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April 6, 2006
I started reading Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz here then dropped it. Suprisingly, I did so, despite the text being an account of ethical response to biopolitical subjection in the concentration camp, which Agamben holds operate as 'the nomos of the earth', as the biopolitical space par excellence. Maybe I was reading the text politically rather than ethically? Agamben explicitly distinquishes between ethical categories and juridical categories (responsibility and guilt) to clear a space in which the problem of Auschwitz has not been overcome.
Remnants of Auschwitz is an interpretative account based on the writing of others, notably Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved. In this text Agamben takes the condition of the camps as a starting point. He says that in ' the camp, one of the reasons that can drive a prisoner to survive is the idea of becoming a witness.' He grounds his witnessing of the horror of Auschwitz on those 'who have experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it'--a camp prisoner.
The figure who witnesses is the living dead, the Muselmann, the shell man who marks the threshold between life and death ; it is limbo in which human passes into non-human. The threshold or non-place is the world of the half living. The Muselmann are immobile skeletons who do not speak and who had touched bottom. Agamben says that:
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 daily life. But it is this paradoxical tendency of the limit situation to turn over into its opposite that makes it interesting. As long as the state of exception and the normal situaion are kept separate in space and time, as is usually the case, both remain opaque though they secretly institute each other. But as soon as they show their complicitly, which happens more and more today, they illuninate each other, so to speak, from the inside.
Agamben says that before Auschwitz became an extermination or death camp it was a concentration camp in which the Jew is transformed into a Muselmann, and the human being into a non-human.
Agamben says that what is at stake in the extreme situation of Auschwitz is remaining human or not, becoming a Muselmann or not. Agamben aims to show us that the Muselmann raises the most profound questions about the basis of dignity, morality, and politics--indeed about our very understanding of humanity. Is he right about this?
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This is not precisely relevant, but "Muselmann" is the Yiddish word for "Muslim" (see Muselmann in the Camps).
Agamben's account of the camps may be usefully contrasted with Adorno's sense of "Auschwitz" and the "new categorical imperative" that it carries with it.