Four essays. Preface opens with the reasonable proposition that the discrepancy regarding Auschwitz “concerns the very structure of testimony” (12): “On the one hand, what happened in the camps appears to the survivors as the only true thing and, as such, absolutely unforgettable; on the other hand, this truth is to the same degree unimaginable, that is, irreducible to the real elements that constitute it” (id.). The discrepancy concerns “facts so real, by comparison, nothing is truer; a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements—such is the aporia of Auschwitz” ((id.). One survivor, Lewental, a sonderkommando, wrote that “the complete truth is far more tragic, far more frightening” (id.)—to which author responds: “more tragic, more frightening than what?” We see that the “aporia of Auschwitz is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension” (id.). We also see that
I – “The Witness”
In Auschwitz, one reason to survive was “the idea of becoming a witness” (15). Primo Levi “does not consider himself a writer; he becomes a writer so that he can bear witness” (id.).
Latin has two terms for our ‘witness’: testis (“from which our word ‘testimony’ derives, etymologically signifies the person, who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (*terstis)” (17)) and superstes (“a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it”) (id.). These latinate concepts problematize the notion of bearing witness to Auschwitz, as we shall see. Levi is interested only in “what makes judgment possible: the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims” (17). Judgment can be made, of course, but important that “the law not presume to exhaust the question. A non-juridical element of truth exists such that the quaestio facti can never be reduced to the quaestio iuris” (id.).
Author notes the standard “tacit confusion of ethical and juridical categories” in this connection (18)—all of this is “contaminated by law,” which has the “ultimate aim” of “the production of a res judicata” (id.), quite distinct from the finding of truth or the disposition in justice. Rather, “the sentence becomes the substitute [supplement?] for the true and the just, being held as true despite its falsity and injustice” (id.). Via reference to Kafka, law is reduced to judgment, and judgment to trial: “execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct” (19) (the plotinian hoion, of course) and dude concludes that judgment constitutes “the mystery of trial.” Some suggestion that the post-war trials (which involved “only a few hundred people,” an “evident insufficiency” (19)) “are responsible for the conceptual confusion that, for decades, has made it impossible to think through Auschwitz,” as “they helped spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome.” We get now that “law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself” (20).
Some discussion here on ‘responsibility’—it has been “irredeemably contaminated by law” (20) (likely we need an archaeology of contamination, considering dude’s reliance thereupon) (cf. also Bakhtin on ‘answerability’). Levi would place certain occurrences in a “zone of irresponsibility,” based on his “unprecedented discovery” at Auschwitz of “an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility,” wherein “the long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner comes loose” (21). We are not “beyond good and evil” (i.e., with Nietzsche), but “before them”; “before is more important than any beyond—that the ‘underman’ must matter to us more than the ‘overman’” (id.). Again, this “First Circle” of irresponsibility is Arendt’s banality of evil. The sonderkommando is the representative of this zone of irresponsibility (25).
Etymology again tells the story: spondeo “means ‘to become the guarantor of something for someone (or for oneself) with respect to someone’” (id.). For the Romans, the “custom was that a free man could consign himself as a hostage—that is, in a state of imprisonment, from which the term obligatio derives—to guarantee the compensation of a wrong or the fulfillment of an obligation” (22), and the “term sponsor indicated the person who substituted himself for the reus, promising, in the case of a breach of contract, to furnish the requested service” (id.). Responsibility is accordingly “genuinely juridical and not ethical” wherein “the legal bond was considered to inhere in the body of the person responsible” (id.). (We shall recall this when we get around to volume IX.)
The analysis turns to Greek martis, ‘martyr,’ as translation for ‘witness’: though the ante-Nicene fathers regarded martyrdom as witness to the faith, the Auschwitz survivors are unanimous that “what happened in the camps has little to do with martyrdom” (26). Conceptually, however, there is some connection, insofar as the Greek term is derived from the verb ‘to remember,’—“the survivor’s vocation is to remember; he cannot not remember” (id.). More significantly, however, the ante-Nicene fathers “were confronted by heretical groups that rejected martyrdom because, in their eyes, it constituted a wholly senseless death (perire sine causa)” (27). The doctrine of martyrdom was confected to justify “the scandal of a meaningless death, of an execution that could only appear as absurd” (id.): “Confronted with the spectacle of a death that was apparently sine causa, the reference to Luke 12: 8-9 and to Matthew 10: 32-33 [quotations omitted] made it possible to interpret martyrdom as a divine command and, thus, to find reason for the irrational” (id.). Levi does not like the term Holocaust because of the implication of an offering or a punishment for sins (28), noting how Wiesel coined the term “then regretted it and wanted to take it back” (id.).
As we might have predicted, an etymology follows: holocaustos ultimately as a ‘complete burning,’ “used to translate […] the complex sacrificial doctrine of the Bible” (there’s several different Hebrew terms, and the term that the Vulgate rendered as holocaustum, olah, concerns “the dispatch of the offering to the divinity” (29)). The Ante-Nicene fathers used the term literally against Judaism, to “condemn the uselessness of bloody sacrifices” (id.), but then used it metaphorically to refer to the torture of the Christian martyrs, with the ultimate extension, by Augustine, to se holocaustum obtulerit in cruce Iesus.
The metaphorical usage is not limited to holocaust; the preferred term has been so’ah, which also reveals a metaphorical usage, meaning “‘devastation, catastrophe’ and, in the Bible, often implies the idea of divine punishment (as in Isaiah 10:3)” (31). Unlike holocaust, however, so’ah “contains no mockery”; the former term is an “attempt to establish a connection, however, distant, between Auschwitz and the Biblical olah and between death in the gas chamber and the ‘complete devotion to sacred and superior motives’” (id.). In swearing off the use of the term forever, author notes that “Not only does the term imply an unacceptable equation between crematoria and altars; it also continues a semantic heredity that is from its inception anti-Semitic” (id.).
Agamben had been challenged for trying to “ruin the unique and unsayable character of Auschwitz” (31). ‘Unique’ is conceded, but ‘unsayable’? Works through Chrysostom’s notion that God is unsayable, unspeakable, unwritable (32), such that the angels must merely adore Him in silence. Author translates ‘adore in silence’ as euphemein, and regards it as the proper way to cognize the complaint that he has ruined the unsayable character of Auschwitz.
“Testimony, however, contains,” once more, “a lacuna” (33): as Levi notes, “witnesses are by definition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege.” This lacuna “calls into question the very meaning of testimony and, along with it, the identity and reliability of witnesses” (id.); Levi: “I must repeat: we the survivors, are not the true witnesses.” Levi makes his testimony essentially a representative capacity: “Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy” (34). Agamben notes that “the value of the testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority” (id.). Rather, the survivors speak as “pseudo-witnesses” insofar as “they bear witness to the missing testimony” (id.). Of course, by means of the standard adverse inference under the requisite rules of evidence, disappeared witnesses and concealed evidence compels the presumption that the party procuring the absence fears its disclosure and therefore we should assume the worst—so we should not be troubled by pseudo-witnesses.
This difficulty is explained otherwise as an inside/outside distinction: “The Shoah is an event without witnesses” because “it is impossible to bear witness from the inside” (no one survives to tell) or from the outside “since the ‘outsider’ is by definition excluded from the event” (35). Agamben thinks that the threshold of indistinction (hoion, recall) between inside and outside “could have led to a comprehension of the structure of testimony” (36). Testimony as the “disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness” (39)?
II – “The Muselmann”
Muselmann as the “untestifiable” to which “no one has borne witness” (41). The Muselmann as a “staggering corpse,” “mummy men,” “living dead” (id.), who “became indifferent to everything happening around them” (43). (The designation arises in Auschwitz from “the impression of seeing Arabs praying” (id.), according to one survivor.) No one had sympathy for the muselmanner (id.), and “all the muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story” (44). Little agreement on the “origin of the term Muselmann,” but many synonyms (45).
Muselmanner as marking “the moving threshold in which a man passed into non-man and in which clinical diagnosis passed into anthropological analysis” (47); “in Auschwitz ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the ‘complete witness,’ makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man” (id.) (NB: hoion). This particular zone of indistinction is what ties this volume very plainly to volume I (to the extent that “the Muselmann’s ‘third realm’ is the perfect cipher for the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed” (id.)) and volume II (insofar as the philosopher’s “extreme situation” is the jurist’s “state of exception”). In this latter connection, Karl Barth’s notion that “human beings have the striking capacity to adapt so well to an extreme situation that it can no longer function as a distinguishing criterion” (49), i.e., noting the “incredible tendency of the limit situation to become habit (hexis recall): “Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of life” (id.) (we shall recall the notion of ‘perfect coincidence with the rule’ in volume VIII).
Muselmanner described with increasing intensity: “witnesses confirm the impossibility of gazing upon the Muselmann” (50); filmmaker who “patiently lingered over naked bodies, over the terrible ‘dolls’ dismembered and stacked one on top of another, could not bear the sight of these half-living beings” (51); Muselmanner as “an absolutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes” (id.); although the Muselmann is noted by most survivors as “a central experience,” the figure is “barely named in the historical studies on the destruction of European Jewry” (52); Levi designates the Muselmann as “he who has seen the Gorgon” (53). Lots on the Gorgon stuff, impossibility of seeing and being seen, &c.
Much on other interpretations of the Muselmann (57 ff): a biological machine, a limit of certain principles, an experiment, a refutation of Apel’s obligatory communication thesis, as Aristotle’s ‘plant man,’ a radical refutation of all refutations (66).
Critique of the doctrine of dignity thereafter (67 ff.): “Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm” (69) insofar as “the bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands not conforms to anything” (id.). Rather, “the atrocious news that the survivors carry from the camp to the land of human beings is precisely that it is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagination, that there is still life [zoe] in the most extreme degradation” (id.). The Muselmann is accordingly on the threshold of the new ethics of “a form of life that begins where dignity ends” (id.).
Camps as having the role of “the fabrication of corpses” (as stated by Arendt) (71): “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced” (72). (Am skipping over all the Heidegger stuff.) Some reflections on Adorno’s well known positions on Auschwitz (80 ff.), as well as on Foucault’s notation of the passage of sovereignty (“to make die and let live”) to biopower (“to make live and let die”) (82 ff). The Third Reich is of course where the “unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics” (83). The NSDAP dream of volkloser Raum, “not simply a matter of a desert,” but rather “a fundamental biopolitical intensity” (85), “an absolute biopolitical space, both lebensraum and todesraum” (86).
III – “Shame, or on the Subject”
Upon his liberation by the Red Army, Levi reported a sense of shame, which “becomes the dominant sentiment of survivors” (88), which conflated very soon with guilt. Bettleheim reports it as a survivor’s guilt: “one cannot survive the concentration camp without feeling guilty that one was so incredibly lucky when millions perished” (89).
This leads to a critique of the doctrine of collective responsibility (94 ff), which Levi acknowledges to be bogus insofar as “it makes no sense to speak of a collective guilt (or innocence) and that only ‘metaphorically can one claim to feel guilty for what’s one’s own people or parents did” (95).
Some thoughtful comments on Hegelian theory of tragedy in this connection (96 ff). Also, Nietzsche: “The ethics of the twentieth century opens with Nietzsche’s overcoming of resentment” (99) via the eternal return thesis—but: “Auschwitz also marks a decisive rupture” (id.). (I.e., who wants Auschwitz to return? “One cannot want Auschwitz to return for eternity, since in truth it has never ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself” (101).)
Levinas on shame: it does not derive from “the consciousness of an imperfection or a lack in our being from which we take distance” (104), but rather “shame is grounded in our being’s incapacity to move away and break from itself” (id.). Shame as “the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness [sic] to its own disorder” (106). Shame as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty” (107).
In Levi, we find “the impossible dialectic between the survivor and the Muselmann” (120): “Who is the subject of testimony?” A zone of indistinction “in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ of the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness” (id.).
We see that “life bears with it a caesura that can transform all life into survival and all survival into life. […] survival designates the pure and simple continuation of bare life [cf. volume I]” (133).
IIII – “The Archive and Testimony”
Lotsa linguistics stuff: Benveniste, Foucault, &c. “Auschwitz represents the historical point in which these processes collapse, the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real” (148). We see that the Muselmann is the absolutely unwitnessable, invisible ark of biopower. Invisible because empty, because the Muselmann is nothing other than volkloser Raum, the empty space of people at the center of the camp” (156).
Ultimately, “the subject of testimony” is “a remnant” (158). This is a “theologico-messianic concept” (162). Regarding the remnant, “the aporia of testimony coincides with the aporia of messianism” (163).
“Let us indeed posit Auschwitz, that to which it is not possible to bear witness; and let us also posit the Muselmann as the absolute impossibility of bearing witness” (164).
Recommended for those who examine the incomparable; phenomenology of heteronymic depersonalization, degree zero pseudonyms, and readers in secret solidarity with the arcanum imperii.
One of the lessons of Auschwitz is that it is infinitely harder to grasp the mind of an ordinary person than to understand the mind of a Spinoza or Dante. (Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the ‘banality of evil,’ so often misunderstood, must also be understood in this sense.) (13)Though Agamben states that this text has little that can’t be found in the actual testimonials, “it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna: in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to” (id). His task became an interrogation of the lacuna, even though “listening to something absent” may seem counterintuitive: “it made it necessary to clear away almost all of the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics” (id.).
I – “The Witness”
In Auschwitz, one reason to survive was “the idea of becoming a witness” (15). Primo Levi “does not consider himself a writer; he becomes a writer so that he can bear witness” (id.).
Latin has two terms for our ‘witness’: testis (“from which our word ‘testimony’ derives, etymologically signifies the person, who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (*terstis)” (17)) and superstes (“a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it”) (id.). These latinate concepts problematize the notion of bearing witness to Auschwitz, as we shall see. Levi is interested only in “what makes judgment possible: the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims” (17). Judgment can be made, of course, but important that “the law not presume to exhaust the question. A non-juridical element of truth exists such that the quaestio facti can never be reduced to the quaestio iuris” (id.).
Author notes the standard “tacit confusion of ethical and juridical categories” in this connection (18)—all of this is “contaminated by law,” which has the “ultimate aim” of “the production of a res judicata” (id.), quite distinct from the finding of truth or the disposition in justice. Rather, “the sentence becomes the substitute [supplement?] for the true and the just, being held as true despite its falsity and injustice” (id.). Via reference to Kafka, law is reduced to judgment, and judgment to trial: “execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct” (19) (the plotinian hoion, of course) and dude concludes that judgment constitutes “the mystery of trial.” Some suggestion that the post-war trials (which involved “only a few hundred people,” an “evident insufficiency” (19)) “are responsible for the conceptual confusion that, for decades, has made it impossible to think through Auschwitz,” as “they helped spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome.” We get now that “law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself” (20).
Some discussion here on ‘responsibility’—it has been “irredeemably contaminated by law” (20) (likely we need an archaeology of contamination, considering dude’s reliance thereupon) (cf. also Bakhtin on ‘answerability’). Levi would place certain occurrences in a “zone of irresponsibility,” based on his “unprecedented discovery” at Auschwitz of “an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility,” wherein “the long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner comes loose” (21). We are not “beyond good and evil” (i.e., with Nietzsche), but “before them”; “before is more important than any beyond—that the ‘underman’ must matter to us more than the ‘overman’” (id.). Again, this “First Circle” of irresponsibility is Arendt’s banality of evil. The sonderkommando is the representative of this zone of irresponsibility (25).
Etymology again tells the story: spondeo “means ‘to become the guarantor of something for someone (or for oneself) with respect to someone’” (id.). For the Romans, the “custom was that a free man could consign himself as a hostage—that is, in a state of imprisonment, from which the term obligatio derives—to guarantee the compensation of a wrong or the fulfillment of an obligation” (22), and the “term sponsor indicated the person who substituted himself for the reus, promising, in the case of a breach of contract, to furnish the requested service” (id.). Responsibility is accordingly “genuinely juridical and not ethical” wherein “the legal bond was considered to inhere in the body of the person responsible” (id.). (We shall recall this when we get around to volume IX.)
Responsibility and guilt thus express simply two aspects of legal imputability; only later were they interiorized and moved outside law. Hence the insufficiency and opacity of every ethical doctrine that claims to be founded on these two concepts. (22)Eichmann at his trial walked this distinction by claiming meaninglessly that he felt “guilty before God, not the law” (23). The silliness arises after “having raised juridical categories to the status of supreme ethical categories and thereby irredeemably confusing the fields of law and ethics,” secular ethics still wants to be separate (24): “But ethics is the sphere that recognizes neither guilt nor responsibility; it is, as Spinoza knew, the doctrine of the happy life” (id.), which reduces, furthermore, the ethical with the mere aesthetic. One would think that if there were an irreducible core of the ethical, regarding which aesthetics is of no moment, then it should be discoverable at Auschwitz.
The analysis turns to Greek martis, ‘martyr,’ as translation for ‘witness’: though the ante-Nicene fathers regarded martyrdom as witness to the faith, the Auschwitz survivors are unanimous that “what happened in the camps has little to do with martyrdom” (26). Conceptually, however, there is some connection, insofar as the Greek term is derived from the verb ‘to remember,’—“the survivor’s vocation is to remember; he cannot not remember” (id.). More significantly, however, the ante-Nicene fathers “were confronted by heretical groups that rejected martyrdom because, in their eyes, it constituted a wholly senseless death (perire sine causa)” (27). The doctrine of martyrdom was confected to justify “the scandal of a meaningless death, of an execution that could only appear as absurd” (id.): “Confronted with the spectacle of a death that was apparently sine causa, the reference to Luke 12: 8-9 and to Matthew 10: 32-33 [quotations omitted] made it possible to interpret martyrdom as a divine command and, thus, to find reason for the irrational” (id.). Levi does not like the term Holocaust because of the implication of an offering or a punishment for sins (28), noting how Wiesel coined the term “then regretted it and wanted to take it back” (id.).
As we might have predicted, an etymology follows: holocaustos ultimately as a ‘complete burning,’ “used to translate […] the complex sacrificial doctrine of the Bible” (there’s several different Hebrew terms, and the term that the Vulgate rendered as holocaustum, olah, concerns “the dispatch of the offering to the divinity” (29)). The Ante-Nicene fathers used the term literally against Judaism, to “condemn the uselessness of bloody sacrifices” (id.), but then used it metaphorically to refer to the torture of the Christian martyrs, with the ultimate extension, by Augustine, to se holocaustum obtulerit in cruce Iesus.
The metaphorical usage is not limited to holocaust; the preferred term has been so’ah, which also reveals a metaphorical usage, meaning “‘devastation, catastrophe’ and, in the Bible, often implies the idea of divine punishment (as in Isaiah 10:3)” (31). Unlike holocaust, however, so’ah “contains no mockery”; the former term is an “attempt to establish a connection, however, distant, between Auschwitz and the Biblical olah and between death in the gas chamber and the ‘complete devotion to sacred and superior motives’” (id.). In swearing off the use of the term forever, author notes that “Not only does the term imply an unacceptable equation between crematoria and altars; it also continues a semantic heredity that is from its inception anti-Semitic” (id.).
Agamben had been challenged for trying to “ruin the unique and unsayable character of Auschwitz” (31). ‘Unique’ is conceded, but ‘unsayable’? Works through Chrysostom’s notion that God is unsayable, unspeakable, unwritable (32), such that the angels must merely adore Him in silence. Author translates ‘adore in silence’ as euphemein, and regards it as the proper way to cognize the complaint that he has ruined the unsayable character of Auschwitz.
“Testimony, however, contains,” once more, “a lacuna” (33): as Levi notes, “witnesses are by definition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege.” This lacuna “calls into question the very meaning of testimony and, along with it, the identity and reliability of witnesses” (id.); Levi: “I must repeat: we the survivors, are not the true witnesses.” Levi makes his testimony essentially a representative capacity: “Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy” (34). Agamben notes that “the value of the testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority” (id.). Rather, the survivors speak as “pseudo-witnesses” insofar as “they bear witness to the missing testimony” (id.). Of course, by means of the standard adverse inference under the requisite rules of evidence, disappeared witnesses and concealed evidence compels the presumption that the party procuring the absence fears its disclosure and therefore we should assume the worst—so we should not be troubled by pseudo-witnesses.
This difficulty is explained otherwise as an inside/outside distinction: “The Shoah is an event without witnesses” because “it is impossible to bear witness from the inside” (no one survives to tell) or from the outside “since the ‘outsider’ is by definition excluded from the event” (35). Agamben thinks that the threshold of indistinction (hoion, recall) between inside and outside “could have led to a comprehension of the structure of testimony” (36). Testimony as the “disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness” (39)?
II – “The Muselmann”
Muselmann as the “untestifiable” to which “no one has borne witness” (41). The Muselmann as a “staggering corpse,” “mummy men,” “living dead” (id.), who “became indifferent to everything happening around them” (43). (The designation arises in Auschwitz from “the impression of seeing Arabs praying” (id.), according to one survivor.) No one had sympathy for the muselmanner (id.), and “all the muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story” (44). Little agreement on the “origin of the term Muselmann,” but many synonyms (45).
Muselmanner as marking “the moving threshold in which a man passed into non-man and in which clinical diagnosis passed into anthropological analysis” (47); “in Auschwitz ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the ‘complete witness,’ makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man” (id.) (NB: hoion). This particular zone of indistinction is what ties this volume very plainly to volume I (to the extent that “the Muselmann’s ‘third realm’ is the perfect cipher for the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed” (id.)) and volume II (insofar as the philosopher’s “extreme situation” is the jurist’s “state of exception”). In this latter connection, Karl Barth’s notion that “human beings have the striking capacity to adapt so well to an extreme situation that it can no longer function as a distinguishing criterion” (49), i.e., noting the “incredible tendency of the limit situation to become habit (hexis recall): “Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of life” (id.) (we shall recall the notion of ‘perfect coincidence with the rule’ in volume VIII).
Muselmanner described with increasing intensity: “witnesses confirm the impossibility of gazing upon the Muselmann” (50); filmmaker who “patiently lingered over naked bodies, over the terrible ‘dolls’ dismembered and stacked one on top of another, could not bear the sight of these half-living beings” (51); Muselmanner as “an absolutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes” (id.); although the Muselmann is noted by most survivors as “a central experience,” the figure is “barely named in the historical studies on the destruction of European Jewry” (52); Levi designates the Muselmann as “he who has seen the Gorgon” (53). Lots on the Gorgon stuff, impossibility of seeing and being seen, &c.
Much on other interpretations of the Muselmann (57 ff): a biological machine, a limit of certain principles, an experiment, a refutation of Apel’s obligatory communication thesis, as Aristotle’s ‘plant man,’ a radical refutation of all refutations (66).
Critique of the doctrine of dignity thereafter (67 ff.): “Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm” (69) insofar as “the bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands not conforms to anything” (id.). Rather, “the atrocious news that the survivors carry from the camp to the land of human beings is precisely that it is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagination, that there is still life [zoe] in the most extreme degradation” (id.). The Muselmann is accordingly on the threshold of the new ethics of “a form of life that begins where dignity ends” (id.).
Camps as having the role of “the fabrication of corpses” (as stated by Arendt) (71): “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced” (72). (Am skipping over all the Heidegger stuff.) Some reflections on Adorno’s well known positions on Auschwitz (80 ff.), as well as on Foucault’s notation of the passage of sovereignty (“to make die and let live”) to biopower (“to make live and let die”) (82 ff). The Third Reich is of course where the “unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics” (83). The NSDAP dream of volkloser Raum, “not simply a matter of a desert,” but rather “a fundamental biopolitical intensity” (85), “an absolute biopolitical space, both lebensraum and todesraum” (86).
III – “Shame, or on the Subject”
Upon his liberation by the Red Army, Levi reported a sense of shame, which “becomes the dominant sentiment of survivors” (88), which conflated very soon with guilt. Bettleheim reports it as a survivor’s guilt: “one cannot survive the concentration camp without feeling guilty that one was so incredibly lucky when millions perished” (89).
This leads to a critique of the doctrine of collective responsibility (94 ff), which Levi acknowledges to be bogus insofar as “it makes no sense to speak of a collective guilt (or innocence) and that only ‘metaphorically can one claim to feel guilty for what’s one’s own people or parents did” (95).
Some thoughtful comments on Hegelian theory of tragedy in this connection (96 ff). Also, Nietzsche: “The ethics of the twentieth century opens with Nietzsche’s overcoming of resentment” (99) via the eternal return thesis—but: “Auschwitz also marks a decisive rupture” (id.). (I.e., who wants Auschwitz to return? “One cannot want Auschwitz to return for eternity, since in truth it has never ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself” (101).)
Levinas on shame: it does not derive from “the consciousness of an imperfection or a lack in our being from which we take distance” (104), but rather “shame is grounded in our being’s incapacity to move away and break from itself” (id.). Shame as “the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness [sic] to its own disorder” (106). Shame as “the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty” (107).
In Levi, we find “the impossible dialectic between the survivor and the Muselmann” (120): “Who is the subject of testimony?” A zone of indistinction “in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘imagined substance’ of the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness” (id.).
We see that “life bears with it a caesura that can transform all life into survival and all survival into life. […] survival designates the pure and simple continuation of bare life [cf. volume I]” (133).
IIII – “The Archive and Testimony”
Lotsa linguistics stuff: Benveniste, Foucault, &c. “Auschwitz represents the historical point in which these processes collapse, the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real” (148). We see that the Muselmann is the absolutely unwitnessable, invisible ark of biopower. Invisible because empty, because the Muselmann is nothing other than volkloser Raum, the empty space of people at the center of the camp” (156).
Ultimately, “the subject of testimony” is “a remnant” (158). This is a “theologico-messianic concept” (162). Regarding the remnant, “the aporia of testimony coincides with the aporia of messianism” (163).
“Let us indeed posit Auschwitz, that to which it is not possible to bear witness; and let us also posit the Muselmann as the absolute impossibility of bearing witness” (164).
Recommended for those who examine the incomparable; phenomenology of heteronymic depersonalization, degree zero pseudonyms, and readers in secret solidarity with the arcanum imperii.
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