Por Andrea Hellemeyer.
The movie by Edward Berger is the third film adaptation of the book “Nothing New in the West”, a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who was himself a German veteran of World War 1. The book describes the German soldiers' horror experiences during the war as well as the detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home from the battle front. The novel was first published 1928 in a German newspaper and in a book form in late 1929. 11 years after of that 11 of November at 11 hrs, time in which the armistice begun. The book and its sequel, The Road Back (1930), were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany.
In the film we follow the trajectory of youngsters Paul, Albert and Muller: from their decision to enlist in the German army until the very last minute of the war. There are indeed many important aspects that could be consider but I will take two main concepts that are in the core of the psychoanalytical ethics: responsibility and guilt.
Psychoanalysis allows us to grant these terms of colloquial and everyday use, the theoretical consistency necessary to turn them into operational tools. In relation to responsibility, it is necessary to make a first distinction and differentiate moral- legal responsibility of subjective responsibility.
Regarding moral responsibility, two clarifications:
The first, linked to the conception of subject on which it is based. Responsibility understood in the framework of legal discourse is sustained in the idea of a subject that governs himself, an autonomous subject, subject of conscience, will and intentionality.
The second warns us that responsibility in legal discourse is not immanent to the subject. Responsibility is granted. Thus, for those individuals to whom cannot be imputed a conscience, a reason, or will, they will be placed under the category of unimputable, among them the insane and the children. They are the irresponsible par excellence, and this is not a minor issue for those of us who are interested in the clinic with children and young people who have gone through experiences linked to violence.
The void of responsibility that the legal discourse establishes, will be a central variable to consider when it comes to promoting the subjectivation of the horror experienced. Precisely, what the youngster is deprived of, is the act of responding in his own name about what has happened to him. Let us keep in mind that esponsibility and response share the same ethimological root. In this sense, that what defines the responsibility is precisely the response provided by the subject. Thus, within the framework of the law it is only possible to impute guilt to those who are legally responsible. Which is the same as posing: if he is not responsible, so he is not guilty.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, conceives the subject as responsible by definition. Subjective responsibility, which we know, is based on the conception of the subject of the unconscious, subject of desire. This has been indeed a central Freudian finding, that allows the subject, in an analysis, to confront to what presents for himself as foreign but carries the mark of his own desire. This precise way to think the subject, contrary to what legal discourse promotes, questions the subject himself outside the borders of the self, outside the ideals. On the other hand, the idea of autonomy, restricts the field of responsibility to its moral and legal aspect by reducing the problem to the realm of conscience, reason and intentionality.
In this sense, we will say that subjective responsibility is solidary of the notion of an ethical subject. As Subjective responsibility is one possible path among many that the subject could take regarding what has challenged him. Interpellation and subjective responsibility do not have a causal link. The subject that has been questioned, can respond from the ideals and thus close the door to the subjective responsibility. He could also just ignore what has burst into his life and consequently intensify the symbolic universe in which he sustains his life coordinates.
The responses to the interpellation that the real presents for the subject are multiple and varied, but the path of subjective responsibility is not confused. It is the one where a subjective act has taken place. Act, which will be presented to the subject with a certain opacity that responds to the fact that in the strict sense there is no subject of act, but pure subjective destitution. If there is no subject of the act, the responsibility only belongs to the subject that the same act has produced. The ethical act creates a subject, and therefore the responsibility will be presented under a retroactive logic.
Now, what relationship can we establish between subjective responsibility and guilt?
Guilt is the pathos of responsibility[1]. Only those who know themselves guilty can open the way to a responsibility that challenges them beyond the border of conscience, intentions and will. Guilt that will account for the subjective implication, as the subject knows he is concerned, implicated in what challenges him. If there is implication, that is, subjective commitment to the word that the answer carries, the path to subjective responsibility can be opened.
Responsibility that supposes a singular answer, outside of any plan or calculation. Subjective responsibility is played in the decisional field, and therefore opens the ethical dimension for the subject.
The decision of the subject, elevated to the status of subjective act, assumes that it will not be directed or tied to the Other, and only in this way it would introduce that absolute singularity that is not tied to any end, to any ideal neither religious, nor political, nor social, that which in its excess, in its radical difference, in its exceptionality, as Derrida indicates, takes the test of the impossible: as if interrupting the ordinary course of historical temporality.
Bibliography
Derrida, J. (2003) The century of forgiveness. Ediciones La Flor.
Salomone, G. Dominguez, M. (2006). The transmission of ethics, clinical and deontology. Editorial Letra Viva.
Palacios, Claudia (2016). Forgive the unforgivable. Editorial Planeta.
[1] Jacques Alain Miller. Pathology of ethics. First lecture, in Logics of Love Life. Editorial Letra Viva.
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