Our Dark Side (17 page)
Authors: Elisabeth Roudinesco
2
The Final Solution was implemented by Heinrich Himmler; Eichmann was in charge of its logistics and Rudolf Hoess, who was in command of several camps, answered to them.
3
He did, on the other hand, say (cited Arendt 1994: 460: â “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.” ')
4
I have been unable to establish with any certainty whether or not Lacan had read the pages Arendt devotes to the Eichmann trial.
5
The International Nuremberg Tribunal was created by the agreement signed by France, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union on 8 August 1945. Eighty major Nazi war criminals appeared before it between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946. Some two hundred other people were subsequently put on trial at Nuremberg, while one thousand six hundred were brought before other military courts.
6
From the Greek
genos
(birth, genus, species) and the Latin verb
caedere
(to kill).
7
A âgroup' can be described in ethnic, religious, national or racial terms. The criteria used by the authors of the Nazi genocide could, by extension, include handicaps, anomalies or perverse sexuality (the mentally ill, the abnormal, dwarfs, hunchbacks, conjoined sisters, twins, sexual perverts, homosexuals â¦).
8
Adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948.
9
As I have already emphasized, the notion of sadism, which was invented by the discourse of psychopathology, has nothing to do with Sade's theory of evil.
10
Gilbert (1947; 1950). Gilbert was an American intelligence officer who spoke fluent German and who had trained as a psychologist. Like his colleague the psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelly, he took the view that the war criminals who had been put at his disposal were âlaboratory mice'. He enjoyed treating them as such and made them the target of his sarcastic remarks. He thought that Rudolf Hoess was intellectually normal but suffered from âschizoid apathy'. The more âneutral' Goldensohn supported the âinternational plot' thesis (Goldensohn and Gellaltely 2004).
11
Rather than investigating the psychology of the killers, Bruno Bettelheim (1974) who, in 1938â9, was deported to Dachau and then Buchenwald (which had yet to become an extermination camp), developed the concept of an âextreme situation' to describe the living conditions that force men either to abdicate, and to identify with the destructive power embodied in both their torturers and those around them, and their situation, or to resist by adopting the survival strategy that leads the subject to build an autistic-style inner world whose fortifications can protect him from outside aggression.
12
The Nazis claimed to be the protectors of certain animals and especially dogs and horses. As we have seen, Himmler claimed that it was an insult to animals to say that homosexuals behave as they did. Hitler's bitch Blondi was the love of his life and, in
Mein Kampf,
he linked Jews to rats, spiders, bloodsuckers, earthworms, vampires, parasites and bacilli. Göring passed an anti-vivisection law, but thought that cutting human beings to pieces was quite normal.
13
See Ian Kershaw's
Nemesis
(2000). In Greek mythology, Nemesis, the daughter of night, is the goddess who demands that the gods punish men for their madness and overweening pride.
14
Primo Levi was in Auschwitz III from January 1944 until February 1945, and was present when the camp was liberated by Soviet Troops. He was one of the first deportees to describe his experience of the camps in the magisterial
If This be a Man
(Levi 1987).
15
See Lorenz (1981; 1966). First used by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to describe the study of animal behaviour in the natural environment (zoology), the term âethology' is used by Lorenz in the post-Darwinian sense of the comparative biological study of animal and human behaviour.
16
Lorenz is mistaken: many animals kill others of the same species, but that does not mean that they are murderers or exterminators in the same way that men are. It is the law of men that defines murder and the awareness of murder, and not the laws of nature or biology.
17
Coined by Plautus (
Homo homini lupus
), the formula was popularized by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
18
On this topic, see the account of Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka, as reported by Gitta Sereny (Sereny 1974). In Shoah (1986), Claude Lanzmann describes the killers and their victims as using radically different language-regimes.
19
The book consists of two texts: the first, dated November 1946, was used as evidence against Ernst Kaltenbrunner at Nuremberg in April of that year, and describes in detail the âFinal Solution of the Jewish question in Auschwitz concentration camp'; the second, dated February 1947, is the autobiography proper.
20
When asked by Leon Goldensohn, who had been asked to write a report on him, what his punishment should be, Hoess replied that he should be hanged, meaning not that he deserved to die, but that he should suffer the same fate as the other accused. See Goldensohn and Gellately (2004).
21
In his novel
Death is My Trade
(1954), Robert Merle invents a diabolical childhood for Hoess, drawing on the autobiography and notes communicated to him by Gilbert. In similar fashion, Norman Mailer (2007) invents a terrible childhood for Hitler, and has the Devil appear in the shape of destiny.
22
Hoess is mistaken when he claims that Himmler ordered the complete extermination of the Jews in the summer of 1941. Elsewhere, he insists that he could not recall the precise date. Himmler had in fact asked him to draw up plans for the mass extermination of the deportees, and the first Soviet prisoners were gassed in August and September 1941. It was after Hitler met the main leaders of the Nazi party in Berlin on 12 December 1941 and after the Wansee Conference of 21 January 1942 that the Final Solution was implemented. Its goal was to exterminate eleven million European Jews within a year. Thanks to the actions of Hoess and his successors, Auschwitz became the biggest death factory in the entire Nazi concentration system until the Soviet troups arrived on 27 January 1945. See Brayard (2004).
23
WVHA:
Wirtschafts und Verwatlunghauptamt
. Hoess spent nine years of his life managing camps; three and a half of those years were spent at Auschwitz.
24
Because they were ârace polluters' of the worst kind, the Jews wore a second, inverted, yellow star beneath the first; this formed a six-pointed star (cf. Kogon 1950). The category of
Nacht und Nebel
(night and fog) applied to prisoners who had to be tried and executed in secret.
25
Julius Streicher (1885â1946), founder and editor of the anti-Semitic paper
Der Stürmer
. Found guilty of crimes against humanity by the Nuremberg Tribunal, he was hanged.
26
Hoess was accused of abusing his power by the SS judge Konrad Morgen, but the affair was quickly hushed up. Cf. Langebin (1975: 391).
27
The best account of biocracy, after Weindling (1989), is that given by Massin (2003). (See also Massin 1993.)
28
This is the thesis of Goldhagen's
Hitler's Willing Executioners
(1997). For a critique see Burin's excellent article (1997).
29
Stanley Milgram (1933â84), American psychologist and designer of the so-called âobedience to authority' experiment. A subject is placed in an experimental situation and conditioned to obey murderous orders that go against his conscience (Milgram 1974).
30
A disease caused by malnutrition: the tissue of the cheek atrophies and reveals the teeth and the bones of the jaw.
5
The Perverse Society
The victory over Nazism was made possible thanks to an alliance of Communists and Democrats who all supported the ideal of freedom, progress and emancipation that they had inherited from the Enlightenment. The victors did not, however, share the same conception of man and human aspirations. In those societies where the Communist model had triumphed, it was obvious from the 1930s onwards that the great socialist utopia had degenerated into a regime that constantly encouraged crime, a delight in evil and the loss of all freedoms. Believers in progress therefore had to ask themselves if it was possible to perpetuate the spirit of the Revolution, despite its vicissitudes, by supporting struggles against the subjugation of women, the colonized and ethic minorities. The question was all the more important in that the democratic system, which was based upon individualism, freedom of competition and mercantilism, was, despite its obvious superiority, by no means immune to inversions of the Law that frequently resulted in aberrations that went against its own principles: witch hunts, imperial conquests, absurd pretensions to normalize human behaviours, the degradation of culture, repression in the name of an ideal of good, Puritanism, pornography, and so on.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conflict between these two conceptions of man ended, as we know, with the victory of a liberal democratic model based upon a disenchanted world view, an insane belief that the end of history was at hand, and the conviction that society could be rationalized by the application of calculations, and therefore evaluation, to all human activities. A new biopower would, it was believed, abolish not only nation-states, which would give way to multitudes (Milner 2005),
1
but also the boundary between humans and animals and, within the human world, all conflict, all aspirations to rebellion, all desire for self-annihilation, and therefore all the excesses that revealed the presence of our dark side. There would be no more perversion and no more sublimation.
2
Doing away with perversion: such is the new utopia of today's democratic, globalized and supposedly post-modern societies. They wish to eradicate evil, conflict, destiny and excess, and to promote the ideal of the tranquil management of organic life. But is there not a danger that this project will result in the appearance of new forms of perversion and new perverse discourses within society? Is there not a danger that society itself will be transformed into a perverse society?
After Auschwitz, all the words that supposedly defined the defining characteristics of humanity came under serious challenge. Given that men had, thanks to scientific and technological progress, succeeded in inventing a way of exterminating men that was without precedent in human history, the issue of man's place within the natural world acquired a new urgency.
As ethology developed into a comparative study of human and animal behaviour that contradicted the old Cartesian theory of the duality of mind and body, the question of the origins of evil was raised once more, just as it had been raised after the Darwinian revolution.
If the most despicable of men who tortures other men can be described as âbestial' or âinhuman' because he displays, in his relations with his fellow men,
3
a cruelty that appears to be an expression of his profound animality, what are we to make of the way human beings treated animals? As Catherine Clément notes (2006: 111):
In Western societies we have yet to reach the heights of the life that human and non-humans share in native societies. In our societies, we are still capable of abandoning pets that have become a nuisance, of dressing them up in coats and making them wear hats or sunglasses [â¦] In our societies, we put animals that are close to death to sleep on the pretext of preventing them from feeling any pain; we are not even capable of helping them to die with dignity; we treat them like beasts.
Do we have the right to torture animals
4
or, more simply, to fetishize them in the same way that we fetishize people? Do we have the right to make them suffer the horrors of industrial slaughter houses that do not spare them the pain of dying? Do we have the right to shut them up in laboratories and to carry out what are often perfectly useless experiments on them without concerning ourselves about their sufferings? Do we have the right to train them to teach them to satisfy human sexual perversions? Is it not unworthy of a civilized humanity to use them to kill or torture human beings? What is the difference between humans and animals? What do apes and human beings have in common? Which is crueler and more murderous: the animal or the man? Are animals perverse? We are descended from apes; are we destined to revert to being apes, now that the behavioural and cognitive sciences have established a continuity between human and non-human primates? Are we to assume that non-human primates not only experience mental states, feeling and emotions but may also have a symbolic organization and a language?
5
One last question also needs to be asked: given that the great apes were brought to Europe at the time when the rights of man were being promulgated, is it now â one hundred and fifty years after the Darwinian revolution and sixty years after the mass murders of the twentieth century â legitimate to extend those same rights to non-human primates that are facing extinction as a result of human madness? In a celebrated text, Lévi-Strauss (1962: 41) argues that
We started by cutting man off from nature and establishing him in an absolute reign. We believed ourselves to have thus erased his most unassailable characteristic: that he is first a living being. Remaining blind to this common property, we gave free reign to all excesses. Never better than after the last four centuries of his history could a Western man understand that, while assuming the right to impose a radical separation of humanity and animality, while granting to one all that he denied the other, he initiated a vicious circle. The one boundary, constantly pushed back, would be used to separate men from other men and to claim â to the profit of ever smaller minorities â the privilege of a humanism, corrupted at birth by taking self-interest as its principle and its notion.
While relations between humans and animals are central to the founding mythologies that lie at the origins of human societies, it is not irrelevant to note that the word âbestiality' was for centuries used to refer not just to human ferocity â being an animal â but to the consummation of a sexual act between a human and an animal. In this context, it should be noted that crossing the sexual species barrier â or âcarnal habitation'â is not to be confused with the great mythical tales of the Minotaur, the Great God Pan, Zeus and Leda, of how the Egyptians copulated with crocodiles to increase their virility or with the totems of primitive people.
Despite all the fantasies bestiality may inspire, it is humans and not animals who indulge in the practice, as they alone have the privilege of choosing the objects to which they are attracted. No matter whether it takes a festive, murderous or ritualized form, the act of bestiality is inevitably, to different degrees, the result of training, or in other words of the perverse use of the body of the animal. It is in fact a way of enjoying the pain inflicted on the animal by inflicting it, through the animal, on oneself or other people. In that sense, training, which is in fact an ambiguous term, is not the same as âteaching' â which may, for example, tame an animal or domesticate it so that it can live among human beings and, if need be, help them.
6
Male animals that are specially trained, by means of conditioning with food or scents, to have sexual relations with humans are therefore called
androzoons
. Pornographic and scientific literature abounds in terrifying tales depicting every possible form of sexual intercourse between human beings and animals. Just as the gladiators were forced to play a part in their own extermination and just as Christians were fed to starving lions simply to satisfy the perversity of the mob, animals trained to copulate with humans were once featured prominently in the games staged in the circus. In the sixth century, the Empress Theodora, the daughter of a bear leader, the debauched and violent protectress of prostitutes and a follower of the Monophysite doctrine, would expose herself to the howling mob in the arenas of Constantinople. As she lay on her back with her legs raised, carefully trained geese pecked grains of corn from her open vagina.
While animals, like slaves and gladiators, were used to satisfy the sexual appetites of kings and emperors, they were also used in torture. Bears, goats, dogs, bulls and zebra were trained to rape and murder prisoners or those who had been sentenced to death.
7
In other periods, they were used in the privacy of brothels or private salons to provoke certain kinds of orgasm, as in the ancient practice of âavidosodomy' or having sex with a bird: âAs the man is about to orgasm he breaks the neck of the bird causing the bird's cloaca sphincter to constrict and spasm, thus creating pleasurable sensations for the man' (Love 1999: 300).
Smaller animals such as rats, insects and small snakes have always, without knowing it, inflicted terrible torments on human beings, but it was human beings who invented them, and they sometimes brought about their own deaths as a result. Everyone is familiar with the notorious practice of inserting a rodent into the body, as described by Freud in the case history of the ârat man' (Ernst Lanzer). When he was off during manoeuvres in 1907, he heard Captain Memeczej, a man who was âobviously fond of cruelty' describing a specially horrible punishment used in the East: the criminal was stripped naked and tied up, âa pot was turned upside down on his buttocks ⦠some
rats
were put into it ⦠and they â¦
bored their way
⦠into his anus. After half an hour, both the rats and the victim were dead' (Freud 1909: 166).
8
Because it was likened to a transgression of the procreative order, and therefore considered to be an unnatural vice, bestiality was seen by the monotheistic religions, and especially by Jews and Christians, as a crime and a heresy, just like sodomy and onanism. While the old practices of exhibiting and training animals to torture prisoners or for perverse festivities had been abolished, wretched peasants who were simply found guilty of âcarnal habitation' with their favourite animals were burned at the stake for centuries.
Convinced that anyone who had sexual relations with the Devil would give birth to monsters, magistrates sentenced the animals to death on the grounds that they were as perverse as their partners. In 1601, for instance, Claudine de Culam, a servant at the priory of Reverecourt and the daughter of a peasant family from Rozay-en-Brie, was sentenced to be burned at the stake at the age of sixteen because she had been caught in a state of carnal habitations with a white dog with red spots. âI found Claudine sprawled on her bed of rest', explained the prior, âwith the dog between her thighs and having carnal knowledge of her. As soon as she saw me, she pulled down her skirts and chased the dog away, but as it began to thrust its muzzle up her skirts, I kicked it and it went off, whimpering and limping.' The girl spoke up in her dog's defence, but it was beaten.
At the request of her mother, who believed her to be innocent, she was examined, in the presence of the animal, by a panel of experts in a room adjoining the court of appeal. The experts later concluded that the dog had jumped on Claudine âto take her doggy style'. The guilty pair â one is tempted to call them lovers â suffered the same fate, and were strangled before being burned. Their ashes were then scattered to ensure that no trace of their coitus remained (Lever 1985: 94â6). Would anyone who reads this tragic story dare to say that the case of poor Claudine, who was in love with the dog, was identical to that of the terrible Theodora? They certainly both indulged in carnal habitation, but only Theodora dreamed up a training system that made animals the instrument of the human exercise de
jouissance
and domination. In one case, sovereign power was exercised over animals; in the other, both victim and animal were handed over to the law of their executioners.
Unlike the homosexual, the masturbating child and the hysterical woman, who, as we have seen, were for the sexologists of the nineteenth century the three major figures of human perversion, the zoophile â who was subject to no penal sanctions once the crime of bestiality and sodomy had been removed from the statute book
9
â was no longer seen as a real pervert in the sense that he posed a threat to society. The zoophile was simply a sick person, afflicted by a sort of social and mental debility.
Krafft-Ebing (1924) identifies three types of zoophilia: bestiality (violation of animals), zooerasty (which results from impotence for the normal act) and erotic zoophilia. He takes absolutely no interest in the mute suffering of the animal, and nor does he take animal sexuality into account. He thus differentiated himself from the judges of the ecclesiastical courts in the same way that modern ethologists differentiate themselves from him.
Be that as it may, the positivist medicine that lay at the heart of scientific knowledge no longer saw any need to include animals in its great catalogue of deviant pathologies. Animals were not regarded as ill and were not forced to undergo treatment when they were found guilty of carnal habitation with a human being. The nosological world of the perversions, as defined by sexology, was a purely human realm. Over the next one hundred years, an impressive number of sophisticated terms were coined to describe every possible transgression of the species barrier in order to conceal the horror they inspired by a scientific facade: avisodomy (birds), cynophilia (dogs), necrobestiality (dead animals), ophidiophilia (reptiles), simiophilia (monkeys), animal voyeurism, pseudo-zoophilia (sex games in which one partner behaves like an animal), bestial sadism and so on.