrent space of terror and domination), Derridean écriture, and Walter Benjamin’s constellation to argue for a poetics of memory in which the relationship between present and past … takes the form of a superimposition and interaction of different temporal traces to constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by, another. These traces retain a temporal overlay of a number of different moments, hence producing a chain of signification which draws together disparate spaces and times.¹⁷ Silverman illuminates how these palimpsests, with their condensation and displacement of sites, histories, and communities, produce a cosmopolitical memory, that is to say, a cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust and colonialism that contribute to a Derridean, post-Enlightenment democracy to come. Silverman’s focus on the politics of memory’s poetics is very much in the spirit of this book, and our corpus of French and francophone works is complementary. However, I foreground the ethical complications that arise in political figurations and poetic compressions of cultural memory. My interest is in highlighting the kind of memory work aesthetic discourse activates when it brings disparate histories together, but at the same time also pointing to what is potentially precarious or dangerous about the gesture.

Cultural memory’s migration across sites of trauma has received one of its most lucid accounts by Michael Rothberg, whose Multidirectional Memory investigates the relations between Holocaust memory and decolonization, illuminating the multidirectional orientation of collective memory since World War II. Rothberg excavates a differentiated collective memory capable of holding together similarity and difference and of mobilizing remembrance in the service of political responsibility without relativizing or negating historical specificity.¹⁸ For Rothberg, these dialogues between Holocaust memory and other histories of trauma existed before and during the consolidation of the Holocaust as a unique historical event and continue today. This focus on the ties that bind different cultural formations and subject positions opens an important alternative to the ethno-cultural grounding of collective memory and resists the collapse of memory into identity.¹⁹ Indeed, multidirectional memory assumes that the borders of memory and identity are jagged; what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be a borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant.²⁰ Multidirectional memory considers collective memory as a productive rather than privative process and offers an alternative to the zero-sum logic of competitive memory, that is to say, the notion of memory as a closed economy in which the recognition of one history will necessarily diminish or displace that of another. Rothberg is thus a point of reference in theorizing the multidirectional traffic of memory as it circulates between sites, temporalities, and communities.²¹

This book is informed by and in dialogue with these vibrant developments in transcultural memory studies. I share a commitment to bringing into relief the connections between legacies of remembrance, with a focus on how aesthetic figures such as allegory, palimpsest, and irony function as vectors of memory.²² Yet even as this book traces the multidirectional traffic of memory, it also foregrounds the collisions and conflations that can occur when pathways of remembrance converge. If memories travel around our global cultural landscape, I see their confluence as a dangerous intersection as well as a productive multidirectional site. Of particular concern to this project are the tensions between the ethics of testimony and its demand for specificity—in this case, the specificity of the Nazi genocide and its victims—and a more pragmatic politics of memory in which this genocide is deployed toward other times, subjects, and bodies. This is a fundamental tension from which each chapter in this book springs, and as readers will see, my objective is not to resolve the tension but to highlight its operation within the reading process.

This book also departs from a critical tradition that has primarily conceived of cultural memory in terms of trauma. Although I do not question the validity of trauma as an experience, or diminish its claims, I argue against the current tendency to blur the distinction between surviving a trauma and receiving its memory. Traumas such as the Holocaust, slavery, colonialism, and 9/11 have shaped collective imaginaries and group identities, yet they are also mediated representations that can be unmoored from lived experience, an unmooring that is the condition of cultural memory, prosthetic memory, and traumatic memory alike. The overwhelming focus on victimhood in the reception of such memory can lead to appropriations of stories not our own and can even become alibis for the perpetration of violence. The dominance of trauma and identification in the reception of Holocaust memory positions us largely as victims of history rather than as potential actors who participate in history’s making in myriad ways.

Historically, our collective tendency to identify with the victims’ trauma is linked to the emergence of the Holocaust’s specificity. As Annette Wieviorka has argued, the broadcasting of Adolf Eichmann’s trial through television and radio airwaves inaugurated an era of the witness, endowing the survivor with unprecedented authority as a human voice that has traversed history and harbours not the truth of facts, but the more subtle indispensable truth of an era and of an experience.²³ For Wieviorka and others, the rising authority of testimony and subjective experience has turned trauma and affect into privileged modes of our access to the historical past. Witnessing witnessing is Thomas Trezise’s evocative expression for our position as receivers of survivor testimony. In Trezise’s account, the sacralization of the Holocaust as an unspeakable history whose transmission demands various forms of traumatic identification has the effect of silencing survivors and suppressing more attentive modes of reception.²⁴ Gary Weissman describes the contemporary tendency to appropriate the experience of survivors as an attempt to feel the horror in a fantasy of witnessing that conflates survival and spectatorship. As a corrective to these identificatory modes of reception, he puts forward the category of the nonwitness as a necessary reminder that we who were not there did not witness the Holocaust, and that the experience of listening to, reading, or viewing witness testimony is substantially unlike the experience of victimization.²⁵ In a warning against the perils of our current emphasis on vicarious experience when we are witnessing witnessing, Richard Crownshaw advocates that we hold onto a more nuanced and gradated sense of trauma and historical affect, particularly in the face of a confluence of histories not necessarily our own, being aware of our possible implications in transferential relations but also knowing the limits of our affective and experiential participation in memory after the Holocaust.²⁶

Along with these critics, I am wary of the theoretical tendency to collapse events and their representation. If affect and identification are inevitable features of our engagement with memory’s movement toward otherness, I foreground the violence of this engagement and the complex responses that the work of art demands.²⁷ Adapting Richard Crownshaw’s term critical memory studies for approaches skeptical of trauma’s universalization, I position my work within a field of critical multidirectional memory studies, and I focus on the complicitous identifications invited by representations that gather together disparate histories of violence.²⁸

Memory and Complicity highlights the uncomfortable place of perpetration and complicity within the constitution of a memorial field. The hypostasis of the victim as sole witness can give us only a partial view of historical violence, and it runs the risk of foreclosing further investigation into the complexity of a historical juncture and our own position within its ethico-political fabric.²⁹ Instead, I give an account of the many instances in which we (readers, spectators, witnesses) are positioned in often contradictory ways within configurations of power and violence, as victims, perpetrators, accomplices, or bystanders. This focus on complicity responds to Susannah Radstone’s invitation to embark on the path not taken into testimonial witnessing’s darker side. It investigates memory’s gray zones to probe the ethical value of postmemorial art in terms of its capacity to move its spectator through fantasy identifications with perpetration as well as with victimhood.³⁰ Literature demands the practice of what, in an inflection of Rothberg’s formulation, we might call a multidirectional ethics whose solidarities emerge from within a sustained reflection on complicity. This reflection allows new questions to come into view: How does complicity, rather than affect-based discourses of trauma, shame, and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? How is collective memory, whether transcultural, multidirectional, or cosmopolitan, inflected in distinctive ways when the memories in question are those of a perpetrator or an accomplice to a violent regime or event? What are the politics and ethics of complicity, collusion, collaboration, and repentance when Holocaust memory is employed for other ends and vice versa? How might memory-in-complicity function as a form of commitment?

Complicity is a capacious and elusive term, which may explain the relative paucity of its theorization. It may be worth unpacking the range of its uses in this book. If complicity designates the state of being an accomplice, or partnership in wrongdoing, its secondary and now archaic usage is the state of being complex or involved (OED). Further, if it means collusion or collaboration, in French complicité can also mean understanding or intimacy. As I noted earlier, complicity’s Latin root, complicare, to fold together, captures the interweaving of histories and memories examined in this book. The recognition of complicity can have contradictory effects: It might illuminate convergences between self and other, past and present, here and elsewhere. But it can also convert difference into sameness or conflate the extreme and the everyday. Each of the works that the book discusses is, in effect, a case study of this more complex understanding of complicity.

As a nation formerly occupied and yet guilty of deportation, internment, and torture in service of colonial occupations, postwar France is a significant locus for the exploration of complicitous memory. The salience of complicity as a mode of historical engagement is undoubtedly linked to the French experience of Nazi occupation and the Vichy government’s collaboration with the deportation of 75,000 Jews (of whom only 2,500 returned). Sartre’s essay Paris sous l’Occupation (1945), for example, conveys the ubiquity of complicity during that period. The quotidian, tentacular, and faceless presence of Nazism contaminated each and every action with its plague so that the bravest acts of resistance could mutate into collaboration, enmeshing civilians into a shameful and indefinable solidarity … created … out of a biological accommodation with the enemy.³¹ In Henry Rousso’s classic The Vichy Syndrome (1987), this complicity is diagnosed in light of its pathological impact on collective memory, from the postwar repression of collaborationism to the current obsession with a past that refuses to pass. The memory of the war in France remains a memory of—and in—complicity. Beyond the French and francophone context, complicity, guilt, shame, and other uneasy feelings of implication have been cast as the ethical feel of postmodernity. The information era has placed us in the virtual front row of the global news. The mass media’s spectacularization of violence and trauma implicates us as witnesses, but also as spectators, bystanders, accomplices, and even consumers.³² In the words of the contemporary philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, complicity is an inescapable existential predicament, for we are all caught at the scene of the crime:

To be modern, one must be touched by the awareness that, besides the inevitable fact of being a witness, one has been drawn into a sort of complicity with the newer form of the monstrous. If one asks a modern person, Where were you at the time of the crime? the answer is: I was at the scene of the crime—that is to say, within that totality of the monstrous which, as a complex of modern criminal circumstances, encompasses its accomplices and accessories, those who are accomplices by action and accomplices by knowledge. Modernity means dispensing with the possibility of having an alibi.³³

In such a view we are complicit and entangled in global patterns of violence by virtue of our knowledge as well as our actions, by simply being there. This structural implication in atrocities of all kinds is the dark side of the connective turn in a modern age of mass media and digital technology. It is also the moral tenor of a world after Auschwitz envisioned as the exemplary scene of historical crime, a world forever tainted by the complicity between those guilty of the crime and those who stood by or looked away, those complicit by action and by knowledge, the accomplices and accessories, and the generations raised in its shadow.

Although this existential view of complicity emerges from a valuable sense of our fates being inseparable from those of subjects and histories remote from us, I caution against such universalization. Primo Levi’s gray zone has been crucial to universalizing complicity in the aftermath of Auschwitz. The survivor reminds us that in the camps the perpetrators and victims could not be divided into a ‘we’ inside and the enemy outside, separated by a sharply defined geographic frontier.³⁴ Levi diagnoses the intricate chain of complicities that bound victims, perpetrators, accomplices, and bystanders under the concentration camps’ conditions of extreme deprivation. The gray zone is at the center of recent thought on the Holocaust, and more generally on the ethics of witnessing in the postmodern age. The traumatized complicity it conveys—between victims, executioners, and witnesses, but also between banality and horror—makes it emblematic of the demands that Holocaust memory places on successive generations: our duty to remember and our collective responsibility for the past and present, but also our vigilance toward new Holocausts dormant in everyday practices. Yet if the moral ambiguity of the gray zone is a useful category for considering our ongoing implication in past and present historical violence, such ambiguity has also given rise to politically questionable interpretations of the Holocaust (such as Giorgio Agamben’s) that will be the subject of chapter 1. The tendency within contemporary philosophy, theory, and cultural politics to foreground what I call traumatic complicity as the primary lens through which we receive the Shoah’s memory, for example, positions us largely (and paradoxically) as victims and recipients of history. If complicity, as an entanglement of subject positions and histories, leads to a convergence of subject positions and memorial pathways, these convergences remain dangerous intersections in which histories can become blurred, conflated, universalized. By putting us at the scene of every crime, the hyperbolic gray zone we find in cultural discourses of trauma and shame can foster melancholy abdications toward the violence of history. Paradoxically, the narratives that position reading subjects as traumatized victims of history (i.e., we are all victims) and those that conceive of subjects as universally complicitous with historical violence (i.e., we are all accomplices) both run the risk of muting any sense of the subject’s political agency and responsibility.

In this regard, although this book takes issue with the universalization of trauma, it also challenges the gray zone’s universalization as the structural complicity of our age. I approach complicity not as a generalized sign of the times but as a form of commitment. How might the memory of complicity, and memory-in-complicity, open an engagement with the violence of history, and offer alternatives to discourses that route us back to the scene of the crime? How might complicity rather than shame or trauma, both honor remembrance and enable us to contest ongoing injustice? Complicity might in fact be at the foundation of responsibility since it is the refusal of complicity that is the traditional hallmark of commitment. In the foundational text of intellectual engagement, Emile Zola came forward during the Dreyfus Affair as a citizen who refuses complicity with the state: My duty is to speak out; I do not wish to be an accomplice.³⁵ Several decades later, as the French army tortured in Algeria, Simone de Beauvoir similarly expressed her commitment as a refusal of complicity: I wanted to stop being an accomplice in this war.³⁶ The recognition of complicity with structural violence, of the effects that our actions or inactions have on the fate of others, can serve as a catalyst for ethical and political action.

Opposition takes its first steps from a footing of complicity, Mark Sanders declares in his study on the subject; a motivated acknowledgment of one’s complicity in injustice is the prerequisite for responsibility and engagement.³⁷ Sanders theorizes complicity in the context of apartheid and invokes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s pedagogy of responsibility in complicity.³⁸ For the TRC, a recognition of Arendt’s banality of evil and our universal potential for perpetration (or the little perpetrator within) were the foundations of postapartheid collective life. Similarly, Tzvetan Todorov argues for a robust engagement with the memory of perpetration and complicity in order to counter the overwhelming dominance of identifications with victims and heroes.³⁹ A reorientation of collective identification toward complicity and perpetration need not lead to the permissive fatalism of propositions such as only circumstances prevent us from killing. Instead, it would foster a nuanced understanding of how power folds us into its mechanisms, of the institutional forces that mediate our agency, of the past’s reverberations in the present.

In its must rudimentary sense, then, complicity alerts us to what Sanders calls the basic folded-together-ness of being, that is to say, to modes of responsibility attuned to the effects of our actions elsewhere.⁴⁰ The legal scholar Christopher Kutz’s theory of complicity elucidates the mediated nature of our impact on others in a technological, globalized era. Kutz delineates the domain of complicity as the cultural and legal practices, surrounding relations of an agent to a harm that are mediated by other agents.⁴¹ His complicity principle addresses an individual’s moral position within a collectivity’s wrong and suggests that we are accountable for a harm regardless of whether our actual actions made a difference in that harm. This considerably expands our responsibility’s domain, for not only am I accountable for what others do when I intentionally participate in the wrong they do or the harm they cause, but I am also accountable for the harm we do together, independently of the actual difference I make. A simple illustration of this expansion of accountability is global climate change. Although drivers may not be committed to producing this effect or even intend to produce it, and even if their specific emissions are not causing it, they nevertheless participate in a broader social process that causes environmental damage. Kutz’s theory thus proposes that individuals must come to think of themselves as inclusively accountable for what they do together, to see themselves as participants in a group.⁴²

Yet what does it mean to invoke such forms of complicity in the realm of memory, where harm has occurred in the past and can no longer be repaired? How does complicity function within cultural memory, as a mode of encountering, or witnessing, an aesthetic representation of past injury and suffering? And how might complicity enable a passage from the represented past to an unfolding present, and to our current potential for what Kutz calls our mediated relations to harms?⁴³ Does memory-in-complicity return us to the scene of the crime as a witness, and if so, what kind of a witness? In an argument against the rhetoric of the unspeakable in Holocaust studies, Naomi Mandel proposes that complicity constructs a "self affiliated with the horrors of history. An attunement to complicity affords the recognition that all of us, literary authors and critics alike, are the producers and the products of our cultures and hence always already complicit in the ugliest aspects of our histories."⁴⁴ For Mandel, complicity entangles us into cultural forms that bear witness to the horrors of history through modes of affiliation rather than identification, that is to say, modes that neither beckon a fixed identification with victims nor sentence us to an always already guilty helplessness. Her view of culture as a force that we shape as much it shapes us conveys the vitality of aesthetic representation as a conduit for moral reflexivity and historical responsibility.

This book examines how aesthetic discourses of literature and cinema can generate such forms of responsibility in complicity. A final model, this time derived from the field of ethnography, might help to further clarify how the aesthetic experience of complicity can spur a self-reflexive movement of memory across disparate histories of violence. For George Marcus, complicity offers a way of thinking about the anthropologist’s rapport with his or her informant in a postcolonial and increasingly transcultural context. Whereas the traditional regulatory ideal of rapport or collaboration between anthropologist and informant was based on an asymmetrical relationship in which the anthropologist sought access to local knowledge through false reciprocities that could mask colonial or neocolonial agendas, Marcus argues that complicity captures the new mise-en-scène of anthropological fieldwork in a decentered, global, and multi-sited research context. Complicity emerges from an awareness of how other sites influence the anthropological encounter. Defined as a sense of doubleness, mediation, curiosity, and anxiety shared by anthropologists and their subjects/informants, complicity involves "having a sense of being here where major transformations are under way that are tied to things happening simultaneously elsewhere, but not having a certainty or authoritative representation of what those connections are.… The individual subject is left to account for the connections—the behind-the-scene structure—and to read into his or her own narrative the locally felt agency and effects of great and little events happening elsewhere."⁴⁵ Marcus stresses that the ethnographic encounter—indeed, its very terrain—is in flux, co-created by both parties, and with an awareness of their connection to external changes that may be difficult to grasp. This account highlights complicity’s secondary meaning as a state of being complex or involved, for it signals how each subject is engaged in a creative relationship that mediates between inside and outside, a local here and several elsewheres.⁴⁶ In an ethnographic context, then, complicity is less an ethical stance than a cognitive model that involves reflexive positioning at the inside/outside boundary of the terrain for both researcher and informant.⁴⁷ Yet even as a cognitive structure, complicity remains embedded in narrative, situational, and ethical reflections on the conditions of the ethnographic encounter and its relationship to other sites and trajectories.

This account of complicity is suggestive for an ethics of multidirectional memory in cultural production. Setting aside the evident differences between a live encounter in fieldwork and the mediations of literature and film, we might imagine artworks as sites of self-reflexive positioning and multi-sited, multi-temporal investigation. The aesthetic encounter does not simply open up our identification with various forms of alterity, in a conversion of difference into familiarity. The concept of complicity prompts a turn away from such intimate modes of identification and invites a supple, dynamic approach to the multiple meanings that are harbored in the artwork. Figures, by definition, are always pointing beyond or outside themselves; like memory, they are perpetually on the move. Metaphor, the figure of resemblance where one thing is likened to another, is a form of travel, from the Greek metaphorein, to move or carry over, to transfer, to put across. Similarly, allegory, or the trope of tropes—from allos, or other—dislocates meaning toward what lies elsewhere. To engage with a work of figuration, in all of its elusiveness, is to be aware of the displacements of meaning across multiple spaces and times. A complicitous approach positions the reader-viewer not as the passive recipient, but as an uneasy co-creator who is aware that figures, like memory, are on the move, taking us toward several elsewheres. It demands that the reader-viewer consider the elusive connections between sites, memories, and places while remaining aware that there may be no authoritative representation of what those connections are, as Marcus puts it. Allegories, for instance, are constellations of potential meanings that are actualized differently by readers at different times. If aesthetic figures, by virtue of signifying beyond themselves, carry us to crossroads of memory, these are further complicated by the frames of reference that we currently inhabit or project into the future. The ethnographic terrain’s diffraction toward other sites is in this regard not unlike the dislocations of allegory,