[Full Title: The Fragile Ethics of
Testimony: Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz]
Because I remember, I despair.
Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers,
I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons
to hope.
---Elie
Wiesel, “Hope, Despair and Memory”
I.
Introduction
This essay engages the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s
book Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness
and the Archive, which was published first in Italian in 1998 and
subsequently translated into English in 1999. My essay will begin with a brief
overview of Giorgio Agamben’s education and philosophical perspective, followed
by a more thorough discussion of some of his recent work on political theory
and modern government. Next, I offer a reading of Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz that highlights
the ethical aspect of the work. Fundamentally, I argue that the book contains a
central, though fragile, ethical imperative toward witnessing that is a
distinctively philosophical response to the ineluctable place Auschwitz
inhabits in the collective memory of Europe and the world. This “fragile ethics
of testimony,” grounded in a provocative approach to human subjectivity,
constitutes a new form of ethics that attempts to overcome the malaise of
postmodernism without evoking the totalizing (or totalitarian) narratives of
modernity. Finally, I will conclude with a critique of Agamben’s philosophy and
method that places him in the context of an indispensable strand of
anti-postmodern continental philosophy.
