April 8, 2006
Catherine Mills in a review essay of Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, says that:
The ethical problematic presented by Auschwitz then is that of remaining human or not; however, in the biopolitical situation of the camps, remaining human takes on a particular cast that eludes and contradicts attempts to sanctify human life through moral categories such as dignity and respect. Agamben argues that neither the claim that the intolerable uniqueness of Auschwitz lies in the degradation of life nor, conversely, in the degradation of death, is sufficient to yield an understanding of the indistinction of the human and the inhuman and an ethics adequate to the challenge presented by the Muselmanner.
In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben say that:
Auschwitz marks the end and ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor confoirms to anything...the good that the survivors were abke to save from the camp--if there is any sense in speaking of a "good" here--is therefore not dignity ... The Muslemann..is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where dignity ends. (p.69)
This means that Agamben is critical of those like Bruno Bettleheim who interpret the limit experience of the Muselmann in moral terms.
Bettleheim tells us that once one passes beyond the point of no return, the Muselmann abdicates his inalienable freedom and loses all traces of affective life and humanity. He is no longer a creature about whom we can speak of his human dignity, a being who is capable of responsibility. Agamben argues that dignity and responsibility are originally legal (not moral) concepts, obscure the threshold reality of the Muselmann. In a manner similar to Nietzsche, Agamben also argues that our moral concepts have their genealogy in the history of the law. Our standard moral discourse fails to do justice to the fact that the Muselmann is "beyond" dignity and responsibility. Auschwitz shows us that it is possible to lose one’s dignity and decency but that there is still life in this most extreme degradation.
What kind of ethics is Agamben pointing to? That's where it gets fuzzy.
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