Instead of a divide between human and animal (eg., one is a sentiment being and the other is not) we can talk in terms of the threshold between the human and the inhuman.
For instance, rather than simply being a death camp, Auschwitz is the site of a biopolitical experiment, wherein 'the Jew is transformed into a Muselmann (ie., a 'living corpse') and the human into a non-human'.
Agamben argues that the Muselmann is not just put outside the limits of human and the moral status that attends the categorization. Instead the Muselmann signigies a more fundamental indistinction between the human and the inhuman, in which it becomes impossible to distinguish them from each other.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 29, 2005 12:02 AM | TrackBack