(December, 2017)
In László Nemes 2015 film “Son of Saul,” the camera follows Hungarian Sonderkommando Saul Ausländer closely as he navigates the horrifying milieu of 1944 Auschwitz-Berkenau. In this paper, it will be my goal to pay close attention to Nemes’ film and the choices it makes, deploying Heideggerian and Levinasian concepts in my analysis. I will argue that because Nemes’ representation of Auschwitz so thoroughly realizes the technological dangers of positionality (Ge-stell), both Heidegger’s notion of world and Levinas’ notion of vulnerability all but fail to occur within the ‘climate’ of the camp. The sole exceptions to this uninterrupted metaphysical consistency occur as the film’s defining moments: the first, only minutes into the film, wherein Saul adopts a boy as his son as he watches a Nazi doctor murder him; the second, near its end, when Saul looks up and smiles to see a young Polish farm boy standing in the doorway of an abandoned barn in the forest. The scene of adoption, the events which follow from it, and the scene with this second boy constitute the primary focus of this paper. How can we understand the complex, multivalent commands of mercy and justice which the dead boy imparts to Saul? Do we have any recourse to determine what Saul ought to do? Can anything like ethical priority enter into this dismal scene? This is also already to ask, does the movement between metaphysical willing and non-metaphysical ‘letting’ in the encounter of the one for the other absolutely contain the ethical, or can the ethical persist as an imperative (for whom and in what manner?) beyond this encounter? The cinematographic choices made in “Son of Saul” provide a compelling and horrifying backdrop against which and with which we might ask such questions.
Shot primarily over Saul’s shoulder, with either his face or his back persistently in the frame, the film uses the camera’s focal plane to visually stage Saul’s alienation from himself, from others, and from the grisly reality of his surroundings. Moreover, the film’s aural landscape operates disjunctively with its visual one: bird song filters through the noise of the ovens and gas chambers, garbled, incoherent speech buzzes everywhere amidst the shouted directives of Nazi soldiers, and the volume of sound often bears little relation to the source’s distance from Saul (who serves as the film’s perspectival locus). These choices operate, from the film’s earliest moments, to highlight the strange kind of spatiality that takes place in the camp. In Heideggerian terms, the film’s portrayal of the camp’s brutal technological efficiency suggests that the worlding of world cannot take place in Auschwitz. Instead, events in the camp unfold according to the logic of positionality (Ge-stell), which constantly brings everything into non-enigmatic orderability, into the nihilistic (the completion of metaphysics which occurs in Ge-stell, as opposed to Heidegger’s notion of authentic nihilism) machinations of the standing reserve.
The audience is already confronted with this phenomenon in the film’s opening scene. A blurry figure walks towards the camera, becoming clearer and clearer as he approaches the camera’s focal plane. Although this shot is one of the only ones in the film for which the camera is still for a substantial interval, it comes to an abrupt end almost as soon as Saul comes fully into focus. Just as we begin to grasp the horror and uncanniness writ large across his face, the words “Let’s go” issue from off screen and the motion resumes. The camera follows Saul as he directs prisoners off the newly-arrived trains into the anteroom of the gas chamber. Nazi guards repeat orders for Saul and the other Sonderkommandos to “hurry up,” to “get back to work,” and in turn, they increase their efficiency under threat of death. That is, Saul, the other Sonderkommandos, and the prisoners are constantly forced into the position (Stellung) of having to preserve themselves by completing whatever task is demanded of them at gunpoint. The film’s emphasis on this manipulative efficiency which reduces everyone to inventoried, exchangeable pieces readily shows the viewer the extent to which Auschwitz’s horrible technology denies Heideggerian world. As “the appropriating mirror-play of the single fold of the earth and sky, divinities and mortals,” world “guards the essence of presencing as such” (Heidegger 18, 46). Positionality, on the other hand, wrests everything into technological orderability, and always refuses the fourfold’s “join[ing] pliantly and worldingly the world” (Heidegger 18). It is because positionality necessarily positions all that presences into the standing reserve that it prohibits the nearing of nearness which brings the world near (ibid. 44). Standing reserve and world take place in mutually exclusive ways, and insofar as Auschwitz constitutes a death machine — the insidious, technological, and nihilistic perfection of Western metaphysics’ drive for efficiency, intelligibility, and order (hierarchy) — world cannot world within the confines of the camp.
The omnipresence of standing reserve in the film is especially and symbolically marked by the Nazi guards’ use of the word “piece” to refer to corpses in the film. Heidegger suggests that the proper meaning of this word would have it extend far beyond the corpses; it describes the position (Stellung) of the whole population of Auschwitz-Berkenau insofar as they are all conscripted secretly, constantly, and in advance by the plundering, self-sustaining drive of technology. He writes, “In the age of technological dominance, the human is placed into the essence of technology, into positionality, by his essence. In his own way, the human is a piece of the standing reserve in the strictest sense of the words ‘piece’ and ‘standing reserve’” (Heidegger 35). Insofar as each person within the camp becomes little more than a piece of standing reserve to be drawn upon by the insatiable requisitioning of the death machine, positionality reigns and does not let nearness near. The incredible ‘bustle’ of the camp, of this harried process whereby each human in the camp is made into a piece and “isolated against one another in the extreme,” ensures that Saul and the other Sonderkommandos consistently place themselves into the willful, metaphysical preservation of self. This “heighten[s] and secure[s] their character as pieces” and prevents them from being interrupted, restored to their status as mortals (capable of death as death) by the event of worlding or by their proximity to each other (Heidegger 35). As pieces and not as mortals, the human world exists nowhere at Auschwitz. In its absence, every interaction between Saul and another is governed by the camp’s technological attitude, by positionality, in which Saul himself treats others as “piece-for-piece equivalent” tools in his mission to bury his son (ibid.). That is to say, even after the interruptive moment of adoption, Saul treats other Sonderkommandos, Kapos, prisoners —even rabbis — as pieces of standing reserve in order to continue his metaphysical task uninterrupted.
We can now see more clearly perhaps the importance of this pivotal moment for the film’s trajectory. This instant, near the film’s beginning, marks its particularly tragic character and lends it its profound relevance to our questions. In the instants when Saul hears the boy breathing, turns to look, and fails to substitute himself for the boy as he watches the Nazi doctor kill him, the film presents the audience with its only moment of Levinasian command and the almost instantaneous failure of that command to be absolutely binding. Saul fails to undergo the boy’s vulnerability in this moment as “the susception of dying for the other,” as the situation of “ow[ing] him everything,” and so helplessly stands by while the boy dies rather than stop the doctor’s perversely ‘helpful’ hands. (Levinas, “Peace and Proximity” 167). When Saul is interrupted by the boy’s breathing, he slips from the camp’s metaphysical, willful non-world into the non-metaphysical, non-reciprocal encounter of the one for the other. He lets himself be interrupted by the command of the breathing, and its death rattle rings heavily in the ears of the audience as Saul stands transfixed in the doorway. The power of this ‘letting,’ as opposed to willing, consists in its ability to allow us “to say ‘adieu’” to the “world of revenge, of war, of the preferential affirmation of the I” (Levinas, “Questions and Answers” 83). Nevertheless, this interruption does not prompt Saul to “deposition” himself in order to die for the boy (the resonance between Levinas’ use of “deposition” here and Heidegger’s use of “positionality” is more likely than not a coincidence born of Andrew Mitchell’s unconventional translatation of Ge-stell (usually “enframing”). Nonetheless I think the language bears out the meaning of the movement in and out of metaphysics, between “love without concupiscence” and the “preferential affirmation of the I.”) (ibid.). Saul, in failing to help the boy faced with the violence of the Nazi doctor, succumbs to the metaphysical calculus of the camp and his will to preserve himself. Instead of dying for the other, Saul only intervenes after the boy’s death, in order to accept responsibility and provide a proper burial for his corpse.
However, perhaps we should not be so quick to understand Saul’s not intervening as a failure as such. The film offers us clues for reading Saul’s mission to bury the body properly as “do[ing] the right thing,” even as he seems to be a bystander in the moment that the boy is killed. After Saul loses the gunpowder which would have helped the Sonderkommandos to destroy the crematoria and escape Auschwitz, Abraham tells Saul and the fake rabbi he has found at the pits that “you two will get us killed.” In response, Saul says that “we are already dead.” Read by way of Heidegger, Saul can be understood here as expressing the horror of “undying death” (Heidegger 54). Whereas to die in its proper sense entails being “endeared to the essence of death” as a mortal, Heidegger suggests that this sense of death cannot emerge for the piece: “the human is not yet the mortal” (ibid.). In what has since become an infamously controversial passage in “The Danger,” Heidegger asks three times whether or not the piece (the Holocaust victim) can die, and each time answers instead that “they perish,” “they become pieces of inventory of a standing reserve for the fabrication of corpses,” “they are unobtrusively liquidated in annihilation camps” (Heidegger 53). Though this passage might be politically perturbing taken out of context, through “Son of Saul,” we can see the extent to which Heidegger articulates the horrifying reality of the camp and of Saul’s predicament. We can understand Saul’s actions, in this light, not as “letting the other alone faced with the mystery of death,” but as a reflection of the absence of world and of the consequently near-impossibility for death to take place as death (Levinas, “Peace and Proximity” 167). Saul’s son was “already dead,” and in this light, Saul’s quest to bury his body signals his determination to find mercy, to find a world in which he might bury his son. Instead of failing to die for the other, Saul succeeds in giving everything he has to his mission, only surviving because the rabbi from the film’s beginning pulls him from the water as he is drowning, trying desperately to retrieve the body even as he slips under the surface.
The truth of all this not withstanding, it has still not quelled Levinas’ voice in my ear, asking me: “are you sure that suffering stops at itself?” (Levinas, “Questions and Answers” 83). The extent to which Saul disposes of and fails ‘living’ others in his effort to bury a corpse begs us to ask after mercy and justice in a context which exceeds the command the boy places on Saul. In Levinasian terms, it seems imperative to consider who the third party might be in the context of the camp. Returning to the scene of the boy’s murder and adoption, we might keep in mind Levinas’ words: “my resistance begins when the harm [the other] does me is done to a third party who is also my neighbor….it is the violence suffered by the third party that justifies stopping the violence of the other with violence” (ibid.). Would the Nazi doctor and the boy, then, respectively be the other and the third party? For Levinas, the other and the third party are both my neighbor, to whom I owe peace and proximity. But the relation between me, the other, and the third party is hardly determinate. Although responsibility for the other is “anterior to every question,” he also asks: “What, then, are the other and the third party with respect to one another? Birth of the question” (Levinas, “Peace and Proximity” 168) Although the arrival of the doctor — under ordinary circumstances — might mean help for the boy rather than the perversely murderous help that the Nazi doctor provides, the fact that Saul does not prevent the boy’s murder after realizing the doctor’s intentions nevertheless might be read as signaling his unwillingness (his help-lessness) to say ‘adieu’ to the preferential affirmation of the I. His subsequent choice to so thoroughly decenter himself for the sake of a corpse, even while treating others as pieces, begs us to ask again, perhaps more clearly this time: can we assert, by way of the third party, an ethical priority for those still ‘living’ in undying death over those who have already “perish[ed]”? (Heidegger 53) That is, does justice — understood here as a kind of metaphysical questioning which founds consciousness “and not the reverse” — hold sway in the radically isolated non-world Saul moves in (Levinas, “Peace and Proximity” 169)?
The film perhaps best illustrates the desperate isolation of Saul’s perspective in a scene where Saul searches for his son’s body. Clambering over piles of corpses in his search, stepping on and casting aside dozens of the dead, Saul cannot see the ontic horror of the scene. Almost blindly, or as if his eyes were only prepared for his singular task, he barely gives a second glance to the innumerable dead surrounding him. For Saul, the onto-theological horror of his failure to die for his son propels him despairingly but determinedly onward towards mercy, while nevertheless turning him away from the ontic horror of the camp, from the suppressed but sincere “distresses and tribulations” of the other undying dead. (Heidegger 53). Indeed, Saul does not give “attention” to the suffering of the other Sonderkommandos, Kapos, and rabbis (Levinas, “Useless Suffering” 94). When Abraham addresses Saul, Saul fails to look him in the eye, except to unflinchingly assert that “I must take care of my son.” Abraham insists that Saul has no son, and that he has “forsaken the living for the dead,” which, as we have seen, are both ontically (if not necessarily ontologically) correct statements. Saul’s insistence that everyone in the camp is already dead allows him to maintain the priority of the boy’s command over him, instead of allowing the suffering of the other Sonderkommandos to take on meaning in him, becoming “the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable suffering of the other” (ibid.). Strangely, their ontic suffering fails to be legible for Saul because they are “already dead,” even as the onto-theological ‘suffering’ of the boy’s corpse (insofar as it cries out to be properly buried) must be “taken care of,” despite the fact that the boy can no longer suffer in the sense of suffering as “a datum in consciousness” (ibid. 91). Still, in all this, we have not yet been able to answer the question: can ethical priority, the “supreme ethical principle — the only one which it is impossible to question” enter into this scene?
Levinas writes that this sense of priority or ultimacy is a Greek (metaphysical) idea, rather than a biblical (in the sense of non-metaphysical or de-centered) one, and suggests that in questioning itself, questions are not posed but instead “take[] hold of you: there you are brought into question” (Levinas, “Questions and Answers” 85). However, he also tells us that “in the relationship with another I am always in relation with the third party. But he is also my neighbor. From this moment on, proximity becomes problematic: one must compare, weigh, think; one must do justice which is the source of theory” (ibid. 82, my emphasis). What I would like to suggest, in this light, is that Saul is taken hold of by the question of mercy for his son, even as he fails to be brought into question by the unjust suffering of the other Sonderkommandos as the third party. In Heideggerian terms, in the non-world of the camp, Saul conceives of the being of himself and those around him as “undying death,” and undergoes the moment in which he adopts the boy as his son as a glimpse of mortality in a world which otherwise only contains pieces. In Levinasian terms, the third party does not appear in Saul’s relation with his adopted son, and so the question of justice fails to emerge. Insofar as Saul is not brought into question by the third party, by the unjustifiable suffering of the other Sonderkommandos, we have no recourse — without proximity becoming problematic, without metaphysically comparing, weighing, and thinking in this decidedly Greek way — to determine whether Saul is ultimately right or wrong in his metaphysical mission to find mercy for his son’s body.
Although the film focuses so tightly on Saul, I think by comparing and weighing in the way Levinas suggests we must, we can see that the film depicts not Saul, but the rabbi who saves him as the truly ethical figure. This rabbi warns Saul from the beginning that his quest to properly bury his son can only fail: Saul does not know the boy’s name. He tells Saul to say kaddish for the boy, even as he recognizes along with Saul that this is not enough. But he departs from Saul by weighing what he is willing to do for the boy with the demands of justice. Despite Saul’s failure to consider justice for the other Sonderkommandos, this rabbi not only enacts justice in the film, but also enacts mercy, pulling Saul from the water as he is drowning near the film’s end.
Perhaps now we can understand, if not the univocal meaning of the film’s end, at least a variety of possibilities for making sense of the appearance of the Polish farm boy in the doorway of the abandoned barn. After the rabbi rescues Saul from the river after he has lost the body to the current, Saul loses all of the purpose his mission to bury the boy had imparted to him. He no longer cares to preserve his own life for the sake of the boy. He lags behind the other Sonderkommandos and has to be prompted multiple times and hurried along by the rabbi who saved him from the river. Arriving at the barn, Saul sits despondently with his head down. The camera is still and points towards the door, focused on the space that it frames. For approximately thirty seconds, the rabbi in the blurry foreground tends to the wounded and prepares the other Sonderkommandos to continue fleeing the Nazi soldiers on their tail. But, in the last ten seconds of the same still shot, the farm boy steps into the doorway and into the camera’s focal plane. Slowly, Saul looks up, and for the next fifty seconds, the camera shows Saul’s face — breaking from it only twice to show the farm boy’s face — as they make sustained eye contact and Saul slowly but surely breaks into a smile. In the seconds before the farm boy turns and runs, the corners of his lips twitch upwards, and he recognizes Saul. It is because of Saul’s smile, the farm boy’s twitch of recognition, and because this moment causes the transfer of the film’s perspectival locus from Saul to the boy, that I wish to argue that this also constitutes a kind of interruptive moment. The interhuman flicker that occurs in this moment, even as the boy runs off, restores to Saul his mortality. That is, in this strange moment, the nearness of the boy brings Saul into a world, even as he is the only person in the barn to notice the boy. The smile breaks out across his face in a way which seems to signal — if not his ontic escape from the clutches of the Nazi regime — an onto-theological release from his abject failure to bury his son. It is from out of this sense of forgiveness that “Son of Saul” may be read to be a Christian film: the other more obvious way of arriving at this Christian reading fails to be rigorous. This farm boy is obviously not the resurrected corpse of Saul’s son.
That said, I do not wish to suggest that the film necessarily ends in a Christian manner. For Levinas, ethical “attention” and “action” are so “imperiously and directly incumbent on human beings (on their I’s) that it makes awaiting them from an all-powerful God impossible without our lowering ourselves” (Levinas, “Useless Suffering” 94). In this way, we can perhaps read Saul’s smile and the boy’s responding twitch to be expressions of this ‘lowering,’ of immanently responding to the other in their alterity, of letting the world world without relying on the technology of theodicy. Running these Christian and Judaic readings together, as I think may rightly be done, we can understand Nemes’ film as offering a kind of veiled comforting resolution, in which Saul is revived from his state of undying death to a state of mortality, brought into a world by the appearance of the Polish farm boy before he is killed in an ambush by the Nazi soldiers. In this way, Saul becomes capable of death as death: outside of the confines of the camp, and seemingly indifferent to his own life after losing his son’s body, he is able to be interrupted by the farm boy, and able to produce the uncannily indescribable but sincere smile which seems to release him, to open him to the world. He is no longer a piece but has entered the interhuman with the recognizing twitch of the boy’s lips and his curious and astonished gaze. Devastating as “Son of Saul” is, perhaps it gives us some comfort to believe that Saul at least reaches death as death, as Beyng in its refuge in the poem of the world (Heidegger 53). If even in these most unbearable of conditions, alterity and the interhuman can still emerge, perhaps we can restore our confidence in the enigma of Beyng, in the inability for Ge-stell to completely saturate Beyng itself. Perhaps we can learn to hear each other, to remember that “objectivity repos[es] on justice,” and to say ‘adieu’ to revenge, war, and the perverse ways in which the logic of Auschwitz persists to this day.
WORKS CITED:
Heidegger, Martin. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking. Trans. Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “Peace and Proximity.” Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Print.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “Questions and Answers.” Of God Who Comes To Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “Useless Suffering.” Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith, Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Print.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 