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May 1, 2006
In his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive Giorgio Agamben asks:
What does it mean to be passive with respect to oneself?
He says that passivity does not mean receptivity, the mere fact of being affected by an external force, since the the passive subject must be active with respect to its own passivity. He then links it to Auschwitz:
Passivity, as a form of subjectivity, is thus constitutively fractured into a purely receptive pole (the Muselmann) and an actively passive pole (the witness), but in such a way that this facture never leaves itself, fully separating the two poles. On the contrary, it always has the form of an intimacy, of being consigned to a passivity, to a making oneself passive in which the two terms are both distinct and inseparable. (p.111)
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