IV.3
Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz
In contrast to many sociologists and philosophers who have
examined the phenomenon of “survivor’s guilt” in relation to the Holocaust,
Agamben prefers to discuss “shame,” reminding the reader that “guilt” cannot be
recouped from its juridical implications. After briefly focusing on expressions
of shame and resentment in survivors’ testimony, Agamben, following Emmanuel
Levinas, attempts to understand shame as that which is “grounded in our being’s
incapacity to move away and break from itself,” or, as he rephrases it, “to be
consigned to something that cannot be assumed.”[i]
Agamben attempts to confirm his distinctive understanding of shame through
reference to a variety of disciplinary discourses, including philosophy,
poetry/literature, psychoanalysis, and, finally and most convincingly,
linguistic theory. Shame, it turns out, is inherent to the structure of
testimony, for shame is the result of a subject’s self-expression through
language, which takes place only through an unavoidable process of desubjectification. To constitute
oneself through an “enunciation” (defined here as an act or “taking place” of
language), one must subjectify oneself to that enunciation and identify with
the pronoun “I,” which, like other “shifters” of enunciation, has no fixed or
relational meaning but is instead given meaning only through the context of a
specific discourse.[ii] Thus, “The subject of discourse is composed of discourse
and exists in discourse alone,”[iii]
and shame is the “hidden structure” of subjectivity because “consciousness
constitutively has the form of being consigned to something that cannot be
assumed.”[iv]
Unfortunately, Agamben does a poor job of connecting this digression into
linguistics to his original thesis, but it seems that testimony, insofar as it
bears witness to that which it is impossible to bear witness, represents the
subject’s struggle to assume an unassumable role, that of the “true witness”
who can never bear witness. According to Agamben, both the structure and result
of this struggle is shame.
In the fourth and final chapter of Agamben’s book, “The
Archive and Testimony,” Agamben positions his understanding of testimony in
contrast to Foucault’s use of the term archive. Briefly stated, Foucault’s
archive “designates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said” in
an enunciation, and therefore brackets the question of the subject; testimony,
on the other hand, designates the system of relations between what is sayable
and what is unsayable—the possibility and impossibility of speech—and therefore
marks a return to the question of the subject.[v]
Because subjectivity is produced through the interplay of the possible and
impossible, Agamben turns to the four modal categories (possibility,
impossibility, contingency, and necessity) to understand how the modal
categories function as “ontological operators, that is, weapons used in the
biopolitical struggle for Being…[T]he subject is what is at stake in the
processes in which they interact.”[vi]
[i]
Ibid., 104-105.
[ii]
Ibid., 115-116.
[iii]
Ibid., 116-117; italics original.
[iv]
Ibid., 128.
[v]
Ibid., 145.
[vi]
Ibid., 146-147.
