Catastrophe as Exception

Adorno has his famous line about there being no poetry after Auschwitz. This is a difficult statement to dismiss. In The Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben emphasizes the reconstructive power of the crimes of World War II (Agamben argues that the term holocaust is inadequate and inappropriate). He claims that ethical endeavors such as Nietzsche's Eternal Return of the Same are no longer valid in a world after World War II. His argument is rather simple. Nietzsche's Eternal Return is predicated on answering Yes to the angel who asks if you would be willing to experience everything, in every detail, with every pain, as it happened again and again for all eternity. By entering the horrors of the holocaust into this equation, Agamben sympathetically responds with an emphatic No. In this case a Catastrophe is not a descriptive term at all. Were it to be a general phenomenon, a catastrophe would never compromise the Eternal Return. Agamben is not alone in his fear of the concentration camps' ethical significance. Robert Mishari argues that there would be no Spinozism after the Holocaust, that adequate Reason thinking the idea of a perfect reality, becomes absurd. One might want to ask what catastrophes were like before World War II, if they still permitted Ethics of reason and Eternal Return. One might also have to confront that despite what seems the unbearable singularity of what happened during the past century, that it, like all the rest of what has been smoothed over by time, decays into the narrow confines of human forgetting. In either case, catastrophes have their own qualities, and the various resonances that are thought are reflections of them. And it would seem easy to remain locked in the past if the catastrophe there is valued supreme. On a smaller scale, psychological malfunction usually gets stuck in all its turmoil when grasping on to self-catastrophes, or making them up.