Who owns identity? Who claims authority over the owner of an identity to grant it, withdraw it, delete it, or void it from a person in accordance with their own definition? Who sets the rules of the game? Who seals the boxcars? This is what the “male gaze” is in its pure and most insidious state; a disease that permeates the conscience without roots; toxic because it plays with the sensitive and complex emotion of acceptance and rejection while sapping the strength of the spirit down to the level of existential struggle with identity and against myriad forms of labels, categories and cataloging that reduces to the individual to the legal entity of “human”, another commodity to be passed through the filter of the culture industry.
Boris Lurie did not reject who he was, the concentration camp number on his arm, the legal authority of his owners was burned into him; the hick was this ethnic i.d. imposed on him by gentile society; this invisible constraint facing an identity struggling to define itself outside of the “gaze”, the objectification by outsiders, and as Raul Hilberg asserted, an unconscious complicity by those of official authority within his Jewish identity. If we peel back the element of isolation here, the dynamic is almost universally applied, duping and doping of something more profoundly systematic.
Martin Niemoller:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Norman Finkelstein:I once asked my late mother, who survived Maidanek concentration camp, about Dawidowicz’s depiction of all the Jews in the ghettos and camps furtively staying faithful to their religion until their final steps into the gas chambers. “When I first entered my block at Maidanek, all the women inmates had dyed-blond hair,” my mother laughed. “They had been trying to pass as Gentiles.” The shocking accounts of Jewish corruption that could be found in conveniently forgotten memoirs like Bernard Goldstein’s The Stars Bear Witness were deleted in Dawidowicz’s fantasy. Read More:http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/remembering-raul-hilberg-2/
The most public trial of the holocaust was Eichmann’s in 1961 after being kidnapped, tried, and then dispatched to the hangman. The Eichmann trial was, in a sense, a trial on the inability to think. No communication was possible with Eichmann, not because he lied, instead he was wrapped by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others,the inability to think, and hence insulated against reality as such . It was a proof against reason and argument and information and insight and empathy of any kind as Hannah Arendt asserted.
As witness to the trial, Arendt saw that the banality of evil is potentially of unlimited extent; the evil perpetrated by an Eichmann can be blown to the four corners of the earth like a “fungus” precisely because it has no root. Seen in this sense, evil actors like Eichmann were not technically or legally “corruptible”. Having overcome or in his case forgotten any inclination he may have had to halt or hinder the organization and transportation of millions of innocent Jews to their deaths, Eichmann boasted that he had done his duty to the end. The sad aspect is that psychological testing of Eichmann declared him frightingly normal; a theme later further enigmatized by the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments.
Donald Kuspit:It is no accident, as the art critic Harold Rosenberg observed, that the great majority of innovative American artists in the postwar period were Jews. As Max Horkheimer points out, because the Jew by definition can never fit into Christian society, however hard he tries to assimilate and conform, he is by definition a nonconformist, and has the opportunity of becoming a creative nonconformist—a nonconformist who can transform society by introducing unexpected ideas and new possibilities into it. In a sense, the Jew is destined to be avant-garde whether he wants to be or not. Perhaps Barnett Newman was the most forthrightly Jewish avant-garde American artist working at the same time as Lurie. Newman designed a synagogue and one of his major abstract paintings alludes to Abraham, 1949, the patriarchal founder of Judaism. He led the way beyond Abstract Expressionism with his innovative “zip” paintings. Newman’s abstract sublime paintings, to use the art historian Robert Rosenblum’s famous term, have been understood as quintessentially Jewish in their iconoclasm….
…Lurie is one of these Jewish innovators and creative non-conformists, but his Jewish art negates the sublime—just as Newman thought the sublime negated the beautiful—and with that art’s “higher purpose.” Many Jews felt that the Holocaust indicated that God had abandoned the Jews, and they abandoned God in response: holiness has fled the world, leaving only the profane—profane human beings, which is why Lurie never abandoned the figure. Lurie’s art deals in profanities—the profaneness of it all. He curses it all, as his Curse Paintings suggest. There is nothing “high” about art, for there is nothing up high. Art is forced to get low down and dirty because the world is lowdown and dirty.Read More:http://borislurieartfoundation.org/book/export/html/11
…As Boris Lurie clearly knew, the process of dehumanization precludes rebellion. Its a numbing paralysis like Kafka’s Metamorphosis or The Trial.The world is Kafka’s Penal Colony. The most provocative aspect of Eichmann in Jerusalem was its study of human conscience. The court’s refusal to consider the question of Eichmann’s conscience resulted in its failure to confront what Arendt called “the central moral, legal, and political phenomena of our century,”based on the idea that the traditional “voice of god” was not applicable in a Nietzschean context of “god is dead” and within a structure of general moral collapse, even within the Jewish community and their own complicity, though perhaps unconscious in cooperating with authorities.
Eichmann had a conscience, and it seems to have “functioned in the expected way” for a few weeks after he became engaged in the transport of Jews, and then, when he heard no voice saying Thou shalt not kill but on the contrary every voice saying Thou shalt kill, “it began to function the other way around.” – Arendt.
ADDENDUM:
Hune at Martin Buber Institute: since at least the days of spinoza, jewish identity has struggled to define itself independent of both the gaze of the outsiders and that of the official authorities. the generation of kafka and buber and others, one that will not be repeated in its towering genius, brought this struggle to the fore. spinoza was excommunicated by officialdom (the official “state” literary authorities of his time) (to his eternal glory), kafka was ignored, buber was paid lip service and only for a while. but kafka went beyond his jewish identity. his was a struggle with the futility of life. he was not a nihilist nor a revolutionary. he was a “futilist” and for that, just like spinoza (and also the rabbi from brazlav with whom he share literary forms 200 years beforehand) allowed himself to expire at an early age. i feel personally guilty for his death…kafka once defined himself as a “typical example of a western jew,” “this means that i don’t have a moment of peace, that nothing comes easily to me, not just the present and the future, but even the past, that thing that each man receives as his birthright: even that i have to conquer, and perhaps that is the hardest task.”
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Read More:http://eotd.wordpress.com/2008/06/01/1-june-1962-karl-adolf-eichmann/
You did like that “male gaze” concept; to my observations, is just the effort of normal men/women, more often in men, to evaluate objectively a scene they are watching, before reacting to it.
Eichmann was a psychopath, many of them flourished under IIIrd Reich.
Guess Kafka disliked a certain aspect of jew culture; too lucid to live in that specific moment of history, as his friend Milena said.