Lets not do the unheard of
becomes inaudible(*)

LEYACK Patricia

"Before this, we used to say OK. We have enemies. It is perfectly natural. Why shouldn’t we have them? What was happening now was different. It was really as if an abyss had opened... This should not have happened. And I do not refer only to the number of victims. I refer to the method, the production of corpses and all the rest. This should not have happened".

I take these words from Hannah ArendtÀ about the Shoah, in whose enunciation the effect of subjective commotion can be heard, to place the nazi extermination as an "event", in the sense of a grounding fact. There is a before and an after Auschwitz in history "The worst has already happened", this is the tittle Santiago Kovadloff gave to one of his essays on the matterÁ . That the worst has got into what can be possible opens the issue of its repetition. What can be repeated of nazism is its "science" its "methods": the Argentine Dictatorship is an example.

The disturbing furrow initiated by Auschwitz is that of a possible picture of Thanatos, under the shape of a destructive drive, of a hatred that is aimed at making its object disappear using for this cold technical devices.

In nazism the biopolitics is carried out as thanatopolitics. The ideal of german aryan pure raze which supports the "ethnic cleaning" performed, was being developed throughout german history in an up going spiral: segregation, assimilation, elimination. The movement towards elimination is, in common terms as well as in scientific ones, a catastrophe, in its double meaning of disruption and collapse. Even more: a catastrophe of the ethics. A limit has been gone through and this restricts a spot of "irremediable" dullness (Cf. Primo Levi).

The anti-semite "builds up" his own jew, Sartre said .

There is not a third one between the nazi and his hated object: the situation becomes such that a binary logic replaces, due to regression, the ternary logic, that is the symbolic universe in which we move. Nazism refers to the One and the object to eliminate. And to a One without Other, precondition for the subject to be destroyed and thus it is possible to proceed to its final elimination. As a basis for this logic the placement of a charismatic leader, whose words are non questionable orders, in his position of absolute Master and the concomitant functioning of the people as a mass.

Freud had already pointed out the cancellation of a subjective function in the mass. A point in which the alert must be permanent. It is in this same direction that Alain Didier Weillà warns us about the danger of the stupid enthusiasm of totalitarianism, whose effect is a continuous abolition of the subject, an abdication of every discriminatory thought, as the one raised by the signifier "Führer".

The first step towards the extermination is an action on the language: nazism conceals, more even elides what is aberrant with euphemisms. "The euphemism turned to be the rhetoric figure par excellence: "bugs", "louses", "cockroaches" are used to name the jews; "final solution", the extermination of millions".Ä The filiation function of the language is cancelled with the euphemism. And from this one to make literal the signifiers, nazism can act over the jew which its hatred "builds up" as over parasites, garbage, rests to be eliminated.

It is in this line that Sneh and Cosaka propose a thesis: nazism as grammar of the extermination, is not a discourse. It is the destruction of the discourse, radical and authentic annulment of the unconscious.Å Starting from this procedure on the language, from this whole Symbolic, with no limit from the Real recorded, nazism produces a feeling of nothingness in the subject in order to be able to act on him; a feeling of nothingness which this one feels as annihilation. The extreme concretion of the pair feeling of nothingness-annihilation is the "Muslim", "(...) appellative with which his own companions called the inhabitant of the concentration camps to whom the horror, the fear and the humiliation have deprived of any humanity", as AgambenÆ said, of any subjective linking. The assassination of the "the subject´s metaphor", as R.LéviÇ wants is, in the "Muslin", a perfect work.

In this delirious rise towards disappearance in three steps: feeling of nothingness, real death in industrial scale and elimination of the rests, which nazism invented, there has been, nevertheless, an error in the machinery: the survivor and his testimony.

Primo Levi, a paradigmatic witness, made militant his testimony. The radiographic capillarity of his written testimonies is such that it is necessary, from time to time, to stop reading to cover up the horror: he does not allow us to ease up. His word is able to transmit that "uninterrupted unease" which harassed him in the camp and continued harassing him in his later life up to his suicide. The responsibility of giving testimony is in Primo Levi a denial, an act of opposition to the subjective razing which the death machinery tried to install. It is this decision of giving testimony which, we could say, kept him alive during his experience in the camp.

Primo Levi started to give and to write his testimonies almost compulsively as soon as he left the camp. Jorge SemprúnÈ had to leave fifteen years gone by, along which ones Eros covered up that unknotted Real of the "extreme situation" (Cf.Winnicot). When "he was finally able to talk" he made it from an intermediate zone, half fiction half testimony, that narrow pass which makes the polarity true/false to burst, always saying a little more and yet not ending to say.

The psychosomatic phenomena are those in which the Other´s jouissance is so unassimilable that leaves the subject out of playing. As this jouissance can not be questioned by the subject, it directly fixes on the body.

Sneh and Cosaka place nazism as a phenomenon in a parallel sense to what was described before for the psychosomatic phenomenon: a razing jouissance supported by a non castrated will which acts on a mass of bodies from which their condition of subjects has been taken away.

Doing the phenomenon, as what remains outside inscription, to turn to trauma and thus being able to be linked, in following turns, even knowing that some part will always remain uncoated by the Symbolic, is the task.^(*) Having been able of maintaining the condition of subjects, on the survivors´ side . To think – the paradox is valid – the unthinkable, at least to enclose its coordinates; to avoid the unheard of gets frozen in an inaudible, on our side.

Not different is our acting on the discourse of an analysand with psychosomatic phenomenon when we bet on the subject, on the subject of the unconsciuos which remained omitted in the phenomenon, and we cut off, here and there, a letter which removes the jouissance .

Patricia Leyack

À - From an interview to Günther Grass, 1964. Quoted by G. Agamben, in "Lo que queda de Auschwitz".

Á - Book in progress.

 - Juan Paulm Sartre, "Reflexiones sobre la cuestión judía" – Edit. Sur, Buenos Aires, 1960.

à - Alain Didier Weill, "Los tres tiempos de la ley" – Buenos Aires, Edit. Homo Sapiens.

Ä - David Kreszes en "Filiación y juridicidad de la lengua"/Revista Redes de la Letra Nº 7

Å - Perla Sneh y Juan Carlos Cosaka, "La Shoah en el siglo/Del lenguaje del exterminio al exterminio del discurso" – Xavier Bóveda Edic., Buenos Aires, 1999.

Æ - Giorgio Agamben, "Lo que queda de Auschwitz/El archivo y el testigo – Homo Sacer III"/Edit.

Pre-textos, Valencia, 2000.

Ç - Robert Lévi, "Un deseo contrariado", Edit. Kliné, Buenos Aires, 1998.

È - Jorge Semprún, "La escritura o la vida", Edit. Tusquets, Barcelona, 1995