Vladimir L. Marchenkov - Arts and Terror-Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2014)

Arts and Terror
Arts and Terror
Edited by
Vladimir L. Marchenkov
Arts and Terror,
Edited by Vladimir L. Marchenkov
This book first published 2014
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2014 by Vladimir L. Marchenkov and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-4161-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4161-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii
List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix
Preface ........................................................................................................ xi
Art, Terrorism, and the Negative Sublime ................................................... 1

Arnold Berleant
Looking at Terror with the Ghosts of Baudrillard and Beuys

in DeLillo’s Fictions and Laurie Anderson’s Spectacles ........................... 17
Leslie Stewart Curtis
“The Camps—Nobody Has Ever Shown Them”: Jean-Luc Godard,

Holocaust, Histoire(s) du cinema, and “Cinema of Resistance” ............... 37
Michael Baumgartner
Terror in the Laboratory: The Visual and Poetic Iconography of the Mad
Scientist: From Joseph Wright to J. W. von Goethe to James Whale........ 73
Mike McKeon
Demonic: The Destructive Side of Chaos.................................................. 83

Algis Mickunas
This Body Speaks: Phaedra’s Theatrical Suicide .................................... 105

Rebecca Johannsen
“Horror” and “Terrifying Emotion”: Aesthetic Categories in Nineteenth-

Century German and French Conceptions of Monumentality ................. 117
Annie Yen-Ling Liu
Name Index ............................................................................................. 139

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I should like to thank all participants in the conference on Arts and

Terror held by the Ohio University School of Interdisciplinary Arts in
2009, that initially brought together the authors presented in this volume.
Thanks are also due to the Ohio University College of Fine Arts, College
of Arts and Sciences, Institute for Applied and Professional Ethics, Center
for International Studies, and Scripps College of Communication for their
contributions that made the gathering possible. The support of my
colleagues and students at the School made my work on this project both
enjoyable and rewarding. Dora Wilson, William Condee, Shannon Harry,
and Kristin Steckmesser deserve a special mention. And last but not least,
I am grateful to Arnold Berleant and Imprint Academic for permitting me
to include the first essay in this book.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Two Holocaust victims covered up by two camp liberators.

2. Nicolas de Staël, Nu couché bleu (Reclining Nude in Blue, 1955) with
superimposed intertitle “Bon pour la légende” (Good for the legend).
3. Still frame: Fragment of a letter possibly written by an anonymous
French camp inmate.
4. Letter fragment superimposed on Nicolas de Staël’s Nu couché bleu.
5. Excerpt from Andrzej Munk’s film Pasazerka (The Passenger, 1963).
An anonymous inmate violinist performs Bach’s Violin Concerto in E
major (BWV 1042).
6. Still frame: Rembrandt, Self-portrait in a Cap, with Eyes Wide Open
(1630).
7. Attacking Messerschmitt fighterplane.
8. Detail from Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937).
9. Still frame from Friedrich W. Murnau, Nosferatu (1922).
10. Still frame: photograph of the two Belarus partisans Masha Bruskina
and Volodia Shcherbatsevich.
11. Still frame: Francisco de Goya drawing of a hung prisoner.
12. Still frame from George Stevens’ 16 mm color footage shot at Dachau.
13. Elizabeth Taylor patting the hair of her lover, Montgomery Clift (from:
George Stevens, A Place in the Sun, 1951).
14. Close-up of Elizabeth Taylor (from: George Stevens, A Place in the
Sun, 1951).
15. Elizabeth Taylor stroking her lover’s hair (from: George Stevens, A
Place in the Sun, 1951).
16. Still frame from George Stevens’ 16 mm color footage shot at
Dachau.
17. Elizabeth Taylor leans down to her lover for a kiss (from: George
Stevens, A Place in the Sun, 1951).
18. Still-frame, an excerpt from Giotto’s Noli me tangere (c. 1305).
19. Superimposition of Giotto’s Noli me tangere and Elizabeth Taylor
kissing her lover (from: George Stevens, A Place in the Sun, 1951).
20. A detail from Giotto’s Noli me tangere, before Godard’s rotation of the
image by ninety degrees clockwise.
21. The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone, Discovers
Phosphorus. Joseph Wright, 1771. Derby Museums & Art Gallery.
x List of Illustrations
22. The Bride of Frankenstein. Dir. James Whale. Perf. Boris Karloff,
Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger, and Elsa Lanchester. 1935. DVD.
(Universal/Photofest).
PREFACE
The theme of terror has invaded today’s cultural space and the arts are
not exempt from this invasion. Yet even a brief look at the history of
various art forms shows that the phenomenon of terror is by no means new
to them. From Homer’s depiction of the sack of Troy by Achaeans to
Francis Bacon’s shocking images artists in all art forms have confronted
terror – as an emotion, violent action, and state of the world. Still one
cannot deny that in recent years art’s engagement with terror has
undergone a considerable change. The nature of this change is not easy to
define but it certainly calls for the philosopher’s and art lover’s attention.
This volume presents a series of philosophical reflections on various
manifestation of terror in the arts, from Antiquity to the present day. The
authors’ subject-matter and approaches vary greatly, encompassing diverse
choices of works, artistic practices, and interpretative perspectives. What
unites them, however, is the underlying conviction that artists’
engagement with the theme of terror merits our close attention and is
relevant both to artistic expression itself and to art’s often tangled and
sometime tortuous relation to life.
V. Marchenkov
ART, TERRORISM,
AND THE NEGATIVE SUBLIME
ARNOLD BERLEANT1
“In due time, the theory of aesthetics will have to account not only for the
delight in Kantian beauty and the sublime, but for the phenomena like
aesthetic violence and the aestheticization of violence, of aesthetic abuse and
intrusion, the blunting of sensibility, its perversion, and its poisoning.”2
Terrorism and Aesthetics

It has become increasingly clear that the arts, and the aesthetic, more
generally, occupy no hallowed ground but live on the everyday earth of
our lives. Recognition is growing that the aesthetic is a pervasive
dimension of the objects and activities of daily life.3 Perceptual
experiences that possess the characteristics of aesthetic appreciation are
marked by a focused sensibility we enjoy for its intrinsic perceptual
satisfaction. We typically have such experiences with works of art and
with nature, but they are equally possible on other occasions and with
other kinds of objects. Such experiences engage us in an intensely sensory
field in which we participate wholly and without reservation, as we
customarily do with works of art. The objects and occasions, however,
may be ordinary ones, such as eating, hanging laundry, engaging in social
relations, or operating a perfectly functioning automobile or other
1
This has appeared in my book, Sense and Sensibility: The Aesthetic Transformation
of the Human World (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010), 175-192, and earlier in
Contemporary Aesthetics Vol. 7 (2009). I would like to thank the anonymous
reviewers for Contemporary Aesthetics for their helpful comments on this essay.
2
Katya Mandoki, Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Plan of Culture and Social
Identities (Ashgate, 2007), p. 42.
3
Recent work includes Katya Mandoki, op. cit.; Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).); The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed.
Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005).
2 Art, Terrorism, and the Negative Sublime
mechanism. The range of such occasions is limitless, and this adds to the
significance of the aesthetics of the everyday.
Such an expansion of the aesthetic has important consequences.
Perhaps the most striking is the need to acknowledge that the range of
aesthetic experience includes more than the appreciative engagement with
art and nature. But not only does the aesthetic extend to the uncustomary;
it encompasses the full range of human normative experience. Experiences
of the aesthetic include not only the elevated and noble but the
reprehensible, degrading, and destructive. This is so not as the result of an
arbitrary decision to include them, but from actual experience and practice.
The aesthetic offers a full and direct grasp of the human world. That it
may include violence and depravity is not the fault of aesthetics but of that
world.
A salient symptom of that world is terrorism. Its wanton violence and
uncontrolled destruction are appalling. But easy moral outrage offers no
understanding, and only by grasping the meanings and significance of
terrorism can we hope to deal with it effectively. Let me begin with the
Happening, for the Happening can provide a forceful illumination of the
aesthetic of terrorism.
Not that Happenings took negative form. A syncretic, visual-theatrical
artistic development of the 1960s, Happenings were a deliberate artistic
innovation intent on transgressing all the hard boundaries that protected
the arts and made them safe. In Happenings audiences became the
performers, no clearly circumscribed object could be identified as the
work of art, aesthetic distance was relinquished to the active engagement
of the audience, artistic genres were fused into unrecognizable combinations
and, most significantly, the boundary between art and life disappeared.
Happenings were often playful, even festive occasions that danced over
the pieties of conventional artistic axioms.
Some commentators quickly recognized that the importance of the
Happening lay beyond its iconoclasm and entertainment value. One of
them was Régis Debray, a young French radical intellectual, who
"regarded a revolution as a coordinated series of guerrilla Happenings.
Some of his admirers, in fact, took part in Happenings as training for
future Happenings when they would use guns and grenades."4 What many
had considered a bizarre exaggeration following the dismissal of
traditional artistic forms turns out to have been an uncanny pre-vision of
the world half a century later. The net of terrorism in which the world is
4
Arnold Berleant, Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple, 1992), p. 40.
Arnold Berleant 3
now enmeshed is all-enclosing. But how can terrorism be considered in the

same sense as art? The question itself seems outrageous.
Happenings made a radical break from the aesthetic tradition by
denying that art occupies its own exclusive realm separate from the world
outside. Yet it was not only Happenings that rejected this tradition; many
other artistic developments in the twentieth century deliberately crossed
that boundary. The presumptive difference between the world of art and
the world of daily life lies at the source of such perennial problems in
aesthetics as the status of truth and illusion in art, the moral effects of art
works, and the nature of artistic representation. Such continuing issues, all
of which can be traced back to Plato, find in artistic autonomy the domain
of human freedom, as Kant had claimed.5 Yet at the same time, separating
the arts from daily life establishes an autonomy that, by philosophic
decree, vitiates the force of the arts and ignores their power.
The tradition of restricting and removing art from the world of daily
life dates from Plato’s suspicion that the arts can have a morally
degenerating influence. Expressed most famously in The Republic, it led
him to advocate strict controls on the use of the arts in education and to
propose censorship.6 This, of course, was related to Plato’s mistrust of
sense experience, which he considered the source of illusion and false
belief. These views were reinforced and enlarged by Kant, who claimed
early in the modern period that the autonomy of judgments of taste is
entirely independent of the existence of the object of our satisfaction and is
not bound up with practical interest.7
The effect of these ideas on the history of philosophy has been
profound. Plato’s mistrust of the senses and artistic independence and his
failure to recognize the imaginative contribution that the arts can make to
education and moral development joined with Kant’s denial of full
aesthetic satisfaction to the interests of daily life. Together they functioned
effectively to muzzle the power of the arts. Yet once we recognize the
active interplay that occurs between art objects and activities and the
world in which they exist, we find vast new opportunities for power and
influence.
5
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, (J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951)
§4. See A. Berleant, "Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXIX, 2 (Winter l970), l55-l68. Reprinted in Arnold
Berleant, Re-thinking Aesthetics, Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), ch. 4.
6
The Republic Bk. II, 377A-382; Bk. III, 376E-403B.
7
Immanuel Kant, op. cit. , First Book, §2-5.
The force inherent in this relation has not been lost on the modern
state. For philosophical aesthetics deliberately to ignore the political
potential and use of the arts is to hand that power over to others whose
values, standards, and behaviour are often ignorant, manipulative, and
self-aggrandizing. The traditional separation of aesthetics from daily life
has freely allowed the political appropriation, often the misappropriation,
of the arts. That is why governments practice “news management” and
other forms of censorship, why they “stage” conferences, rallies, and other
political events, why they promote “official” art, and why they persecute
artists who do not conform to their purposes and destroy their works. Art
is dangerous, and Kant got it backwards when he placed morality and art
in separate domains.
In the interpenetration of art and the human world are the grounds for a
new aesthetic vision and the need to articulate it.8 When Happenings fused
art with the everyday world, they did so as art. But what about presumably
non-art objects that are directly perceived as art? There is, of course, found
art, where an object is extrapolated from the everyday world, segregated,
and framed: a piece of driftwood, a bouquet of field flowers, and, of
course, the perennial urinal. Art is claimed where none was intended.
Some instances of found art are benign, some provocative, others
deliberately inflammatory. They say nothing about the motives of those
who did the making and for whom the idea of art was probably far from
mind. What found art does do is center our attention on an object or event
in a way that resembles the intense focus we give to things designated as
art by an artist, an institution, or the art world. Like Happenings, found art
places art squarely in the ordinary world. Can this apply to acts of
terrorism?
Some of the most striking claims of art for things outside the art world
were responses to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The avant-garde composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen called them "the greatest work of art ever….the
greatest work of art for the whole cosmos," "a jump out of security, the
everyday." And the British artist Damien Hirst excluded art from all moral
judgment, arguing that the violence, horror, and death associated with
Ground Zero (the name given to the site of the demolished New York
World Trade Center) do not rule out the possibility that film footage of the
8
Developing such an aesthetic has been the incentive of most of my previous
work. See especially Re-thinking Aesthetics, Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the
Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1991), and The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic
Experience (Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas l970). Second (electronic) edition, with
a new Preface, 2000.
Arnold Berleant 5
attack could be "visually stunning" and resemble works of art.9 Indeed,

perceiving that footage as art may be the ultimate act of framing. Whether
these events can be considered found art can be debated, but the label we
give them is incidental. Of more concern here is the claim that they are art
or like art.
Attributing artistic achievement to the perpetrators may seem revolting,
but it would be arrogant and myopic to blithely dismiss statements like
Hirst’s and Stockhausen’s. For we must take care not to confound the
aesthetic with art or to consider either of these necessarily positive. To call
the film footage of the attack visually stunning acknowledges their
aesthetic impact. Many art works could be described in similar terms but
yet reflect different content and moral meaning. Frederick Edwin Church’s
“The Icebergs” (1861) is visually stunning; so are Turner’s “The Burning
of the Houses of Lords and Commons” (1834) and Mathias Grünewald’s
“Crucifixion” (1515).
But so also are many natural events: sunsets, the full moon in the night
sky, the sea in a great storm. But perceptual force alone, while aesthetic,
does not make art. It may lie in the subject-matter of an art work but as
part of the whole it is something different. There is a sense in which
Stockhausen’s comment can be taken literally by regarding the 9/11
terrorist attacks as theater. Stockhausen himself composed musical works
with dramatic venues and enormous scale, so his calling the attacks “the
biggest work of art there has ever been” was not entirely unpredictable or
out of character.
But how can we respond to these comments? Is it possible to
disentangle the aesthetic from the moral in such a highly charged situation
or does the moral issue entirely overpower the aesthetic one? There are no
unequivocal answers and perhaps the consideration of Happenings,
transgression, and violence can help us make these assertions understandable.
9
Stockhausen, cited in Emmanouil Aretoulakis, "Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics,
and 9/11," Contemporary Aesthetics Vol. 6 (2008), sect. 1. Hirst, a British artist,
called the September 11th terrorist attacks "a visually stunning artwork." Loc.cit..
Aretoulakis argues that "there is a need for aesthetic appreciation when
contemplating a violent event such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks. What is more,
appreciation of the beautiful, even in case of a 9/11, seems necessary because it is
a key to establishing an ethical stance towards terror, life, and art. It should be
stressed that independent aesthetic experience is not important in itself but as a
means to cultivating an authentic moral and ethical judgment." My discussion of
terrorism was stimulated by Aretoulakis's thoughtful and balanced consideration of
the aesthetic significance of the 9/11 attacks.
They may suggest a way of grasping them that is not immediately obvious.
But first, however, is the matter of terrorism, itself.
Simply to list the definitions of ‘terrorism’ would take pages. What
they have in common is the use of violence or the threat of violence.10
Most often added to the definition is that terrorism focuses on a civilian
population with the intention of creating widespread fear, and that it is
motivated by political or ideological objectives. Terrorism also carries an
element of the unexpected. An element of chance enters into its choice (if
we may call it that) of victims and sometimes in the determination of
specific time and location, and this adds greatly to the fear that acts of
terrorism evoke.
It is interesting to consider that this combination of elements that
define terrorism – violence, civilian victims, fear – does not specify the
perpetrators. These may be indifferently radical groups of the right or left,
military, paramilitary, governmental, or non-governmental organizations.
The media unquestionably play a central role in promoting such fear.
When fear-mongering is deliberate, the media that practice it could
themselves be considered terrorist organizations, just as could other
fomenting organizations, such as government bureaus (what Badiou calls
“bureaucratic terrorism”11) and ad hoc groups of individuals who may be
the perpetrators, as in the Oklahoma City bombing. It is important to
recognize the scope of terrorism, since labeling organizations as ‘terrorist’
because they use or threaten violence toward a civilian population,
regardless of their place in the social order, is revealing and sobering: they
are not necessarily marginal. Recognizing the wide range of sources of
terrorism helps avoid self-righteous exclusions.
It is important to realize that the use of terror is not confined to Asia or
the Middle East. Terror, in fact, has become a standard practice at the
present stage of world history. Totalitarian states know well that
terrorizing a population is the most effective way of controlling it, far
more potent than overt force. We can recognize the climate of fear and
terror that has spread not only throughout regions in the African, Asian,
and South American continents; it is being deliberately implemented in
Western industrialized nations, as well, by the use of so-called national
security measures. Indeed, if state terror were made visible, it would
10
See Walter Reich (ed.), Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies,
Theologies, States of Mind (Woodrow Wilson Center Press), 1998.
11
Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy (London & New York: Verso, 2008), p.
92.
Arnold Berleant 7
obscure the individual acts of terror that have achieved such notoriety
today.12
Acts of terrorism are appallingly inventive and their range is extreme.
They extend from suicide bombers in the Middle-East and the release of
the nerve gas sarin in the Tokyo subway by the religious cult Aum
Shinrikyo and its attempts at biological terrorism to the 9/11 suicide plane
crashes perpetrated by Al Qaida. But we cannot exclude state terrorism in
this portrayal: the use of overt police action and military force to control
social activities, gangs dispatched to foment social violence, and secret
police to instil fear. And there is also the increasingly sophisticated
propagandistic use of the media—magazines and newspapers, TV talk
shows and news broadcasts—to proliferate false information, obscure and
distort current events, and instil insecurity. This is no reign of terror; we
are living in an age of terror.
Can terrorism be justified?

The scope of terrorism is, then, surprisingly large and its definition
surprisingly inclusive. At the same time it is important to recognize the
difference between terrorism and terror and not to confuse the two.
Terrorism is, as we have seen, the calculated use of violence or threat of
violence against a civilian population with the intent of causing
widespread fear for political purposes. Terror, on the other hand, is the
overpowering emotion of intense fear. More about this later. What I am
concerned with just now is terrorism, not terror, as such.
Can terrorism ever be justified? What makes terrorism so morally
appalling is that its victims are circumstantial, uninvolved, and oblivious
of what is happening. It is a vicious lottery with equal opportunity to lose.
The devastating results of terrorist acts are not much different from the so-
called “collateral damage” suffered by civilian populations throughout the
whole history of warfare. Violence visited deliberately on an innocent,
circumstantial population condemns it as one of the most heinous social
wrongs, irrespective of any self-justifying motives. For this reason
terrorism can never be vindicated, and terrorism practiced by a state is no
more exempt from moral condemnation than when used as a tactic by a
political or religious group.
12
One is reminded of Hobbes' characterization of the nature of war as not actual
fighting but "in the known disposition thereto," a description that applies not only
to what has been called a "cold war" but equally to a society in a state of continual
fear and thus easily moved to violence. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1660), ch.
13.
But apart from the question of whether terrorism is ever justifiable, it

must nonetheless be recognized and understood. Visible and bold acts of
terrorism force us to acknowledge that such acts of violence are not
aberrations committed by deluded individuals but social actions
deliberately perpetrated by groups and for clear reasons. They may be the
arms of state oppression or they may represent political opposition to what
is perceived as correlative injustice. Terrorist acts are often committed in
response to the social violence of exploitation or oppression of one
population group by another. Yet one form of violence cannot be
selectively justified over against another. By being directed against
unwitting victims, all such actions are morally flawed. A violent act
committed in response to other acts of violence is not thereby exonerated:
both are equally condemnable. Can terrorism be considered morally
justifiable if it is the only available means to a political or ideological end
when there is no alternative way to redress an injustice? This is the critical
moral question and central to understanding terrorism.
The question of the justifiability of terrorism does not, however,
answer the aesthetic question: are aesthetic values present in terrorist acts?
Is there an aesthetics of terrorism? What, indeed, has terrorism to do with
aesthetics at all? It is necessary to confront these questions because acts of
terrorism make effective use of the techniques and skills of art and possess
aesthetic force. Yet how can we speak of political acts such as terrorism in
the same breath as art and the aesthetic? Must art that uses violence to
convey a moral message and make a moral judgment be condemned when
that message could not be made in any other way? We arrive again at the
same moral dilemma. This is a question that must be faced by any
argument for true democracy, the political form that claims to provide
means for peaceful social change.13 Democracy or terrorism?
The use of terrorism as a political act thus raises difficult aesthetic as
well as moral issues, and it is important to understand terrorism, not just to
condemn it. Indeed, considering terrorism from an aesthetic vantage point
can cast considerable light on such acts. For these events are perceptually
powerful, engaging not only the visual but all the senses. They are
aesthetic because of their sensory force. These are desperate acts
committed in order to make a moral and political statement through their
aesthetic, that is, their sensory impact. Moreover, their inherent political
import is a dramatic rejection of the traditional difference between art and
reality, a feature they have in common with the modern arts.
13
This is a problem that stands apart from the aesthetic questions I am dealing with
here and clearly requires its own separate treatment. As a version of the means-end
problem, it has a long history of philosophical debate.
Arnold Berleant 9
Since aesthetics centers on direct sensory perception, it is clear that

acts of terrorism have powerful aesthetic force. All those who experience
the effects of terrorism – its chance victims, their relatives and associates,
the organizations and institutions that are damaged, the general public, the
social order – all can attest to its aesthetic impact. Human values – and the
value of humans – are at stake, but we cannot measure such value
quantitatively. How is it possible to compare or judge experience? Is a
physical act of terrorism such as a suicide bombing worse than the
repression of a whole population by a government policy instituted in the
name of security, causing widespread fear and requiring overt acts of
brutality to enforce it? Is a deliberately planned riot designed to
manipulate a population less terrifying than, say, an attempt to poison a
public water supply? Here, I think, differences in conditions, means, and
consequences need to be identified and each situation appraised on its own
terms and not by some general formula. At the same time and more
important, such alternatives are morally unacceptable as well as rationally
irresolvable. There is no choice between Hitler and Pol Pot.
Unlike acts of sabotage, acts of terrorism have no direct military target.
Perhaps it can be said that in this respect they mirror the largely self-
contained character of art. And what sort of aesthetic value can terrorism
have? “[T]he tragic in real life will necessarily have an aesthetic
dimension as long as the sensibility of the subject comes into play by
judging something as being ‘tragic’.”14 Is there art in terrorism? It cannot
be denied that much of the political effectiveness of terrorist acts comes
from their carefully planned aesthetic impact. Indeed, their effect is
primarily, often spectacularly theatrical. We can in fact say that such
actions are deliberately designed to be high drama. In this sense, then, is
theater any less appropriate a way to describe a spectacular act of terrorism
than it is to designate military activities? Perhaps it now becomes
understandable how an artist could consider a terrorist act a work of art.
Can terrorism have positive moral value? Simple ascriptions of
positive and negative value no longer fit. Such morally complex situations
demand a different kind of analysis. If a terrorist act contributes to
achieving social justice, can we even ask whether it is morally positive or
negative? A Kantian analysis would find it negative, for such actions
cannot be universalized. A utilitarian analysis might find it positive to the
extent it contributes to political or social reform, if it does indeed have that
consequence, rather than the redoubled use of state terror. But can we even
14
Mandoki, loc. cit.
presume to balance immediate pain, death, and destruction against future

benefits?
Neither of these analyses resolves the issue. Universalizability is an
ethical principle and a logical desideratum but it is not axiomatic and
exempt from critical reflection. And to consider consequences only
selectively is effectively to disregard their wide-ranging fallout. Moreover,
failing to acknowledge the full scope of consequences continues the
common practice of hiding behind moral principles at human cost. Most
important is the further consideration that means and ends are never
separable. What kind of society can emerge from terror-induced change?
Though the intent of terrorist action may be the goal of human liberation,
the short-term effects are unavoidably negative. And its long-term effects?
It is clear that the moral issues terrorism raises are complex. In
traditional terms the judgment may seem clear, but under full consideration
it becomes ambiguous. As in warfare where everyone claims right, justice
is on every side – and so, too, is injustice. The pain of an enemy is no less
great than one’s own. Life lost is lost life, no matter whose life it is.
Is a spectacular terrorist act aesthetically negative or positive? It must
be considered positive because of its dramatic force. If, however, fear and
terror overpower perceptual experience, not only in its unwilling
"participants" but also in its larger "audience,” so that they feel in actual
danger, a terrorist act exceeds the possibility of aesthetic experience and so
is aesthetically negative.15 So aesthetically, too, terrorism is indeterminate.
Such situations seem, then, to be ambiguous both morally and aesthetically.
How a terrorist act can be morally positive in any sense may be
difficult to see. We must acknowledge that the strategy of the acts and the
motives of the actors may be guided by the goals of liberation, of a more
just social order, of an end to oppression and exploitation, and other
humane objectives. But they may also be guided by the intent to preserve
power and the social and economic privileges that accompany it. Do any
ends ever justify terrorist means? Their morally reprehensible effects are
so blatant that it seems inconceivable that any goal, however noble, could
exonerate them. One cannot choose between two incommensurable
wrongs. At the same time, even if a terrorist act could claim to be morally
positive -- which I do not believe is possible, does this justify its aesthetic
negativity? Morality and aesthetics are not easily distinguished here. Pain
and delight are both inherently moral and aesthetic: The same act can be
both morally and aesthetically positive or negative, for the moral and the
15
Both Burke and Kant noted the impossibility of experiencing the sublime when
one’s safety is at risk. Cf. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §28.
Arnold Berleant 11
aesthetic may be fully interdependent, inseparably fused. The very

perpetration of a terrorist act is at the same time both aesthetic and moral,
spectacularly destructive in both respects.
Generalities pale before the intense particularity of terrorist acts. Every
incident has its unique conditions and no logical decision procedure seems
possible. Does the sheer scope and force of a terrorist act place it in a new
and different category? Just as we cannot measure aesthetic pleasure or
grade works of art, fear and terror are not truly quantifiable. Nor are
consequences fully determinable. And because both their scope and their
intensity cannot be specified precisely, they are truly inconceivable. There
is a concept in aesthetics that denotes experience so overwhelming that it
exceeds comprehension—the sublime, and it is worth considering whether
the sublime could conceivably be applied to acts of terrorism.
The Negative Sublime

The sublime is a theory that reflects on a distinctive kind of aesthetic
experience. While the sublime became prominent in the eighteenth century
as a key dimension in the development of aesthetic theory, it has become
increasingly important in recent aesthetic discourse. The starting point is
usually Kant’s account, although Kant was not the first to elaborate a
theory of this distinctive mode of aesthetic apprehension. Burke’s
discussion of the sublime had come half a century before,16 and while
Kant’s formulation has dominated subsequent discussions, Burke’s
observations are particularly germane to the present one. For according to
Burke, the central feature of the sublime is terror. The most powerful
passion caused by the sublime in nature, he states, is astonishment, a state
of mind with an element of horror in which all other thoughts are
suspended. Fear at the prospect of pain or danger freezes the capacity to
reason and act and evokes the overpowering feeling of terror. As “the
strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling,” Burke maintained
that the feeling of terror is a principal source of the sublime: “[W]hatever
is qualified to cause terror, is a foundation capable of the sublime….” 17
And, “Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or
16
Edmund Burke, Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Burke did
not originate the concept; a treatise On the Sublime is attributed to Longinus, in the
third century CE, although its authorship and date of composition have been
contested.
17
Burke, ibid., Part One, Section VII; Part Two, Sections I and II; Part IV, Section
III; pp. 36, 53-54, 119.
latently the ruling principle of the sublime.”18 Burke described many

emotions associated with the sublime and the conditions under which the
sublime may be experienced, and he cited many instances of terror incited
by fear. His analysis, however, did not proceed beyond such descriptions.
Kant, too, recognized fear as a feature of the (dynamical) sublime.19 In
contrast with Burke, Kant developed an elaborate theory illuminated by a
distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime. In the
first, the magnitude of the absolutely great is a measure that the mind
cannot wholly encompass.20 Applied to a terrorist act, its effects and
consequences cannot be fully described or even mentally encompassed
and are incommensurable. Its material consequences in the form of
physical destruction and social disruption, the scope of the human anguish
inflicted, and the protective measures and reciprocal violence wreaked
upon society in reaction can never be fully enumerated. Its human
consequences are immeasurable because they are incalculable. We may
indeed say that we cannot quantify the destructive force of a terrorist
attack: it evokes the mathematical sublime.
The second, Kant's dynamical sublime, concerns the fear we feel in
response to the enormous might of nature, although we must nonetheless
feel personally secure and unthreatened, able to rise above that fear and
not be subject to it. Ironically, even war, Kant avers, has something
sublime in it if carried on with order and respect for citizens' rights,21
presumably by protecting non-combatants. In the place of might in Kant's
dynamical sublime, the sublime in terrorism is present in the intensity of
physical force, in its engulfing emotional power, in the overwhelming
psychological pressure of the situation.
Like Kant’s dynamical sublime, the effectiveness of terrorism lies in
its potential threat to safety and in the very insecurity and social instability
that result. In terrorism safety is especially equivocal: while there may be
non-combatants, everyone is vulnerable. The actual victims are but
sacrificial lambs for their effect on the larger population. Another
important similarity is in the fact that, like the quantitative forms of the
Kantian sublime in which both magnitude and might (as force) seem to be
18
Ibid., Part Two, Section II, p. 54.
19
Critique of Judgment, §28.
20
Ibid., §27.
21
Ibid., §28. "War itself, if it is carried on with order and with a sacred respect for
the rights of citizens, has something sublime in it, and makes the disposition of the
people who carry it on thus only the more sublime, the more numerous are the
dangers to which they are exposed and in respect of which they behave with
courage." p. 102.
Arnold Berleant 13
immeasurable, the intensity of the terrorist sublime is also immeasurable and

its dimensions indeterminate. And it results in consequences that are
qualitatively indeterminable and thus incomparable. Only in their
circumstances and means are the acts and effects of terrorism distinguishable.
Since both the scope and the intensity of terrorist attacks are beyond
conception, both morally and aesthetically, we need a new concept, the
"negative sublime," as their truest and most eloquent identification.
Because acts of terrorism elude meaningful quantitative determination,
we must further acknowledge their moral and aesthetic incommensurability,
indeed, their very inconceivability. Perhaps the only concept that can
adequately categorize them is the negative sublime. Like the aesthetic, the
sublime is not necessarily a positive determination but a mode of
experience. Hence to consider acts of terrorism instances of the negative
sublime is not an oxymoron but the recognition of negativity whose
enormity cannot be encompassed in either magnitude or force. The
uniqueness of such extreme actions renders them capable of description
only. One might claim that an act of terrorism exemplifies the post-modern
sublime as Lyotard described it, in making the unpresentable perceptible.22
And because the moral and the aesthetic are inseparable here, the negative
sublime incurs identical aesthetic and moral value. That the moral is also
aesthetic makes it even more intolerable. Death is the ultimate human loss,
and body counts and statistics are deceptively specific and impersonal.
Such qualitative consequences as the human suffering from extreme acts
of terrorism are beyond measure. "After the first death, there is no other."23
Acknowledging that there may be an aesthetic in acts of terrorism,
even a positive aesthetic, does not condone or justify such action, for in
terrorism the aesthetic never stands alone. Recognizing its presence may
help us understand the peculiar fascination that the public has with such
events of world theater. These are indeed acts of high drama that fascinate
us by their very sublimity.24 But the theatrical forcefulness that impresses
22
There is a resemblance here to Lyotard’s characterization of the sublime as
making `the unpresentable perceptible. “The art object no longer bends itself to
models, but tries to present the fact that there is an unpresentable….” Cf. Jean-
François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81; “The sublime and the
avant-garde,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Blackwell:
Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 207.
23
"A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," in The Collected
Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1957), p.112.
24
“…far from articulating the need of personal expression on the artistic level, art
becomes fully politicized as an agency that acts on its own in the social sphere,
us with their image is indissolubly bound up with their moral negativity,

and identifying them as the negative sublime is to condemn them beyond
all measure. As an agent here in the social sphere, art affects the world
directly. Indeed, “by attacking reality, art becomes reality.” 25
Terrorism dramatically exposes the inseparability of the moral and the
aesthetic, yet this is an extreme form of what is always the case. Utopian
thought, to turn to the other side of the normative ledger, also has a strong
aesthetic component. Utopianism is pervaded by moral values of social
and environmental harmony and fulfilment. Its goal of facilitating living
that is deeply satisfying through the fruitful exercise of human capacities
is as aesthetic as it is moral.26 To conform to the tradition that separates
the aesthetic from the moral mirrors its segregation from everyday life and
constricts its force. Let us see the picture whole and not in parts.
Bibliography
Aretoulakis, Emmanouil. "Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11,"
Contemporary Aesthetics Vol. 6 (2008), www.contempaesthetics.org.
Badiou, Alain. The Meaning of Sarkozy. Translated by David Fernbach,
London & New York: Verso , 2008.
Berleant, Arnold. Art and Engagement. Philadelphia: Temple, 1992.
thus enabling itself to interact with and affect the world directly.” Artetoulakis, op.
cit., sect. 4. Again, “If we do not merely settle into thinking of art as personal
expression within the canonically bounded domain of the aesthetic, and we ascribe
to art an active involvement…then we better be ready to come to terms with art as
a realm in which humanity exercises its utmost creative/destructive potential, and
not in the so-called (since Hegel) world of the spirit but in the world itself.” Stathis
Gourgouris, “Transformation, Not Transcendence,” Boundary 2 31.2 (2004): 55-
79. Quoted in Aretoulakis, op. cit.
25
Aretoulakis, op. cit., sect. 5. Katya Mandoki saw it plainly: “What must be noted
is that art and reality, like aesthetics and the everyday, are totally entwined, not
because of the explicit will of the artist, but because there is nothing further,
beneath or beyond reality. Even dreams are real, as dreams. The effort to unite art-
reality is, therefore, unnecessary. Moreover, when art manifests itself as a
mechanism for evasion or for emancipation … they are fatally and irremediably
immersed in reality, whether indexically pointing at it by the evasion itself (silence
is very eloquent) or by assuming particular sides for criticism or emancipation.
Mandoki, op. cit., pp. 15-16.
26
I have called such a joining of the aesthetic and the ethical “humanistic
function.” See my essay, “Aesthetic Function,” in Arnold Berleant, Living in the
Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1997).
Arnold Berleant 15
—. "Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts,” The Journal of Aesthetics

and Art Criticism, XXIX, 2 (Winter l970), l55-l68.
—. Re-thinking Aesthetics, Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts.
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—. The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience.
Springfield, Ill.: C. C. Thomas l970.
—. Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of Environment.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.
Burke, Edmund. Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Gourgouris, Stathis. “Transformation, Not Transcendence,” Boundary 2
31.2 (2004): 55-79.
Laqueur, Walter (ed.), Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies,
Theologies, States of Mind. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998.
Light, Andrew and Jonathan M. Smith (eds.). The Aesthetics of Everyday
Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984
—. “The sublime and the avant-garde,” in The Lyotard Reader. Edited by
Andrew Benjamin, pp. 196-211, Blackwell: Cambridge, MA, 1989.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard, New
York: Hafner, 1951.
Mandoki, Katya. Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, the Plan of Culture and
Social Identities. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007.
Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New
Directions, 1957.
LOOKING AT TERROR WITH THE GHOSTS
OF BAUDRILLARD AND BEUYS
IN DELILLO’S FICTIONS AND LAURIE
ANDERSON’S SPECTACLES
LESLIE STEWART CURTIS
Terrorism of the Word: Artists’ Statements

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Swiss
authorities apprehended, detained, and questioned a suspicious character
whose name showed up on a terrorist watch list. The suspect turns out to
have been none other than the famous composer and conductor Pierre
Boulez who had made the watch list because back in 1967 he had said “All
of the opera houses should be blown up . . . because they are full of dust
and excrement.”1 On one level, what Boulez said is typical of artists’
statements that attack tradition and suggest ridding the world of the old in
order to make way for the new. For example, in much the same spirit at
I would like to thank Professors Linda A. Koch, Joseph J. Tanke, Paul Lauritzen
and Vladimir L. Marchenkov for their helpful comments during the preparation of
this essay.
1
This is how Boulez’s famous statement was translated for a story on National
Public Radio about the composer’s eightieth birthday. “At 80, Boulez makes a
Grand Tour,” transcript from an interview with Vivienne Goodman, hosted by
Jennifer Ludden. Aired May 22, 2005. The original statement was made by Boulez
in an interview with the editors Felix Schmidt and Jürgen Hohmeyer, in Der
Spiegel, no. 40 (September 25, 1967). The article was translated into English and
published as “Opera Houses? – Blow them up!” by the journal Opera 19, no. 5
(June 1968): 440-450. The translation actually reads: “The most expensive solution
would be to blow the opera houses up. But don’t you think that would also be the
most elegant?” Only later, when speaking about the Paris Opera, does Boulez
speak of it being full of “dust and crap.” On the detainment of Boulez, see James
Coomarasamy, “Conductor held over ‘terrorism’ comment.” BBC News. December
4, 2001.
18 Looking at Terror with the Ghosts of Baudrillard and Beuys
the beginning of the twentieth century, Maurice de Vlaminck was quoted

as saying “I wanted to burn down the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with my
cobalts and vermillions.”2 He was one of the artists who were given the
label “Les Fauves” (or wild beasts) and thus was associated with one of
the first avant-garde “isms” of the twentieth century. Vlaminck’s statement
would seem to distinguish him somewhat from his fellow Fauve Henri
Matisse who stated his aesthetic a bit differently: “What I dream of is an
art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing
subject matter, an art which might be for every mental worker, be he
businessman or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother,
something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.”3
That Boulez would not agree with Matisse’s approach is made clear in his
remark that “comfort is the worst enemy of art.”4 Another statement by
Vlaminck would seem to complicate matters, however. He also is quoted
as saying: “Painting was an abscess which drained off an evil in me.
Without a gift for painting I would have gone to the bad. . . . What I could
only have achieved in a social context by throwing a bomb . . . I have tried
to express in art.”5 Upon closer comparison of Vlaminck’s statements with
the ideas of Matisse, it becomes clear that both take an approach that
suggests art has a civilizing, even soothing effect that might serve as a
“counter” to terror. Thus it seems that there are at least two very different
directions implied by these various statements. On the one hand, we find
the artist who wishes to emphatically challenge an entrenched tradition by
whatever means necessary, even if it requires destruction of the traditional
forms. On the other hand, we find the idea that the arts have the power to
subdue the effects of terror and to serve a therapeutic purpose.
The first tendency (suggested by Boulez’s comments) can be seen in
the declarations of the Italian Futurists. For example, F.T. Marinetti,
writing in the 1909 Founding and Manifesto of Futurism declared that the
Futurists would “glorify war – the world’s only hygiene” and in a slightly
later treatise wrote: “We Futurists, who for over two years, scorned by the
Lame and Paralyzed, have glorified the love of danger and violence,
2
Maurice de Vlaminck as quoted in Jean Leymarie, Fauvism: A Biographical and
Critical Study, trans. James Emmons (New York: Skira, 1987; first published
1959), 49.
3
Henri Matisse, from “Notes of a Painter,” 1908, quoted in Herschel B. Chipp,
Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1968), 135.
4
“At 80, Boulez makes a Grand Tour,” National Public Radio, May 22, 3005.
5
Maurice de Vlaminck, quoted in Joseph-Emile Muller, Fauvism, trans. Shirley E.
Jones (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., Publishers, 1967), 71.
Leslie Stewart Curtis 19
praised patriotism and war, the hygiene of the world, are happy to finally
experience this great Futurist hour of Italy.”6 Ultimately he asserted that
“[t]he present war is the most beautiful Futurist poem which has so far
been seen.” The Italian Futurists were one of the few groups who
championed the onset of World War I with the unfortunate results that
several of their most famous members, such as Umberto Boccioni and
Antonio Sant’Elia, died in the war. By the time of the Second World War,
it also became clear that Marinetti’s earlier Futurist ideas would serve the
ends of Mussolini’s fascism. Although very different from the Italian
Futurists in terms of their political aims, the Surrealists also issued
statements that exemplify this tendency. In his 1928 novel Nadja, André
Breton coined the famous phrase: “Beauty will be convulsive or it will not
be at all.”7 In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism of 1930 Breton wrote:
“The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol
in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the
crowd.”8 Any number of art works might be seen as having a point of
departure in these statements, but one in particular comes to mind because
of its poignancy in light of recent events. Chris Burden created this work
in 1973. Called 747 and documented in a photograph that has been issued
in editions, it involves Burden’s actions described on the margins of the
photograph: “At about 8 am at a beach near the Los Angeles International
Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747.”
6
F.T. Marinetti, War, The World’s Only Hygiene (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di
Poesia, 1915). He also wrote: “Futurist poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians of
Italy! As long as the war lasts let us set aside our verse, our brushes, scapulas, and
orchestras! The red holidays of genius have begun! There is nothing for us to
admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnels and the mad sculptures
that our inspired artillery moulds among the masses of the enemy.”
7
André Breton. Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1928). Reprinted with trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Grove Press, Inc. 1960). The last lines in the novel are: “La
beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera pas.”
8
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R.
Lane (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1969), 125. Breton adds:
“Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to
the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place
in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.” It is also interesting to note that Pierre
Boulez quoted from this document in his own theoretical text. See Pierre Boulez,
Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 23. Boulez’s composition ...
explosante fixe ... (1991-93; conceived in the 1970s) also takes its title from a line
in Breton’s Nadja.
Joseph Beuys: Art Therapy for Terrorists

The other tendency as suggested by the statements of Matisse and
Vlaminck would define art has having a civilizing, even therapeutic effect.
In 1972 Joseph Beuys (in an official exhibition context) took up this
approach in Dürer, I will personally lead Baader + Meinhof through
documenta V. This work resulted from his encounter with the action artist
Thomas Peiter, who spoke briefly at the opening press conference for
documenta 5 and went around the exhibition dressed as Albrecht Dürer.
Supposedly, Peiter made frequent visits to the space that Beuys inhabited
during those 100 days, the Information Office of the Organization for
Direct Democracy through Referendum, where Beuys would engage in
discussions with visitors. Beuys befriended Peiter and would address him
as Dürer, and one day, he called out to him: “Dürer, I will guide Baader
Meinhof through the documenta V. Then they will be rehabilitated!” It was
Peiter who wrote some of these words (and signed Beuys’s name) on
wooden placards that had been painted yellow, and Peiter walked around
the exhibition carrying these signs. With the omission of the last part of
Beuys’s declaration, these signs might suggest that he was sympathetic
with the well-known Red Army Faction terrorists (most of whom had, in
fact, been apprehended before the closing of documenta in October of
1972). At a certain point, these placards were placed in Beuys’s “office”
space and, shortly after the exhibition closed, Beuys added the felt
slippers, and placed margarine and rose stems in them.9
Revisiting these works by Burden and Beuys is interesting given our
current situation, if for no other reason than that it puts into sharp relief
their strategies of approaching and using terrorism as a trope in artistic
creation. While both artists challenge traditional societal notions of art, it
is worth noting that Burden, who at that time had just completed his
9
This work is discussed at length in several sources. London and New York,
Gagosian Gallery, Joseph Beuys: Just Hit the Mark; Works from the Speck
Collection (exhibition catalogue, London, 10 September to 15 November 2003 and
New York, 9 January to 14 February 2004), 14, 70-71, 96, 104-106. Michaela
Unterdörfer, I Believe in Dürer (Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 2000), 26. Veit Loers and
Pia Witzmann, eds., Joseph Beuys: documenta-Arbeit (Kassel: Museum
Fridericianum, 1993), 114. Peter-Klaus Schuster, “Man as His Own Creator: Dürer
and Beuys – or the Affirmation of Creativity,” in Joseph Beuys in Memoriam,
Obituaries, Essays, Speeches (Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1986), 21. Paris, Musée
national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Joseph Beuys (exhibition
catalogue, 30 June to 3 October 1994; organized by the Kunsthaus Zürich, 26
November 1993 to 20 February 1994), 172-173 and 324-325.
master of fine arts degree, was certainly looking for alternative means of
bringing his work before the eye of the public. Indeed, Burden hardly
seems to have been unprepared for the way this and other of his works
such as the performance piece Shoot (1971) were received. (This work was
documented by a few grainy photographs – and a very brief super 8 film
clip – with the following inscription: “At 7:45pm I was shot in the left arm
by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket 22 long-rifle. My friend was
standing about fifteen feet from me.”) According to Martin Patrick,
“Burden has consistently tried to defend himself against the criticism that
his early works offered only sensationalism and recently asserted, 'I think
that our culture is totally fascinated with violence. . . . A lot of people have
accused me of using danger for sensation, but I stopped doing those pieces
when I got that kind of publicity. I'm not an Alice Cooper. When I did
those early works, I made damn sure that NBC and all of those people
weren't there because they would screw it up. It was okay to have [artist]
Tom Marioni and a few of my friends there.' Burden has always disliked
the fact that he obtained more media coverage of his early works through
popular outlets than the art press.”10
On the other hand, Joseph Beuys very consciously manipulated the
news media and especially the art press by making his gesture on the
grand stage of what has become the most famous of international
exhibitions of contemporary art. In doing so, he employed one of his
favourite strategies, that of attempting to heal not only the victims, but also
the perpetrators. “If you get cut,” he famously suggested, “you better
bandage the knife.” For her first “single” recording in 1976, the performance
artist Laurie Anderson created “It’s Not the Bullet That Kills, It’s the Hole
(For Chris Burden)” which paid homage to both Burden and Beuys but also
used a folk/country music idiom to parody their (and her own) narcissistic
self-absorption. From today’s perspective both works seem a bit
preposterous. Who could imagine in a post-9/11 world that the FBI might
investigate an artist shooting at a plane (as they supposedly did back in
1973) and determine that there was no harm because the plane was clearly
out of range? As for Beuys, how exactly might we re-envision his work
today? For example, I once suggested invoking the ghost of Jean Baudrillard
to declare: “Baudrillard, I will personally guide you through documenta 12"
or perhaps it should be: “Baudrillard, I will personally guide Osama bin
Laden through documenta 12.”11 But who in our time would seriously
10
Martin Patrick, “Rock/Art,” Art Monthly 276 ( May 2004): 1-4.
11
Leslie Stewart Curtis, “Baudrillard, I Will Personally Guide You through
documenta 12,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 4, no. 3 (October
2007). The notion of Baudrillard as “Terrorist in Theory” was first discussed here.
consider that a guided tour through an art exhibition might help to re-educate
the cynical Baudrillard or rehabilitate a terrorist such as Bin Laden?
Baudrillard and the Terrorist in Theory

Baudrillard’s case is worth examining in some detail because, as one of
the most outspoken critical theorists associated with postmodernism, he
frequently used the most flamboyant language to decry the limits of
contemporary art and also to proclaim his often cogent, if controversial,
ideas about terrorism. Baudrillard was one of the earliest commentators to
condemn the spectacle of art exhibitions such as documenta, which he
described as “the large exhibitions where thousands attend and the crowd
itself constitutes a kind of medium.”12 For example, in one interview with
Ruth Scheps he noted: “I remember saying to myself after the 1993 Venice
Biennial, that art is a conspiracy and even an ‘insider trading’: it
encompasses an initiation to nullity and, without being disdainful, you
have to admit that there, everyone is working on residue, waste, nothingness.
Everyone makes claims on banality, insignificance; no one claims to be an
artist anymore.”13 Ultimately, Baudrillard even admitted, “that art, basically,
is not my problem,”14 and has stated, “True, art is on the periphery for me.
I don’t really identify with it. I would even say that I have the same
negative prejudice towards art as I do towards culture in general.”15
Baudrillard’s comments on architecture, while full of insight, were
equally provocative, especially in how they converge with significant
insights on the specter of terrorism. Long before his ideas were taken up
12
Jean Baudrillard, Interview from La Sept (Société d’édition de programme de
Télévision) television program: “L’objet de l’art à l’âge électronique,” May 8,
1987. The series included interviews with Stuart Hall, Yves Michaud, Jean
Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio. This was published in English with a translation by
Lucy Forsyth in “The Work of Art in the Electronic Age” Block 14 (Autumn
1988): 8-10. Reprinted in Mike Gane, ed. Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 147.
13
Jean Baudrillard, “Art Between Utopia and Anticipation,” Interview with Ruth
Scheps, 1996. Reprinted in Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art; Manifestoes,
Interviews, Essays, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Ames Hodges (Cambridge,
MA and London: The MIT Press, 2005), 56.
14
Jean Baudrillard, “No Nostalgia for Old Aesthetic Values” interview with
Genevièvre Breerette, 1996; reprinted in Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art;
Manifestoes, Interviews, Essays, 61.
15
Jean Baudrillard, “La Commedia dell’Arte,” Interview with Catherine Francblin,
1996. Reprinted in Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art; Manifestoes,
Interviews, Essays, 65.
by Peter Halley and the New York Simulationists and even before he found
his name listed as a contributing editor for Artforum, Baudrillard had taken
on the Beaubourg Center in Paris, which, after having been closed down for
repairs, celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2007. He described this
structure, which had been erected on the edge of the Marais district, as being
like an incinerator, a nuclear power plant, a black hole and/or an oil
refinery.16 Baudrillard managed to “blow-up” this most often visited of
tourist sites long before it came to be considered a high-value target for
terrorists, or at least by the counter-terrorists. In February of 2002,
Baudrillard delivered his insightful, if provocative, comments on the World
Trade Center (about which he had also written earlier essays). In his
“Requiem for the Twin Towers” he wrote: “These architectural monsters,
like the Beaubourg Centre, have always exerted an ambiguous fascination,
as have the extreme forms of modern technology in general – a
contradictory feeling of attraction and repulsion, and hence, somewhere, a
secret desire to see them disappear.”17 But perhaps his most memorable
phrase is as follows: “The violence of globalization also involves
architecture, and hence the violent protest against it also involves the
destruction of that architecture. In terms of collective drama, we can say that
the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable
from the horror of living in them – the horror of living and working in
sarcophagi of concrete and steel.”18 His ultimate conclusion was that, “by
the grace of terrorism, the World Trade Center has become the world’s most
beautiful building – the eighth wonder of the world!” Baudrillard argued that
“[t]here is an absolute difficulty in speaking of an absolute event. That is to
say, in providing an analysis of it that is not an explanation – as I don’t think
there is any possible explanation of this event . . .” even for intellectuals.
Instead, he offered what he called the “analogon” which he described as
“an analysis which might possibly be as unacceptable as the event, but
16
Jean Baudrillard, “The Beaubourg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence,” in
Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 1994; originally published in Paris: Editions Galilée, 1981), 61-
73. In terms of deterrence, Baudrillard wrote: “All around, the neighborhood is
nothing but a protective zone – remodelling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygienic
design – but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.
It is a bit like the real danger nuclear power stations pose: not lack of security,
pollution, explosion, but a system of maximum security that radiates around them,
the protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but surely, over
the territory – a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis.”
17
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers,
trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 46.
18
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, 45.
strikes the... let us say, symbolic imagination in more or less the same
way.”19 In so doing, he invoked his favoured strategy of reversibility, which
has been discussed at length by Gerry Coulter. Coulter calls upon the
following passage from Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” essay to
emphasize this point: “‘One must push what is collapsing,’ said Nietzsche. .
. . I am a terrorist and a nihilist in theory as the others are in weapons.
Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource we have left to us.”20
Indeed, Baudrillard has often been cast in the role of “intellectual
terrorist” and he has also spoken of the “(unwittingly) terroristic
imagination which dwells in all of us,”21 even if he emphasizes that literal
physical acts of terrorism are immoral. For example, in an interview with
Nicholas Zurbrugg he said, “I’m a very bad aesthetic analyst! And it’s
perhaps for that reason that I often have a more brutal reaction!” When
Zurbrugg asked him if he enjoyed being a “theoretical terrorist” his
response was: “Yes, I think it’s a valid position – for the moment, I can’t
envisage any other. It’s something of an inheritance from the Situationists,
from Bataille, and so on. Even though things have changed and the
problems are no longer exactly the same, I feel I’ve inherited something
from that position – the savage tone and the subversive mentality. I’m too
old to change, so I continue!”22 In the same interview Baudrillard said,
“[I]t is no longer possible to assume a purely critical position. We need to
go beyond negative consciousness and negativity, in order to develop a
worst-possible-scenario strategy (une stratégie du pire), given that a
negative, dialectical strategy is no longer possible today. So one becomes
a terrorist.”23
19
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, 41
note 1.
20
Gerry Coulter, “Reversibility: Baudrillard’s ‘One Great Thought,’” International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies 1, no. 2 (July 2004). Baudrillard is quoted from
Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 1994), 153. “One must push at the insane consumption of
energy in order to exterminate its concept. One must push at maximal repression in
order to exterminate its concept. ... ‘One must push what is collapsing,’ said
Nietzsche. ... I am a terrorist and a nihilist in theory as the others are in weapons.
Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource we have left to us.” Art writers
(historians, critics, theorists) who have responded to Baudrillard, seem too often to
forget the extent to which, as Coulter emphasizes, Baudrillard used “theory as
challenge,” a tendency that may explain why artists, who also frequently intend
their art as challenge, have been especially attracted to Baudrillard’s ideas.
21
22
Mike Gane, ed. Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, 168.
23
Mike Gane, ed. Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, 169.
Artist as Terrorist: Don DeLillo and Laurie Anderson

Even before Baudrillard, several other writers and visual artists
adopted similar strategies. One of the most prescient of these is Don
DeLillo, who has often returned to the theme of terrorism in his fiction.
We find these preoccupations in short stories such as “The Uniforms”
(1970) and “Baader Meinhof” (2002), and in novels such as Players
(1977), Running Dog (1978), The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), and
Mao II (1991) to name only a few examples. Indeed, one of the most
famous statements about terrorism in DeLillo’s writing can be found in
Mao II, where his fictional writer, Bill Gray, prophesies that “in the future
artists (writers) will be replaced by terrorists.”24 DeLillo has said that “this
book is an argument about the future” and on one level, Vince Passaro is
correct to call it a battle between the “arch individualist and the mass
mind.”25 The other major theme in the book involves a meditation upon
the relative power of the written word and the photograph, or as Mark
Osteen has put it, “it invites us to consider writing and photography as
contrasting or complementary modes of representation and authorship.”
Going a bit further, Osteen sees the book as a meditation upon the idea of
“spectacular authorship” or what he describes as “the power to use
photographic or televised images to manufacture, as if by magic,
spectacular events that profoundly mold public consciousness.”26 Thus, it
is interesting that DeLillo’s novel started not so much as a text, but as a
collection of images, as was discovered by Vince Passaro: “Images,
especially photographs, with their insinuating, organizational power, form
a narrative line in Mao II; they are also a part of its inspiration.”
According to Nan Graham, DeLillo’s editor at the time, “Long before he
had written anything, Don told me he had two folders – one marked ‘art’
24
Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Viking, 1991). In a famous passage from
DeLillo’s novel his main character, the writer Bill Gray, says: “There’s a curious
knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as
our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they
feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the
inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were
all incorporated” (p. 41).
25
Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo,” Thomas DePietro, ed. Conversations
with Don DeLillo (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), p. 81.
26
Mark Osteen, American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with
Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 192-193.
and the other marked ‘terror.’”27

A number of similar themes were explored by Laurie Anderson in
Stories from the Nerve Bible, a performance piece that commented – as did
Baudrillard – on the first Gulf War. But whereas DeLillo began with
images, at least one of Anderson’s sections originated from an inspiration
in DeLillo’s text, for she paraphrased from his famous passage about
artists and terrorism from Mao II. In the segment called “The Cultural
Ambassador” she included recollections of her experience of working in
Israel at the time. Anderson tells about how one of her Israeli contacts
helped her with some small “stage bombs” she was planning to use in one
of her performances. She was clearly intrigued by the irony of the situation
because, as she says, “Here I am, a citizen of the world’s largest arms
supplier, setting off bombs with the world’s second largest arm’s
customer, and I’m having a great time. So even though the diplomatic part
of the trip wasn’t going so well, at least I was getting some instruction in
terrorism. And it reminded me of something in a book by Don DeLillo
about how terrorists are the only true artists left because they are the only
ones capable of really surprising people.” In the conclusion to this
segment, Anderson’s reflections about how “the media coverage of the
war was something between grand Opera and the Super Bowl” seem to be
reminiscent of ideas expressed in DeLillo’s early novel End Zone,
especially his musings on the parallels between thermonuclear war and
football.28 Also, like DeLillo, she is very interested in the idea of
“spectacular authorship.” Thus, “The Cultural Ambassador” served as a
sort of “theory piece” for another sequence called “Night in Baghdad.”
Signalling with flashlights in a manner that made the stage take on
connotations of an aircraft carrier-like space, Anderson stood before
projected images based on video clips from television coverage of the U.S.
bombing of Baghdad. The lyrics for her musical accompaniment were
taken from the words of a CNN reporter who described everything as being
so “euphoric,” so “beautiful.”
In more recent times it is Stephen Kurtz who has come to embody the
idea of the “artist as terrorist.” Kurtz is a professor of art at the State
University of New York at Buffalo, and a member of the Critical Art
Ensemble. The group’s contributions were discussed in a New York Times
article by Randy Kennedy, who described how they “pushed the art deep
into the realm of activism, questioning the activities of the biotechnology
industry and even proposing what they call ‘fuzzy biological sabotage’ –
27
Nan Graham as quoted by Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo,,” reprinted
in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 80.
28
Don DeLillo, End Zone (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
such as releasing strange-looking genetically mutated flies into offices and

restaurants around biotech-company plants to sow paranoia or releasing
rats near fields where genetically altered plants are being tested so that
they invade and destroy the test samples.” 29 According to the web site
devoted to the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund, on May 11 of 2004,
Kurtz and his wife Hope were “preparing to present Free Range Grange, a
project examining GM agriculture, at the Massachusetts Museum of
Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA), when Hope died of heart failure.” The
emergency responders to Kurtz’s home were suspicious about what they
saw and alerted the FBI. “The art materials consisted of several petri
dishes containing three harmless bacteria cultures, and a mobile lab to test
food labelled ‘organic’ for the presence of genetically modified
ingredients.” Bookshelves in the home held titles such as The Biology of
Doom and Spores, Plagues and History: The Story of Anthrax. Given the
concerns about anthrax poisoning and fears about bioterror threats in the
months and years after 9/11, Kurtz was suddenly a very suspicious
character. The following day, while on his way to the funeral home, he
was “detained by agents from the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force,
who informed him he was being investigated for ‘bioterrorism.’” Men in
Hazmat suits searched his home and “they seized his cat, car, computers,
manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife’s body from the county
coroner for further analysis.” Although evidence has shown that there was
no foul play in his wife’s death from heart failure, for several years Kurtz
faced trumped-up charges of mail and wire fraud that, under the new
Patriot Act, carried a penalty of twenty years in prison. In artistic circles,
Kurtz became a “cause celebre,” bringing more attention than ever to his
work with the Critical Art Ensemble. Individual professors, editors of
distinguished journals in both art and science, and a number of academic
associations organized letters of support on his behalf. Nevertheless, the
charges were pursued until April 21, 2008, when, in a highly unusual
move, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcana dismissed the government’s case
against Kurtz, finding that the suit was “insufficient on its face,” meaning
that even if the charges were true “they would not constitute a crime.”30 In
the context of Baudrillard’s writings, we realize that Kurtz was invoking a
kind of “fatal strategy” by pushing scientific systems to their logical
conclusion of collapse – and perhaps even the authorities now realize the
danger of this strategy.
The danger of speaking honestly about the events of 9/11 and trying to
29
Randy Kennedy, “The Artists in the Hazmat Suits,” New York Times (July 3,
2005).
30
http://www.caedefensefund.org/faq.html, accessed on October 7, 2012.
make sense of them using metaphors that might be familiar within the
realm of artistic creation became extremely clear when the German
composer Karlheinz Stockhausen responded to a reporter’s questions
about the significance of those events. Stockhausen said the following:
What has happened is – now you all have to turn your heads – the greatest
work of art there has ever been. That minds could achieve something in
one act, which we in music cannot even dream of, that people rehearse like
crazy for ten years, totally fanatically for one concert, and then die. This is
the greatest possible work of art in the entire cosmos. Imagine what
happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on one
performance, and then 5000 people are chased into the Afterlife, in one
moment. This I could not do. Compared to this, we are nothing as
composers.31
A similar response can be found in the statements the visual artist Damien
Hirst made in a video essay for the BBC online on the eve of the first year
anniversary of September 11, 2001 attacks:
The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of like an artwork in its own right. . . .
Of course, it's visually stunning and you've got to hand it to them on some
level because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever
have thought possible – especially to a country as big as America. So on
one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away
from, which is a very dangerous thing.32
31
These remarks were made in a radio interview in Hamburg with the
Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) on September 16, 2001. A transcript (and an
English translation) is posted on a web site maintained by Remko Scha on behalf
of the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. Margarete Zander, a journalist for the
NDR, wrote a letter published on The Stockhausen Home Page in which she
asserts that she was present at the interview and also that, as Stockhausen asserted,
his remarks were given in the sense that the attacks were “the devil’s art works”
(http://www.stockhausen.org/zander.html; accessed on November 25, 2009). See
also Julia Spinola, “Monstrous Art,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (English
Edition) September 16, 2001. In a “Review Article” considering post-World War
II avant-garde music, Ben Parsons discussed the comments of Boulez and
Stockhausen and remarked on the irony of “post war serial music” being involved
with the “extra-musical.” In a footnote, Parsons also mentions similar comments
made by the artist Damien Hirst. Ben Parsons, “Review Article, Arresting Boulez:
Post-war modernism in context,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol.
129, no. 1161-176 (2004), 161 and 161 note 2.
32
Damien Hirst, video essay for the BBC Online. Part of the program “September
11 one year on.” September 12, 2002. These comments were also discussed in the
Like Stockhausen, Hirst later apologized for any offense caused by his
remarks, but certainly the original comments received far more attention
than the apologies. Indeed, Remko Scha, on behalf of the Institute of
Artificial Art Amsterdam, maintains a web site that posts a photograph of
the World Trade Center towers on fire that is identified as a (would-be)
work of art: “The Demolition of the World Trade Center” by Satam M.A.
Al Suqami, Waleed M. Alshehri, Wail M. Alshehri, Mohamed Atta,
Abdulaziz Alomari, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan Al
Qadi Banihammad, Ahmed Alghamdi, Hamza Alghamdi, and Mohand
Alshehri.” Just below the photograph and caption there is a section called
“Reviews” and prominently placed among these are the comments of both
Stockhausen and Hirst.33 Thus, these statements become justifications for
calling the event a work of art.
The Aesthetics of Terror

In all of these works we find a response to a kind of “aesthetics of
terror.” This might be the type of thing Frank Lentricchia had in mind when
he argued that DeLillo’s “books have a kind of literary joy that is
countervailed by the vision – so that the final prospect is both terrifying
and beautiful.”34 According to DeLillo, “in a society that’s filled with glut
and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only
meaningful act. People who are in power make their arrangements in
secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power. People
who are powerless make an open theatre of violence. True terror is a
language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts,
and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to
aspire to.”35 Thus, he suggests that: “Only a catastrophe gets our attention.
We want them, need them, we depend on them, as long as they happen
somewhere else.”36 When speaking of the events of September 11, 2001,
press. For example: Rebecca Allison, “9/11 wicked, but a work of art says Damien
Hirst,” The Guardian, September 11, 2002.
33
http://radicalart.info/destruction/ArtificialDisasters/WTC/index.html (accessed
on November 25, 2009).
34
Frank Lentricchia, as quoted by Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo,”
reprinted in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 83. He says
DeLillo’s writing “represents a rare achievement in American literature – the
perfect weave of novelistic imagination and cultural criticism.”
35
DeLillo, as quoted by Vince Passaro, “Dangerous Don DeLillo,” reprinted in
Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 84.
36
Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 66.
that happened closer to home, DeLillo wrote: “Before politics, before

history and religion, there is the primal terror. People falling from the
towers hand in hand. This is part of the counternarrative, hands and spirits
joining, human beauty in the crush of meshed steel.”37 For DeLillo, a
counternarrative was necessary after September 11, because, as he put it,
“Terrorism is now the world narrative, unquestionably. When those two
buildings were struck, and when they collapsed, it was, in effect, an
extraordinary blow to consciousness, and it changed everything.”38 In a
slightly different context, the Lebanese artist Walid Raad responded to the
question of whether his own work was “aestheticized terrorism” by
suggesting that “aestheticizing can be understood as a displacement of
trauma.” Nevertheless, “he recounted the instance of New Yorkers
remarking on the blueness of the sky behind the World Trade Center on
the morning of 11 September 2001.”39 The idea that a terrifying event can
be accompanied by experiencing an inexplicably intense sensation of
beauty must surely be one of the most perplexing dilemmas of our time
and our aesthetics and critical mechanisms are not well equipped to deal
with it. If, as Stockhausen, Damien Hirst, and Remko Scha have
suggested, the events of 9/11 were a work of art, could we create an
artistic pedigree for those acts by tracing the stylistic influences back to
Claude Monet and his Impression: Sunrise? Consider for example how the
orange fireball against blue skies framed by the Manhattan skyline on 9/11
invokes an Impressionistic use of simultaneous contrast of colours!40 In his
exquisite and incisive essay, The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard spoke of
our urgent need to respond to the events of September 11, 2001: “[Y]ou
have to move more slowly – though without allowing yourself to be buried
beneath a welter of words, or the gathering clouds of war, and preserving
intact the unforgettable incandescence of the images.”41
But the challenge for artists, according to Baudrillard, is that “a work
of art no longer has any privilege as a singular object of breaking through
37
Don DeLillo, “In the ruins of the future,” The Guardian (December 21, 2001).
38
Don DeLillo, in an interview with David L. Ulin, in “Finding Reason in an Age
of Terror,” Los Angeles Times (April 15, 2003).
39
See Graham Coulter-Smith and Maurice Owen, editors, Art In the Age of
Terrorism (London: Paul Hoberton Publishing, 2005), 2.
40
As another example, we could consider how the news media treated the crash of
Cypriot Helios Airlines Flight 422 in Greece – I was shocked by how the original
press photo contrasted with the “aestheticized” reversed image as it appeared in my
local paper. See Leslie Stewart Curtis, “Baudrillard, I Will Personally Guide You
through documenta 12.”
41
this type of circuit, of interrupting the circuit in some sense – because that
is what it would amount to, a singular, unique appearance of an object
unlike any other.”42 Through the character of his writer Bill Gray in Mao
II, DeLillo put it another way: “Years ago I used to think it was possible
for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and
gunmen have taken that territory, they make raids on human consciousness.
What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”43 One extreme
example of an aspiring English student’s turn to violence in attempting to
overcome these obstacles would be Seung-Hui Cho’s shootings at Virginia
Tech in May of 2007. Before the incident he had sent a package of
information to the NBC Evening News that was ultimately described as a
“multimedia manifesto.” In this light, one wonders if DeLillo’s famous
statement must be revised to say, “In the future the only true artists will be
mass murderers.” But even political and military leaders bump into
challenges when they try to control the headlines. For example, despite the
failure of the U.S. government to create “shock and awe” in the beginning
phases of the Iraq “war,” the very title of the operation suggests a reach for
a type of spectacle that would benefit from a better understanding of the
aesthetic possibilities in terrorism (or counter-terrorism). Perhaps a better
solution than spending so much effort (and money) on the “war on
terrorism” (or “struggle against terrorism”) or on “counter-terrorism,”
would be to focus instead on the development of an “aesthetics of terror.”
If this does not suggest the need for a possible President’s cabinet-level
position, then surely a university could create an academic chair, or at least
form a committee to focus on the “aesthetics of terror” – I can almost hear
Baudrillard laughing. Certainly these matters would strike us as being far
more serious if it were determined that Osama bin Laden had been making
an earnest study of the Futurist manifestoes!
Conclusion: Exploding Boundaries in the Arts

In this paper I have attempted to explore a few of the more memorable
and sensational artists’ statements that have shocked and captured the
public’s imagination, especially those concerned with the relations
between art and terror. In some cases (as with the declarations of Pierre
Boulez or Maurice de Vlaminck), these seem to be little more than the
inevitable consequences associated with an avant-garde – especially given
42
Jean Baudrillard, “The Work of Art in the Electronic Age,” in Mike Gane, ed.,
Baudrillard Live, 147.
43
Don DeLillo, Mao II, 41.
the militaristic connotations of the word – attacking traditional norms. But

even within this approach we have also found suggestions that the creative
act (and in some ways its sublimation of violence) may serve as a
therapeutic balm – for example, Vlaminck’s sense of personal salvation
through art. Still questions about just how far this approach can be taken
have arisen in consideration of Joseph Beuys’ provocative suggestion that
a tour of a contemporary art exhibition might help to rehabilitate the
Baader-Meinhof terrorists. Even the approach of a conceptualist such as
Chris Burden, who explored violence within his own personal limits, has
been called into question when his thematic material has been
reconsidered in a more recent context. The writer Don DeLillo, the visual
artists Laurie Anderson and Damien Hirst, and the musician Karlheinz
Stockhausen have all noted parallels between their own aesthetic activities
and contemporary acts of terrorism. These have sometimes produced new
artistic forms and sometimes provided commentary that could serve to
identify new artistic forms in contemporary events. Given the chilly
reception that has befallen some of those who have uttered these remarks,
or the difficult path of such free thinkers as Professor Steve Kurtz, we
might consider carefully the following statement by Don DeLillo and the
fact that it applies to all writers, from novelists to presenters of academic
research papers:
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of
affiliation and independent of influence. The writer is the man or woman
who automatically takes a stance against his or her government. There are
so many temptations for American writers to become part of the system
and part of the structure that now, more than ever, we have to resist.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more
dangerous.44
DeLillo is ever mindful of the role of the artist as engaged with the
world of events, even if this results, as suggested by his fictional writer in
Mao II, in the writer’s or artist’s withholding his or her only means of
resistance, i.e. the production of his or her own work. In a way, the latter
strategy was also suggested, in a slightly different context, by Baudrillard,
who mused: “[I]f only art could capture the magic act of its own
disappearance!”45 Thus, I would argue that one way these artists,
musicians, and writers have stood and “lived in the margins” has been by
44
Don DeLillo in an interview with Ann Arensberg, “Seven Seconds,” reprinted in
Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, p. 45.
45
Jean Baudrillard, interviewed by Catherine Francblin in Flash Art 130 (October-
November 1986): 54-55.
working outside of their chosen medium or by finding ways to call their

medium into question. Their approaches remind me of strategies employed
by the Dadaist Hugo Ball, who proposed assaulting the word and its uses
and abuses (he especially objected to its uses to justify the First World
War on all sides): “In these phonetic poems, we renounce the language
that journalism has abused and corrupted. We must return to the innermost
alchemy of the word, we even give up the word, to keep for poetry its last
and holiest refuge. We must give up writing second-hand: that is,
accepting words (to say nothing of sentences) that are not newly invented
for our own uses.”46 Thus, some writers have decided to “give up the
word” and for some visual artists this has meant, rather than inventing new
forms, recycling old forms in provocative ways (a strategy that was also
adopted by Dada). When words or images reached a point of saturation,
other strategies have been adopted. For some this meant returning to such
strategies as the “detournement” of the Situationists and Guy Debord; for
others, like Baudrillard, this meant something else. He argued that “[a]rt
has become quotation, reappropriation, and gives the impression of an
indefinite resuscitation of its own forms. But tangentially, everything is a
quotation: everything is textualized in the past, everything has always
already existed.”47
If, in a post 9/11 world, everything is changed, what is left to be done?
In short, the deck has been reshuffled and the relationship of art to terror
has been inverted. Ultimately, in adopting his “worst-possible-scenario
strategy,” Baudrillard became a “theoretical terrorist.” Others, especially
the visual artists mentioned here, have turned to different media. It is
unclear whether this is because they have confronted the difficulties of
“breaking through the circuit,” as Baudrillard put it, or because of the
weight of tradition or because of the overwhelming forces of the simulacra
or because of the fear of being subsumed by the larger commodification of
art, by the society of the spectacle, or simply by having reached a dead end
in their chosen medium. The visual artists or the musicians have chosen
words – albeit in the form of the manifesto or artist’s declaration, that can
easily be turned into a catchy sound bite. Through his main characters, a
writer and a photographer, DeLillo meditated upon the relative power of
the word and the image. Some of the poets, such as Marinetti, turned to a
form of visual poetry (parole in libertà). Even Baudrillard turned to
photography. All of them contemplate their relationship to violence and
46
Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball (1927), ed. John
Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 71. Entry for June
23, 1916.
47
Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art; Manifestoes, Interviews, Essays, 55.
clearly see a relationship between artistic creation and the plotting of

terrorists. Even academics, like Scha, sometimes take on a more creative
and engaged role and put artists like Stockhausen and Hirst in the guise of
the critic or aesthetician, so as to focus on the difficult realization that, in
some cases, it is the terrorists who have become the most powerful artists
in our time.
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“THE CAMPS—NOBODY HAS EVER
SHOWN THEM”:
JEAN-LUC GODARD, HOLOCAUST,
HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA,
AND “CINEMA OF RESISTANCE”1
MICHAEL BAUMGARTNER
The controversial exhibition “Mémoire des camps” (Memories of the

Concentration Camps), shown in Paris at Hôtel de Sully from January to
March 2001, rekindled an ongoing, fierce debate in France regarding the
legitimacy of images depicting the Holocaust. The exhibition presented
photographs taken at the concentration camps by the Nazis (one hundred
photographs), the victims (thirty photographs), and the liberators, as well
as present-day photographers (eighty photographs). Of particular interest
were four “snapshots” clandestinely taken at Auschwitz in August of 1944
by members of the Sonderkommando, two revealing a group of women
being pushed toward the gas chamber of crematorium V and another two
showing the cremation of gassed bodies in the open-air incineration pits in
front of crematorium V. The art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, who
regards the discovery of the four photographs as an important step towards
documenting the cruelties of the “death-factory at work,” offers in the
exhibition catalogue an attempt at reconstructing the circumstances under
which these photographs were taken.2
1
Michel Perez and Jean-Paul Kauffmann, “Godard: ‘Je commence à savoir
racconter des histories,” Interview with Jean-Luc Godard, Le Matin Magazine,
May 10–11, 1980, p. 30; here quoted from Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema:
The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry
Holt & Co., 2008), 510. I would like to extend my gratitude to Matthew Evans-
Cockle for editing this chapter and providing valuable comments.
2
See Georges Didi-Huberman, “Images malgré tout,” in Mémoire des camps:
Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis, 1933-1999
(Paris: Marval, 2001), and Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from
38 Godard, Holocaust, Histoire(s) du cinema, and “Cinema of Resistance”
Didi-Huberman was harshly criticized, notably by the filmmaker

Claude Lanzmann, for his enthusiastic acceptance of these four
photographs and for his blind conviction that they are the only surviving
“real” photographic evidence of operational activities in and around the
gas chambers.3 Lanzmann questions the status of the photography by
emphasizing that what is at stake is not whether these visual testaments are
a document, but whether they can or should be considered “true.” Quoting
Paul Klee, Lanzmann argues that art does not reproduce, but rather renders
the visible. Another prominent voice, the author and psychoanalyst Gérard
Wajcman, attacked Didi-Huberman on the grounds that these four images
are incapable of pointing “beyond mass graves.” For Wajcman, these
photographs must fail as representations of the truth, for any “image of the
Shoah” would of necessity be on the level of a “disappearance beyond the
visible,” for it must show the impossible: how “all bodies, all remains, all
traces, all objects, all names, all memories, and also all instruments of
obliteration were obliterated, cast outside the visible, outside of memory
itself.”4
Both Didi-Huberman’s position, on the one side, and Lanzmann’s and
Wajcman’s positions, on the other, are part of a Holocaust discourse split
into two opposing factions of “iconophilic” and “iconophobic” convictions.
In this paradigm Didi-Huberman’s “iconophilism” is under attack by
Lanzmann and Wajcman who aim to define a new type of Holocaust
denial. In the conventional sense, a “Holocaust denier” claims “that gas
chambers did not exist because no one who saw a gas chamber firsthand
has ever returned to bear witness.”5 The new Holocaust denier, as
perceived by Lanzmann and Wajcman, would hold that “there are, indeed,
visual traces of the genocide.”6 Such an assumption fundamentally
contradicts the view of a “true believer” in the Holocaust, who must
“believe that even if there were images, they would have to be dismissed
as irrelevant to historical truth” (Chaouat 2006, 88).
Auschwitz (trans. Shane B. Lillis, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

2008).
3
See Michel Guerrin, “Claude Lanzmann, écrivain et cinéaste: La question n’est
pas celle du document, mais celle de la vérité,” Le Monde, January 19, 2001,
Rubrique Culture.
4
Gérard Wajcman, “De la croyance photographique,” Les Temps Modernes 613
(2001), 76–7 (here quoted from Didi-Huberman Images in Spite of All, p. 122). It
is worth noting that the general editor of this issue of Les Temps Modernes was
Claude Lanzmann.
5
Bruno Chaouat, “In the image of Auschwitz,” diacritics 36/1 (2006), 88.
6
Chaouat, “In the Image of Auschwitz,” p. 88.
Michael Baumgartner 39
Lanzmann accordingly declared, in the wake of the release of Steven

Spielberg’s fictional account Schindler’s List in 1994, that if a film shot by
an SS soldier had existed, which similarly showed “how three thousand
Jews, men, women, children, died together, asphyxiated in the gas
chamber of crematory 2 at Auschwitz,” he would have destroyed it.7
Lanzmann remained faithful to the radical spirit of this credo in his
monumental nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoa (1985), in which he
abstained from presenting archival footage shot in the concentration camps
by the liberators and iconic footages of overpopulated train cars with
deportees departing for the camps. Instead he conducted, from 1974 to
1985, interviews with Jewish survivors, Polish witnesses, and German
participants in the genocide. He supplements these by images of the camps
Chelmno, Ponari, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz at the time of the
completion of the film. Lanzmann was unmistakably influenced by Alain
Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) and by the
“revolutionary interviewing style” of Marcel Ophüls, which he used for
his documentary film Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity,
1971) about French denouncers during World War II. In Shoa he
reconstructs history by collecting single events, occurrences, stories, and
fragments in order to assemble a whole, a collective memory of the
darkest human catastrophe of the twentieth-century.8 Shoah is therefore
not a film about remembrance. Remembrances are things from the past. It
is a film about memory (Ertel 1998, 46). The film scholar Philip Brody
accordingly states that “Shoah is a film of history that takes place entirely
in the present tense.”9 Not unlike an archaeologist, Lanzmann unearths and
records the horrific past that lies silently buried, although not inert, in the
interviewees, all of whom had been affected by the Holocaust in one way
or another. In this sense Shoah is both the “recognition of the Shoah as the
unprecedented, orchestrated Nazi attempt to annihilate all Europe’s Jews
by modern industrial means” and a “definite Jewish reappropriation of
their own memory and history, the right to tell it and demand
acknowledgment and, where possible, reparation.”10 It is oriented upon the
present as the site not only of the residual trauma of memory, but of the
living and communally embodied values that are the precondition of the
socially meaningful, “historically true” representation of the Holocaust.
7
Claude Lanzmann, “Holocauste, la représentation impossible.” Le Monde, March
3, 1994, Supplément Arts-Spectacles: i, vii.
8
Giacomo Lichtner, Film and the Shoah in France and Italy, (London; Portland,
Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), 160.
9
Brody, Everything is Cinema, p. 510.
10
Lichtner, Film and the Shoah, p. 161.
Contrary to Lanzmann, Jean-Luc Godard has maintained an “iconophilic”

position regarding the ethical question of whether the Holocaust can and
should be visually represented. As early as 1963 Godard deliberated about
a possible visual portrayal of the Holocaust. In connection with the
cinematic presentation/non-presentation of war in his film Les Carabiniers
(The Carabineers, 1963), he came to the conclusion that a film that
visually reveals all the details of the “death factory” “would be
intolerable.” “What would be unbearable would not be the horror aroused
by such scenes, but, on the contrary, their perfectly normal and human
aspect.”11 In the following year, in 1964, in spite of his reservations,
Godard did not hesitate to insert images of a concentration camp into Une
Femme mariée (A Married Woman, 1964). Charlotte and her lover,
Robert, meet secretly in the dark of a movie theatre at the Orly Airport
where Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) is shown. The shot
reverse shot between the disturbing images on the screen and the
embracing couple in the theatre reveals the utter indifference of the two
spectators towards the events on the screen. Their disinterest in the gloomy
past is in macabre resonance with the narrator’s admonishment in Resnais’
film. In the words of Jean Cayrol, the author of the film commentary and
Holocaust survivor, “[E]ven a vacation village with a fair and a steeple can
lead very simply to a concentration camp.”
At the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, while promoting Sauve qui peut (la
vie) (Slow Motion/Every Man for Himself, 1979), Godard presented his
ideas regarding the practicability of realizing a film about the concentration
camps. A major obstacle, he noted, would be finding “twenty thousand
extras who weigh thirty kilos.”12 Brody understands this statement as
implying, provocatively, “that no fiction film about the concentration
camps could adequately convey their horror.”13
Five years later, in conjunction with the forty-year commemoration of
the camp liberation, Godard added fuel to the controversy by proposing
that “the camps were surely filmed in every which way by the Germans, so
the archives must exist somewhere. They were filmed by the Americans,
by the French, but it wasn’t shown because if it had been shown, it would
change something. And things mustn’t change. People prefer to say: never
11
Jean-Luc Godard, “Feu sur les Carabiniers,” Cahiers du cinéma 146 (1963), 2;
quoted from Brody Everything is Cinema, p. 510.
12
Perez and Jean-Paul Kauffmann, “Godard: ‘Je commence à savoir racconter des
histories,” p. 30; quoted from Brody, Everything is Cinema, p. 510.
13
Brody, Everything is Cinema, p. 510.
again.”14 In a 1998 interview in the French music journal Inrockuptibles,

on the occasion of the release of his last instalment of the monumental
eight-part television epic Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard reaffirmed his
earlier conviction adding that since the Nazis were possessed by “the
mania to record everything . . . images of the gas chambers” must exist. He
added that “with the help of a good reporter, it would take me no more
than twenty years to find images of the gas chambers.”15 A couple of
months after this remark, Wajcman accused Godard in Le Monde of
nurturing Holocaust denial by investing too much faith in the historical
relevance of the visual medium.16 Wajcman, who was particularly
disturbed by Godard’s confrontational comment about finding images of
the gas chambers in no more than twenty years, replied: “[I]f images
constitute the ultimate proof, then what if one could not unearth enough
convincing and irrefutable images, after twenty years of systematic
investigation?”17Sternly challenging Godard’s conceptual position,
Wajcman thus poses the rhetorical question of whether the hypothetical
lack of visual evidence would mean that the Holocaust did not take place.
In this regard, Lanzmann agrees with Wajcman that the point of
departure for a reasonable discussion about the visual representation of the
Holocaust must be “a radical refusal of the ‘logic of proof’ that would
fetishize the image, a logic more dubious than ever at a time when new
technologies of representation are undermining the status of the image as
visible evidence, as credible witness.”18 Wajcman is equally aware of this
threat and admonishes that to “concoct images of the Shoa permanently
occurs more or less to dulcify, to trivialize the crime, which in its
monstrosity cannot have any image.”19
Wajcman’s interdiction against the visual depiction of the Holocaust
has particularly harsh consequences for the art of cinema, since cinema
depends primarily upon visual and aural representation of its subject. In
14
Antoine Dulaure and Claire Parnet, “Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard,” L’Autre
Journal: Les Nouvelles Littéraires 2 (1985): 21; quoted from Brody Everything is
Cinema, pp. 510–511.
15
Frédéric Bonnaud and Arnaud Viviant, “La légende du siècle,” Les
Inrockuptibles 170 (1998): 20–8; quoted from Chaouat “In the Image of
Auschwitz,” p. 88.
16
Wajcman, “De la croyance photographique.”
17
Wajcman “De la croyance photographique”; quoted from Chaouat Chaouat, “In
the Image of Auschwitz,” p. 88.
18
Lanzmann 1994, vii. A summary of Lanzmann’s sharp critique can be found in
Saxton 2004, 369.
19
Wajcman “De la croyance photographique” (my translation).
this sense, Godard’s simplistic and inflammatory statements about the

visual depiction of the Holocaust do not do justice to the perceptive,
coherent and inventive method with which he himself approaches this
topic through the medium of film.20 The work in question is Histoire(s) du
cinéma. The series in its entirety was an unprecedented audiovisual
achievement. As a completely personal account, Godard pieces together an
enormous montage of sound and image, assembled from countless visual
and aural fragments from the vast vault of cinema, literature, music, and
the arts and thus proposes his own narrative of film history as seen
through the history of the twentieth century. By employing a never-ending
abundance of superimpositions, slow-motion effects, freeze frames, fade-
ins and fade-outs, and pulsation effects—that is, an ultra-fast alternation
between two still images, simulating movement—on the image track
together with a parallel superabundance of sound clips from fiction films,
newsreels and radio programs, and short, mutilated musical fragments, as
well as other sonic events on the soundtrack, Godard creates a new
audiovisual work out of a numberless array of recorded fragments that
function as a collective memory.
The message of this cinematic tour de force, which Godard reiterates
by means of text quotation, fiction, and newsreel film footage throughout
the series, is that “cinema has failed in its duties. It’s a tool that we’ve
misused. Cinema has not played its role as an instrument of thought. . . .
The final blow had come when the concentration camps were not filmed.
. . . Six million people, principally Jews, were killed or gassed, and cinema
wasn’t there. . . . By not filming the concentration camps, cinema threw in
the towel completely.”21
Having been unable to find the infamous “missing reel” shot in the gas
chamber, Godard was urged to explore other means to approach the
depiction of the Holocaust. He therefore launched an artistic exercise of
20
The film scholar Céline Scemama expresses a similar view in relation to an
image of a camp victim in chapter 4B (28:17 min.), carried away by two kapos, in
which Godard replaces the superimposition of the intertitle “juif” (Jew) with
“musulman” (Muslim) (Scemama, Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard: la
force faible d’un art, p. 182).
21
Lavoignat, Jean-Pierre, and Christophe d’Yvoire. “Le cinéma n’a pas su remplir
son role.” Interview with Jean-Luc Godard. Studio 156 (1995): 155–8. Reprint in
Alain Bergala (ed.), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, tome 2: 1984-1998,
(Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998), 155; quoted from Michael Temple and James S.
Williams, “Introduction to the Mysteries of Cinema, 1985–2000,” in Michael
Temple and James S. Williams (eds.), The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of
Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000),
19.
visually and aurally representing the Holocaust by refusing to take the

content of images at face value, as trustworthy documents, relying instead
upon the critical concepts of a “cinema of resistance.” According to
Godard, the quality of true resistance could not be properly or historically
attributed to cinema. On the one hand, cinema was commercialized by
Hollywood and, on the other, it was misused by totalitarian systems, such
as those of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. On the eve of cinema’s
centenary, Godard had set himself the task of creating the hitherto
unrealized “cinema of resistance” in Histoire(s) du cinéma, as an act of
filmic redemption.
His design for a “cinema of resistance,” on a purely formal level,
involves literally recomposing and re-sculpting the vestiges of the “failed”
history of cinema into a new whole. Through a refined assemblage of a
multitude of disparate visual and aural snippets from the past Godard
creates an extraordinarily rich and polymorphous work that enables
possibilities for multiple readings. He destabilizes both image and sound
by means of fragmentation, filtering, superimposition, layering, and fading
in and out – until he achieves a maximum of resistance against the visual
and aural material, so that an effortless, superficial decoding of the
message by the viewer and listener is considerably hindered. By creating
such a “cinema of resistance” through defamiliarizing, decontextualizing
and deallegorizing, Godard displays a profound distrust for the image and
sound triggered by the history of cinema itself.22 Godard manifests this
distrust most overtly whenever he addresses topics of terror. A short
sequence towards the conclusion of chapter 1A (45:15–47:58 min.), which
is at the tail end of a twenty-minute segment on World War II, exemplifies
how the director utilizes the full range of cinematic tools at his disposal in
order to realize his “cinema of resistance.” 23 In this sequence, which
consists of four segments, Godard explores the possibilities of depicting
the non-depictable, the Holocaust.
22
James S. Williams, “European Culture and Artistic Resistance in Histoire(s) Du
Cinéma Chapter 3A, La Monnaie De L’Absolu,” in Temple and Williams (eds.),
The Cinema Alone,” p. 125.
23
All time indications in this article are in reference to the four-disc edition of
Histoire(s) du cinema (Neuilly-sur-Seine: Gaumont, 2007).
Shakespeare, Aragon, Nicolas de Staël

and Two Auschwitz Victims24
The first segment opens with a short excerpt from a documentary—
probably shot by camp liberators—in stuttering slow-motion. On a
meadow, two straw mattresses are placed next to each other, sheltering the
dead body of two Holocaust victims. Two liberators, of whom only the
legs and hands are visible, cover the heads of the corpses (fig. 1). This
image, which is sufficiently horrific by itself, gains an even more striking
significance through the superimposition of an intertitle and the addition of
a soundtrack. The intertitle presents the slightly altered last line of the first
verse from Louis Aragon’s poem “Les Lilas et les roses” (“The Lilacs and
the Roses”), published in his anti-war collection Le Crève-cœur
(Heartbreak, 1941). The surrealist author, who fought against the
Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and who was a member of the
Resistance movement during the Nazi occupation, considered this poem
collection an elegy for the soldiers and civilians who were victims of the
Nazi invasion. Aragon juxtaposes images of pastoral spring serenity and
gloomy battle scenes. Accordingly, the last two lines of the first verse
read:
Je n’oublierai jamais les lilas ni les roses

Ni ceux que le printemps dans ses plis a gardés.
(I shall never forget the lilacs and the roses
Nor those whom spring has kept in its folds.)25
Godard employs the second line while exchanging the first word “ni” (nor)
with “tout” (all) in order to obtain a complete sentence. The metaphorical
connotation of the word “folds” achieves a very concrete meaning through
interlacing the text with the image of the two corpses: the “folds” are both
earth and blankets in which the bodies are enshrouded. With the addition
of this intertitle the two bodies can most likely be interpreted as victims of
the Nazi occupation of France.
Not enough. Godard augments the complexity of the audiovisual
contents even further by inserting on the soundtrack a quotation from
Shakespeare:
24
This section discusses minutes 45:15 to 45:40 of Histoire(s) du cinéma, chapter
1A.
25
Louis Aragon. Le Crève-cœur. Collection Métamorphoses xi (Paris: Gallimard,
1941), 40 (my translation).
If you prick us, do we not bleed?

if you tickle us, do we not laugh?
if you poison us, do we not die?
(The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene 1)
Godard borrowed the sound clip from Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi film To
Be or Not to Be, where Shylock’s verses are spoken by the stage actor
Greenberg (played by the East Prussian Jewish-born actor Felix Bressart,
who had to flee from Germany in 1936). The “we” in Shylock’s string of
rhetorical questions refers to the Jewish people. Since Shylock describes a
scene of Christians assaulting, torturing, and murdering Jewish citizens,
the two corpses in the image evoke not only victims of the German
invasion in France, but also (and more pointedly) the victims of a more
general Holocaust to which Nazism merely contributed the latest and most
horrific of chapters.
This first segment of the two-and-a-half-minute sequence towards the
end of chapter 1A discloses Godard’s program for approaching the
depiction of the horror of the Holocaust. With the tools of his “cinema of
resistance” he adds additional layers to the visual material of the archival
shot with the two victims. One layer is the intertitle revealing a fragment
of a poem written by a member of the Resistance; the other is the
quotation from Shakespeare about anti-Semitic discrimination by
Christians recited by the exiled Jewish actor Felix Bressart. In addition to
these two layers Godard manipulates the documentary footage itself by
slowing down the image. The stuttering slow-motion effect creates as
much resistance as the Aragon and Shakespeare quotations do. Thus
Godard offers one possible solution to the problem of finding adequate
expression for the Holocaust via cinematic means. Godard is aware that
such an objective cannot be achieved by re-enacting scenes of the camps,
nor by inserting unaltered documentary footage into one’s own project, but
only through combining different, seemingly disparate “texts” with one
another and the manipulation of the archival footage in order to create a
new “text,” a text which is literally multilayered and generates multiple
levels of metaphorical meaning.
The segment under scrutiny continues along similar lines. Shylock’s
moving monologue on the soundtrack is reciprocated by a short sound
excerpt from another film, a woman lackadaisically uttering “Mais que
m’importait ses sentiments” (“But what did I care about their feelings”)
over a black screen. This aural clip is a metonymic reference to the attitude
of all non-Jewish French during the Nazi occupation, denying the
deportation of Jewish French citizens to Eastern Europe. The blackout is
followed by a detail from one of Nicolas de Staël’s last paintings, Nu
couché bleu (Reclining Nude in Blue, 1955). Godard does not insert
Staël’s painting unaltered into his Histoire(s), but masks the image frame
with an iris, lays another (non-recognizable) image under the painting to
provide contour, saturates the colours to intensify the red, blue and white,
and superimposes the intertitle “Bon pour la légende” (fig. 2) Not only
does the intertitle (“Good for the legend”) point to Staël’s untimely suicide
in 1955—he leapt to his death from his high-rise apartment building in
Antibes—but the colour saturation also invokes the French flag due to its
representation of the brilliant colours of the drapeau tricolore, bleu, blanc,
rouge (tricoloured flag, blue, white, red). The Godard scholar Jacques
Aumont evocatively calls such a process of altering a painting via
cinematic devices, which Godard frequently employs in Histoire(s) du
cinéma, the “migration and transfer of images.”26
If we consider this “migrating and transferred” image not in isolation,
but within the temporal context of the filmic montage, the blue, naked
female body resembles in shape and position the two Holocaust victims of
the previous shot. Also, the following shot, revealing an insert of a detail
from a fragmented letter (fig. 3), has to be interpreted as a death symbol:
au jour de ma mort
blague c’est unique
il y a tout là.
Si on est different
je rentre bientôt
t’embrasse
(on the day of my death
joke, this is exceptional
there is everything here
If one is different
I return home soon
hugs and kisses)
The debris of fragmented sentences suggests that this letter had been
written by an anonymous camp inmate. The transition from the Staël
painting to the letter does not occur via an immediate cut, but by stepwise
motion. Godard first replaces the black iris framing with the letter, so that
the reclining blue body and red painting-background are isolated—like
cut-outs—in front of the white background of the letter (see fig. 4). In the
second step, Godard fades out the female nude, red background, and
intertitle, so that the letter becomes fully visible. During this visual
transition, for a brief moment, the blue, white, and red resemble the
26
Jacques Aumont, “Migrations,” Cinémathéque 7 (Spring 1995): 35–47.
tricolore. With this collage-like French flag on top of the letter, probably
written by a French Jew, the frame may be read as signifying that, having
tolerated the deportation of French citizens to the camps in the east, France
bears part of the responsibility for the Holocaust.27
Bach Concert in Theresienstadt28

In the subsequent segment, we are indeed in a concentration camp,
although a fictional one. An excerpt from Andrzej Munk’s film Pasazerka
(The Passenger, 1963) discloses an enactment of a concert at Auschwitz
given by its Jewish inmates (fig. 5). The sequence from Pasazerka, a
“fictional” film, seems bizarre, with prisoners performing the “Adagio,”
the second movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto in E major (BWV 1042).
Similar concerts were indeed given – albeit not at Auschwitz, but at
Theresienstadt. The camp leadership officially allowed prisoners to own
musical instruments, which enabled the development of a broad spectrum
of musical life. Such musical activities were primarily tolerated for
propaganda purposes. Theresienstadt was above all a “show-camp,” as is
evident from the propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus
dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film of
the Jewish Settlement Area), shot in August and September 1944.29 In this
hypocritical and cynical portrayal of Jewish collective life in the
concentration camp as idyllic and peaceful there is a short sequence of a
concert performance. Well-known Czech conductor Karel Anþerl directed
the last two-and-a-half minutes of the finale of Hans Krása’s children’s
27
Godard had already made a similar claim earlier in chapter 1A (41:32 min.)
when he juxtaposed the archival footage of a famished camp survivor lying in a
makeshift bed with a sequence from Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (Rules of the
Game, 1939), where masked members of a hunting society in a country manor
house wildly hop and dance in a circle, disguised as skeletons during an amateur
theatre performance. Godard ingeniously dissolves back and forth between the two
shots so that it seems as if the skeletons were dancing around the Holocaust
survivor. Metaphorically, this montage suggests that the French high society was
in denial about the imminent political and human catastrophe, choosing instead to
indulge itself in cruel pastimes and play-acting that ultimately came to mirror the
brutal fate of millions.
28
1A.
29
For a detailed account of this film see Lutz Becker, “Film Documents of
Theresienstadt.” in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (eds.), Holocaust and the
Moving Image: Representation in Film and Television Since 1933 (London; New
York: Wallflower Press, 2005) , 93–101.
opera Brundibár (1942). Both Anþerl and Krása were prisoners at

Theresienstadt. Both were deported to Auschwitz in September and
October; while Krása perished in the camp, Anþerl survived.
There is a reason why Godard did not use the “real” concert scene of
Theresienstadt, opting instead for a staged one.30 In the Theresienstadt
documentary film the audience mainly consists of elder, upper-class
Jewish intellectuals dressed in formal evening attire. The musicians wear
black tie, and the concert takes place in a respectable “concert hall.” The
concentration camp concert in Munk’s film, by contrast, portrays the
Jewish musicians in striped prison outfits playing in a makeshift outdoor
setting before an audience of high SS officers. This re-enactment fulfilled
much more accurately Godard’s requirements than the forged documentary
images, staged solely for propaganda purposes, despite their employment
of real prisoners as both musicians and audience members.
The concert in Munk’s film is disturbing. Jewish prisoner musicians
are playing Bach, who is, alongside Beethoven and Brahms, one of the
great composers comprising the “Three Bs.” They perform a musical work
that represents one of the highest achievements of German culture. It is
performed, however, within the confines of an institution that is the most
diabolic invention of that same culture, the concentration camp. This
sequence from Munk’s film uncovers a clash between the most sublime
moment of German culture and its most barbaric one. In this context,
Bach’s transcendent “Adagio” with its slow-moving, lament-like texture
takes on a haunting significance. The moribund musicians, who are
enacting the preservation of German high art, perform their own requiem,
which is at once the requiem for German culture and art, as well as for
humanity at large.
Godard intensifies this horrific scene by inserting a series of iconic
paintings from the Western canon into the camp concert. In a series of
slow dissolves we proceed from Rembrandt’s 1630 etching, the Self-
portrait in a Cap, with Eyes Wide Open, to Claude Monet’s Impression,
soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise, 1873), to the listening Nazi audience
with a high-ranking officer in the centre, back to Rembrandt, thence to the
prisoner violinist, to the Virgin Mary with child from Matthias
Grünewald’s Issenheim Altarpiece (1512–5), to Caravaggio’s Salome
30
Godard must have been fascinated with the concert sequence in Munk’s film
long before he began his work on Histoire(s). He mentioned this very sequence as
an example of a “true” depiction of concentration camp life in an interview as early
as 1980 (Perez Perez and Kauffmann, “Godard: ‘Je commence à savoir racconter
des histoires,” p. 30).
receiving the head of John the Baptist (1610)—all accompanied by Bach’s

“Adagio.” 31
Rembrandt stares at the musicians like a terrified onlooker who cannot
believe his eyes (fig. 6). By employing the cinematic tool of shot reverse
shot, Godard creates a spatial and causal link between the painter and the
camp concert (fig. 5 follows fig. 6). Why does Godard link Rembrandt
with the concert sequence from Pasazerka? Chapter 4a offers a clue.
There, the eminent French actor, Alain Cuny, recites an extensive passage,
dedicated to Rembrandt, from Élie Faure’s Histoire de l’art (History of
Art, 5 volumes, 1919–21).32 Godard made a few alterations to the original
text. For instance, he replaced the word “painting” throughout with
“cinema.” In this new reading, cinema claims the “legacy of the pictorial
tradition” (Rancière 2006, 176). In the nineteenth century, Rembrandt was
perceived as a painter who broke “with the traditional hierarchy of
subjects and division of genres that had always structured the opposition
between noble history painting and vulgar genre painting” (Rancière 2006,
176). In this sense, Rembrandt represents for Godard the primary model
for visual composition in cinema. In the sequence of the camp concert,
Rembrandt, however, acts as the doomsayer of cinema. In Godard’s words:
“The flame [of cinema] extinguished itself definitely at Auschwitz.”33
As in the first segment—the two bodies of the Holocaust victims with
Aragon, Shakespeare, Lubitsch, Staël, and the anonymous letter—Godard
creates this second segment likewise according to the rules of his “cinema
of resistance.” The agonizing images of the concert sequence are interrupted
by Rembrandt’s terrified gaze and by Monet’s, Grünewald’s and
Caravaggio’s masterpieces as the representatives of Western art in order to
show that despite the human devastation of the Holocaust art cannot be
extinguished. Accordingly, on the soundtrack, the prison orchestra
continues to perform Bach.
31
Godard’s voiceover comment at this point, referring to “art, that is to say that
which is reborn out of that which has been burned,” has been critically received.
Youssef Ishaghpour observes that this link of Grünewald’s excerpt depicting the
birth of Christ with Holocaust victims, which invokes resurrection and redemption,
may be offensive to Jewish viewers (Godard and Ishaghpour, Archéologie du
cinéma, p. 76). Miriam Heywood, in defence of the filmmaker, argues “that whilst
art, like Christ, might be reborn out of what has been destroyed, the former cannot
redeem the horrors of genocide, for it will always contain the memory of the
deaths out of which it grew” (Miriam Heywood, “Holocaust and Image: Debates
Surrounding Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98),” Studies in
French Cinema 9/3 [2009], 278).
32
Chapter 4A, 16:00 min.
33
Chapter 3A, 12:31 min.
Picasso, Partisans, and Guernica34

Godard continues to employ his innovative devices of a “cinema of
resistance” in a particularly conspicuous fashion in the Guernica segment.
By focusing on Guernica he establishes the Spanish Civil War as the point
of departure for the imminent catastrophe. Godard subdivides this segment
in four distinct sections, each separated by a complete blackout. The first
section presents a pulsating effect back and forth between two images,
both details of a modernistic painting depicting a Mediterranean village
from two different angles. The white intertitle “histoire(s) du cinéma” is
barely visible. The second section also consists of a pulsating effect, now
between archival footage of an attacking Messerschmitt fighter plane,
bearing the insignia of the Luftwaffe and dropping a bomb, and a detail
from Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937) (figs. 7 and 8). The third
section reveals a still photograph of Nosferatu from Friedrich W.
Murnau’s 1922 film of the same name (fig. 9). After a short black screen
the pulsating effect begins once again, now back and forth between the
still photograph of Nosferatu and a detail from Guernica. The montage
between Nosferatu’s ominous gaze downwards and a detail of Guernica
suggest the terror that the German military involvement in the Spanish
Civil War brought to the small Basque village: Guernica was used by the
Luftwaffe as a test site for maximizing efficiency in aerial bombardment:
an experiment whose effects would be felt dramatically in the following
years throughout the rest of Europe.
The fourth and last section discloses first a photograph of the two
partisans Masha Bruskina and Volodia Shcherbatsevich (fig. 10), who
were publicly executed together by the Nazis in Minsk on October 26,
1941 and who were both sixteen years old, then a close-up from the same
photograph of Volodia on the gallows and finally an excerpt from what is
possibly a Francisco de Goya drawing portraying a hung prisoner (fig. 11).
The superimposed intertitle “Bon Voyage” both over the photograph with
Masha and Volodia and the Goya drawing refers to the following insert,
showing a detail from plate 64, “Bon Voyage,” the “vices taking flight to
the land of ignorance,” of Goya’s Los Cappriccios (Capriccios, 1799).35
34
1A.
35
This quotation reproduces Goya’s own caption in the manuscript of Los
Cappriccios deposited at the Bibliothèque nationale (here quoted from George
Didi-Huberman, Images in spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008], 143).
Segment three is the only part of the sequence of contention that makes
no direct reference to the Holocaust. It is also the segment in which
Godard uses the filmic devices of his “cinema of resistance” most
extensively (i.e., the pulsation effect and the many dissolves into black). In
addition, this segment contains the most references to forces of resistance
during war times. The most prominent of these is the photograph of the
two partisans Masha and Volodia. Perhaps significantly, the photograph
does not disclose that Masha was Jewish. It may, indeed, have been to
draw attention away from this fact that the executors made her wear a
placard announcing: “We are partisans and have shot at German soldiers”
while she was hanged.36 Even though she was a native of Minsk, her
identification remained officially concealed until 1968.37
Godard’s voiceover comment, which accompanies the photograph of
the two partisans, cites Valentin Feldman, the philosopher, who was
executed in Mont-Valérien in July 1942. He courageously addressed his
executors with “imbeciles, I am dying for you!” Another indication on the
soundtrack, which underlines the theme of this section, resistance, is the
song that begins with the pulsating Nosferatu and Guernica images and
finishes under the Goya drawing of the hanged prisoner. This song is
“Bella ciao,” the legendary “anthem” of the left anti-fascist resistance
movement in Italy, the Partigiani. Precisely at the moment when Godard
cuts to the close-up of Volodia, we first hear faintly the words “morto per
la libertà” (died for freedom) and then clearly “o bella ciao, bella ciao”
(bye, bye, o my beauty) under Godard’s narrated commentary. Godard’s
connecting of the visual and aural elements is rather simplistic here: A
beautiful woman is executed in the name of freedom and is bid “bon
voyage” on her journey to a heroic death.
36
In this instance the Nazis would have been primarily interested in discouraging
like resistance and would not have wished to encourage possible feelings of
solidarity among onlookers by drawing attention to the particular religion of any
given partisan. Later in the atheistic Soviet Union there would again be an
avoidance of the particularity of her faith with emphasis placed upon her “heroic”
act.
37
For a detailed account of the Masha Bruskina and Volodia Shcherbatsevich case,
see Tec, Nechama and Daniel Weiss, “A Historical Injustice: The Case of Masha
Bruskina,” Holocaust Genocide Studies 11/3 (1997): 366–77.
Elizabeth Taylor, Giotto and Ravensbrück38

Our short sequence ends with segment four, which stages the
resurrection of cinema out of the ruins of World War II. This last segment
is composed of three visual elements: two still-frames from the Dachau
concentration camp, four trimmed-down shots from George Stevens’ film
A Place in the Sun (1951) and an excerpt from Giotto’s fresco Noli me
tangere (c. 1305). The question is, how does Godard create a new set of
meanings from these apparently unrelated splinters, taken arbitrarily from
the vast resources of the history of cinema and painting. The filmmaker
himself proposed an explanation to the late French film critic, Serge
Daney:
In A PLACE IN THE SUN, there’s a deep feeling of happiness that I’ve
rarely encountered in other films, even better ones. It’s a simple secular
feeling of happiness, one moment with Elizabeth Taylor. And when I
found out that Stevens had filmed the camps and that for the occasion
Kodak had given him their first rolls of 16-mm color film, that explained
to me how he could do that close-up of Elizabeth Taylor that radiated a
kind of shadowed happiness . . .”39
Godard works to recreate an analogous “shadowed happiness” by

means of his “cinema of resistance.” He begins the segment with a still-
frame from George Stevens’ 16-mm colour footage shot at Dachau,
depicting the open door of a freight car containing a pile of chaotically
amassed corpses (fig. 12). Not only is the visual analogy between the
previous image of the “howling” heads of the “infernal cohort” in Goya’s
“Bon Voyage” etching striking, but also the unexpected turn into the
following image.40 Godard dissolves into a shot from A Place in the Sun
which presents Elizabeth Taylor in a dark swimsuit sitting on a lakeshore
38
1A.
39
Serge Daney, “Godard Makes (Hi)Stories.” Interview with Jean-Luc Godard, in
Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (eds.), Jean Luc Godard: Son + Image,
1974–1991 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992, 165), 159–68; quoted from
Alan Wright, “Elizabeth Taylor at Auschwitz: JLG and the Real Object of
Montage,” in Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds.), The Cinema Alone:
Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2000), 51–2.
40
This quotation reproduces Goya’s own caption in the manuscript of Los
Cappriccios, deposited at the Prado Museum (see: Francisco de Goya. Les
Caprices (1799), trans. into French by J.-P. Dhainault [Paris: L’Insulaire, 1999],
166; here quoted from Didi-Huberman, Images in spite of All, p. 143).
and patting the hair of her lover, with his head in her lap. This shot is
faded out before it ever has a chance to fully materialize (fig. 13). The
still-frame with the freight car door and the corpses continues to dominate
the screen until Godard dissolves into a close-up of Taylor, an image that
fully materializes this time (fig. 14). Godard retains an original cut by
Stevens that leads back to the shot with Taylor stroking her lover’s hair
(fig. 15). A sharp cut then confronts us with a second still-frame from
Dachau, revealing an upwards tilted head with a distorted face, which is
marked by a gaze of sheer terror, and a wide open mouth, as if the victim
utters a silent scream of horror (fig. 16). Employing the rhetorical figure of
antithesis, Godard cuts harshly to a slow-motion shot of Taylor who is
about to lean down to her lover for a kiss (fig. 17). Incidentally, there is a
correspondence between this and the preceding frame since Taylor’s eye
line matches that of the distorted face. It seems, by reason of Godard’s
implied visual syntax, as if Taylor does not kiss her lover (for his head is
hidden behind a log on the ground), but the Dachau victim. The kiss,
however, is suspended for later, because Godard dissolves into a still-
frame, an excerpt from Giotto’s Noli me tangere. After a brief moment,
the slow-motion shot of Taylor kissing her lover fades in once more, but
never fully materializes, except fleetingly at the very end of the segment
(figs. 18 and 19). In a superimposition of Giotto and Taylor, the actress
rises in staggered, extreme slow-motion from her kneeling position—
recalling the Venus Anadyomene—and vanishes in a blackout while
moving towards the right side of the frame.
Godard himself called the dialectical juxtaposition, which happens
within the Taylor/Ravensbrück segment, a “historical montage.”41 In spite
of this neutral, emotionless designation, the juxtaposition is much more
disquietingly and emphatically charged than Godard seems to be willing to
admit. For Alan Wright, the conjunction of Taylor and a Holocaust victim
“exposes the brutal reality of human suffering in the interval between the
beauty of a smile and the hell of the Final Solution.”42 In other words, the
intensely haunting segment four visualizes the notion that behind the
glamorous Hollywood star there permanently hovers the gaze of terror.
After the horrific reality of the Holocaust it is no longer possible to live the
carefree life of young lovers without being constantly cognizant of the
catastrophic stain that the Holocaust left on Western civilization. This
41
Gavin Smith, “Interview: Jean-Luc Godard.” Film Comment 32/2 (1996): 31–41,
38; quoted from Wright, “Elizabeth Taylor at Auschwitz,” p. 52. This is a montage
that does not strive to convince, nor to reconcile, but to remember and to rethink
the Holocaust with the assistance of the traces that have survived.
42
Wright, “Elizabeth Taylor at Auschwitz,” p. 52.
indelible stain taints the moment of the couple’s happiness at the

lakeshore. The “place in the sun” remains black and white, drained of life
and colour, while the admonishing “place of utter darkness” lives on in the
“realistic” colour that captures its enduring horror.
George Stevens, who filmed the Dachau victims and directed Elizabeth
Taylor, was well aware of this reality. The idyllic get-together at the
lake—as edited by Godard, with the soundtrack stripped—is misleading.
First, on the “tampered” soundtrack, we hear bars 1 to 5 of the first
movement, “Fantasie,” from Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for Viola and
Piano, op. 11, No. 4 (1919), from the first close-up of Taylor to the
moment when the superimposition of Taylor’s image over Noli me tangere
vanishes. The elegiac music confirms the peaceful atmosphere that
emanates from the shot with the couple. This peaceful atmosphere is the
result of Godard’s intelligent montage. Seeing images of Holocaust
victims and simultaneously hearing music by a German modernist
composer evokes uneasy sentiments. Hindemith emigrated to Switzerland
in 1938 and to the United States in 1940, partly because of Joseph
Goebbels’ public declaration at the Tagung der Reichskulturkammer in
1934 that he was an “atonal noisemaker” (atonaler Geräuschemacher);
partly because of the official ban of his music in Germany from October of
1936 until 1945 and its vilification at the exposition of Entartete Musik
(Degenerate Music) in Düsseldorf in 1938; and partly because his wife
was Jewish.
The original soundtrack of this segment, however, reveals another
story than the one suggested by Hindemith’s soothing sonata. In the
original unaltered sequence of A Place in the Sun Taylor mentions to her
lover that a couple drowned in the lake the summer before. The fact that
the body of the man was never found induces the Montgomery Clift
character, a young social climber, to plot the murder of his pregnant
working-class girlfriend. By committing this crime he expects to free
himself from her and to continue the rest of his life with the rich heiress,
Taylor’s character, with whom he thinks he is in love and who proposes to
him towards the end of the lake sequence. On the soundtrack Stevens
subtly introduces death symbolism with the eerie call of a loon at the
closing of the sequence.
The rising movement of Taylor’s impeccable body, announced by an
ascending sixteenth-note viola run in the Hindemith sonata on the
soundtrack, while she looks tenderly at her handsome lover, makes one
wonder what price the couple is willing to pay in order to enjoy marital
bliss. Stevens provides an answer: the beautiful, quiet life may only be
realized through the suppressed memory of the premeditated murder of the
working-class girlfriend. Godard provides another answer: the drowned

man in the lake symbolizes the six-million buried Holocaust victims.
Consequently, the comfortable life, which the Taylor character lives and
which the Clift character aspires to, is made possible only at the expense
of the lives of others. The lake fulfils the same purpose as the Dachau
images. They both function as a constant reminder of the horrific truth of
the systematic extermination of the Jewish people and prevent escape into
comfortable amnesia: “out of sight, out of mind.” A voiceover comment
by Godard, which accompanies Taylor’s rising movement and which
Godard borrowed from Robert Bresson’s film Journal d'un curé de
campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951), exemplifies this idiom:
Oh what wonder to be able to look at what we cannot see

O sweet miracle of our blind eyes.
The image of the Holocaust victims lingers until it is replaced by Giotto’s

Noli me tangere. Godard’s voiceover comment, “39 44, martyrdom and
resurrection of the documentary,” reveals that following World War II the
fiction film was reborn out of the documentary film. The resurrection of
the Hollywood star happened, therefore, from the bodies of Auschwitz but
after Auschwitz there also emerged another cinematic gaze, one marked
by the abject, as Julia Kristeva employs the term, signifying the eruption
of the Real into our lives.43 This resurrection is framed by the preeminent
sinner, Mary Magdalene. She represents what the Taylor character is for
the Clift character: merely by existing, she disrupts his relationship with
his working-class girlfriend and lures him to a sinful deed, murder. She is
the “fatale beauté” to which Godard repeatedly refers throughout Histoire(s)
du cinéma.
Giotto’s Noli me tangere (Touch Me Not) depicts a kneeling Mary
Magdalene reaching out to the Saviour. He, who is no longer mortal and
has become the son of God, rejects her with a dismissive gesture, because
no human being must touch him while he ascends to Heaven. Godard
reinterprets the fresco by rotating the image ninety degrees clockwise (fig.
20, compare with fig. 18). Mary Magdalene “is now hovering in midair
with her arms reaching out to the ground.”44 While in the original the right
arm of Christ points towards the ground, the very same arm rises from the
ground in Godard’s version. By visually rendering Maurice Pialat’s dictum
43
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3.
44
Rancière, “A Fable Without a Moral: Godard, Cinema (Hi)stories,” in Film
Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2006), 184.
“from the victorious hand to the imploring hand, a simple change of angle
suffices,”45 Godard alters the gesture of absolute command to a gesture of
sheer imploration. Through this ninety-degree rotation the positions of
Christ and Mary Magdalene have also changed. Mary Magdalene, who
was unsuccessfully attempting to touch Christ’s hand, is now at the top of
the fresco while Christ is at the bottom, on the ground, trying desperately
to touch her hand. As the film scholar Céline Scemama has observed, only
an arm and a hand remain of Christ’s body in Godard’s rendition.
“Godard’s metamorphosis turns Christ into a mortal who has lost all of his
divine power. He has become a human being begging for help.”46
While the philosopher Jacques Rancière reads Mary Magdalene—after
Godard’s rotation—as the “angel of the Resurrection,” the art historian
Georges Didi-Huberman perceives her as the “angel of history”, Miriam
Heywood—as has been elucidated earlier in this text—doubts that Mary
Magdalene is an angel at all.47 She is, theologically speaking, merely “a
reformed sinner, and, therefore, is not in a position to give word of
cinema’s redemption.”48 In this interpretation the Taylor character is also
not an “angelic promise of welcome,” in Libby Saxton’s words, but a
morally doubtful accomplice to Mary Magdalene—one more embodiment
of the “fatal beauty.”49 According to Heywood, it is therefore simplistic
“to interpret Mary Magdalene as the angel of Christian redemption” since
there are other angels featured in Histoire(s) du cinéma, such as Paul
Klee’s Forgetful Angel (1939) and Luis Buñuel’s El Angel exterminador
(The Exterminating Angel, 1962), which do not represent the resurrection.50
Likewise for Didi-Huberman—despite his own designation of Mary
Magdalene as the “angel of history”—this “angel” is powerless to provide
a perspective upon the end of time, or the Last Judgment. Thus, there is no
resurrection in the “theological sense of the term” in this image of Mary
45
From Pialat’s essay-documentary L’Amour existe (Love Exists, 1960); here
quoted from Scemama 2006, 177–8 (my translation).
46
Céline Scemama, Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard: la force faible
d’un art (Paris: Harmattan, 2006), 178 (my translation).
47
Jacques Rancière, “A Fable Without a Moral: Godard, Cinema (Hi)stories,” in
Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2006), 183–4;
Didi-Huberman, Images in spite of All, pp. 147 and 150.
48
Miriam Heywood, “Holocaust and Image: Debates Surrounding Jean-Luc
Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98),” Studies in French Cinema 9/3 (2009),
277.
49
Libby Saxton, “Anamnesis and Bearing Witness,” in Michael Temple, James S.
Williams and Michael Witt (eds.), For Ever Godard: The Work of Jean-Luc
Godard 1950–2000 (London: Black Dog, 2004), 368.
50
Heywood, “Holocaust and Image,” p. 277.
Magdalene at the top and Christ at the bottom, “because there is no

dialectical culmination.”51 In a theological reading, “Christ has been a
martyr, but here he remained a martyr: there is no resurrection, nor
ascension of Christ.” The ones who scream in the earth remain in the earth
and scream until the end of time, for there is nothing that could save
them.52
In this last segment of the sequence in question, towards the end of
chapter 1A, Saxton detects a “production of a semantic excess, obscene
yet fertile.”53 This serves as an example of Godard’s attempts to depict the
horror of the Holocaust in his Histoire(s) du cinéma. The sequence ends
with the idea that the Holocaust can only be overcome through an act of
redemption. This Christian message is immanent in Godard’s inversion of
St Paul’s doctrine in First Corinthians, according to which “the image will
come at the time of the resurrection,” into the claim that “it is the image
that produces the resurrection.”54 Accordingly, Godard confirms that such
images can only be produced through the elemental cinematic device of
montage, for “montage is the resurrection of life.”55
For his highly subjective and frequently polemic interpretation and
representation of the Holocaust, Godard has not only been subjected to
harsh criticism by Gérard Wajcman, but also by Céline Scemama, who
condemns Godard’s linking of Christian sacred imagery with images of
Holocaust victims. “All these sacred images give the impression that
Christian society has appropriated the drama which the Jewish people have
been subjected to, because Christian society has [re]created its own
martyrdom out of a catastrophe which it has not suffered.” According to
Scemama, Giotto’s Noli me tangere mutates in Godard’s reinterpretation
into “an expression of guilt feeling for a whole civilization. By means of
this guilt feeling, however, Christian civilization overreaches the object of
its repentance, and appropriates the tragic source of its guilt for its own
purposes.” 56
****
51
Didi-Huberman, Images in spite of All, pp. 150.
52
Scemama, Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard, p. 180 (my translation).
53
Saxton, “Anamnesis and Bearing Witness,” p. 366.
54
Saxton, “Anamnesis and Bearing Witness,” p. 367.
55
Godard, Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, tome 2: 1984-1998 (Paris:
Cahiers du cinéma, 1998), 246; quoted from Saxton, “Anamnesis and Bearing
Witness,” p. 366.
56
Scemama, Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard, pp.176-177 (my
translation).
Through his “cinema of resistance” treatment of the images in

Histoire(s) du cinema, Godard emphasizes that it is not the archival value
of the image that is important, but its metaphorical quality. Truthful visual
representation of the Holocaust cannot be effected through the use of
unaltered documentary images. What is required, to get to the heart of the
matter, are mediated, transposed, and altered images. For this reason,
Godard must work against Roberto Rossellini’s dictum “les choses sont là
/ pourquoi les mani-puler” (things are here / why mani-pulate them),
which he quotes on an intertitle towards the end of chapter 3a.57
Histoire(s) du cinéma stages the flat contradiction of Rossellini’s maxim,
revealed by the intertitles “une pensée qui forme / une forme qui pense” (a
thought which forms / a form which thinks). The filmmaker must
manipulate the “things” he finds already there in the world in order to
produce meaning that points beyond the superficial content of image and
sound. Godard’s “cinema of resistance” makes a sophisticated science of
such cinematic manipulation – from the various montage techniques, such
as the pulsation effect in the Guernica segment, to the dialectical
juxtaposition of Munk’s concentration camp concerto with masterpieces of
Western art, to the triple superimposition of a shot that brings together
Holocaust victims, Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, and Giotto’s
Noli me tangere.
A seemingly less sophisticated device, a staggering slow-motion effect,
is used by Godard in order to manipulate a shot from Lanzmann’s Shoah.
The renowned shot consists of the engineer Henrik Gawkowski leaning
out of his locomotive in front of a sign announcing “Treblinka.”
Gawkowski cruelly repeats the same gesture of throat slitting, which he
had made every time a Jew was deported. While this shot in Shoah
“highlights the indifference of the Poles towards the camps situated near
their dwellings,” as Libby Saxton has observed, the meaning is intensified
in Histoire(s) du cinéma.58 Godard slows down the shot with Gawkowski
and plays with the temporal perception of the spectator, as he did with the
celebrated shot of a female bicyclist touring the peaceful Swiss French
countryside in Sauve qui peut (la vie).59 The undulating slow-motion shot
of Gawkowski goes beyond the mere beauty of visual composition of the
scene in Sauve qui peut. While in Shoah the non-manipulated shot
primarily bears a documentary quality, acting as a visual testimonial and a
belated confirmation of the crime, the manipulated version of the same
57
Godard hyphenates “mani-puler” in order to stress the Italian “mani” (hands),
the manual aspect emphasized by the verb.
58
Saxton“Anamnesis and Bearing Witness,” p. 345.
59
Chapter 1A, 35:17–35:26 min.
shot in Histoire(s) du cinéma achieves—via the creative process of an

artistic treatment—the status of pointing beyond the limits of the image in
order to reveal the consequences of the Holocaust fifty years later.
As Christian Delage has accurately observed, “the question is not
about its being a document, but about its truth.”60 Godard similarly
demonstrates in Histoire(s) du cinéma that the dilemma depicting the
Holocaust is not one of the existence or non-existence of visual material
that adequately documents the Holocaust, but of the very manner in which
truth may be revealed. It is about a third dimension beyond those of fiction
and documentary. It is about sustaining the Holocaust discourse in the
present and provoking dialogue between the image and the spectator. My
analysis of the shot with Gawkowski from Lanzmann’s Shoa, as well as of
the short sequence depicting the cruelty and incomprehensibility of the
Holocaust at the end of chapter 1A, supports Heywood’s conclusion “that
together these images signify a resistance to the total irretrievable
destruction the Nazis so desire, by recognizing the need to excavate
history and lay bare its artefacts.”61
To come full circle, Godard’s “mani-pulated” images may be what
Wajcman envisions when he states that “the Real lies beyond the tumefied
visages, beyond the lacerated bodies, beyond the mass graves. What
remains to be shown is smoke, where the bodies rose to the heavens—
indeed the only way in Auschwitz to reach the heavens—and to show the
dust […]. Those are the true images.”62 This smoke and this dust, these
true images, are Godard’s cinematic rendering of the atrocities of the
Holocaust and his attempt to keep the discourse alive in our minds and in
our consciences.
Bibliography
Aragon. Le Crève-cœur. Collection Métamorphoses xi. Paris: Gallimard,
1941.
Aumont, Jacques. “Migrations.” Cinémathéque 7 (Spring 1995): 35–47.
Bonnaud, Frédéric, and Arnaud Viviant. “La légende du siècle.” Interview
with Jean-Luc Godard. Les Inrockuptibles 170 (1998): 20–8.
60
Christian Delage, “‘Mémoire des camps’ (compte rendu de l’exposition
organisée à Paris en janvier 2001),” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 72 ( 2001),
145 (my translation).
61
Heywood, “Holocaust and Image,” p. 281.
62
Wajcman, “De la croyance photographique,” pp. 76–7; quoted from Didi-
Huberman , Images in spite of All, p. 122).
Brody, Richard. Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc

Godard. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., 2008.
Chaouat, Bruno. “In the image of Auschwitz.” diacritics 36/1 (2006): 86–
96.
Daney, Serge. “Godard Makes (Hi)Stories.” Interview with Jean-Luc
Godard. In Jean Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1974–1991, edited by
Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy, 159–68. New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1992.
Delage, Christian. “‘Mémoire des camps’ (compte rendu de l’exposition
organisée à Paris en janvier 2001).” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire
72 (2001): 143–5.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Images malgré tout.” In Mémoire des camps:
Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis,
1933-1999, ouvrage publié sous la direction de Clément Chéroux,
Paris: Marval, 2001.
—. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated
by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Dulaure, Antoine, and Claire Parnet. “Entretien avec Jean-Luc Godard.”
L’Autre Journal: Les Nouvelles Littéraires 2 (1985): 12–27.
Ertel, Rachel. “Il nero miracolo.” In Il racconto della catastrofe: Il cinema
di fronte ad Auschwitz, a cura di Francesco Monicelli e Carlo Saletti,
43–9. Verona: Società Letteraria di Verona, 1998.
Godard, Jean-Luc. “Feu sur les Carabiniers.” Cahiers du cinéma 146
(1963): 1–4.
—. Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, tome 2: 1984-1998, sous la
direction de Alain Bergala, Collection Atelier, 335–43. Paris: Cahiers
du cinéma, 1998.
Godard, Jean-Luc, and Youssef Ishaghpour. Archéologie du cinéma et
mémoire du siècle. Tours: Farrago, 2000.
Guerrin, Michel. “Claude Lanzmann, écrivain et cinéaste: La question
n’est pas celle du document, mais celle de la vérité.” Le Monde,
January 19, 2001, Rubrique Culture.
Heywood, Miriam. “Holocaust and Image: Debates Surrounding Jean-Luc
Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98).” Studies in French Cinema
9/3 (2009): 273–83.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by
Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Lanzmann, Claude. “Holocauste, la représentation impossible.” Le Monde,
March 3, 1994, Supplément Arts-Spectacles: i, vii.
Lavoignat, Jean-Pierre, and Christophe d’Yvoire. “Le cinéma n’a pas su
remplir son role.” Interview with Jean-Luc Godard. Studio 156 (1995):
155–8. Reprint In Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, tome 2:

1984-1998, sous la direction de Alain Bergala, Collection Atelier, 335–
43. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1998.
Lichtner, Giacomo. Film and the Shoah in France and Italy. London;
Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008.
Perez, Michel, and Jean-Paul Kauffmann. “Godard: ‘Je commence à savoir
racconter des histoires.” Interview with Jean-Luc Godard. Le Matin
Magazine, May 10–11, 1980: 22–3.
Rancière, Jacques. “A Fable Without a Moral: Godard, Cinema
(Hi)stories.” In Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista, 171–88.
Oxford; New York: Berg, 2006.
Saxton, Libby. “Anamnesis and Bearing Witness.” In For Ever Godard:
The Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1950–2000, edited by Michael Temple,
James S. Williams and Michael Witt, 364–79. London: Black Dog,
2004.
Scemama, Céline. Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard: la force
faible d’un art. Paris: Harmattan, 2006.
Smith, Gavin. “Interview: Jean-Luc Godard.” Film Comment 32/2 (1996):
31–41.
Temple, Michael, and James S. Williams. “Introduction to the Mysteries
of Cinema, 1985–2000.” In The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of
Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000, edited by Michael Temple and James S.
Williams, 9–32. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000.
Wajcman, Gérard. “De la croyance photographique.” Les Temps Modernes
613 (2001): 47–83.
—. “‘Saint Paul’ Godard Contre ‘Moïse’ Lanzmann, Le Match.” Le
Monde, December 3, 1998.
Williams, James S. “European Culture and Artistic Resistance in
Histoire(s) Du Cinéma Chapter 3A, La Monnaie De L’Absolu.” In The
Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000,
edited by Michael Temple and James S. Williams, 113–39.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000.
Wright, Alan. “Elizabeth Taylor at Auschwitz: JLG and the Real Object of
Montage.” The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc
Godard, 1985–2000, edited by Michael Temple and James S.
Williams, 51–60. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000.
Fig. 1: Two Holocaust victims covered up by two camp liberators.
Fig. 2: Nicolas de Staël, Nu couché bleu (Reclining Nude in Blue, 1955) with
superimposed intertitle “Bon pour la légende” (Good for the legend/tale).
Fig. 3: Still frame: Fragment of a letter possibly written by an anonymous French

camp inmate.
Fig. 4: Letter fragment superimposed on Nicolas de Staël’s Nu couché bleu.

Fig. 5: Excerpt from Andrzej Munk’s film Pasazerka (The Passenger, 1963). An
anonymous inmate violinist performs Bach’s Violin Concerto in E major (BWV
1042).
Fig. 6: Still frame: Rembrandt, Self-portrait in a Cap, with Eyes Wide Open
(1630).
Fig. 7: Attacking Messerschmitt fighterplane.
Fig. 8: Detail from Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937).

Fig. 9: Still frame from Friedrich W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922).
Fig. 10: Still frame: photograph of the two Belarus partisans Masha Bruskina and
Volodia Shcherbatsevich.
Fig. 11: Still frame: Francisco de Goya drawing of a hung prisoner.
Fig. 12: Still frame from George Stevens’ 16 mm color footage shot at Dachau.
Fig. 13: Elizabeth Taylor patting the hair of her lover played by Montgomery Clift
(from: George Stevens, A Place in the Sun, 1951).
Fig. 14: Close-up of Elizabeth Taylor (from: George Stevens, A Place in the Sun,
1951).
Fig. 15: Elizabeth Taylor stroking her lover’s hair (from: George Stevens, A Place
in the Sun, 1951).
Fig. 16: Still frame from George Stevens’ 16 mm color footage shot at Dachau.
Fig. 17: Elizabeth Taylor leans down to her lover for a kiss (from: George Stevens,
A Place in the Sun, 1951).
Fig. 18: Still-frame, an excerpt from Giotto’s Noli me tangere (c. 1305).
Fig. 19: Superimposition of Giotto’s Noli me tangere and Elizabeth Taylor kissing
her lover (from: George Stevens, A Place in the Sun, 1951).
Fig. 20: A detail from Giotto’s Noli me tangere, before Godard’s rotation of the
image by ninety degrees clockwise.
TERROR IN THE LABORATORY:
THE VISUAL AND POETIC ICONOGRAPHY
OF THE MAD SCIENTIST FROM JOSEPH WRIGHT
TO J.W. VON GOETHE TO JAMES WHALE
MIKE MCKEON
I.
Depictions of nature’s fecundity in Western art as the effect of a
divinely sanctioned procreative act are pervasively optimistic and this
optimism is affirmed from landscape painting to Michelangelo’s iconic
fresco The Creation of Adam. By contrast, when depicting man’s illicit
penetration into God’s creative office, art can powerfully strike terror into
the human heart. One of the best artistic examples of this latter affect is
found in James Whale’s 1931 film version of Mary Shelley’s novel
Frankenstein. In the famous laboratory scene, Dr. Henry Frankenstein
seeks to create life in circumvention of the divinely appointed manner.
And though by today’s standards of cinematic terror Whale’s laboratory
scene strikes the viewer as relatively tame and camp, Henry
Frankenstein’s now immortal line, “In the name of God, now I know what
it is like to be God!”, can still pack a blasphemous punch.1
In this paper I attempt to restore the lost terror of Whale’s immortal
laboratory scene by considering both Whale films, Frankenstein (1931)
and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), as two distinct yet thematically
unified works of art. In each film, terror is generated by an irreverent
attack on traditional institutions, such as marriage and the biological
propagation of the human species as ordained by God. Desire to possess
forbidden knowledge is the impetus behind these attacks and is often
accompanied by blasphemous declarations from the protagonist about
being “God-like.”
1
Frankenstein, DVD, directed by James Whale, Burbank, CA: Universal Studios
(1931), 1999.
74 Terror in the Laboratory
The romantic longing for forbidden knowledge is not new, and indeed,
we find its origin in a variety of literary sources ranging from Mary
Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein to the poetry of Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe.2 Goethe was quite taken with alchemy, and equally driven to
describe poetically his occult studies on creationism in the 1832
publication of Faust. For instance, in the scene “Laboratory” from Part II
of Faust, we find Faust’s former assistant, Wagner, labouring intensely in
the act of creating life contrary to God’s ordained process.3 Tricked out in
alchemist attire and at work in an alchemist’s laboratory, Wagner seeks to
know the origin of life. At the same time, he wearily mocks God’s
ordained act of procreation by describing it as “Brute’s delight” and
exclaims: “[O]h god forbid! Begetting in the former fashion [sexual
procreation] we laugh to scorn beside the new, [which] has now been
ousted from its age-old sway.”4
This scene demonstrates a remarkably consistent view of human
sexuality held by both Wagner and Dr. Frankenstein, a view in which sex
is ultimately supplanted by something higher, a creative source sought in
man’s “superior resource,” which is his reason, knowledge, and science.5
We may thus characterize this epistemological transition from the divine
to the human as a usurpation of knowledge that substitutes one mythic
space, the garden, for another, the laboratory, as science becomes the new
tree of knowledge.
II.
The ruthless pursuit of knowledge and mockery of the divine is what
makes romantic terror “romantic,” an aspect conspicuously missing from
earlier forms of creationism. For instance, one of the Hermetic and
alchemical sources that informed Goethe’s laboratory scene is the work of
Paracelsus (1493-1541).6 A man of great intellect, Paracelsus describes the
creation of life without a woman’s participation as an essentially
beneficent if largely occult act:
But neither must we by any means forget the generation of homunculi. For
there is some truth in this thing, although for a long time it was held in a
most occult manner and with secrecy . . . [that is] whether it was
2
Cf. Faust, Goethe, trans. by Walter Arndt, 172-176.
3
Ibid., 172.
4
Ibid., 172.
5
Ibid., 172.
6
Ibid., 332
Mike McKeon 75
possible . . . that a man should be begotten without the female body and
the natural womb. I answer hereto . . . that it is perfectly possible. In order
to accomplish it you must proceed thus. Let the semen of a man putrefy by
itself in a sealed cucurbite . . . for forty days . . . until it begins to live. . . .
This we call a homunculus [and] is one of the greatest secrets God has
revealed to mortal and fallible man. It is a miracle and marvel of God . . .
and deserves to be kept secret until the last times, when there shall be
nothing hidden, but all things shall be made manifest.7
Noticeably absent in Paracelsus’ creationism is any hint or trace of Henry

Frankenstein’s irreverent, self-assertive tone or the mocking disdain of
Goethe’s Wagner. Rather, the creation of homunculi is described by
Paracelsus as a sign of God’s fulfilment of a prophecy, which is the same
secret wisdom and knowledge Faust seeks in Faust Part I:
So I resorted to Magic’s art,

To see if by spirit mouth and might
Many a secret may come to light;
So I need toil no longer so,
Propounding what I do not know;
So I perceive the inmost force
That bonds the very universe,
View all enactment’s seed and spring,
And quit my verbiage-mongering.8
If romantic and Renaissance outlooks share a common goal of creating

life, then their essential mutual identity, despite differing forms of
expression, must lie in their attitude toward divine knowledge. That
attitude is best illustrated in the visual iconography of The Bride of
Frankenstein, which, I argue, is directly traceable to the artwork of Joseph
Wright of Derby, to which we now turn.
III.
If romantic terror is, in part, to be found in the replacement of one
mythic space (the garden) with another (the laboratory), it helps to
consider what the medieval science laboratory looked like. What type of
architecture enveloped that laboratory and what sorts of instruments did
7
Paracelsus, Concerning the Nature of Things, 124-125. Cucurbit is a gourd-
shaped portion of an alembic, and a vessel used for distillation.
8
Goethe, Faust, 10.
Goethe’s medieval laboratory possess; moreover, do we find aspects of the

medieval alchemical laboratory in either one of the Frankenstein films?
To answer these questions we may look at Joseph Wright’s The
Alchemist (fig. 1). Painted in 1771, Wright’s canvas depicts an elderly
alchemist dressed in the robes of a magus and cast as an early Christian
ascetic, perhaps Francis or Jerome.9 He kneels before an illuminated piece
of scientific apparatus called an alembic. Brilliant white light emits from
this gourd-shaped piece of glass, and reveals a Gothic architectural
interior: high ribbed vaulting and lancet windows that are further
illuminated from outside by a glowing moon. Sitting atop the furnace and
lit by the phosphoric gas glowing within the alembic are open books in
disarray, along with a globe, a clock set to one side, and other
paraphernalia of alchemical pursuits. In the background two young
apprentices provide a fascinated spectatorship. The alchemist’s pose and
gesture combine with shock and amazement on his face visually to
represent a moment of awe as he discovers artificial light.10 Interestingly,
all these elements, down to the facial expression of the alchemist, share a
remarkable consistency and correspondence with Wagner’s rapture over
the creation of the homunculus. Indeed, the painting could function as an
illustration to Goethe’s laboratory scene:
There, there the veils of darkness fall;

In the alembic’s inmost member
A glow is lit like living ember,
Yes—like a glorious jewel’s spark
It shoots it flashes through the dark!
A glare of dazzling white is sent!
. . . [watching the alembic in rapture]
The glass glows tuneful with its lovely power,
Its clouding, clearing, nearly done within!
I see in shapely harmony cower
A dainty little manikin.11
IV.
Wright’s visual iconography may map well onto Goethe’s poetry but
what light do both images shed on the meaning of creation and terror in
each Frankenstein film? The connective tissue linking all four artworks
together is found in the mysterious character of Dr. Septimus Pretorius
9
Vertesi, “Light and Enlightenment in Joseph of Derby’s The Alchymist,” 6.
10
Vertesi, “Light and Enlightenment in Joseph of Derby’s The Alchymist,” 6.
11
Goethe, Faust, 172-173.
Mike McKeon 77
from The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). This somewhat enigmatic character

has been, and continues to be, the source of much scholarly debate. Who is
he, and is his identity in any way bound up with the significance of his
name?
Like Professor Waldman from the Mary Shelly novel, Dr. Pretorius is
a former mentor and professor of Henry Frankenstein, and that much is
made clear in The Bride of Frankenstein, but the significance of his name
has become a subject of speculation in film history. According to Scott
McQueen, the name “Pretorius” is derived from the Latin word “praetor”
meaning magistrate, and like a magistrate Dr. Pretorius “is his own law
meting out life and death as he sees fit.”12
There is more, however, to the mysterious Dr. Pretorius than Latin
etymology reveals. When writing the screenplay for The Bride of
Frankenstein, veteran playwright and Hollywood screenwriter William
Hurlbut brought thirty years of literary knowledge to bear on his work. As
he wrote, Hurlbut must have been aware not only of the laboratory scene
from Goethe’s Faust, but of its occult sources as well.13 How else can we
explain, for instance, the appearance of Dr. Pretorius in The Bride of
Frankenstein and the fact that Goethe consulted the works of a Johannes
Praetorius as he wrote the laboratory scene from Faust Part II? In addition
to Paracelsus, as Cyrus Hamlin notes, Goethe’s research into the occult
drew heavily on Praetorius’ Anthropodemus Plutonicus (1666),
specifically the chapter “Homunculi” when he was writing “Laboratory”
in 1832.14 Add to this the fact of Dr. Septimus Pretorius’ unique contribution
to the creation of life and it is decidedly an “open and shut case” (see
Figure 2). In a memorable scene from The Bride of Frankenstein Dr.
Pretorius dons “a skull cap, an archaic fashion associated with alchemy,”
and reveals a series of homunculi of his own creation.15 Pretorius explains
how in creating them he “went to the source of life for [his] materials . . .
[and] grew his creatures, like cultures, as nature does from seed,” unlike
Frankenstein who scavenged and stitched together dead tissues and
bones.16
Dr. Pretorius’ creationism eerily recalls the methods described earlier
by Paracelsus and those implied in Goethe’s scene; moreover, Paracelsus’
description of the putrefaction of male semen, or “seed” warmed by venter
12
Scott McQueen’s audio essay The Bride of Frankenstein.
13
Ibid.
14
Cyrus Hamlin, “Interpretive Notes,”in Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt,
332.
15
The Bride of Frankenstein, audio essay by Scott McQueen.
16
Ibid.
equinus and nourished with human blood evokes Pretorius’ organic “black
magic,” especially when contrasted with the galvanism of Dr.
Frankenstein.17 And indeed, Henry Frankenstein declares as much to Dr.
Pretorius as they meet to discuss their future collaboration.18
V.
With regard to Wright’s painting, note Dr. Pretorius’ use and storage
of each homunculus in an alembic (see Figures 21 and 22), and the
alembic’s corresponding poetic description in Goethe’s Faust:
A glare of dazzling white is sent!

...
The glass glows tuneful with its lovely power,
Its clouding, clearing, nearly done within!
I see in shapely harmony cower
A dainty little manikin.19
Also note the similar expressions of awe in Wright’s elderly alchemist and
Wagner’s euphoria over the successful creation of the homunculus. These
visual and poetic images clearly anticipate the highly expressionistic
declarations of Frankenstein at the moment of his creation.
Finally, what are we to make of the creative process itself, which
science and alchemy propose as a replacement of God’s divinely
sanctioned procreative act? In addition to Biblical exegesis, the myth of a
garden, first parents, and transgression, we can solicit the wisdom of the
ancient Greeks as understood by Friedrich Nietzsche. The terror in both
Frankenstein films ultimately lies in this: that man through science seeks
to know what in principle cannot be known, since science itself, and
culture in general, is the product of primordial creativity. For instance,
from The Birth of Tragedy we learn that the primal origin of tragedy is
found in the creative “enchantment” of the chorus.20 Indeed, “the maternal
womb”21 of the Apollinian dream world, and all that Apollo symbolizes,
which includes science, is rooted in the ecstasy and primal creativity of the
17
Venter equinus is Paracelsus’ expression, and a technical term in alchemy for
decaying dung that is used as a heat source.
18
Cf. The Bride of Frankenstein, DVD, directed by James Whale, Burbank, CA:
Universal Studios (1935), 1999.
19
Goethe, Faust, 172-173.
20
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 524-525.
21
Ibid., 525.
Mike McKeon 79
Greek chorus. Prominent among the many Dionysian ecstatic activities,

such as dance, song, chant, and wine drinking, is sex. Members of the cult
engaged in sex not to serve their lust per se, but as one among many ways
of achieving ecstasy. Each Frankenstein film symbolically transfers the
sex act from the ecstasy of the chorus to the laboratory of the polis, and by
doing so produces the terror we identify with at a deeply unconscious
level. How so? What once fell under the purview of human sexuality now
occurs in a scientific space rather than in nature, and substitutes for the
Dionysian maternal womb a glass device designed for the voyeuristic eye
of empirical observation. That eye is Apollo’s, and as man attempts
scientifically to plumb what in essence belongs to Dionysus and his
mysteries, he struggles to know what is unknowable in principle. Only
then does man begin to feel the horror of human existence in its
fundamental inexplicability. In the films Frankenstein and The Bride of
Frankenstein, that terror is not only manifested in the ghastly image of the
monster and his bride but in the boundary that science unlawfully crosses.
Bibliography
The Bride of Frankenstein. DVD. Directed by James Whale. Burbank, CA:
Universal Studios, (1935) 1999.
Frankenstein. DVD. Directed by James Whale. Burbank, CA: Universal
Studios, (1931) 1999.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust: A Tragedy. Trans. Walter Arndt.
New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976.
Hamlin, Cyrus. “Interpretive Notes.” Faust: A Tragedy. Trans. Walter
Arndt. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976.
McQueen, Scott. Audio Commentary. The Bride of Frankenstein. Directed
by James Whale. Burbank, CA: Universal Studios, 1999.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Birth of Tragedy.” Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman.
Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Ed. Albert Hostadter and Richard
Kuhns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Ed. Michael D. Coogan, et al. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Paracelsus. “Concerning the Nature of Things.” The Hermetic and
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Hohenheim, called Paracelsus the Great. Trans. Arthur Edward Waite.
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Vertesi, Janet A. “Light and Enlightenment in Joseph of Derby’s The
Alchymist.” Diss. U of Cambridge, 2002.
Figure 21. Joseph Wright, The Alchemist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone,
.
1771.
Mike McKeon 81
Figure 22. The Bride of Frankenstein. Dir. James Whale. Perf. Boris Karloff, Colin
Clive, Ernest Thesiger, and Elsa Lanchester. 1935. DVD. Universal Studios, 1999.
DEMONIC:
THE DESTRUCTIVE SIDE OF CHAOS
ALGIS MICKUNAS
Introduction
In various elevated circles it is fashionable today to speak of “chaos
theory,” albeit in a strange way. Theory, after all, is a structure that offers
“explanations” and definitory morphologies. But the term chaos is much
older than theories evoking it suggest; it purports to deal with the origin of
all. Hesiod proposed that first there was chaos and then the broad-bosomed
earth. Before him the Egyptians conceived of a primordial abyss as chaos
– nut, which gave birth to ra, the sun and the beginning of order. For
Babylonians the goddess of the formless was tiamat. The reappearance of
the discussion of chaos in modern sciences is significant since the search
for origins demands acceptance of phenomena that are irreducible to the
simplistic sequential order premised on spatial metaphors offering precise
calculations of every event in the universe. One expression of this
simplicity was the Newtonian system that was later challenged by Henri
Poincaré who discovered that within systems of this type all was well as
long as there were only two simple factors involved – sun and earth – but
instability arose as soon as the third factor was added (the moon). The
“three body” issue suggested that prediction could only offer approximate
estimates. Given an even greater complexity of factors, prediction would
offer an infinite number of possible variations. Indeed, even small
perturbations in a system can result in erratic, unpredictable courses of
events. Poincaré discovered nonlinearity and opened the question of chaos.
Yet due to the influence of Max Planck and Albert Einstein chaos was
forgotten.
It took Edward Lorenz to discover that small changes in a system could
result in significant impact, known in common parlance as the butterfly
effect, while the scientific phrase was “sensitive dependence upon initial
conditions.” The classical notion of precise conditions and precisely
predictable results ceased to make sense, since results might unfold
84 Demonic: The Destructive Side of Chaos
unpredictably. This also means that a selection of isolated variables to

predict results is equally redundant; after all, minute changes may be
amplified exponentially as their implications unfold, creating results that
bear little or no resemblance to the initial state of affairs. Predicting
outcomes from complex processes becomes impossible. Given that
complex events comprise more complex systems, every change in any
event, amplified exponentially, also means a continuous amplification of
other events – iteration of amplification – that do not trace the initial
conditions. In this sense the changes that are present in systems are
nonlinear.
The latter circumstance means that there is no reaction, but rather
interaction. The activity of iteration in a dynamic system is not the
doubling of rational numbers, but the doubling of irrational numbers.
(Irrational numbers are those that can never be written down as a ratio of
integers.) While systems move toward chaos by bifurcation, chaos shows
up in the claim that bifurcations may be predictable, but change cannot use
Feigenbaum numbers. No need to speak of various other factors in chaos
theory, from attractors to fractals. What is the most important aspect of
chaos theory for our purposes is that it has not left the shoreline of modern
philosophy. The final outcome of chaos theory is that a particular complex
event in a system may have indefinite possible outcomes, that it is open to
an open horizon of possibilities. Such a view is the crowning glory of
modern reason defining reality as conditions for the possibility of being.
Thus we must turn to a more uncanny trend in the modern West that opens
the question of chaos as Origin in its more dangerous manifestation, a
manifestation that chaos theories do their best to ignore. What follows are
two main explications of this more dangerous or even uncanny appearance
of chaos, one in literature and the other in philosophy.
Demonic Traces
If in various civilizations chaos is regarded as the origin that gives
birth to various figures emerging from it, then it should be also accepted
that it has no specific characteristics such as true or false, good or evil,
spiritual or material, conscious or unconscious, and living or non-living.
Yet it can appear as ever present through traces that may be emphatically
oppressive to chaos, such as modern constructs of reason or monotheism,
where chaos may be seen as totally disruptive, as we shall explicate
shortly. The disruptions appear in demonic images of the last two centuries
in such a way that the demonic has no specific shape. The demonic
depicted in literatures and poetry shows up in absurd, tragic-comic, and
Algis Mickunas 85
macabre dynamics. Friedrich Dürrenmatt suggests that we live in an age

where individual responsibility and accountability have been abolished
and as a result we cannot create tragedy – only comic tragedy. Albert
Camus concurs that the world is absurd where the memory of a lost home
has long since vanished and a promised land is no longer on the horizon.
This awareness is a partial result of the loss of old standards and divinities
without any prospect of creating new ones. Chaos and abyss open up in
numerous traces. As Wolfgang Kayser suggests, our world has turned into
something strange, where once known events suddenly become macabre,
incomprehensible, where chaos and paradox seep into human life. But to
reach this disruptive domain one is prudent to move carefully in order to
avoid sweeping proclamations.
The understanding of the demonic in our epoch cannot be depicted by
such notions as deviation, distortion, or transgression since such terms
suggest standards, whereas we no longer have any. Thus the origin of the
demonic in our age has to be sought elsewhere. Further, the demonic
cannot be a product of imagination that composes various natural forms, as
was the standard in previous ages. The demonic now is not a mere
deviation from natural forms; rather it is a posture that shifts even more
toward the macabre, all the way to chaos and formlessness. In one sense it
may be an ironic grin mocking our baseless seriousness as we plod
through our daily routines pretending that all is well, that our aims have
value and importance. If there are depictions that still presume to offer the
demonic in human, mineral, and biological forms, such forms are not
disruptions of natural beings but their destruction and reconstruction by
unknown logic.
Re-formation by this logic is alien to any known forms and all of our
standards are transformed into something standard-less emerging from
total chaos. Thus the demonic of our age is not the Middle-Eastern
Luciferine wherein one absolute order is challenged by another, where one
set of values is exchanged for another set of contrary ones, both with
clearly recognizable features. Basically, the current demonic is a rejection
of anything that is recognizable. Although macabre figures are paraded
incessantly, they do not offer any semiotic spider web of connected
meanings. They provoke an anxiety that is not that of distorted forms
signifying danger. What appears is a “pre-civilized” anxiety tracing
something beneath all cultural forms and their recognizable expressions.
This anxiety calls up inhuman laughter that does not flow from mental
awareness, a laughter that does not reveal joy in the disruption of natural
forms or accepted order, but rejoices instead in something that astounds us
all the way to the lack of words and modes of behavior. No exorcism can
be of any use.
This awareness is counter to the Middle-Eastern demonic figures
(Christian, Islamic, Jewish) where the demon is reduced to an object of
derision and of pelting by stones. Lester Bridaham suggests that this
awareness in earlier times showed the demonic to be a serious figure, but
by the Gothic period the religious motives lost their primary significance,
and the demonic was transformed into a comic figure distorted by human
derision.1 Any sense of the macabre is voided of danger and the gaping
chaos is covered over. In the Middle-Eastern cults there is nothing
unrecognizable, unknown; the demonic is a distortion of the human. It has
its sphere of power and influence where the human and other forms are
recognizable even in hell. Any macabre expressions are comfortably
known and possess no utterly alien, incomprehensible power. But this is
not the demonic of our age; our demonic is not disarmed by macabre
expressions. On the contrary, such expressions make the demonic more
powerful, since they are not distortions of something human. The demonic
is not an envoy from hell where a human being can fully recognize a
normal order: one is in hell for transgressing certain norms established by
some divinity. In our age the demonic shows up as a collapse of the world
from within. As Heinrich Weinstock suggests, contemporary anxiety in
relationship to the demonic is not one about some spook but about the
collapse of our world.2 All structures are deposed and chaos is revealed to
reside right in our midst, so that even nature has lost its orderly visage.
What is to be noted here is not that the world is destroyed, but that at base
there is no sensible order or structure.
Absence of any structure is an indication of a process moving toward
the dissolution of all that is known and recognizable in such a way that the
demonic figure, tracing this process, is not involved in threatening; such a
figure appears as if it were a movement, the unfolding of a spectacle
wherein the demonic demonstrates itself in full view only as this spectacle
without wanting to corrupt and possess our souls. These movements
appear as a dance that is neither beauty nor harmony; it is non-rhythmic:
no specific movement would imply other movements. It appears in leaps,
jumps, burlesque, hunching, and mocking. Such dances are depicted by
1
Lester Burbank Bridaham, co-author with R. A. Cram of The Gargoyle Book:
572 Examples from Gothic Architecture (New York: Dover 2006), first published
in 1930 under the title Gargoyles, Chiméres, and the Grotesque in French Gothic
Sculpture.
2
Heinrich Weinstock, Die Tragoedie des Humanismus (The Tragedy of
Humanism) (Wiesbaden: Aula Verlag, 1989), 174ff.
Algis Mickunas 87
skeletons residing on the edge between life and death. Thus there is no
exhibition of another order but merely the dissolution of the existing one.
The demonic domain reveals decay, putrefaction that is not hidden and,
unlike derision, does not conceal any other domain; it is a direct
expression of the very essence of the world. There is no tragedy or destiny
here with its own purposes as an attempt to justify the world or to remedy
its inadequacies. On the contrary, the world and life appear to be madness
pervaded by chaos. The human is seen as meaningless and purposeless,
incapable of clothing itself in tragedy or destiny. There emerges now
world terror, since presumed world order is a joke. Life itself is grotesque
and the forms into which it clothes itself reveal its banality and
superficiality. Demonic terror is not a threat of transgression, but a trace of
the dissolution of the known daily world, a direct exhibition of the fact that
our daily life and understanding are a comedy without descendants or
results.
Rudolf Majut contends that the demonic appears during epochs of
dissolution of all known orders; all institutions collapse and life is exposed
as a chaotic event. In times like these some presumptuously decide that the
old collapsing orders have to be helped along toward a speedier
dissolution and be replaced by new and fresh orders.3 In the twentieth
century there have been hysterical efforts by fascism and communism,
fundamentalist revivals and scientific assurances, all aiming to establish
one absolute order or another. While these efforts are demonic, their
demonic is still traditional, replacing one absolute order by another. But
they go to uncanny lengths in an attempt to cover over the basic demonic
of our age, appearing as an abyss of chaos. After all, the new orders were
more furiously destructive than anything seen in previous history. The
search for new orders is a cosmic posturing in the face of chaos, in the face
of a foreboding that all orders are mere facades, a thin civilizational veneer
barely concealing the abyss. One is reminded of Heinrich Heine’s
Florentine Nights where the ghosts of young brides dance on their own
cold graves; their dances are the more nonsensical when we know that the
brides feel the cold graves under their feet, the abyss where they disappear
not for salvation or punishment, but for dissolution. Such scenes confirm
Heine’s understanding of the absurdity of daily postures and self-
inflations. The reality of order is an image, phantasm, while demonic
fantasticalness and strangeness pervade the entire experience of life. Such
3
Rudolf Majut, Lebensbuehne und Marionette; ein Beitrag zur
seelengeschichtlichen Entwicklung von der Genie (The Stage of Life and Puppets:
A Contribution to the Cultural-Historical Unfolding of Genius) (Nendelen/
Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1967).
a demonic is anti-apocalyptic. While decay and dissolution appear

everywhere, there is no destruction of the world; rather there is an
exhibition of the untenable ground of the world. Heine’s demons parade in
a blood-red sea to reveal their presence; they do not battle the good or
tempt with evil. There is no other purpose but self-exhibition. The
emerging demons reveal the power that is collapsing worldly order.
Demonic in Literature
In Karl Immerman’s writing one of the characters, Flamchen, is
marked by a strangeness that seeps through everything. Although
Immerman’s theatre is designed to show the superficiality of theatre in
contrast to nature, Flamchen’s actions are nonetheless excessive,
destructive, and transgress all boundaries. They represent the degeneration
of all forms down to senselessness. Just as her puppies and monkeys, her
“wild crowd” which she feeds is depicted as avaricious without limit.
Sensible action is deformed toward the demonic. Lack of sense and
purpose is complemented by a one-sided vitality that immediately
fragments itself into nonsense and chaos.4 Since demonically traced chaos
releases things from all limits, creativity is turned toward the absurd. Don
Juan, for example, vitalizes everything but his vitalizations give birth to
unrecognizable grotesques. Creativity is distortion, as if it were a parade of
chaos that sinks into an abyss under the weight of chimeras. Immerman
fights valiantly against such phantasms with his prosaic realism, yet what
he reveals is a senseless world whose power cannot be overcome.
The depiction is not concerned with the dissolution of things into
chaos, but with the very principle of dissolution, inherent in the cosmos.
Here every normal human characteristic is merely an agent of decadence
and dissolution. One of Immerman’s characters, Durr, is suffused with
demonic powers. He forces a woman to study demonology to such an
extent that she is led to leer at all occultisms. Old demons and spirits are
abolished as lies and illusions, while their place is taken by the demonic
that is pre-civilized, preconscious. Durr is not a representative of another
world, but a trace in the world of the principle of dissolution. Another
figure, a witch, seems to possess access to another world but it turns out
that she is an “envoy without a home.” Envoys no longer have homes in
other worlds and testify that the demonic inheres in the very essence of our
world. Although demonism is sometimes made comic through grotesque
4
See Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. W. Ulrich
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 88.
Algis Mickunas 89
images, these images do not disarm the demonic because, having no home,
they cannot be exiled or exorcised. Another figure, Patriotenkaspar, is not
an envoy of other-worldly powers and yet he, too, traces uncanny cosmic
shocks that expose decaying power in all of its forms. Although he is
exiled from a peaceful and orderly Oberdorf, his tireless presence shows
that the exile is unsuccessful. He lives in the town’s vicinity as an abyss
that opens at any sign of decay. Thus Patriotenkaspar creeps around and
seeps into everything. He slinks around homes looking for any crack
through which to get in, and always finds one. Not an envoy from another
world, his demonic reveals that human efforts to thwart omnipresent chaos
are merely comic. Even in Adalbert Stifter’s writings, figures such as
Brigitta are depicted as grotesque – not because they are deviations from
an ideal, but because they are designed to destroy the ideal.5
After Romanticism writers are no longer able to extricate themselves
from the demonic. The agents of evil in Romanticism hand over their
masks to the envoys of chaos. Such envoys form a covenant with modern
consciousness where Romantic eternal joy opens up a space for the
presence of an abyss and chaos in the forms of the grotesque and the
distorted that constantly veer into chaos. Apparent efforts to hold onto
some form of orderly realism are in vain and order constantly escapes
realization. Even when real order and ideals based on it seem to be
durable, demonic figures reveal the intrusions of chaos into unsuspecting
peaceful life. In Theodor Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter the sea, having sent
fearsome figures, finally breaks the barriers and threatens to engulf all
orderly life. Anything depicted as grotesque, designed during other periods
to disarm the demonic as something to be mocked, is now mocking our
puny efforts to withstand the abyss.6
Amidst Us
Charles Baudelaire extends the understanding of beauty to include the
bizarre. In Curiosités esthétiques he states, for example: “Le beau est
tojours bizarre” (“The beautiful is always bizarre”). Absence of standards,
deviation from norm, and deformity are beautiful. The search for creative
novelties and rejuvenation now discovers chaos and the grotesque as
attractive subject matter. With the abolition of other worlds, and thus of
hell, the sphere of the otherworldly demonic no longer holds sway. It is
5
Adalbert Stifter, Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works), vol. 3 (Prag: 1901-1927),
225.
6
Theodor Storm, Werke (Works), vol. 3 (Muenchen: Th. Knauer, 1955), 273.
now in the world; moreover, it dominates its process. Naturalness is of no

value and is indeed repulsive. It goes without saying that the critique of
naturalism is a critique of civilized naturalism. As Hippolyte-Adolphe
Taine suggests while commenting on Baudelaire, “the corsets and clothing
of our ladies are cutting into their rumps. Just look at summer resorts and
notice the sad and miraculous distortions, among them the red and pallid
colors of their skins. They have lost the habit of the sun; they are irradiated
only by civilization.”7
Decay is regarded positively as something having magical attraction.
In his famous poem “Une Charogne” (“A Carcass”) Baudelaire depicts a
decomposing body that nonetheless radiates a morbid attraction. It is
phosphorescent and shifts from a simple body into a vision, a “carcasse
superb,” which is compared to a blossoming flower. At the end, we are
told that everything is temporal, a theme that also shows up in Danse
Macabre, where skeletons dressed in fine attire reveal in their dance
universal dissipation. The demonic shows up in Baudelaire’s “destruction”
as an element of total confusion and, according to Arthur Rimbaud, his
poetic cycle Fleurs du mal unfolds the demonic where the world itself is
turned inside out. The human being is sick, criminal, with a horrible soul.
As Rimbaud suggests, here reality is provoked and order is swept aside.8
If we were to evaluate the demonic in statements made by such authors
as Heinrich Hart, Irma von Troll-Borostynais, Leo Berg, we would find
the following theoretical sketch: the demonic reveals the basic truth about
human beings and the world.9 We must accept demonic terror, horror, and
chaos as the state of the world. As such, it does not merely oppose the
flood of traditional beauty, order, and pleasure, but rather pervades it all
from the outset. Beauty and harmony are principles of an old tradition,
while the contemporary call ought to be the truth of the cosmos: the
demonic, horror, and chaos. They can no longer be depicted negatively,
but must be given a founding role in all creativity. Healthy naturalism
simply hides the gnarled nerves that possess more truth than apparent
robustness. The latter is an exaggeration and a lie. Even Vincent van
7
Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, Philosophie de l’art (Philosophy of Art) (Paris:
Hermann, 1964), 470.
8
Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 61.
9
Heinrich Hart, “Der Kampf um die Form in der zeitgenoessischen Dichtung”
(The Struggle over Form in Contemporary Poetry), in Krirische Jahrbuch 1:2
(1927), p. 75); Irma von Troll-Borostynais, “Die Wahrheit im modernen Roman”
(Truth in the Modern Novel), in Gesellschaft 2:4 (1921), p. 217; and Leo Berg,
Der Naturalismus: zur Psychologie der modernen Kunst (Naturalism: Towards a
Psychology of Modern Art) (Muenchen, 1982), 129.
Algis Mickunas 91
Gogh’s oeuvre suggests that no figure, regardless how normal it may look
to an academic eye, is necessary in the painting of our times. To paint an
orderly environment is nonsensical. With red and green colors he wants to
paint horrible suffering, he wants to evoke shock and pain.
Anti-naturalism is stressed in Georg Heym’s writings; when he was
seventeen he still believed that a human being is destined to be noble and
good and must contribute to the well-being of all. Only a few years later
he proclaims that the orderly peace is cunning and as oily as wax shining
on old furniture. “I choke on my enthusiasm for the banality of our times.
Our illness is to live at the end of the world, its evening which chokes one
so badly that it is no longer possible to endure the stench of decay. I hope
for war, but even that will not do. We need more than war, we need the
demonic.”10 In his poem Die Vorstadt (The Outskirts) we find everything
that is vanishing and devitalized, all that is decrepit and sick.11 The general
spread of sickness and decay is seen as having no place, as if appearing
out of nowhere. Demonic chaos no longer comes from another world, but
appears everywhere. Thus it has no source, since it is itself the origin; it is
nowhere and everywhere, at no and at all times. What is interesting in
Heym’s depiction of the demonic is that in it all heavenly characteristics
are replaced by their demonic counterparts. His poem “Schwarze Visionen:
an einer imaginären Geliebte” (“Black Visions: To an Imaginary
Beloved”) depicts a beauty that is at once demonic and heavenly. In a
setting marked by a high altar, organ, choirs, and vaults the demonic
appears: “Deeper than thousand heavens deeper, his melancholy – radiant
as hell itself.” The demon shows up, moreover, like a divinity of feeling:
Note the fire around his magnificent head; he is two horned in the pride of
dusk,
alluring with darkness from his enticing forest.
The demonic is depicted not as something to be mocked, but as

magnificent and powerful:
Come! His mouth as sweet as fruit; his blood like wine, slow and heavy; from
his mouth a dusk red fragrance; weighty blue haze heat from distant
summer sea;
10
Georg Heym, Gesammelte Gedichte, mit einer Darstellung seines Lebens und
Sterbens (Collected Poems with an Account of His Life and Death), ed. C. Seelig
(Zuerich: Verlag der Arche,1947), 24. Translation from the German here and
further is mine, unless otherwise specified.
11
Ibid., p. 219.
Come! Graceful hair of youth in his lines, like young stars, the golden night
casts a trembling light on his face, golden beard, like crystal in its depths.
Such a depiction is similar to Baudelaire’s understanding of the demonic

as an embodiment of beauty and magnificence. Yet there is a noticeable
tension between magnificence and something distant, repelling. There is a
sense that this graceful figure is horrible and destructive. The radiant
words cover over something uncanny and threatening:
Upward he comes from the abyss, and floats down on flowers, sinks tiredly
into a wound,
Into a grand chalice of blood, blossoming darkly like a bouquet of roses.
Heym unites the demonic with beauty, where all aesthetic, sacral, and
heavenly values are pervaded by a foreboding of the abyss. Heym’s
demonic and its appearance as the very ground of the world points to the
loss of heaven and its order. Once the order of the world was assured by a
heavenly power; the loss of this power and its light exiles the world into
darkness and chaos:
The dark sky is pouring downward, overfilled with horror, into a black lagoon,
With faded clouds the pale abyss threatens with the unholy, the night bringing
misfortune.
The loss of heaven is the loss of hell, and its appearance amidst the world.
As Heym writes:
How grand was the face of the shining moon, bringing on a horizon with half
fullness another world.
Like a meteorite sunk into a forest has lost its way, oppressing the forest with
its burning veil
Expanded as an air ship above the meadow, unknown giant’s staring eye,
awesome blast of red fire
Bloody mask severed in half, the churchyard trees stirred around the grave
Through them slinked a red radiating dog, barked silently as with cat’s howl
The black dog vanished, and silently lay the air.
This is a demonization of nature. The rising moon looks like a spiritual

vessel, and like the eye of unknown depths unenlightened by heavenly
sun. As Christoph Eykman points out, these lines reveal Heym’s vision as
deviation from visible reality.12 It is as though some forces that no longer
12
Christoph Eykman, Die Funktion des Häßlichen (The Function of the Ugly)
(Bonn: H. Bouvier u. Co. Verlag, 1969), 27.
Algis Mickunas 93
can find a place for themselves in an empty sky without a purpose or

direction were transformed into an abyss, from which emerges a dark
demonic illumination of the world. The demonic arises out of the
emptiness of lost heaven. This emptiness is expressed as infinite space:
“Before the beginning of night in eternal space” or “the bluish emptiness
of infinite space.” In this emptiness human powers lose their sense; it is an
illusion. This emptiness allows the poet to distort the reality that has
become inessential:
All is empty, all death mask; when it shatters, there is nothing inside, no odour,
no blood, empty fragments.
With the loss of essence all interiority collapses; this is what is

superficially called by postmodernity “the death of the subject.” As Heym
writes in his Daemonen, “the dark ones are moving, grandiose, empty,
empty, round, and faceless.”13 Faceless, the demonic is the formless
ground of all that annihilates all forms. The poet shifts all natural events
and civilizations toward the emptiness from which arises all destructive
power. According to Eykman, Heym’s poetry traces metaphysical images
that intrude into our fleeting days.14
Another poet, Georg Trakl, also explicates the powerlessness of old
metaphysics. He expresses this loss through the images of vanishing
divinities: “I saw divinities falling into night; powerless and shattered are
sacred harps.” With the advance of the demonic not only divinities, but
even their retinues must vanish: “With broken breast a fiery angel crashes
upon a rocky crag.” From this vanishing arises the night of horror:
You shattered eyes, black mouths, where a descendent in a soft night forebodes
alone the darkest end.
Or:
before our sorrow and our joy, a stony mocking of an empty mask;
all earthly things have shattered on it, and this still unbeknownst to us.
Adolph Behne suggests that traditional thinking and art are too limited;
they require something oriental. According to him, the Orient is an ocean,
while the West is an islet where one can tie one’s boat in safety and
proclaim harmony and luminescence. Although the West senses open
13
Georg Heym, Gedichte und Prosa (Poems and Prose), vol. 5, ed. H. Rauschning
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1962), 138.
14
Eykman, op. cit., p. 27.
storms and deep furrows of oceanic waves, it praises its own flat inlet as
an ideal. What is stormy, what arises in the fury of ocean storms is
regarded as too intense, barbaric, and distorted. The West has entered the
period of the dark, stormy, and pathless oceanic chaos.15
The Other Side of Creation

It has been repeated many times since Nietzsche that creativity requires
some chaos in our souls. Even Emmanuel Levinas, who became a devout
follower of a monistic divinity, once claimed that monism leaves no room
for creativity. What we saw in the writings about the demonic is the other
side, the total destruction as an opening to chaos without replacement by
any civilizing veneer. It is reaching into the horror of something
completely uncanny, a pre-civilized, chaotic from which purportedly
comes creation of various recognizable shapes and order. Once again, the
origin is not to be understood as anything civilized, even as archƝ and
magic. What is this pre-civilized state as our awareness?
It has been also stated since Nietzsche that all life is exercise of power,
vitality; in order to live life must violate and destroy other life. The
destructiveness is deemed to flow from the drive for survival. This drive
inheres in the most radically opposed theses, from evolution to theology.
In the latter, members of personality cults thank the lord for having saved
them from a tornado, a storm, or some other disaster. And if no disaster
threatens, there is constant genuflection and begging to be “saved” for a
survival in “another world” – even if such salvation takes the form of self-
destruction in order to be “reborn” or destruction of others, designated the
enemies of the lord, to gain survival points. Even hell is acceptable as long
as one continues to exist. Survival is carried into the metaphysical realm.
The notion of survival constantly transgresses against the ontological
awareness of the world in its own right and introduces functions that tend
to destroy or abolish such awareness. We have learned from modern
rationality that whatever is present in the world is seen directly as
instrumental, as means for some purpose or, more immediately, as a sign
among other signs. The first perception of things in the world is
circumspective such that everything is perceived as being “in order to . . .”
and not as it is in itself; perception of the world is annihilated at the outset
in favour of valuation. The latter has no rational rules since rationality
functions merely as a calculative value, and it is one of the major traces of
15
Adolph Behne, Die Wiederkehr der Kunst (The Return of Art) (Leipzig: Kurt
Wolff Verlag, 1919), 61.
Algis Mickunas 95
modern chaos. Evaluative awareness is not given as anything that could be

explained by worldly things and events, whether material, psychological,
or mental, since even these aspects depend upon their function as selected
with a view to their value and re-constructible. Valuation skips over all
these factors and simply points to more valuation – without any reason.
Reason is no longer relevant as the ground for the chaos of our times.
Apart from more valuation, what do these values serve? We know from
all postmodern claims that, at base, human beings are nothing other than
desiring events such that even the will to power is subtended by a desire for
power. The desire itself is thus not identical to power. Nor is it identical to
any psychological immanence, since the desire to change our psychological
experiences, to reconstruct our mental functions is different from these. In
this sense desire, which initially emerged with magic, is transformed in the
modern world into a metaphysical background that is not given directly, but
is traceable by the destruction it wreaks. Here we uncover not the creative,
but the destructive, the other side of chaos. While chaos was once regarded
as a source of creativity, we must also note the ways chaos is opened by a
metaphysical desire that is destructive. Buddha’s effort was in fact to avoid
all desires, since whether we desire noble or base objects, they will all lead
to disaster. But the disaster threatening an individual is insignificant in
comparison with the disaster our desire has brought about and continues to
accumulate as the very essence of our history.
The appearance of magic already traces this desire in its excess over
needs. The only natural need there is to guarantee our survival is food. For
that we destroy other lives, but there is no need to engage in sacrifice of
other lives and those of our own kind. The sacrificing that does not serve
our direct hunger is in excess of needs, it is destruction that serves no
purpose. This destruction cannot be rationalized, for any explanation
would be a result of reasoning. To say, for example, that by magic human
beings formed a vital identity with another event in order to assume its
powers, such as in hunting, does not lead any further than the need to eat
or to be protected. But to destroy another life beyond what one needs is an
act of excess that shows a desire that is destructive. It could be said that
sacrifice is practiced to gain favor with or avoid the wrath of animistic
forces but in this case one already proposes a metaphysics that reaches
beyond this individual bear, this moose, and this leopard whose powers
one wishes to assume, and thus reveals a more general desire that demands
sacrifice for no specific need. No explanations of this excess in terms of
future security against enemies or forces yet to be encountered will do;
since in magic awareness there is no temporal distance and no psychic
imagination of future dangers. This general desire, in excess of any
specific need, also appears in the generalized vital forces, such as divinities,
who desire sacrifices despite the notion that they have no specific needs to
maintain their existence. This is specifically the case in Middle Eastern
father, son, and prophet cults. This is a joy in making others suffer, shed
blood, and die under torture and in terror, joy in the other aspect of chaos –
destruction. Indeed, the divinities require sacrifices of what many regard
as one of the main pleasures and sustainers of life – eroticism. Asceticism
is simply an extension of this requirement.
But magic awareness, in which this excess first appears, constitutes a
mere ripple in the vast ocean of destruction. The building and expansion of
civilizations into vast empires show an uncanny persistence and growth of
destruction of others, and reveal chaos in our own selves. Here entire
peoples are eradicated – not at all because the survival of the creators of
empires is suddenly threatened by the lack of food or shelter, nor because
their populations demand an expansion of their power. De Sade’s Juliet
counts her gold coins not because she needs them, but because she enjoys
the thought that her possessions deprive others of theirs. But the
destruction of others does not stop there. Our divinity is the only valid one,
whereas that of our others is not, and theirs must be smashed as false and
evil. But it does not stop even there. Having destroyed their others,
empires do not simply enslave those who remain, but also use them to put
the excess of destruction on display. They create public spectacles where
the others are deliberately exposed to torture and death – to the
accompaniment of cheers and jeers from the watching crowd: here belong
the Roman circus, witch burnings, and even the torture of animals. How
gleeful is the crowd, what happiness and joy on their faces and in their
shouts – happiness that the mob does not achieve in the most exotic
bordellos – and all in the face of excessive torture and destruction,
dissolution into chaos. The very order of empires has at its core the chaos
that is traced by desire for destruction. How gleeful are the faithful
gathered in town and village squares to cheer the torture and the burning
of “witches”!
At this point a brief excursus is in order to show the limits of distinct
phenomena. We spoke of the needs that have to be fulfilled in order for the
human being to survive. In this domain no desires are necessary, since
hunger simply compels one to kill and eat the prey. In some cases this
leads to a consumerism that does not reach beyond infantilism; the current
level of our civilization is largely infantilistic in this sense. We need this,
and more of it, even if we no longer have any room for it. An object may
have use value but we have too many of such objects for them to be of any
use based on direct need. The price for accumulating such objects is, of
Algis Mickunas 97
course, excessive destruction of our environment and our others. Here the
acquisition of excessive possessions beyond any use value – money,
things, palaces, mansions, or recreation equipment – neither satisfies
hunger nor provides shelter, but is undertaken for the sake of one’s sense
of significance. The desire for significance is a phenomenon of
consciousness that pervades the building of empires. We have power, but
what the power demonstrates is our significance. I am an emperor and live
a sumptuous life and therefore am most significant. I build sumptuous
monuments to myself and hence become historically significant. Desire for
significance requires a manifestation in created things that spell the
destruction of once immediately given but now transcended environment.
Such a direct transcendence of the immediate for the sake of significance
is metaphysical in nature. We only have to recall the big pseudo-
philosophical battle around the question of meaning: Is the world
meaningful or is it we that give meaning to the world? Jean Baudrillard
captured this metaphysics in the notion of the simulacrum. Consumerism
is rooted not in a biological benefit, but in the metaphysics of the
simulacrum. In fact our biological satiation sends us to diet gurus and
plastic surgeons. We do not acquire things for consumption; rather, we
take possession of signs that proclaim our significance. One expression of
this drive towards possession in excess of use value is globalization.
Desire appears once needs are satisfied. Other creatures go to sleep or
lounge around, but we desire to “create” and thus to destroy the way things
are in their own right. Desire is already an excess of destruction over need.
In need we use things, whereas in desire we abuse them to the point of
becoming destructive. While use value functions at the level of what chaos
theory calls open possibilities of realizable events, desire is premised on
the possibility of the impossible. We already know that anything acquired
even in excess of usefulness is still inadequate for desire. This means that
desire has no object – it is infinite and has neither orientation nor specific
place or time. The metaphysics of Levinas is premised on this notion of an
infinite desire that can never be fulfilled.16 It is the ground of nomadic life.
Desire reaches beyond anything with temporal or spatial, vital or
psychological, mental or rational limits. In this sense desire cannot be
satisfied. It belongs to the atemporal and aperspectival awareness – not as
something creative but as totally destructive. It opens the abyss of
emptiness usually expressed in numerous “high metaphysics” that posit
empty and unreachable idealities deemed to be perfect. Thus we desire
16
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 140ff.
perfect beauty, perfect power, ultimate truth, perfect justice, perfect

children, lovers, and perfect love in return. While empty and abysmal,
these objects of desire demand the destruction of everything that does not
conform to their impossible standard. Since we too cannot “live up to”
these standards, we get confused, lost, and finally do not know what we
desire. This suggests that the source of being irritated is when needs are
fulfilled and desire opens up to itself. I desire, but know not what, I fret
about while everything around me is banal and inadequate. I want to
smash things, destroy both them and myself as inadequate. Nothing will
do and nothing will ever satisfy this metaphysical phenomenon of desire.
As Max Weber noted in relationship to Protestant ethics, a person in
business, who has acquired a modicum of comfortable life cannot sit back
once his task is finished. He begins to fret and gets nervous, looking for
something to do. Within this ethic the desire for the absolute, the infinite,
and the unknowable is what confuses such a person. Such a person will
finally invest his life in wealth but will remain unsure if that is what the
absolute wants. Wealth will be, at best, a sign and all he will ever do is
struggle continuously to accumulate more signs, but never enough of
them. In the process he will not mind sacrificing everything in this world.
His desire is facing an absolute that is simply a trace of an abyss. Thus
desire does not belong within such designations as rational, irrational,
emotional, vital, ethical, moral, amoral or immoral.
Before we explore further depths of desire as something destructive,
one of its aspects needs to be mentioned, namely, its power to individuate
while simultaneously de-individuating all things as objects destined for
destruction. There is no collective desire; the latter is always the core of a
metaphysical individual; the more unique the person, the more she is
individual, the more intense is her desire. The very givenness of desire
demands solitude, individual separation, as is the case with tyrants,
mendicants, philosophers, and poets, where desire often manifests itself as
boredom. As social beings, we are related to objects of needs that we
obtain by using others. But by virtue of having no specific object desire
breaks our relation to others, even when we seek to invest in others our
hopes of satiating the singular intensity of desire. Yet it is an impossible
hope, and the desire that is in the final analysis insatiable shows its
destructive essence, its constant opening up to chaos. The subject is a life
that desires itself and thus, sensing itself as finite, it creates infinite being
as an expression of desire’s infinite destructive side. As subjects we are
because we desire. As Nietzsche suggested, life is a dark, mysterious force
desiring itself. But he also pointed out that such desiring is the source of
Algis Mickunas 99
suffering since this desire cannot be fulfilled by anything and thus it is in

constant turmoil and torment.17
We often hear of the joys but above all of the suffering of creativity.
The creator is constantly shadowed by the limitless desire for more in
creative production, for more to fill the “ideal” creation, the ideal-classical
work, for more destruction of his own products as inadequate. To create is
to destroy. If we are a desire to create, then we are also a desire to destroy.
A creator not only creates works, but also creates himself as a creator. But
this also means that, in creativity, with each new work as an expression of
desire for more, there is also a destruction of what one has made of
oneself. The infinite desire that wants to realize itself in creative works is
also a desire for self-destruction in which there is no resting in what one
has become and what one has accomplished. Such an infinite desire
beyond any need is the perpetuum mobile of creative destruction.
Chaos in Destruction
Even in its most archaic form a human being is radically distinct from
any non-human living entity from any time period. The latter lives by
satisfying its needs and by using others; the destruction that it engages in
is determined by the necessity to fulfill its needs. As the unbounded
contemporary consumerism shows, the human being has no such measure.
Consumerism is an indication not of needs, but of boredom. We fill
emptiness with shopping – we go to the great “centers,” spend hours
“looking for values,” and eight hours later find that “there was nothing
there that I wanted.” This emptiness is the destructive aspect that opens
chaos and the abyss. The archaic human being, such as the head hunter in
Irian Jaya, not only satisfies his needs, but also wants to destroy his other;
what he wants is not booty or more sex (which are basic Middle Eastern
and Western preoccupations), but his other’s head – and for what? He
wants it because of magic, because of his desire to gain the identity of the
other, as well as to become a significant member of his group. The head
hunt is no longer driven by the use value of its object, but becomes the
sign of a metaphysical preoccupation. The very measure of need and use is
already transgressed by the desire to destroy for the sake of destruction. It
is the greatest joy that is expressed in rituals of torturing and killing one’s
own kind. There is no essential difference between a head hunter in Irian
Jaya and St. Thomas Aquinas. After all, the latter did state that, apart from
17
Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden (Works in Three Volumes), vol. 2,
ed. K. Schlechta (München: Carl Hauser Verlag, 1966), 563ff.
the joy of being with his heavenly father, the second greatest joy for him is
to watch the tortures of the damned. This desire for destruction as an
opening to chaos is what comprises the so called “world openness of
human essence.”
The endless wars, the pride in going off to kill and do so “legitimately”
are hardly an outcome of biological, psychological, or even economic
necessities. Peaceful life is nonsense; we go to build empires and enjoy
our triumphant entrance into the domains of others as glorious, elevated,
and significant. Notably, other creatures do not build empires. Every
empire is primarily an expression of a desire to destroy the others, and
what empires build is premised on more destruction of others and, let us be
reminded, destruction of ourselves. The gladiatorial battles, the circus,
where one tested the latest sophisticated implements of sadistic torture and
murder, reveal the desire to destroy, the joy and pride taken in the
destruction. It would be strange to claim that the desire for destruction
weakens with progress. What do exemplary TV figures, the great stars of
the screen reveal? The terminators, the Rambos, the star wars – down to
the destruction of planets – enacted by positively and heroically portrayed
killers; devastation, demolition of cities, rape and pillage, rolling heads,
and streams of blood – all to the cheers of the most advanced and civilized
public. The terminators, the Rambos, the fight night heroes are all cool,
intense, and angry, teed off at the entire universe, ready to kill. Chilly to
the max. What this signifies is not only an opening to chaos through
destruction, but also, conversely, the disclosure that the chaos that is the
origin of all these endless desires for destruction, is innocent. Such desire
for and joy in destruction is becoming global daily fare. The greatest
minds, most creative inventors, and foremost researchers were and are at
the service of improving our military destructiveness. Historians point out
correctly that the greatest innovations and technological advances come
during wars. The twentieth century is a witness to that. Even medical
technology, as historians like Foucault have argued, was first invented as
means of torture for joyful public spectacle. After Auschwitzes and Gulags
we can no longer claim to be either fallen angels or risen apes. As I noted
above, the former have been destroyed, while the latter would disown us.
And we can no longer claim that we are born good and are ruined by our
bad institutions and social environment. Is it not we who create the
institutions and the man-made environment at the expense of its natural
counterpart? We still are mesmerized by the economic “testaments”
promising salvation in the paradise of total consumerism, or are tempted
by the ideological narcotics dreamt up by beautiful spirits. Precisely these
Algis Mickunas 101
hypnoses and narcotics are traces of our insatiable, destructive desire that
manifests our chaos.
Reality
To realize this may be essential in order to understand human
inadequacy, a lack of reality and hence a desire to invent all sorts of “true
reality.” This lack of being – originally called chaos – is the source of all
transcendence, culture, and generally human world. Our highest
achievements are precisely masks obfuscating this lack at our core. While
there may be claims that the world appears to have lacunae and
inadequacies, in truth they are inadequacies and dissatisfactions with the
world that we ourselves have invented and thus our demand to improve
things drives us towards destroying our own inventions and others in their
wake. It is a continuous and incessant effort to cover up our own abyss
appearing as infinite desire, the desire of desire. Thus it cannot be satiated
by temporary constructs. Divinities are empty inventions of an abyss. In
the plenitude of the world around us, in the thick of presence, there
appears, as Sartre noted, the Nothingness that forever transcends all being.
Thus any definition of being points to this transcending and yet all
pervasive presence of nothing, the abyss, the indefinable variant of chaos.
But this also means that whatever is comprehended by us is an arbitrary
construct, and arbitrariness has no rules, is chaotic. Post-moderns are
jumping for joy seeing their desire partially fulfilled: everything, including
ourselves, is an arbitrary cultural construct and thus can be arbitrarily
deconstructed and reconstructed. We should be reminded that arbitrariness
is an expression of unbridled power to destroy for the sake of destruction.
No justification required. All justifications are also arbitrary inventions,
stories that have no reference and represent nothing.
The proclamation that the world lacks secure being, that it is at base
chaos, reveals an inadequacy in our own self-awareness and our own
desire to fill this inadequacy not by the world as chaos, but by our own
efforts to invent a metaphysical world that will never be adequate either,
and hence to be destroyed all the way to the births and deaths of numerous
divinities, their mothers, and their retinues. This abyss must be absolute,
even if it is expressed in myriad ways. All the efforts to cover over this
desire for chaos, even by such claims that we are created images of some
metaphysical Being, even by such claims that we are a risen ape, show our
dissatisfaction, because the risen ape is destined for the Overman, and the
latter is merely a wrinkle in the desire to destroy, to reach “beyond.” The
modern demonic that pervades the conception of reality, the opening to
abysmal chaos, is the source of the creation of great theological facades

and theocratic empires – whether they are sacred or profane.
Postscript
Magic, the first appearance of want, the first initiation of sacrifice that
exceeds human needs, already forebodes the a priori presence of
destruction in our world, chaos. No social, political economic, or
biological controls can abolish this magical aspect. If it were merely
psychological or biological we could invent a pill, transform the genetic
code, and create a new man. But this invention is also premised on a desire
for a new, more perfect man and hence the appearance of the new man is
equivalent to the destruction of the old in favor of the new. We have
simply perfected the avenue to chaos. The “science” of chaos can be
applauded for inventing comfortable consolations that fill the gaping and
incomprehensible ground of our modern world. No pronouncements of
world unity, world integration, or integral consciousness can be adequate
if we cannot integrate the appearance of this most uncanny guest – chaos
in its demonic, destructive presence.
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Eykman, Christoph. Die Funktion des Häßlichen. Bonn: H. Bouvier u. Co.
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THIS BODY SPEAKS:
PHAEDRA’S THEATRICAL SUICIDE
REBECCA JOHANNSEN
The act of suicide is theatrical. People who commit suicide establish

the setting, choose their audience (those closest to them that will be
impacted by the act, by the location of the death, and the person or the
people who will discover the body), and write a text on their body, as well
as in the space. Everything from the damage done to the body itself to its
surroundings conveys a text that we read in an attempt to understand the
ultimate question: why? Did the person leave a note? How did they choose
to kill themselves? What were their final words? Where were they? Those
who survive search for meaning in all of these places in order to
understand why. And we must understand “why” in order to position
ourselves within the moment, to move beyond the liminality into which
we are plunged by this “unnatural” act, and to make sense of the world
again. The terrorizing moment forces us to question the world and our
place within it and, although the healing process seeks to cover up and
move past that placelessness within the world, the space is always
occluded, empty; our questions are never really answered and our position
within the world always tenuous. The image of the body in death is always
present and the space where the body died, always infused with the energy
of that act of terror. So how do we transfer these ideas to the space of the
theatre? What is art’s role in such an act of terror? How does the theatrical
suicided body affect us?
Theatrical performance allows us a unique opportunity to create a
space of simulated reality in which we place characters and conflict and
observe how each responds to that space, and the events that occur within
it. Moreover, as Anthony Kubiak has argued, “theatre is the site in which
cultural consciousness and identity come into being through fear; it is the
proleptic locus of terror’s transformation from thought into culture and its
terrorisms, staging the very birth of that which seemingly gives it birth—
106 This Body Speaks: Phaedra’s Theatrical Suicide
namely Tragedy.”1 The theatrical space is liminal, constantly on the edge

of becoming something solid and controllable, but ultimately escaping
such control. The Greek theatrical space was filled with acts of terror, and
central to the conflict in Greek drama was the division between the male
and the female. The drama is where the masculine fear of female sexuality
is played out, with murderous and lascivious women dominating the
theatrical space. And, while the Greek stage is full of women usurping
power through murder, it is in their suicide that the greatest questions are
raised as to possession of space and body.
The Greek Feminine Body

Obsession with women’s chastity and control of their bodies permeates
society and tragedy throughout the history of western civilization and the
act of suicide establishes permanent possession of the body; it is an act
that deeply disrupts and disturbs the psyche and the space of play. Female
sexuality must be contained in order for women to fall under the control of
men. According to Lacan, the phallus becomes a symbol not only of
sexual difference, but also of power. In order for a woman to fall into
place and “carry on the business of society,” she must accept that, though
she may possess the phallus by supplying the body that circulates power,
her body merely acts as a conduit through which the power is conferred
upon another male: from her father through her to her husband and down
from her to her male children.2 The source of all female power lies in the
power of procreation and that is the basic dilemma posed by the female
body: the indispensable role of women in fertility for the continuation of
the species, and the potential disruption of that process by her free exercise
of sexuality. It is in the moment of recognition that she possesses the
phallus that the woman’s body becomes dangerous.
Free exercise of women’s sexuality is the source of male anxiety over
procreation and distribution of power. Since the time of the Greeks, and
even before, women’s sexuality was stigmatized and separated into the
categories of virgin and whore. Men’s uneasiness with the hidden nature
of women’s sexuality has forced an unattainable ideal upon virginity and
chastity, and women in drama from the Greeks to the modern era are
always fighting to retain their good reputation. Though great value has
1
Anthony Kubiak, Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre
History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 5.
2
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”
in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayne R. Reiter (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1975), 189.
Rebecca Johannsen 107
always been placed on honourable women in society, their chastity has

always been in question. The woman once proven chaste can become a
whore in an instant, as her thoughts and desires are always considered
changeable and unknowable.
In Stages of Terror Kubiak notes that “the tragic hero’s [moment of]
realization . . . terrorizes him into silence.”3 The moment of greatest
tragedy eludes articulation and creates “a terror that breathes in the
fractures that it opens.”4 The self-destruction of the female body on stage,
while terrorizing all into silence, seeks to explode such fractures. Refusing
to temper her passion, but refusing to give in to it as well, Phaedra’s
suicided body rejects the virgin/whore dichotomy and causes the entire
system to collapse. Its collapse may only last for that moment of silence,
yet the cracks have widened. Through an examination of Euripides’
Hippolytus we can understand female suicide as an act of agency.
Phaedra’s remaining body, despite being dead, speaks to create a language
all her own in the moment of silence that her act engenders.
While there are many women in Greek drama who commit suicide, the
story of Phaedra is a remarkable place to start this investigation because
her story has been re-told through the ages, with the main plot remaining
intact but the conditions of her suicide changing from version to version,
with some interesting implications. According to Euripides and Seneca,
Phaedra was the daughter of Pasiphae and King Minos. Her father was
ordered to sacrifice to Poseidon a white bull that emerged from the sea, but
sacrificed instead a different bull. In his rage Poseidon condemned Minos’
wife Pasiphae to fall in love with the bull. With the help of the inventor
Daedalus, Pasiphae managed to mate with the bull and later gave birth to
the Minotaur. From there, the love woes of the women of Pasiphae’s line
increased. Phaedra’s sister Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and helped
him to defeat the Minotaur, only to be betrayed by him later. After raping
the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta, who gave birth to his son
Hippolytus, Theseus marries Phaedra. Phaedra’s curse was to fall in love
with her stepson Hippolytus, who had sworn a vow of celibacy to the
goddess Artemis. The virgin Artemis has a permanent contrast to the love
goddess Aphrodite, who, as Phaedra claims in one version of the play, has
cursed her line because she is
3
Kubiak, 29.
4
Ibid.
descended from the sun

who revealed her adulterous affair with Mars
and showed them trapped in their embrace
so she heaps on all of us unspeakable scandals.5
Several versions of Phaedra’s story begin with Theseus’ absence from

Troezen, where she and Hippolytus wait for his return. Phaedra confesses
her love for Hippolytus to her Nurse and Hippolytus somehow finds out
her secret (whether through her own or the Nurse’s admission). To defend
her honour Phaedra accuses Hippolytus of rape and eventually commits
suicide – in some versions revealing her lie about Hippolytus and in others
letting her secret die with her. Hippolytus is condemned to banishment by
Theseus, who asks Poseidon to put his son to death. Theseus discovers the
truth about his son’s innocence too late and Phaedra is demonized as a
whore and a monster after her death. This paper looks at Euripides’
Hippolytus, the earliest extant version of the story in the theatre, to see
how Phaedra’s suicided body impacts the space of the stage.
This Corpse Convicts You: Euripides’ Hippolytus

In the opening of Euripides’ Hippolytus, the stage directions read,
“Home of THESEUS, with its gate flanked by two statues, one to
APHRODITE, and one to ARTEMIS.”6 As the opposing goddesses of love
and chastity, the statues left and right of the palace door symbolize the
struggle Phaedra will encounter in the course of the play: torn as she will
be between the role of a whore and a virgin. Phaedra becomes the
plaything of the goddesses, as Aphrodite declares that she will seek
revenge on Hippolytus for rejecting her in favour of Artemis. Aphrodite
takes credit for Phaedra’s passion for Hippolytus when she says, “This
forbidden love I myself put in her heart” (line 28). However, this Phaedra,
unlike other incarnations of the same character, refuses to blame the gods
for her own affliction. Despite Aphrodite’s curse, Phaedra is determined
not to give in to her “criminal” love. When Phaedra realizes that ignoring
or resisting such a powerful force is impossible, she takes the ultimate
decision:
5
Seneca, Phaedra, trans. Marianne McDonald (unpublished, 2005), lines 125-127.
6
Euripides, Hippolytus, trans. Marianne McDonald (unpublished, 2005), 12. All
quotes from the play are from this version obtained directly from the translator.
. . . [W]hen neither solution worked,

and my passion was too strong for me, I decided to die.
That is the best plan, and no one will deny it.
Just as I like to have my virtues praised,
I do not want a crown of witnesses to my vice.
(Lines 400-404)
Although Phaedra’s resistance to her love for Hippolytus stems from

her complicity with the patriarchal view that her very thoughts of love
outside the marriage bed make her a whore, her desire for death rather than
concealment speaks to her awareness of the double-standard. “I am a
woman,” she states, “an object men criticize” (lines 406-407). Earlier the
chorus mentions Theseus’ many infidelities, and Phaedra’s willingness to
die in order to preserve her reputation sharply highlights the contradiction.
When she says, “I never want to shame my husband, or the children I bore,
but I want them to speak freely as citizens here in glorious Athens with
good reputations as far as their mother is concerned” (lines 419-423),
Phaedra shows that her decision to die rather than suffer for love stems
from the fear that her children will be affected, should her desires ever
become known.
Despite the awareness of the double standard and unlike her counterparts,
Euripides’ Phaedra makes no excuses for her misfortune. She never tries to
justify her love, nor does she blame the gods – her family’s long history of
love curses notwithstanding. Even Theseus’ infidelities are not dwelled
upon, only briefly mentioned, and absent from this version of the story is
Theseus’ descent into Hades to assist in the rape of Persephone. Neither is
there an insinuation that Theseus may be dead, eliminating any excuse
Phaedra may have for pursuing her love. Explaining her recent depression
to the Chorus, Phaedra exclaims:
Women of Troezen, you who live here

at the edge of the kingdom of Pelops.
I have often thought in long stretches of night,
how human beings destroy their lives.
It is not that they make wrong decisions,
because most people have sound judgment.
I look at it another way. We know and understand
the good, but we don’t carry it out. Some out of laziness,
but others simply because they consciously choose
to do something they know to be wrong,
they are driven by pleasure,
and there are many of them in this life:
long conversations, too much free time, sweet delights.
Some people are driven by modest restraint.
There are two kinds of self-control: one is not wrong,

but the other is a debilitating burden on the house.
(Lines 373-388)
Although Phaedra could rightly blame her quandary on the gods –

earlier Aphrodite admits that she has caused this suffering – Phaedra
resists the role of a victim. There is in her stance a sense of agency:
acknowledging that a flaw exists, but refusing to give in to it because of
her sense of honour. Indeed, Phaedra’s earlier complaint that women are
objects men ridicule is echoed later in Theseus’ speech. During his
confrontation with Hippolytus over the accusation of rape, Theseus
declares that “Aphrodite drives many a man mad with lust, and they’re no
more to be relied upon than women, but they can get away with more
because they are men” (lines 967-970). In a society where misogyny is so
deeply ingrained, such a statement from the mouth of Theseus lends more
credence to the point.
Along with her refusal to blame her situation on outside forces,
Euripides’ Phaedra never fails to bear her burden. When the Nurse
exclaims, “[J]ust hide the shameful, and don’t get caught” (line 466),
Phaedra replies, “This type of advice destroys the cities of men and their
homes. Words that are too sweet and delight the ear rather than give sound
advice that leads to a good reputation” (lines 486-489). Phaedra’s
awareness of the impossibility of giving in to her passion and getting away
with it is what drives her to the decision to die. She would rather die than
destroy her house and her children. When Phaedra learns that the Nurse
has revealed her love to Hippolytus, she is horrified and is forced to
plunge head first toward death to redeem herself.
Although the female goddesses exert control over the world of men,
ultimately they operate to reinforce a society that values men and men’s
rights over women. Several of the Greek goddesses that represent the
“unruly” female antedate their male counterparts in the pantheon, but the
Olympian gods (ruled by Zeus and including numerous androgynous
goddesses that re-affirm masculine control) gain victory over the earlier
incarnations of immortals in Greek mythology. Goddesses such as
Apollo’s sister, the virgin Artemis, and Athena embody the ideal Greek
female, virginal and supportive of the man’s right to rule. As such, power
is conferred upon them to roam free and rule over cities. But where does
Aphrodite fit in such a new world order? It is impossible to eject her from
the pantheon; Aphrodite persists and “drives many a man mad with lust,”
and we must question what her presence does to reinforce the idea of the
unruly sexual female as a destructive force.
Aphrodite’s constant presence in the play is symbolic of the ever-

present danger associated with female sexuality. Despite Phaedra’s efforts
to resist Aphrodite’s passions, she cannot escape them. Aphrodite may
physically disappear after the first moments of the play, but she is always
present. It takes the descent of the virgin Artemis to banish Aphrodite
from the play and to set right what was made horribly wrong by her
influence. Aphrodite, Artemis claims, is “the worst enemy of us who
delight in virginity”; she “injected her venom into your wife,” the virgin
goddess reveals to Theseus, “inflicting on her a passion for your son”
(lines 1302-1303). As with female sexuality, a body tainted by the
“whore” Aphrodite can never be made completely clean again. However,
Phaedra’s rejection of both Aphrodite and Artemis almost thwarts the
efforts of both, complicating the categories of virgin and whore. Had the
Nurse not intervened and told Hippolytus of Phaedra’s love for him,
Phaedra would have died with both her and Hippolytus’ reputations intact.
But the world established by the tragedy will not allow Phaedra to defy the
constraints placed on her. It forces a definition of her as one or the other,
and while her desire for self-destruction can be seen as a condemnation of
such categories, it is her accusation against Hippolytus before she dies that
sends a conflicting message and allows the patriarchy to be re-established,
albeit with a gaping hole left in the space she used to occupy.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that the law of tyrants, the law
Euripides understood, is founded upon the threat of violence to the body if
the law is broken, and in such a system “the body . . . now becomes the
stone and the paper, the tablet and the currency on which the new writing
is able to mark its figures, its phoneticism, and its alphabet.”7 The willing
destruction of one’s own self forces the system of “law” into chaos, as the
threat of violence against the body no longer holds credence, and the
suicided body operates as a referendum on the law of the state. Although
Phaedra’s death takes place off stage, as are all deaths in Greek theatre,
her body is brought out for display centre stage. It is now, along with the
tablet she holds in her hand accusing Hippolytus of rape, the text which we
must read, shocked into silence as we are, terrorized but unable to look
away. As Theseus exclaims to Hippolytus, “Why am I arguing with you,
when this corpse most clearly convicts you!” (line 971-972). Her voice
may no longer be heard, but Phaedra’s body brings not just as an
accusation against Hippolytus, but also a conviction of his crime. Earlier,
upon discovering the note Phaedra left behind, Theseus exclaims, “This
7
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 212.
tablet screams vengeance, screams aloud” (line 877). He then invokes the
connection between the conviction brought upon his son by Phaedra’s
body and her words, when he confronts Hippolytus and exclaims, “This
convicts you, you worst of criminals! What oaths are stronger than her
written words?” (lines 959-961). Although the declaration that Phaedra’s
body makes changes in each version, what remains unchanged is the fact
that her body speaks, and it sends a message of Phaedra’s choosing.
In her analysis of the Rape of Lucretia, Stephanie Jed argues that
Lucretia’s kin make a clear distinction between her violated body and her
innocent mind. According to Jed, this distinction is “an integral part of
Western thought from Plato to the present day” and an essential quality of
a chaste mind is “the splitting off of the body as the region of all potential
contamination.”8 Here we see the opposite: Phaedra’s contaminated mind
uses her innocent body to declare Hippolytus, and thus all men, a monster.
In her false accusation of rape, Phaedra attempts to perform the same
function Lucretia’s body performs in her suicide: maintaining chastity
through self-sacrifice. In the case of Lucretia, the suicide of the body is
meant further to separate the contamination from the mind. Even though
the sexual act was not consensual, the body was tainted and must be
purified. In Phaedra’s case, the destruction of the body is meant to purify
the mind from its corrupt desires. What her body speaks, however,
condemns an innocent man for a defilement that never took place.
In many ways the circumstances under which Lucretia and Phaedra act
are remarkably similar. If Phaedra’s story of rape were true, then the
events and their consequences would be identical. Both women would be
“raped” by men close to their husbands, both “rapes” would occur when
their husbands were absent, and both women would chose suicide as a
means of purification. Lucretia’s and Phaedra’s bodies in the moment of
suicide are capable of usurping the power of the phallus. The presence of
Lucretia’s dead body, forever held in its confused moment of being both
chaste and violated, speaks to Tarquinius’ guilt and operates as the
“sword” which convicts him as a rapist. And, when the phallic power that
her dead body possesses is re-conferred upon the men of her lineage, in the
person of Brutus, it causes the expulsion of Tarquinius’ entire line from
the Roman seat of power. In the moment of her death, Jed recalls,
Lucretia’s cousin Brutus finds his kinsmen grieving over her fate. In that
moment Lucretia’s dead body causes a psychic shock to the men in her
family, momentarily usurping the power of the phallus and feminizing
8
Stephanie H. Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of
Humanism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 13.
them. Upon his entrance, Brutus “‘castigated’ them for their tears and
emotions and urged them to take up arms instead of weeping.”9 Brutus
forces his kinsmen to see the rape and suicide objectively and offers an
opportunity to transfer the men of Lucretia’s house out of the liminal
moment and to re-establish their roles as men. After the liminal moment
passes, Brutus took back this power and, whereas “Lucretia’s raped and
lifeless body was paraded throughout Rome,” he was celebrated by the
Romans who erected his statue in the Capitol.10 In other words, in order to
restore order the phallic body of Lucretia had to be publicly displayed but,
much like her usurpation of the phallus, her lifeless body will eventually
decay and will be replaced by a permanent, stony monument to masculine
power.
Similarly, Phaedra’s dead body in the moment of death possesses the
power of the phallus. However, because her suicide is accompanied by a
false accusation, rather than restoring the patriarchal order, her body drives
it further into chaos. Theseus’ attempt to take back the power of the
phallus in order to “right” the wrong done to it while it is still in a liminal
space creates further disruption and confusion. Like the grieving, emotional
Romans of Lucretia’s story, Theseus is feminized in the moment of
Phaedra’s death. In his grief, Theseus fails to see Phaedra’s suicide and
“rape” objectively and to allow the liminal moment to pass. Her body then,
continues to possess the phallic power through its ability to kill
Hippolytus, using a feminized Theseus as its instrument. It takes the
descent of Artemis to force Theseus to return to objectivity and to restore
order. Artemis particularly chastises Theseus for not allowing the moment
of grief to pass. “[Y]ou were wrong not to wait and ask an oracle,” she
says, “or even for time to go by to reveal the truth, but you charged right
ahead, faster than you should have, and used your curse to slay your son”
(lines1320-1324). Even while she admonishes him, she blames Theseus’
momentary loss of control on the influence of female sexuality, namely
Aphrodite, and remarks that Theseus “couldn’t question [his] wife since
she was dead” (lines 1335-1336). Phaedra’s body speaks, but eludes
questioning through its inability to speak.
Unlike Sextus Tarquinius, who is driven by lustful thoughts and the
desire to possess that which he must not possess, Hippolytus is chaste to a
point of being out of tune with nature. In fact, it is Hippolytus’ chaste
lifestyle that offends the goddess Aphrodite in the first place and sets in
motion the events that lead to his death. Lucretia’s chastity likewise leads
9
Jed, p. 10.
10
Ibid.
to her death. In her case, however, chastity is expected, whereas Hippolytus’

is regarded as unnatural. Theseus believes Phaedra’s accusation because in a
world consumed by the containment of women’s sexuality (and therefore
men’s sexuality as potential violators of the female body), all chastity is
questioned and disbelieved.
Indeed, Phaedra’s suicide ensures her chaste reputation because it is an
excellent performance of an appropriate act of a violated woman. Because
she “performs” the role more convincingly than Hippolytus, her words
now have a weight that they previously could not have gained. Because he
cannot perform the role that is required of chastity as convincingly as
Phaedra, now Hippolytus’ reputation is in question and, like a woman, his
words are not to be believed. In fact, Theseus invokes the notion of the
performance of chastity, as he demands of Hippolytus, “Play the bacchant
and honour the smoke and light show of your words” (lines 653-654).
Words have no power unless supported by the weight of the body and the
conviction of action.
Phaedra’s choice to die comes after Hippolytus discovers her love for
him and violently rejects it. Upon hearing of Phaedra’s love from the
Nurse, Hippolytus declares:
Zeus, why do you create women, this evil false coin

to deceive men in full daylight! You should have
found some other way for men to have children.
Men should make deposits at the temple—
bronze, iron, gold—to purchase children,
...
I hate a clever woman. Never would I have in
my home a woman who knows more than a
woman should. Aphrodite breeds indiscretions
more in the clever ones—the stupid one
is saved from this by her limited intelligence.
...
Damn you! I’ll never have enough of hating women,
even if people complain about my speaking
constantly about it. They are simply evil—always.
(Lines 617-666)
Here Hippolytus rails against women for over fifty lines, yet his speech
cannot help but to recall the woman that is also present yet absent in all
versions of the play: Hippolytus’ Amazon mother, Hippolyta. Although
the extent to which Hippolyta was involved in raising her own son is ever-
changing in the various versions of the tale, this speech by Hippolytus
projects very un-Amazonian ideas about women’s function, intelligence,
and sexuality. The Amazon is always absent from the stage, yet her
presence is always felt. The Amazons represent the balance between
Aphrodite and Artemis: sexuality is freely explored, and they have
freedom to roam, hunt, and control their own destiny. Their present
absence serves as a reminder to Phaedra that the ideal will never be
achieved in a patriarchal society. The only option remaining is death.
Returning to the idea with which the play begins, suggested by the
statues of Aphrodite and Artemis flanking the palace, the notion of the
space of the stage, as well as the space of the body, becomes the
battlefront in Phaedra’s performance. The space of the play is in constant
contention, as opposite forces strive to control the physical space and the
physical body, as well as the intellectual space of the play. Phaedra
decides to kill the body when her mind cannot control its urges. Theseus
banishes Hippolytus from the space of the stage, and thus condemns his
body to mutilation. Artemis banishes Aphrodite from the space of the
stage by descending and restoring Hippolytus’ (and to some degree
Phaedra’s) reputation. Hippolyta is banished from the entire space of the
play but the force of her presence is always felt. The struggle to dominate
the space of the play and control the bodies within that space leads to the
contention between the masculine and the feminine. However, despite the
desire to banish “unruly” forces, they are always present and defy total
containment. Though Phaedra, Hippolyta, and Aphrodite are no longer
present at the close of the play, the force of the terror they have exerted is
still felt. And there is always the danger of re-contamination of the space
by the unruly female, as Aphrodite may “inject her venom” in anyone and
even “enslave the unbending hearts of gods” (line 1268).
To return to Kubiak’s Stages of Terror:
The binary opposition between extremes of violence and power collapses
at a point just beyond the extreme. This collapse is fundamentally a
collapse of meaning—when power and violence are held in equilibrium,
when each supports and feeds off the other as Other, their opposition is
maintained and “meaning” is preserved in the binary opposition itself. But
when the equilibrium is upset, the polarities collapse into a sameness that
is electrifying . . . this is yet another way of understanding theatre’s terror
which is born in the fractures of perception and concealed in the double
bind (p. 44).
The act of Phaedra’s suicide operates as an overpowering shock to the

space of the stage which forces us to question the very nature of the
masculine and the feminine, causing a momentary silence and fracture,
whereby the forces at work, vying for the space, must recuperate and
reconstruct in order to continue. Ultimately, Theseus attempts to restore
the patriarchal order by declaring Phaedra a monster and a whore but the
presence of her body in the space of the stage, even for a moment, impacts
and overshadows all other action.
Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitolism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Euripides. Hippolytus. Trans. Marianne McDonald. Unpublished, 2005.
Jed, Stephanie H. Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of
Humanism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1989.
Kubiak, Anthony. Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as
Theatre History. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 1991).
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’
of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayne R.
Reiter, ???, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975.
Seneca. Phaedra, trans. Marianne McDonald. Unpublished, 2005.
“HORROR” AND “TERRIFYING EMOTION”:
AESTHETIC CATEGORIES IN NINETEENTH-
CENTURY GERMAN AND FRENCH
CONCEPTIONS OF MONUMENTALITY
ANNIE YEN-LING LIU
Nineteenth-century conceptions of monumentality, involving the genre

of the symphony, large-scale form, and the aesthetics of the sublime, were
often associated with the feeling of horror. This association is addressed in
the discourses of German and French Romanticism during the late
eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. That both aesthetic traditions
made this association does not negate the opposition between them; on the
contrary, it highlights their conflicting aesthetic premises. Most
dichotomies that have been proposed between German and French musical
Romanticism are structured through evoking the opposition between
German and non-German music. This opposition relies on a series of
contrasting paired qualities: intellectual versus sensual, poetic versus
prosaic, metaphysical versus physical, and organic versus mechanical.1
1
The dichotomy between German and non-German music is best illustrated by
Bernd Sponheuer. According to Sponheuer, there were two ideal types of German
music: one was “universal” and synthetic, whereas the other was “exclusive.”
Critics or composers who belonged to the first category emphasized German
music’s capacity to blend different styles in conveying a sense of humanity and
achieving a harmonious balance between the sensual and the rational. The second
“exclusive” category rejected non-German music, and its discourse was based on
the series of dichotomies described above. See Bernd Sponheuer, “Reconstructing
Ideal Types of the ‘German’ in Music,” in Music and German National Identity,
ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago, 2002), 36-58 (here, 40, 52-53).
Sponheuer’s ideas correspond to Fritz Reckow’s examination of traditional
comparisons of German and French music. According to Reckow, the contrast
between these two types of music is based on an ideology with a long history.
French music is centered on effect, sensuality, and entertainmant, whereas German
music is intellectual and poetic. See Fritz Reckow, “‘Wirkung’ und ‘Effekt’: Über
118 “Horror” and “Terrifying Emotion”
Such oppositions are largely discussed in a theoretical or abstract manner

rather than through detailed analyses in specific compositional contexts.
By failing to draw a careful distinction between these two aesthetic
traditions, one risks falling into the trap of this long-standing ideology. An
examination of the concept of monumentality, and of the role that the
feeling of terror plays in this concept, is meant not to reinforce this
ideology, but to explain certain reasons why German Romantic music has
been understood as intellectual and metaphysical in nature, while French
Romantic music has been characterized in sensual and physical terms.
The similarities and disparities among accounts of this intense
emotional response in German and French Romanticism have not been
closely studied and compared. Of particular interest are descriptions of
horror and the emotion of terror by E. T. A. Hoffmann and Hector Berlioz.
Berlioz’s importance in this regard has often been overlooked, likely
because scholars have not typically considered his music as a model of
nineteenth-century monumentality, given the prevailing tendency to read
the history of monumentality according to a German focus.
This paper will centre on two primary historical sources: Hoffmann’s
criticism of Beethoven’s symphonic music and Berlioz’ account of
musical monumentality.2 As an influential document of German Romantic
musical aesthetics, Hoffmann’s essay on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
articulates the significance of horror in the composer’s symphonic
monumentality. As a representative of French Romanticism and an avant-
garde composer in the nineteenth century, Berlioz included “terrifying
emotion” as part of his ideal form of musical monumentality. Although
einige Voraussetzungen, Tendenzen und Probleme der deutschen Berlioz-Kritik,”

in Die Musikforschung, vol. 1 (January-March 1980).
2
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a German author, composer,
and music critic, whose essays on music and the arts exerted an enormous
influence on the formation of German Romantic aesthetics. He established a
metaphysical interpretation of instrumental music that came to play an important
role throughout the nineteenth century. Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), a French
Romantic composer, is known for his creation of programme music. His
Symphonie fantastique, for example, attracted vehement criticism because of its
integration of a programme into instrumental music. For Berlioz, the programme
was an essential part of the music rather than an extraneous element. Robert
Schumann’s criticism regarding Berlioz’s overuse of detailed programmes
exemplifies the opposite pole. In terms of formal arrangement, Berlioz’s five-
movement design in this symphony departs from the more traditional four-
movement structure. As a progressive composer, Berlioz was engaged with a
revolution in orchestration, a compositional parameter that had been downplayed
by preceding composers.
Annie Yen-Ling Liu 119
Hoffmann and Berlioz were concerned with different genres, each

emphasized the connections among the ideas of monumentality, large-
scale form, horror or terror, and the sublime. Nevertheless, their concepts
of the seemingly negative, dark, and intense emotions aroused by music
reflect divergent aesthetic premises. For Hoffmann, the outside musical
effect should be supported by an inner and profound musical structure,
whereas Berlioz characterized his ideal of monumentality as the creation
of an overpowering feeling without conventional limitations in orchestral
forces, sounding layers, and dynamics. This expansion of sounding force
does not need to be compensated for by musical structure, complicated
thematic manipulation, or formal unity.
This paper will first focus on the category of horror in Hoffmann’s and
Berlioz’s concepts of monumentality. I will investigate the meanings of
horror and the emotion of terror for each figure and then address the
concept’s relationship with historiographical accounts of the symphony
and aesthetic precedents in the eighteenth century. The complicated and
dynamic relationship among the categories of “emotional convulsion,”
“terrifying emotion,” and the Kantian concept of the sublime will then be
analysed in detail.
The Conflation of “Emotional Convulsion,” the “Grand”

Style, and “Deliberation”
Hoffmann’s essays on Beethoven’s symphonic style and instrumental
music are not usually conceived as the exclusive origin of Romantic
musical aesthetics, yet Hoffmann’s intention to elevate the aesthetic status
of instrumental music to a certain height was provocative and created a
sensation among other critics. Hoffmann’s theories exerted an enormous
influence on Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard Hanslick, who advocated
the idea of musical autonomy.3 Most importantly, Hoffmann’s views
helped to shape the historiography of the symphony. His influence is
exemplified by the writings of one of the most influential German
musicologists in the twentieth century, Carl Dahlhaus. Adopting
Hoffmann’s ideas, Dahlhaus examined the musical characteristics and
3
Hanslick’s 1854 treatise On the Beautiful in Music (Vom Musikalische-Schönen)
clearly and eloquently states his musical aesthetic. Opposing contemporary
aesthetic ideas based on the connection of music and emotion, he argued for the
importance of music’s autonomy. He thus separated himself from contemporary
composers, such as Richard Wagner and Frantz Liszt, and provoked a debate
between the New German School (die Neudeutsche Schule) and himself.
aesthetic basis of the monumental style, as well as the history of

monumentality in various symphonic genres of the nineteenth century. He
conceived of Beethoven’s symphonic model as the paradigm of
monumentality and then treated this paradigm as a criterion for symphonic
monumentality in the middle and late nineteenth century, ranging from the
post-Beethovenian Romantics, Liszt, and Wagner, to the revival of the
second age of symphonic writing in Brahms and Bruckner. In short, the
concept of symphonic monumentality served as a yardstick for Dahlhaus
to demarcate the rise, decline, and revival of the symphony in nineteenth-
century music.
Dahlhaus drew several compositional criteria from Beethoven’s music,
such as the balance among complexity, simplicity, and variety, to evaluate
the monumental style of Beethoven’s followers. Beyond these compositional
aspects, the concept of monumentality in Dahlhaus’ writings includes a
strong aesthetic component: the association between “emotional convulsion”
(Erschütterung) and “deliberation.” Dahlhaus linked the overpowering
emotional response of the listener to collective experience, with the idea of
“deliberation” describing the composer’s activity as an individual:
The association between the emotional convulsion (Erschütterung)
wrought by a work of art and the deliberation with which it was conceived
was identical with the association, made in the eighteenth century,
between spontaneous outpouring and reflection in the ode. Hoffmann
praised the combination in both Spontini and Beethoven. Whether he
found it in vocal or instrumental music, it signified the “grand style” that
was his idea, a style in which monumentality and the art of differentiation
were inseparable instead of mutually exclusive.4
In a separate essay, Dahlhaus makes two additional connections. The first

is between “emotional convulsion” or the monumental style and mass
effect, and the second is between “differentiation” or “deliberation” and
music’s esoteric aspect:
If therefore the paradoxical relationship between esoteric and mass effect,
a relationship in which the problem of the idea of humanity expresses
itself as a musically double concept, belongs to the aesthetic nature of the
symphony and to the distinguishing features that separate it from chamber
music, then the remaining constituents of the symphonic style, of which
however only a few can be elusively sketched, are closely associated with
4
Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music, trans. Mary
Whittall (Oxford, 1993), 70 (italics mine).
one of the so-called moments, either the tendency to differentiation or the

seemingly opposed tendency to monumentality.5
In both passages, Dahlhaus establishes the interdependence of “emotional

convulsion,” “spontaneous outpouring,” “mass effect,” or “monumentality”
and the “art of differentiation,” “reflection,” or “esoteric aspect.” Although
he ties “monumentality” to mass effect or the sounding surface of a
musical work, the meaning of monumentality for him also includes a
quality of reciprocity: “[J]ust as to say that the monumentality is generated
by complication of the syntax would tell only half the story, so, too,
accentuation that was not justified by the phrase structure would be
superficial.”6 In a strict sense, “monumentality” may only seem to refer to
the massive and outward effects it generates in the listener, yet in a
broader sense, the style does not involve isolated surface phenomena or
events but must be supported by the careful manipulation of themes.
Dahlhaus demonstrated this reciprocal nature of monumentality
through a reading of the first movement of the Eroica Symphony. In this
movement, the triumphant and overpowering gesture of the recapitulation
of the first movement creates a mass effect that is in fact dependent on an
internal motivic structure. Simply put, the outer effect is the consequence
of the inner workings of thematic manipulation: “The outside, while the
result and consequence of the inside, is alone and in itself certain of its
effect—an effect whose contradictory mixture of independence and
dependence can be understood, as previously mentioned, as an aesthetic
reflection of conflicting social-philosophical circumstances.”7 This formal
model, which posits “unity” as a prerequisite for aesthetic value, demands
5
“Gehört demnach das paradoxe Verhältnis zwischen Esoterik und Massenwirkung,
ein Verhältnis, in dem sich die Problematik der Humanitätsidee als eines
Doppelbegriffs musikalisch ausdrückt, zum ästhetischen Wesen der Symphonie
und zu deren Unterscheidungsmerkmalen von der Kammermusik, so hängen die
übrigen Konstituentien des symphonische Stils, von denen allerdings nur wenige
flüchtig skizziert werden können, mit einem der genannten Momente, entweder der
Tendenz zur Differenzierung oder aber der scheinbar entgegengesetzten zur
Monumentalität, eng zusammen.” Dahlhaus, “Symphonie und symphonischer Stil
um 1850,” Jahrbuch des Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preußischer
Kulturbesitz (Berlin, 1983/84), 46 (italics mine).
6
Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven, 77.
7
“Die Außenseite ist, obwohl Resultat und Konsequenz des Innere, für sich allein
ihrer Wirkung sicher, einer Wirkung, deren widersprüchliche Zusammensetzung
aus Selbständigkeit und Abhängigkeit man, wie erwähnt, als ästhetisches Abbild
eines zwiespältigen sozialphilosophischen Sachverhalts verstehen kann.”
Dahlhaus, “Symphonie und symphonischer Stil um 1850,” 46.
the congruence of outer effect and thematic detail, particularly for works
that attempt to attain a “monumental” scale.
Dahlhaus’ statements might suggest that most of his ideas derive from
Hoffmann. This suggestion is partly true and somewhat misleading given
that Hoffmann did not introduce the term Erschütterung and did not use
the concept of the grand to describe Beethoven’s symphonic style. This
term and concept in fact stem from Friedrich Rochlitz.8 Rochlitz regarded
the “grand” (das Grosse) as being powerful, distressing, overpowering,
and as involving a “convulsion” (Erschütterung): “The grand (powerful,
distressing) excites the mind to an all-embracing, strong potency in all its
powers—to be sure, to a potency where one is more or less clearly aware
of a quantity and of a whole of fused ideas and through this is inspired and
feels elevated (gehoben). In the sublime, the large dimensions of the
masses first of all take effect: here the dimensions of the whole take effect;
there the one in many; here the many in one.”9 The grand involves
emotional convulsion. In specifying the emotional quality of the grand, he
distinguished the concepts of the grand and the sublime: “By only
moderate attention one easily distinguishes the feeling for the grand from
the feeling for the sublime—that is, from each other anyway. The feeling
for the grand has—if one is allowed to say—more earthiness than the
feeling for the sublime; it has more force, affections, and rapture, and for
that reason the grand manifests more felicity than the sublime.”10
Although the “grand style” as described by Rochlitz suggests an element
8
Friedrich Rochlitz (1769-1842) was a German playwright and music critic. He
was also an editor of the Leipziger allgemeine musikalische Zeitung from 1798 to
1818.
9
“Das Große (Mächtige, Erschütternde) regt das Gemüth auf zu einer
vielumfassenden, starken Wirksamkeit aller seiner Kräfte—und zwar zu einer
Wirksamkeit, wo man sich einer Menge mehr oder weniger klarer und in ein
Ganzes verschmolzener Vorstellungen bewußt wird, und sich dadurch begeistert,
gehoben fühlt. Beim Erhabenen wirkte zunächst die Größe der Massen: hier wirkt
zunächst die Größe der Summen; dort das Eine in Vielem: hier das Viele in
Einem.” Friedrich Rochlitz, “Vom zweckmäßigen Gebrauch der Mittel der
Tonkunst,” Für Freunde der Tonkunst, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1868), 106.
10
“Bei nur mäßiger Aufmerksamkeit auf sich selbst unterscheidet man auch das
Gefühl für das Große leicht von dem Gefühl für das Erhabene; von jedem andern
ohnehin. Das Gefühl für das Große hat—ist es erlaubt, so zu sagen—mehr
Irdisches, als das Gefühl für das Erhabene; es hat mehr Gewaltsames, Affectvolles,
Dahinreißendes—weshalb das Große auch überall und immer mehr Glück macht,
als das Erhabene.” Rochlitz, “Vom zweckmäßigen Gebrauch der Mittel der
Tonkunst,” 107.
of violence, it is mainly founded on the feelings of felicity or joy. Its

earthy characteristic moreover sets itself apart from the sublime.
Dahlhaus’ emphasis on the dual relationship between emotional
convulsion—an exoteric aspect—and its association with compositional
devices from a composer—an esoteric aspect—follows Hoffmann.
Hoffmann’s emphasis on the intertwined relationship between outer effect
and inner structure forms the basis for subsequent aesthetic thought among
German composers and critics, including Wagner and Hanslick. These
ideas were passed down to modern criticism, as exemplified by Dahlhaus’
examination of the history of the symphony and recent studies of
symphonic monumentality.11 According to this view, musical effects in
operatic or symphonic genres should not be empty or bombastic; instead,
they must be justified by genuine expression or thematic structure.
To conclude, the powerful and negative emotional reactions described
by Hoffmann were transformed by Dahlhaus into “emotional convulsion,”
a term borrowed from Rochlitz; Hoffmann’s view of the artifice of the
composer is reflected in Dahlhaus’s terms “deliberation,” “differentiation,”
and “reflection.” Nevertheless, the emotional quality identified by
Hoffmann in Beethoven’s music is slightly different from Rochlitz’s
model. Dahlhaus thus conflated Rochlitz’s notion of “the grand” and the
concept of Erschütterung with Hoffmann’s aesthetics.
Configurations of Emotional Response

and Structural Analysis
For Hoffmann, the feeling aroused by Beethoven’s symphonic
works consisted of inner horror and infinite longing: “Beethoven’s music
sets in motion the machinery of awe (Schauer), of fear (Furcht), of terror
(Entsetzen), of pain (Schmerz), and awakens that infinite yearning which is
the essence of romanticism.”12 These intense emotions are caused by
startling musical effects that may elude comprehension in the beginning
but become evident through a close examination of musical structure.
Hoffmann claimed that one could understand the secret of how Beethoven
11
Alexander Rehding, for instance, has defined Liszt’s monumental style as
involving an “effect” without “cause,” or “vacuous bombast.” See Alexander
Rehding, “Liszt’s Musical Monuments,” 19th-Century Music 26/1 (Summer 2002),
and Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-
Century Germany (New York, 2009), 47-71.
12
E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, ed.
David Charlton and trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge, 1989), 98.
created these overpowering emotions through analysis. In other words, a

causal relationship binds these responses to the composer’s rational
thinking. One of Beethoven’s compositional “secrets” was his skill in
achieving unity, as Hoffmann argues in two related passages:
Our aesthetic overseers have often complained of a total lack of inner unity
and inner coherence in Shakespeare, when profounder contemplation
shows the splendid tree, leaves, blossom, and fruit as springing from the
same seed; in the same way only the most penetrating study of
Beethoven’s instrumental music can reveal its high level of rational
awareness, which is inseparable from true genius and nourished by study
of the art.13
A simple but fruitful and lyrical theme, susceptible of the most varied
contrapuntal treatments, abbreviations, etc., forms the basis of every
movement. All the secondary themes and figures are closely related to the
main idea, and everything is interwoven and arranged so as to produce the
utmost unity between all the instruments. This describes the overall
structure, but within this artful edifice there is a restless alternation of the
most marvellous images, in which joy and pain, melancholy and ecstasy,
appear beside and within each other.14
Drawing a comparison between Shakespeare and Beethoven, Hoffmann

highlighted the way in which audiences only paid attention to the surface
and overlooked the inner structure. Another secret of structural unification,
for Hoffmann, was the repetition of a phrase or a chord in different
instruments:
[In Beethoven’s instrumental music] all the phrases are short, almost all of
them consisting merely of two or three bars, and are also constantly
exchanged between winds and strings. One would think that such
ingredients could result only in something disjoined and impossible to
follow, but on the contrary it is precisely this overall pattern, and the
constant repetition of phrases and single chords, which intensifies to the
highest possible degree the feeling of ineffable yearning.15
Regardless of the variety of sounding events and the startling emotional

experiences, structural or thematic unity prevents a work from collapsing
into an incoherent formal arrangement. Simply put, two important
characteristics mark Hoffmann’s account of Beethoven’s music: the
13
Ibid., p. 98.
14
Ibid., p. 102.
15
Ibid., p. 99.
overwhelming and negative feeling evoked in the listener and the rational
construction of the work. The seemingly mysterious realms of this music
were penetrable through an analysis of the inner musical structure that
disclosed its hidden rationality.
The ideas of terror, pain, and incomprehensibility described by
Hoffmann might suggest that the Kantian concept of the sublime lies in the
background of his symphonic paradigm. Some scholars have argued that
the early-nineteenth-century view of the musical sublime and the
interpretation of the symphony, including that of Hoffmann, are
thoroughly Kantian.16 I will argue that Hoffmann’s account is only partly
Kantian. The negative feelings of pain and horror involved may be related
to Kant’s dynamical sublime, yet Hoffmann’s ideas diverge from the
Kantian model in other respects. Kant places an emphasis on the mind or
the imagination and not the objects themselves. He stressed, for example,
that the feeling of the sublime is judged by the perceiver instead of being
determined by an object: “Hence it is the disposition of the mind resulting
from a certain representation occupying the reflective judgment, but not
the object, which is to be called sublime.”17 It is the mind that generates
the experience of the sublime, and the mind is not necessarily subjected to
an image or an object. By contrast, in his account of Beethoven’s
symphonies, Hoffmann ultimately centred his discussion on the object by
stating that one can discover or unveil the inner structure of a work. In
other words, the primary difference between his concept and the aesthetics
of the sublime in the eighteenth century as defined by Kant is that the
object one perceives is purposive and the experience of the sublime
explicable.
Hoffmann did not apparently use the term “sublime” to define the
symphonic style, instead reserving this term or concept for choral or
church music. The “sublime,” for Hoffmann, was characterized by
transcendence, simplicity, and divine purity. In the essay “Alte und neue
Kirchenmusik” (“Old and New Church Music”), he proposed an ideal
mediation between early sacred music and modern instrumental music. He
viewed the church music of Palestrina and Leonardo Leo as sublime in
terms of their avoidance of ostentatious decoration and insistence on
16
James Webster, for instance, has demonstrated that the Kantian model is
represented in Christian Friedrich Michaelis’s discussion of the musical sublime
through his emphasis on the incommensurable. See James Webster, “The Creation,
Haydn’s Late Vocal Music, and the Musical Sublime,” in Haydn and His World,
ed. Elaine Sisman (Princeton, 1997), 58-62 (here, 63).
17
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer
and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, 2000), 134.
devout simplicity.18 Hoffmann compared Leo’s setting of the text “Miserere

mei, deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam” with that of Sarti and
observed “how forceful and sublime Leonardo’s chorus sounds, and how
weak Sarti’s setting appears beside it.”19 He praised Leo’s simplicity and
criticized Sarti’s style for its ostentatious overuse of sixteenth notes and
dotted rhythms. Hoffmann’s argument about instrumental and sacred
music might lead us to propose a hermeneutic model that places early
sacred music, the sublime, and simplicity on one side, and modern
instrumental music, the Beethovenian model, and the rhapsodic style on
the other. The “sublime” is divine, whereas the symphonic style is
worldly. The model presented by Hoffmann moreover seems to resonate
with the distinction between the grand and the sublime made by Rochlitz.
Nevertheless, Hoffmann did not entirely separate church from
instrumental music. For him, instrumental music to a certain degree served
as a means of recovering church music through the old church style.
Instrumental music, as exemplified by Beethoven, was the paradigm of
absolute music because it is, Hoffmann argued, non-programmatic:
When music is spoken of as an independent art the term can properly
apply only to instrumental music, which scorns all aid, all admixture of
other arts, and gives pure expression to its own peculiar artistic nature. It is
the most romantic of all arts—one might almost say the only one that is
purely romantic. Orpheus’s lyre opened the gates of Orcus. Music reveals
to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual
world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all feelings
circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible.20
Hoffmann’s metaphysical view of instrumental music partially corresponds

to his ideal for church music, which was exemplified by Palestrina’s
sacred works. Hoffmann described Palestrina’s sacred music as “purest,
holiest, and most suitable for the church”; one finds in his works that
“praises of the highest and holiest should flow straight from the human
breast, without any foreign admixture or intermediary.”21 Instrumental
music and church music thus share the quality of purity, and they both
relinquish external aids in communicating with the audience.
18
Hoffmann, “Old and New Church Music,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical
Writings, pp. 366-76.
19
Hoffmann, “Old and New Church Music,” 363-64.
20
Hoffmann, “Reviews of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
Musical Writings, p. 236.
21
Hoffmann, “Old and New Church Music,” 358-59.
Pure instrumental music, for Hoffmann, does not merely share

common ground with church music but may also function as a means of
reforming church music; in other words, the “new” church music is a
combination of old church music and modern instrumental music.
Hoffmann criticized contemporary church music as being inappropriate,
given that it only produced a theatrical effect. This empty effect was
mainly created by “striking modulations, the gaudy figures, the feeble
melodies, the impotent, confusing clamour of instruments” which
stupefied audiences.22 Nonetheless, he fully understood that it was
impossible for contemporary composers to return to the style of Palestrina
and acknowledged that modern instrumentation had to be integrated into
church music. Only a well-handled orchestration could endow church
music with a new style without sacrificing the spirit of old church music.
With its modern orchestration, Mozart’s Requiem, Hoffmann thought,
expressed pure devotion that was created through “awe-inspiring” chords,
and spoke of “another world.”23 In Hoffmann’s view, both Handel and
Mozart were able to balance new instruments and the old church style.
Avoiding confusing and loud voices and ostentatious effects, they
incorporated modern instrumentation into church music without
compromising the sense of simplicity and grandeur.
Modern instrumental music could restore church music because,
Hoffmann believed, a religious quality characterizes the ideal form of
instrumental or symphonic music. The infinite longing and awe evoked by
Beethoven’s music may be conceived as a parallel to the otherworldly
yearning and devotion that form an important foundation for religious
music. Seen in this way, pain and the feeling of horror are not purely
negative emotional experiences but consequences or expressions of
religious passion. This passion should be regarded not as a kind of a
pseudo-religion, but rather as part of a metaphysical view of music.
Moreover, the affect of “horror” for Hoffmann was not confined to
instrumental music. His discussion of J. S. Bach’s sacred music illustrates
this point:
In Bach’s motet for eight voices, I see the bold and wonderful, romantic
cathedral with all of its fantastic embellishments, which, artistically swept
up into a whole, profoundly and magnificently rise into the air. . . . There
are moments, especially when I have deeply studied the works of the great
22
Ibid., p. 360.
23
Ibid., p. 374-75.
Sebastian Bach, at which the numeral proportions of music and the

mystical rules of counterpoint arouse in me a profound horror.24
Like Beethoven’s instrumental works, Bach’s vocal music provokes a

“profound horror”—in the case of Bach, through the masterful use of
counterpoint. The comment concerning Bach’s motet demonstrates an
affinity between Hoffmann’s ideal forms of instrumental and sacred music
as well as similarities of musical structure and intense emotional response
in otherwise contrasting musical genres.
One should be aware of a potential conflict in Hoffmann’s arguments.
On the one hand, the religious quality corresponds to the metaphysical
view of instrumental music; on the other hand, this religious quality to
some extent conflicts with the concept of “autonomy” emphasized by
Hoffmann in his discussion of purely instrumental music. This paradox
may in part compromise Hoffmann’s advocacy for instrumental music’s
absolute and pure nature.
“Terrifying Emotion” and the Imitation of Reality

If one conceives the history of aesthetics from the eighteenth to the
nineteenth century as leading from the introduction of the concept of the
sublime to its integration with a model of musical expression based on
precise characterization, Hoffmann’s aesthetics of the symphony is an
expression of the former, and Berlioz’s music aesthetics is an example of
the latter. Berlioz’s view of musical effects and monumentality offers a
strong contrast to the adherents of German Romanticism. His idea of
musical monumentality is based on an analogy drawn between music and
architecture. He regarded his monumental music as architectural music
and defined monumentality as a “spaciousness of style.” The expanded
performing forces, created by multiple instrumental or vocal groups, are
the primary technical means used to realize this concept. In the Requiem,
for example, Berlioz included four separate brass bands “which answer
each other from different points beyond the main orchestra and the
chorus.”25 Different groups responding to each other create a sense of an
extended space corresponding to the divisions of the performing groups.
The attempt to create architectural music for Berlioz involved not only
the musical imitation of space, but the evocation of sublime feelings
24
Hoffmann, “Extremely Random Thoughts,” in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical
Writings, pp. 104-105.
25
Hector Berlioz, “Postscript,” The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, trans. and ed.
David Cairns (New York, 1969), 525.
similar to those aroused by imposing physical monuments. According to

Berlioz, the purpose of creating an exceptional space or vastness through
music was to overwhelm the listener. This overpowering impression
embodies what Berlioz conceived as the sublime. The composer
experienced it when he visited St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome; in describing
the power of the majestic architecture, he proposed that music should be
able to create similarly sublime impressions. If a cathedral could produce
the experience of the sublime in a spectator, music should also be able to
evoke impressions of “solemnity” and “stillness” in a listener:
I was rushing off to St Peter’s. Sublime, overpowering! . . . And the
intense stillness, the solemnity, the cool atmosphere, the bright, clear
colors, rich and harmonious; an aged pilgrim, kneeling alone in the
immense space; a faint rumbling from some distant corner of the church,
reverberating around the great vaults like far-off thunder. . . . Yes, of
course—these paintings and statues, those great pillars, all this giant
architecture, are but the body of the building. Music is its soul, the
supreme manifestation of its existence. Music is the sum of all the other
arts; it is music that gives utterance to their eternal hymn of praise,
uplifting it as song to the throne of the Almighty.26
Berlioz’s description of the overpowering feeling, the sense of spaciousness,

and solemnity, based on an association with architecture, was the
foundation of his ideas of the monumental style in music.
The emotion of terror was also an important element in Berlioz’s
conception of musical monumentality. He described his Requiem and Te
Deum as particular instances in which extraordinary or terrifying effects
could overpower the listener:
In connection with [the Requiem], I should call your attention to one
conceptual realm which I am almost the only modern composer to have
entered, a region never even glimpsed by the old masters. I mean those
immense compositions that have been termed architectural or monumental
music. . . . These musical projects that I have tried to realize . . . are
exceptional in their use of extraordinary forces. . . . But it is above all the
form of the movements, the spaciousness of style and the tremendous
slowness of certain progressions whose outcome cannot be guessed, that
give these works their extraordinarily gigantic character, their colossal
appearance. It is also the huge scale of this form that has the effect of
26
Berlioz, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, 164-65.
either leaving the hearer completely unaware of what is going on or else

overcoming him with terrifying emotion.27
According to this account, Berlioz attempted to imitate the vast space and
gigantic dimensions of monumental architecture by employing extraordinarily
massive musical forces. Overpowering and terrifying the audience was not
only an outcome of this compositional purpose but was also an aesthetic
objective. In evaluating his concerts Berlioz more than once expressed his
satisfaction with performances that produced “convulsive trembling.” In a
letter to Humbert Ferrand the composer described how the movement Et
iterum venturus of his Messe solennelle was well received:
My Mass was performed on St Cecilia’s day with twice the success it had
the first time; the slight corrections I’ve made to it have been real
improvements. The movement Et iterum venturus especially, which didn’t
come off the first time, was performed now in overwhelming fashion by
six trumpets, four horns, three trombones and two ophicleides. The choral
melody that follows, which I had sung by all voices in octaves, with an
outburst of brass in the middle, produced a tremendous effect on
everybody . . . when I saw the scene of the Last Judgment, that
proclamation sung by six basses in unison, the terrible clangor tubarum,
the cries of fear from the crowd represented by the choir, and all of it
performed exactly as I’d conceived it, I was seized by a convulsive
trembling which I was hardly able to control until the end of the piece. It
forced me to sit down and give the orchestra several minutes’ rest; I
couldn’t stand up any more and I was afraid the baton would leap out of
my hands.28
Massive orchestral sound, choral voices, intense rhythmic expressions, and

sudden changes of tones endow this work with an overpowering and
terrifying effect. This effect, according to Berlioz’s description, is not just
related to an emotional state but is also a physical condition; one required
time to recover from the physical fatigue caused by the intense emotional
experience.
The association between the concept of monumentality and the feeling
of terror in Berlioz’s accounts recalls Hoffmann’s description of Beethoven’s
27
Berlioz, “Postscript,” The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, 524-26; cited in Edward
T. Cone, “Inside the Saint’s Head: The Music of Berlioz,” in Music: A View from
Delft (Chicago and London, 1989), 233-34. (Editor’s note: The English “terrifying
emotion” is David Cairns’ rendition of emotion terrible in the French original.)
28
Berlioz, letter to Humbert Ferrand, November 29, 1827 from Paris, in Hector
Berlioz, Selected Letters, ed. Hugh Macdonald and trans. Roger Nichols (London,
1995), 40-41.
symphonic style, as feelings of horror and pain, among others, characterized

Beethovenian monumentality. The implication of a religious quality
through metaphysical argument in Hoffmann is foregrounded in Berlioz’
definition of monumentality: the “terrifying emotion” is tied to the
inspiration drawn from the cathedral and was particularly realized in
sacred music.
Despite these similarities, an important difference between Hoffmann,
a spokesman of German Romanticism, and Berlioz, a representative of
French Romanticism, is highlighted by their accounts of monumentality
and the role the feeling of terror plays in these ideas. First of all, Berlioz’s
aesthetics of character (definiteness), with its mimetic focus, distinguishes
him from the German aesthetic tradition. Franz Brendel, a spokesman for
the New German School, pointed to the imitative aspect of Berlioz’s
works in comparison with Beethoven’s music, and he argued that this
tendency jeopardized the presentation of poetic ideas:
If the poetic idea in Beethoven, so to speak, still appears to be tied to the
predominantly musical element, the poetic idea in Berlioz appears too
independent, it advances too one-sidedly to the fore of the work, and it
[the poetic idea] is deliberately identified as that which determines and
conditions the whole shape of the work. If the definite delineation of
character is often lost again in vagueness and generality of musical
expression [in Beethoven], then this [delineation of character] shows itself
increasingly prominent [in Berlioz], such that we seem to have before us
figures we might grasp with our very hands; but this is an empty reality
without poetic arousal, without inner life, or any [true] texture of moods.29
For Brendel, Berlioz’s realistic portrayal of characters was excessive and

too acute, so that his poetic ideas and the intelligibility of the music were
sacrificed. Brendel attributes this feature to the typical French style, which
contrasted with the Beethovenian model. He established an unbridgeable
29
“Wenn bei Beethoven die poetische Idee, so zu sagen, immer noch gebunden
erscheint von dem übergreifenden musikalischen Element, so tritt dieselbe bei
Berlioz zu selbständig hervor, tritt zu einseitig an die Spitze des Werkes, und wird
mit deutlich ausgesprochener Absicht als das die gesammte Gestalt Bestimmende
und Bedingende erkannt. Wenn dort die bestimmte Charakterzeichnung häufig
auch wieder in der Unbestimmtheit und Allgemeinheit des musikalischen
Ausdrucks verschwimmt, so zeigt sich dieselbe hier bis zu einer Höhe gesteigert,
dass wir mit Händen zu greifende Gestalten vor uns zu haben meinen, aber eine
kahle Wirklichkeit, ohne poetische Erregung, ohne das innere Leben und Weben
der Stimmungen.” Franz Brendel, Geshichte der Musik: Italien, Deutschland und
Frankreich von den ersten christliehen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig,
1878), 506.
gap between what he viewed as the unsurpassable instrumental music of

German composers and the incompetence of French composers.
Brendel’s reproach that Berlioz tended to express or imitate reality
with crude and overly pointed musical expression is perhaps not entirely
based on a prejudice. As Berlioz himself stated, musical monumentality
imitated the vast space of a monument and the feeling of terror aroused by
physical architecture. For him, there was no restraint in employing various
orchestral means to achieve the presentation of what he called a “colossal
appearance.” Berlioz’s use of the word “colossal” already signals his
departure from traditional German aesthetics. The term “colossal” or
“monstrous” for German aestheticians and composers was a pejorative
aesthetic category that described a grand or monumental style. The
concept of the “colossal” or “monstrous” may be traced back to Kant, who
conceived of the colossal as a concept that is too great to grasp: “The mere
presentation of a concept, however, which is almost too great for all
presentation (which borders on the relatively monstrous) is called colossal,
because the end of the presentation of a concept is made more difficult if
the intuition of the object is almost too great for our faculty of
apprehension.”30
Kant’s account remained valid for early-nineteenth-century criticism
engaging with the aesthetic issues raised by the symphonies of Beethoven
and his contemporaries. H. G. Nägeli regarded certain of Beethoven’s
symphonic works as “colossal” because of their exaggerated musical
forces:
If we find in his [Beethoven’s] Symphonies an excessive accumulation of
‘sound masses,’ as it were, of a material and thus false colossality, we
need to see them in their historical context. For, first of all, a true grand
symphonic style still needs to be developed. Though Beethoven’s
innovative combination of instruments has already developed and
accomplished more than Haydn and Mozart—secondly, the combination
of all the usual instruments of today’s orchestral music makes
overpowering and clumsiness, or a true barbarism, unavoidable. . . . Thus
we see him [Beethoven], particularly with his “Battle at Vittoria” and his
A major Symphony (more than with his Eroica symphony), caught within
the bounds of a false contemporary culture.31
30
Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 136.
31
“Findet sich in seinen Sinfonien mitunter eine übertreibene Anhäufung von
Tonmassen, mithin eine materielle und als fehlerhafte Collossalität, so ist erstens
historisch zu bemerken, dass ein wahrer großartiger symphonischer Stil erst noch
gesucht werden muss, und dass Beethoven, namentlich durch originellen
Similarly, Louis Spohr found the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth

“monstrous” and “tasteless”:
His [Beethoven’s] constant endeavor to be original and to open new paths,
could no longer, as formerly, be preserved from error by the guidance of
the ear. Was it then to be wondered at that his works became more and
more eccentric, disconnected, and incomprehensible? Yes! I must even
reckon the much admired Ninth Symphony among them, the three first
movements of which, in spite of some solitary flashes of genius, are to me
worse than all of the eight previous Symphonies, the fourth movement of
which is in my opinion so monstrous and tasteless, and in its grasp of
Schiller’s Ode so trivial, that I cannot even now understand how a genius
like Beethoven’s could have written it. I find in it another proof of what I
already remarked in Vienna, that Beethoven was wanting in aesthetical
feeling and in a sense of the beautiful.32
In examining early-nineteenth-century critiques of Beethoven’s

symphonies, Siegfried Oechsle has observed that contemporary critics,
such as Nägeli, Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, and Ferdinand Hand, viewed the
overpowering sounds of Beethoven’s symphonies in a negative manner:
“They [the critics] argue against the exaggeration of features, which
constitutes the essence of Beethoven’s symphonies: the dramatic here
borders on fragmentation, the pathetic on sentimentality, the obsession of
the teleological process on the forced, the grandiose on violence, and the
monumental on the monstrous.”33 For critics in the early-nineteenth
century who adopted the Kantian theory of the sublime, the boundary
Zusammengebrauch der Instrumente, schon mehr gefunden und geleistet hat, als
Haydn und Mozart—zweitens macht der Zusammengebracht aller in der heutigen
Orchestermusik üblichen Instrumente Ueberladung und Schwerfälligkeit, ja
eigentliche Roheit—worauf wir in einer spätern Vorlesung noch besonders zu
sprechen kommen werden, unvermeidlich; so dass wir auch ihn, vorzüglich mit
seiner ‘Schlacht beyVittoria’ und der A-dur-Sinfonie (mehr noch als mit der
‘Sinfonia eroica’) in den Schranken einer falschen Zeitcultur befangen finden.” H.
G. Nägeli, Vorlesungen über Musik [1826] (Hildesheim, 1980), 191.
32
Cited in Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2
(Oxford, 2005), 677.
33
“Sie richten sich gegen die Übertreibung von Eigenschaften, die die Quintessenz
der Symphonik Beethovens ausmachen: die Dramatik grenzt da an Zerissenheit,
das Pathetische ans Schwülstige, das Zwanghafte der teleologische Prozessualität
ans Gezwungenem das Gewaltige ans Gewaltsame und das Monumentale ans
Monströse.” Siefgried Oechsle, “Die problemgeschichtlich Vitalität der
Symphonie im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Aspekte historischer und systematischer
Musikforschung: zur Symphonie im 19. Jahrhundert, zu Fragen der Musiktheorie,
der Wahrnehmung von Musik und Anderes (Mainz, 2002), 44.
between the monumental and the monstrous lay in the treatment of

musical material, which had to follow certain constraints in order to be
comprehensible. These critics found fault with what they believed to be
the excessively forceful sounds of Beethoven’s works, and they invoked
the category of the “monstrous” to describe this aesthetic defect.
With its focus on exaggeration and the unlimited force of the
“colossal,” Berlioz’s conception of monumentality to a certain degree
corresponds to aesthetic views in the early nineteenth century. The
difference is that Berlioz thought of this characteristic as a positive one.
Music’s capacity to assume colossal power was for Berlioz not an
aesthetic drawback, but an aesthetic preference that explains his continual
experimentation with orchestration. The idea of “imitation” contradicts
Hoffmann’s view of instrumental music, which denies any associations
with functions or the imitation of specific inner moods or external
appearances. It is this unrestrained quality which leads to the experience of
“terrifying emotion” and which sets Berlioz apart from German
Romanticism. The structural component that German scholarship
traditionally describes as a justification for musical effects, or a restraint
that compensates for the outer effect, does not play a substantial role in
Berlioz’s concept of monumental music. This difference might explain
why certain German critics have characterized Berlioz’s musical style as
sensual and mechanical.
Conclusion
Both Hoffmann and Berlioz connected the concept of monumentality
to the feeling of horror or terror. Hoffmann’s writings on Beethoven and
instrumental music articulate an ideal type of German music in the early
nineteenth century and have proven influential among modern critics and
scholars. Dahlhaus’ historiographical account of the symphony, for
instance, was conditioned in part by Hoffmann. Berlioz’s definition of
monumentality exemplifies his ambition to revolutionize orchestration, a
parameter that had previously been relegated to a subsidiary role in
musical composition. On the one hand, both Hoffmann and Berlioz linked
together the concept of monumentality, the emotional experience of
horror, the general concept of the sublime, and the religious realm.
Hoffmann’s metaphysical view of instrumental music reveals a religious
aspect, while “terrifying emotion” also plays an important role in Berlioz’s
sacred music. On the other hand, the difference between both figures
comes to the fore in their views on monumentality. For Hoffmann,
symphonic monumentality was defined by a powerful musical effect and
emotional distress; the thematic structure was also required to function as

a musical cause to legitimize the outer effect. This structure embodies the
“intellectual” quality that is tied to a composer’s deliberate rational
planning of a musical structure.ġ In contrast, Berlioz’s focus on forceful,
overwhelming, and terrifying effects does not require thematic justification
or structural constraints. Berlioz’s musical effects have accordingly been
characterized as isolated and sensual in nature, and the composer himself
described physical fatigue as the result of an overpowering musical
experience. These sensual and physical qualities for Berlioz were not
aesthetic defects, but symptoms of musical innovation. Hoffmann’s
rejection of instrumental music’s imitative function contrasts with
Berlioz’s emphasis on music’s capacity to represent reality.
Hoffmann’s conceptions of Erschütterung, pain, and horror, along with
Berlioz’s “terrifying emotion,” have a complex relationship with the
Kantian concept of the sublime. The sense of terror and pain in Hoffmann’s
description of the Beethovenian symphonic paradigm has an affinity with
Kant’s dynamical sublime, yet unlike Kant’s emphasis on the mind of the
subject in defining the sublime, Hoffmann associated the feeling of terror
with the aesthetic object—the musical work. The “sublime” work,
although initially incomprehensible, was ultimately penetrable. Berlioz’
conception of monumentality may be framed as a combination of the
“mathematical sublime” and the “dynamical sublime.” The emphasis on
vastness and musical spaciousness recalls the Kantian “mathematical
sublime,” which aspires to boundlessness, whereas the intention to
produce a sense of horror in the listener recalls the “dynamical sublime.”
Important similarities and differences between German and French
Romanticism are manifested in the concept of monumentality, whether
this category is understood in aesthetic or compositional terms. The
association of monumentality with “horror” and “terrifying emotion,” as
articulated in both aesthetic traditions, also provides a means of tracing an
aesthetic lineage from the late eighteenth century to modern criticism,
which branches out at various points into philosophy and other artistic
practices.
Bibliography
Berlioz, Hector. The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, member of the French
Institute, including his travels in Italy, Germany, Russia, and England,
1803-1865. Translated and edited by David Cairns, New York: A. A.
Knopf, 1969.
—. Selected Letters, edited by Hugh Macdonald and translated by Roger
Nichols, London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Brendel, Franz. Geshichte der Musik: Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich
von den ersten christliehen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Leipzig: H.
Matthes (F.C. Schilde), 1878.
Cone, Edward T. Music, A View from Delft: Selected Essays, edited by
Robert P. Morgan, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1989.
Dahlhaus, Carl. Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to His Music.
Translated by Mary Whittall, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
—.“Symphonie und symphonischer Stil um 1850,” Jahrbuch des
Staatlichen Instituts für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 1983/84.
Hoffmann, E. T. A. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana,
The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism, edited by David
Charlton and translated by Martyn Clarke, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated and edited
by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
Nägeli, H. G. Vorlesungen über Musik [1826]. Hildesheim: Olms, 1980.
Oechsle, Siefgried. “Die problemgeschichtlich Vitalität der Symphonie im
19. Jahrhundert.” In Aspekte historischer und systematischer
Musikforschung: zur Symphonie im 19. Jahrhundert, zu Fragen der
Musiktheorie, der Wahrnehmung von Musik und Anderes, Mainz: Are
Musik, 2002.
Reckow, Fritz.“‘Wirkung’ und ‘Effekt’: Über einige Voraussetzungen,
Tendenzen und Probleme der deutschen Berlioz-Kritik.” In Die
Musikforschung, vol. 1 (January-March 1980.
Rehding, Alexander. “Liszt’s Musical Monuments.” 19th-Century Music
26, no. 1 (2002): 52-72.
—. Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in
Nineteenth-Century Germany. New York: Oxford University Press,
2009.
Rochlitz, Friedrich. Für Freunde der Tonkunst, vol. 2, Leipzig: C.

Cnobloch, 1868.
Sponheuer, Bernd. “Reconstructing Ideal Types of the ‘German’ in
Music.” In Music and German National Identity, edited by Celia
Applegate and Pamela Potter, 36-58, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002.
Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 2, Oxford:
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Webster, James. “The Creation, Haydn’s Late Vocal Music, and the
Musical Sublime.” In Haydn and His World, edited by Elaine Sisman,
58-62, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
NAME INDEX
Anþerl, Karel, 47-48 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 37-38,

Anderson, Laurie, 17, 21, 25-26, 32 50, 52, 56-57, 59-60
Aphrodite, 107-108, 110-111, 113- Dürrenmatt, Friedrich, 85
115 Dürer, Albrecht, 20, 36
Aquinas, Thomas, 99 Einstein, Albert, 83
Aragon, Louis, 44-45, 49, 59 Euripides, 107-111, 116
Artemis, 107-108, 110-111, 113, Feldman, Valentin, 51
115 Fink, Gottfried Wilhelm, 133
Bach, Johann Sebastian, ix, 47-49, Giotto, ix, 52-53, 55, 57-58, 70-71
64, 127-128 Godard, Jean-Luc, ix, 37, 40ff
Badiou, Alain, 6, 14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 73ff
Baudelaire, Charles, 89-90, 92 Gogh, Vincent van, 91
Baudrillard, Jean, 17-18, 20ff, 97 Goya, Francisco de, ix, 50-52, 67
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 48, 118ff Grünewald, Mathias, 5, 48-49
Berlioz, Hector, 118-119, 128ff Guattari, Félix, 111, 116
Beuys, Joseph, 17, 20-21, 32, 34-36 Hades, 109
bin Laden, Osama, 21-22, 31 Hand, Ferdinand, 133
Boccioni, Umberto, 19 Handel, George, 127
Boulez, Pierre, 17-19, 28, 31, 34, 36 Hanslick, Eduard, 119, 123
Brahms, Johannes, 48, 120 Haydn, Joseph, 125, 132-133, 137
Brendel, Franz, 131-132, 136 Heine, Heinrich, 87-88
Bressart, Felix, 45 Hesiod, 83
Bresson, Robert, 55 Heym, Georg, 91-93, 102
Breton, André, 19, 35 Hindemith, Paul, 54
Bruckner, Anton, 120 Hirst, Damien, 4-5, 28-30, 32, 34-35
Bruskina, Masha, 9, 50-51, 66 Hitler, Adolf, 9
Buñuel, Luis, 56 Hobbes, Thomas, 7
Burden, Chris, 19-21, 32 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 118-120, 122ff
Burke, Edmund, 10-12, 15 Hurlbut, William, 77
Camus, Albert, 85 Hippolyta, 107, 114-115
Caravaggio, 48-49 Hippolytus, 107ff
Cayrol, Jean, 40 Immerman, Karl, 88
Clift, Montgomery, ix, 54-55, 68 Kant, Immanuel (Kantian), 1, 3-4,
Cuny, Alain, 49 10-12, 15, 119, 125, 132-133,
Dahlhaus, Carl, 119ff 135-136
Debray, Régis, 2 Jed, Stephanie, 112-113, 116
Deleuze, Gilles, 111, 116 Kayser, Wolfgang , 85, 88, 102
DeLillo, Don, 17, 25-26, 29ff Klee, Paul, 38, 56
Krása, Hans, 47-48
140 Name Index
Kristeva, Julia, 55, 60 Rembrandt, Harmensz van Rijn, ix,

Kubiak, Anthony, 105-107, 115-116 48-49, 64
Kurtz, Stephen, 26-27, 32 Renoir, Jean, 47
Lacan, Jascques, 106 Resnais, Alain, 39-40
Lanzmann, Claude, 38-41, 58-61 Rimbaud, Arthur, 90, 103
Leo, Leonardo, 125-126 Rochlitz, Friedrich, 122-123, 126,
Levinas, Emmanuel, 94, 97, 102 137
Liszt, Frantz, 119-120, 123, 136 Rossellini, Roberto, 58
Lorenz, Edward, 83 De Sade, 96
Lubitsch, Ernst, 45, 49 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 19
Lucretia, 112-113, 116 Sarti, Giuseppe, 126
Lyotard, Jean-François, 13, 15 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 119
Marinetti, Filippo, 18-19, 33, 35 Schumann, Robert, 118
Mars, 108 Seneca, 107-108, 116
Matisse, Henri, 18, 20 Shakespeare, William, 44-45, 49,
Michaud, Yves, 22 124
Michelangelo, 73 Shcherbatsevich, Volodia, ix, 50-51,
Minos, 107 66
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 127, Shelley, Mary, 73-74
132-133 Spielberg, Steven, 39
Munk, Andrzej, ix, 47-48, 58, 64 Spohr, Louis, 133
Murnau, Friedrich, ix, 50, 66 Sponheuer, Bernd, 117, 137
Nägeli, Hans Georg, 132-133, 136 Staël, Nicolas de, ix, 44-46, 49, 62-
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 24, 78-79, 94, 63
98-99, 103 Stevens, George, ix, 52-54, 67-71
Oechsle, Siegfried, 133, 136 Stifter, Adalbert, 89, 103
Ophüls, Marcel, 39 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 4-5, 28-30,
Orpheus, 126 32, 34, 36
Palestrina, 125-127 Storm, Theodor, 89, 103
Paracelsus, 74ff Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe, 90, 103
Pasiphae, 107 Tarquinius, 112-113
Pelops, 109 Taruskin, Richard, 133, 137
Persephone, 109 Taylor, Elizabeth, 9, 52ff
Phaedra, 105ff Theseus, 107-115
Pialat, Maurice, 55-56 Trakl, Georg, 93
Picasso, Pablo, ix, 50, 65 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 5
Planck, Max, 83 Virilio, Paul, 22
Plato, 3, 112 Vlaminck, Maurice de, 18, 20, 31-
Poincaré, Henri, 83 32
Pol Pot, 9 Wagner, Richard, 119-120, 123
Praetorius, 77 Wajcman, Gérard, 38, 41, 57, 59, 61
Raad, Walid, 30 Weber, Max, 98
Rancière, Jacques, 49, 55-56, 61 Whale, James, x, 73, 78-79, 81
Reckow, Fritz, 117, 136 Wright, Joseph, ix, 73, 75-76, 78, 80
Rehding, Alexander, 123, 136 Zeus, 110, 114
Reich, Walter, 6

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Arts and Terror

Arts and Terror

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright © 2014 by Vladimir L. Marchenkov and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4161-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4161-0

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix

Art, Terrorism, and the Negative Sublime ................................................... 1

Looking at Terror with the Ghosts of Baudrillard and Beuys

“The Camps—Nobody Has Ever Shown Them”: Jean-Luc Godard,

Demonic: The Destructive Side of Chaos.................................................. 83

This Body Speaks: Phaedra’s Theatrical Suicide .................................... 105

“Horror” and “Terrifying Emotion”: Aesthetic Categories in Nineteenth-

Name Index ............................................................................................. 139

I should like to thank all participants in the conference on Arts and

1. Two Holocaust victims covered up by two camp liberators.

Terrorism and Aesthetics

now enmeshed is all-enclosing. But how can terrorism be considered in the

attack could be "visually stunning" and resemble works of art.9 Indeed,

Can terrorism be justified?

But apart from the question of whether terrorism is ever justifiable, it

Since aesthetics centers on direct sensory perception, it is clear that

presume to balance immediate pain, death, and destruction against future

aesthetic may be fully interdependent, inseparably fused. The very

The Negative Sublime

latently the ruling principle of the sublime.”18 Burke described many

immeasurable, the intensity of the terrorist sublime is also immeasurable and

us with their image is indissolubly bound up with their moral negativity,

—. "Aesthetics and the Contemporary Arts,” The Journal of Aesthetics

LESLIE STEWART CURTIS

Terrorism of the Word: Artists’ Statements

the beginning of the twentieth century, Maurice de Vlaminck was quoted

Joseph Beuys: Art Therapy for Terrorists

Baudrillard and the Terrorist in Theory

Artist as Terrorist: Don DeLillo and Laurie Anderson

and the other marked ‘terror.’”27

such as releasing strange-looking genetically mutated flies into offices and

The Aesthetics of Terror

that happened closer to home, DeLillo wrote: “Before politics, before

Conclusion: Exploding Boundaries in the Arts

the militaristic connotations of the word – attacking traditional norms. But

working outside of their chosen medium or by finding ways to call their

clearly see a relationship between artistic creation and the plotting of

Breton. André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver

Muller, Joseph-Emile. Fauvism. Translated by Shirley E. Jones, New

The controversial exhibition “Mémoire des camps” (Memories of the

Didi-Huberman was harshly criticized, notably by the filmmaker

Auschwitz (trans. Shane B. Lillis, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

Lanzmann accordingly declared, in the wake of the release of Steven

Contrary to Lanzmann, Jean-Luc Godard has maintained an “iconophilic”

again.”14 In a 1998 interview in the French music journal Inrockuptibles,

this sense, Godard’s simplistic and inflammatory statements about the

visually and aurally representing the Holocaust by refusing to take the

Shakespeare, Aragon, Nicolas de Staël

Je n’oublierai jamais les lilas ni les roses

If you prick us, do we not bleed?