IV.1
Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz
Agamben begins his book with a prefatory reflection on the
state of Holocaust studies. He argues that while sufficient attention has been
paid to the specific historical and material circumstances, enough to establish
a “general framework” for current and future studies, there is insufficient
understanding of its “contemporary relevance” due to limited investigations
into the continued “ethical and political significance” of the extermination of
the Jews during World War II.[i]
Though one could easily dispute the totalizing nature of Agamben’s claim—nearly
all literature on the camps grapples
in some way with the ethical and political significance of the
extermination—Agamben seems to be right to suggest that the aura of
unsayability surrounding the camps limits the ability for critical dialogue to
trace precisely these problems. An investigation into the ethical and political
significance of the camps for people living today (and in the near future when
there will no longer be anyone alive who experienced firsthand the horrors of
the Nazi camps) is therefore essential.
Agamben believes that such an investigation must take as its
locus the written and verbal accounts of the survivors of the camps, and he
positions his own book as “a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony.”[ii] At
the very center of testimony, Agamben discovers an “essential lacuna”: “the
survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to.”[iii]
This potent discovery made Agamben realize that all formulations of ethics in
contemporary society are rendered inadequate when faced with this gap, and his
critical intervention must take shape as a tireless rethinking of ethical
categories. Therefore, in response to the crisis of ethics in the postmodern
world, Agamben declares the modest intention of his book: “For my own part, I
will consider myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place
and theme of testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future
cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves.”[iv]
In the four chapters that follow, Agamben offers a moving commentary on the
testimony of Auschwitz survivors, focusing especially on the implications of
Primo Levi’s 1987 book The Drowned and
the Saved.
Agamben’s first chapter, “The Witness,” introduces the
fundamental paradox of witnessing Auschwitz. Termed “Levi’s paradox,” it is
taken from an unsettling but incontrovertible statement in Levi’s book: “We,
the survivors, are not the true witnesses.”[v]
This is the “lacuna” Agamben refers to in the preface, the fundamental lack
that constitutes all testimony on Auschwitz—the only ones who can bear witness
are the ones who did not witness the ultimate horror of the camps; the only
ones who witnessed the ultimate horror of the camps cannot bear witness. Thus,
it is the vocation of the witness to bear witness for the true witness, that is
to say the one who cannot bear witness.
This chapter also begins Agamben’s engagement with issues in
ethics. Though later chapters will develop ethics as integrally bound to
testimony and subjectivity in what I call the “fragile ethics of testimony,” in
this chapter he lays the groundwork for those later reflections by attempting
to separate ethics as a philosophical vocation from law (and, because it is
“contaminated” by law, religion as well).[vi]
The goal of law is judgment, and judgment, Agamben notes, is essentially
self-referential in the sense that it is concerned exclusively with guilt or
non-guilt rather than “the good” or “the ethical.”[vii]
Consequently, Agamben argues that it is a mistake to think that the trials of
Nuremberg have allowed society to “overcome” Auschwitz, for a juridical
framework, which can only arrive at a simple, ultimately meaningless verdict of
the guilt or non-guilt of an indicted party, cannot exhaust the ethical problem
posed by the camps.[viii] It is
essential, therefore, that one not confuse ethical categories with juridical or
legal categories like “responsibility” or “guilt” when discussing the ethics of
testimony.
[i] Giorgio
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The
Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (New York: Zone Books,
1999), 11.
[ii]
Ibid., 13.
[iii]
Ibid.
[iv]
Ibid. Alex Murray has helpfully summarized Agamben’s approach to ethics in two
necessarily interwoven positions: first, in its linguistic/historical
operation, ethics deals with trying to find a way of “remembering and
representing those to whom the greatest injustice was done”; and second, in its
political operation, ethics is engaged in a thorough critique of the power
structures that authorize injustice as well as an attempt to found a “new idea
of community” (117).
[v]
Cited Agamben, Remnants, 33.
[vi]
Ibid., 18.
[vii]
Ibid.
[viii]
Ibid., 19-20.
