At Last, Hurbinek has a voice

SVETLITZA Hugo

In his reflections about the future of Psychoanaysis contained in The Third and in Seminar 17 called The Reverse of Psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan asks the question: what can science provide to us. And finds an answer in the appearance of gadgets. Gadgets serve "to distract from hunger by taking the place of what we lack", he says. Gadgets consist of the multiplicity of mutable, easily replaceable objects that spring from the discourse of science, and which lie there under our eyes and making up for what Martin Heidgger calls the structure of summons. That is to say, objects are not produced but are there for us beforehand.

The Shoa –a word which means catastrophe, devastation and which is used instead of Holocaust, an offering in sacrifice- shows for the first time in history the atrocious, wickedly efficient use of science made by the nazis to produce death industrially. In Auschwitz people were not killed: corpses were produced.

Primo Levy refers to Hurbinek, a boy aged not more than three years, held as prisoner in Auschwitz, as being nobody, having no name, baptized as Hurbinek by his fellows in misfortune. He describes the boy existing as a mere glance, a gaze at the same time desolated and expressive as his only language.

Hurbinek did not speak: he only uttered short, inarticulate sounds, which his mates tried to decipher. Hurbinek died a few months before liberation. "Nothing remains of him: my words are the only testimony of his existence", tells us Primo Levi.

The destruction of the Jewish people undertaken by the nazis is the destruction of discourse, something that cannot be explained by using psychiatric categories. The field to be described requires Ethics.

In "La Shoa en el Siglo", a book written by Perla Sneh and Juan Carlos Cosaka, the authors state that euphemism was par excellence the rhetorical figure used by the nazis. As euphemism replaces the metaphor of the unconscious, it gives rise to a language of pure abstraction that literalizes the significant ‘puppets’, ‘rags’, ‘insects’ used by the nazis when they referred to the Jews. The aim was to accomplish the "most radical withdrawal of the unconscious" emphasize Sneh and Cosaka.

With its cold classificatory and administrative precision, the sadian apathy of Nazism managed to attack language in its subjectifying function.

I understand we should conceptualize in a different manner the expression "withdrawal of the unconscious" used by Jacques Lacan to refer to James Joyce, who invented his sinthôme thus repairing the place of the fault: Joyce gave rise to a cancelled psychic formation, left out of the discourse and located as fourth consistency, which Lacan named as The One of the Sinthôme. Withdrawal implies establishing the bases to produce an act through nomination, inventing a letter that ciphers less rotten ways of jouissance.

In Nazism, where euphemism presides over the place of the Name of the Father causing it to lose its nominating function, what might occur instead of withdrawal of the unconscious is its razing.

There is a name for the crushing of subjectivity and for what cannot be attested: Muslim. This was the euphemism used at the lager to call the prisoners who had abandoned hope, who were wandering bodies, the defeated. The word may come from the Arab where it designates those who surrender without conditions to God’s will.

According to Giorgio Agambem Jews in Auschwitz knew they were not going to die as Jews but as Muslims... For Primo Levi, ‘Muslim’ was the place where an experiment took place: an experiment in which moral itself is questioned, where the same idea of the existence of an ethical limit loses its meaning.

For the nazis, who knew that Jewish tradition in the Diaspora holds memory and transmission among generations as the homeland of its people, the "final solution" meant the destruction of those who kept the writings of the law as support for their existence.

In the Argentine Republic, the totalitarian aspirations of the military dictatorship that usurped the government in 1976 did not only massacre the bodies. It also exerted domination manipulating language. In this sense, ex-Admiral Emilio Massera complained about the language of the "subversives", capable of inoculating foreign ideologies: "words have disturbed reasoning and have been unfaithful to their meanings... time has come to say no to this despicable Tower of Babel and in order to repair so much damage we need to recover the meaning of so many twisted words..." Obviously, what totalitarism cannot stand is the condition of the significant itself, its sliding. Totalitarism longs for a stony coagulation of the sign that subdues all possibility of interval.

Nazism turned man into detritus, mere unlimited waste, crushed by the invasion of the real.

Sneh and Cosaka think that it is the System and not the structure, what mends the Symbolic when it becomes unbound and does not match the real: the place where these two meet is genocide.

A good, precise definition of the Shoa might be Event without witnesses.

Hurbinek cannot testify his suffering, his voice is mute. The testimony offered to us is through delegation. Testimony is the encounter between two impossibilities: the subject of said testimony attests disubjectivation, it is a potency that becomes reality through the impossibility of saying without guaranteeing the truth of the enunciation. In this respect let us remember the "varité" of truth set by Lacan by homophonically overlapping the French words ‘varieté’ (variety) and ‘verité’ (truth). Every truth as long as it is made of significant material bears the possibility of being a lie, a fact that reveals its fictional character. This is why we point to the real.

Eli Wiesel says that those who have not lived the experience of the concentration camps will never know; those who did live it will never tell, not really, not fully...

Yet, with these shreds of truths half said, through the testimonies, we can produce a passage that may allow the detritus to become a rest, something that implies in itself a certain pulsional clipping. ‘Rest’ is a messianic theological concept: in the Old Testament what are saved are not all the people of Israel but a rest.

"Everlasting name I will give them that will not perish

"I will give to them, in my house and within my walls,

"A place and a name better than sons and daughters.

"I will give them an everlasting name

"Which shall never perish."

Isaiah, 56.5

Now Hurbinek does have a voice...

Note: This paper is an individual outcome of the work done by a Cartel named "Shoa. Structure and Memory".

Paraguay 3045, 9° "A"

(1425) Capital Federal

República Argentina

Sneh, P. and Cosaka, J.C., La Shoa en el siglo. (Shoa in the Century), Buenos Aires:

Xavier Bóveda Editores

Agambem, G., Lo que queda de Auschwitz. (What remains from Auschwitz), Valencia: Pre-

Textos, 2000

Forster, R., El exilio de las palabras. (The Exile of Words), Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1999.

Lacan, J., Seminario 17 El reverso del psicoanálisis, Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1992