IV.2
Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz
The second chapter is titled “The Muselmann.” “Muselmann”
(or “Muslim”) was a term created by those interred in Auschwitz to describe
those who had lost any sense of individual will, the ability to use language,
and the consciousness of pain, their surroundings, and their fellow inmates. The
Muselmann represents, in other words,
the “extreme” or “limit situation” of the camps, and beyond him or her “lies
only the gas chamber.”[i]
The production of bare life in the form of the Muselmann can therefore be seen as the “decisive function” of the
Nazi camps, in which one apprehends, in the progressive dehumanization of
people, “the emergence of something like an absolute biopolitical substance
that cannot be assigned to a particular bearer or subject, or be divided by
another caesura.”[ii]
Though it is somewhat unclear how Agamben wants the Muselmann to function in his book—that
is, whether Agamben would like the Muselmann
to become a transhistorical category or retain its historical and material
particularity (a problem that will be returned to later in this essay)—it is
essential for Agamben that the Muselmann
not be misunderstood as a fundamental disjuncture between life and death;
rather, this figure of the camps is to be understood as a “threshold” between
the human and inhuman.[iii]
It is for this reason that the concept of an ethical limit has to be rejected:
“[I]f there is a zone of the human in which these [ethical] concepts make no
sense, then they are not genuine ethical concepts, for no ethics can claim to
exclude a part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that part of
humanity is to see.”[iv] In
other words, because “there is still life in the most extreme degradation,” the
Muselmann becomes “the guard on the
threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where
dignity ends.”[v] Building
on the argument of the previous chapter, Agamben argues that it is in the name
of this dehumanized human that one must bear witness—one must employ one’s own
voice in search of the deafening soundlessness of the Muselmann. Now the gravity of Agamben’s comment that “the survivors
bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to” is completely
clear.
In the third chapter, “Shame, or On the Subject,” Agamben
turns from the reflective commentary of the first two chapters toward building
a theory of ethical subjectivity that takes testimony as its center. It is
unfortunate that this chapter introduces a formal disjunction between the two
halves of the book that Agamben is unable to completely resolve; while the
first half of the book focuses on survivor testimony and its position in
formulating a new form of ethics, the latter half of the book tries too hard to
systematize these observations and, as such, loses much of the specificity that
gave the first half of the book its clarity and weight. Thus, while both halves
of the book share the same key terms and concepts, one cannot help but detect a
palpable shift in the meaning of these terms and concepts congruent with the
shift in context and intention in which Agamben uses them. By the final
chapter, Agamben’s argument becomes so diffuse that it is difficult for him to
tie together all the loose ends. This having been said, Agamben’s insights into
ethics and subjectivity are valuable, and I would contend that they must be
taken seriously. Therefore, it behooves me to give equal attention to the book’s
second half.
[i]
Ibid., 48, 84. The origin and meaning of the term “Muselmann” is uncertain; Agamben lists several possibilities, but
the most likely meaning of the epithet is the literal definition of the word
“Muslim,” i.e., “one who submits unconditionally to the will of God” (44-45).
[ii]
Ibid., 84.
[iii]
Ibid., 55.
[iv]
Ibid., 63-64.
[v]
Ibid., 69.
