ABSTRACT
The movie Son of Saul, by Hungarian director László Nemes, confronts the audience with a major riddle about what it means to be human when dishumanity and annihilation have prevailed in the world. When individual and collective life has been stripped of meaning, the only surviving meaning becomes a ritual, which symbolically reinstates some kind of humane order, a way to reinstate civilization against barbarity and animality. Exquisitely human, rituals represent and convey the survival of civilization and a superior symbolic order, even when life itself has been destroyed and ripped apart. Saul’s attempt represents a way of “going beyond” Antigone’s gesture, cast within the anti-structure (Victor Turner’s term) of the Holocaust.
