Beyond Suffering: Cyborgs, Martyrs and Auschwitz
On the moral lessons we can draw from those who have crossed the threshold between life and death.
I have always been attracted to art that is painful, though the reason eludes me. Art feels like a space where we can dwell on those things that, when encountered in real life, are hard to look at or cope with. Perhaps through interaction with such art we become better equipped to respond appropriately when life’s horrors inevitably knock on our door.
In any case, my inclination towards melancholy creations that luxuriate in the worst aspects of the human condition naturally leads me to establish connections between works that then give rise to reflections on subjects I would otherwise perhaps not be inclined to contemplate. Recently, a series of books have coaxed me into thinking about suffering and what lies beyond its daunting threshold.
These books, which I will get to in due course, also reminded me of one of my all-time favourite horror movies, which I revisited in the hope that it might prove a useful base on which to mould my thoughts. The movie is Martyrs (2008), written and directed by Pascal Laugier.
Transcendence
In a nutshell, Martyrs is about a secret society that kidnaps and tortures young women to the point where they are a hair’s breadth away from death. They do this based on the Catholic notion of transcendence through suffering; their hope is that these “martyrs” will get a glimpse of the afterlife and be able to report back before slipping away. So far, they have only produced “victims”, those who succumb to the pain.
The film forces the audience to witness pain in a way that inevitably binds you to the characters. Laugier himself said that he intended to make the film's audience "feel real pain". It must have worked; when I remember certain scenes they evoke in me the same sensations as memories of being physically hurt. This instrumentalisation of pain as a fundamental part of the artistic experience is intrinsic to the movie’s ulterior vision, as Laugier described it in an interview:
Our epoch is not very glorious. There are no utopias, ideologies have collapsed and our faith in the future with them. I realise it’s not very original to say this, but I really believe that the Western world is sick. Individual anxieties are at their highest, everyone lives in a constant low-level fear [...]. Martyrs is almost a work of prospective fiction that shows a dying world, almost like a pre-apocalypse. It’s a world where evil triumphed a long time ago.
It is for moody tirades like these that Laugier is largely thought to be a nihilist, but I can’t help thinking there is optimism in the film’s premise. In this extreme scenario, the victims’ suffering is exploited, much like Laugier exploits the audience’s squirming, out of a desperate need for meaning, a religious-like hope that, despite the bleakness of present events, this is not the final curtain. Laugier’s martyrs are a bleak reminder that even when you are forced to suffer, the only cause for hope is that you may do something useful with your pain.
Dreams of Amputation
Another writer who spins art from pain is British underground author Gary J. Shipley. His cyberpunk horror novel Dreams of Amputation is set in a post-morality future where the self has become so detached from the body that suffering is rendered meaningless.
The book’s mythology goes something like this: the self is a parasite that has inhabited humans since we acquired the use of language (for it is through language that we spread the parasite to one another). Over time, civilisation developed as a byproduct of our compulsion to “fill the holes” in our existence, i.e., those aspects of knowledge or experience we couldn’t achieve because of our body’s limitations. Our attempts to “fill the holes” include art, religion, love and even morality.
In this future, where lives are spent plugged into cyberspace and body parts can be artificially replaced or enhanced, the self is slowly approximating pure abstraction, becoming less dependant on the body and, as such, doesn’t feel the need to fill holes anymore. This leads to the breakdown of society as we know it. Morality crumbles and human interactions in the physical world are reduced to pointless and impersonal acts of hyper-violence, where suffering is inflicted without ulterior motive.
Now that is nihilistic. The implication is that suffering only makes epistemological sense as long as morality prevails. As such, when we shed our morality, making someone suffer cannot even be said to be cruel. It is an inconsequential interaction.
Not even Laugier goes as far as to dismiss morality as a survivalist feature to stave off our existential dread. The cruelty shown in Martyrs is ultimately in service of morality; it is meant to be painful and thus repugnant. The violence in Shipley’s novel is soul-numbing, which is the worst possible reaction that can be summoned in the heart of man when watching someone suffer.
The Muselmänner
I think our present lies somewhere in between Laugier’s if-life-gives-you-lemons and Shipley’s bleak moral decay, and that is because we live in the shadow of one of the most extreme cases of suffering in human history: the Muselmänner.
These were the prisoners in Nazi death camps who had been made to suffer so much that they crossed an invisible threshold beyond which, despite living, it could no longer be said they were alive. This is how Primo Levi’s describes them in If This Is a Man:
Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.
They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.
In Remnants of Auschwitz, philosopher Giorgio Agamben carries out an extraordinary analysis, with a surface-level detachment that belies heavy undercurrents of empathy, of the nature of the Muselmänner and the significance of their advent in the pages of human history.
In the camps, Jews were downgraded to deportees, deportees to Muselmänner and Muselmänner to Figuren (camp slang for “bodies”; a different word was needed from “corpses” because the Muselmänner were already thought to be corpses, despite their locomotion). Jews didn’t only not die as Jews, they died as something barely human; Agamben calls the Muselmänner an example of “bare life”.
They are truly a disturbing paradox; their deaths cannot be called death because they aren’t alive to begin with. As such, they are perhaps the closest historic example of Laugier’s fictional “martyrs”. And yet, there was no transcendental knowledge to be gained from being a Muselmann; if anything, it is the Holocaust survivors who bear witness on their behalf that come closest to being messengers of what lies beyond the limits of suffering.
Chillingly, these survivors, including Primo Levi, tell us that guards and inmates alike felt no remorse in pushing the Muselmänner around, teasing them or even abusing them. They were so far removed from the human condition, their presence was seen to be as disgusting as that of Shipley’s abused cyborgs who are idly kicked around like so much fleshy filth.
This is the true horror of Auschwitz, and why it’s so important not to trivialise the Holocaust. The death camps were not merely “death factories”, as Heidegger poetically put it, but an industrial process of dehumanisation. Everything about them was engineered to push the prisoners well beyond the limits of what they can and should tolerate while sadistically keeping them alive.
I wonder whether Laugier was thinking of Auschwitz when he described the present as “a world where evil triumphed long ago.” Auschwitz teaches us that we live in a world that has crossed a new threshold of pain - and the natural impulse, as with any trauma, is to want to forget that. It is more comfortable to think of the Holocaust as just another genocide, where people were summarily executed, than to accept the fact that the world is ontologically different to how it was before.
Two Deaths
In his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et sur la mort, the 18th-century anatomist Xavier Bichat painstakingly documented the way in which a human being dies, and came to the conclusion that we in fact experience two deaths: the death of what he calls l’animal existant en dedans, which is the organic succession of assimilation and excretion through which a body self-sustains, and the death of l’animal vivant au-dehors, defined by our relation with the external world.
This lends credibility to the experience of Muselmänner, people suspended between Bichat’s first and second death, both alive and dead. Why we go on living even after all bodily functions necessary for maintaining life have ceased to work is a mystery that disturbed Bichat and should continue to disturb us today:
But wherefore when we have ceased to exist without, do we continue to exist within, since our sensations and above all, our powers of locomotion, are especially destined to place us in relation with those substances, which are to nourish us. Wherefore are those functions enfeebled in a greater disproportion than the internal functions, and why is there no exact relation in the times of their cessation.
I cannot entirely resolve this question.
Witnesses
“Martyr” is the Greek word for “witness”. Agamben sees in the Muselmänner the crux of why it is so hard to grasp what happened at Auschwitz: those who are most deserving of telling us about the extremity of experience they were forced to live are unable to do so. It is up to the Holocaust survivors to give testimony on their behalf. In this sense, by telling their tales, Holocaust survivors act as the “martyrs” are expected to in Laugier’s film: reporting back on what lies beyond death. They might not see beyond terminal death, but they have seen beyond the death of l’animal existant en dedans, where man becomes “bare life”.
The fact that we go on living when our body is no longer able to self-sustain should be reason enough to hold fast to morality. We may be living in Laugier’s age of post-evil but we are not yet in Shipley’s age of post-morality. As such, it is incumbent upon us to not give up on those who have borne the unbearable. If we want the Muselmänner to have not suffered in vain, we must listen to those who bear witness on their behalf.
That is why reading Agamben, despite the miserable subject matters he busies himself with, fills me with joy. I hope you find the humanity he shows in this paragraph as inspiring as I do:
The Muselmann has penetrated into a region of the human - for simply to deny them their humanity would mean to accept the verdict of the SS, to repeat their gesture - where not only help, but also dignity and self-respect have become useless. But if there is a region of the human in which these concepts have no meaning, then they are not genuine ethical concepts, because no ethics can pretend to leave out of its scope a part of the human, no matter how unpleasant or difficult it may be to contemplate.