What needs to be resisted when faced with the shocking reports and images of the burning Paris suburbs is what I call the hermeneutic temptation: the search for some deeper meaning or message hidden in these outbursts.

[...] there is nothing noble or sublime about what Benjamin called divine violence--it is 'divine' precisely on account of its excessively destructive character. Second, we have to abandon the idea that there is something emancipatory in extreme experiences, that they enable us to open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation. There is a memorable passage in Ruth Klüger's Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, in which she describes a conversation with some advanced PhD candidates in Germany:

Auschwitz was no instructional institution ... You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps, I hear myself saying, with my voice rising, and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for? They were the most useless, pointless establishments imaginable.

This, perhaps, is the most depressing lesson of horror and suffering: there is nothing to be learned from it. The only way out of the vicious circle of this depression is to change the terrain toward concrete social and economic analysis.