IV.4
Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz
It is difficult to understand precisely what point Agamben
is trying to prove here. To elucidate Agamben’s argument, then, it is useful to
note that the four modalities of Being can be represented with a semiotic
diagram[i]
that illustrates their structural-linguistic relationship.
“The subject,” it turns out, “is a field of forces always
already traversed by the incandescent and historically determined currents of
potentiality and impotentiality, of being able to be and not being able to be.”[ii]
Until the advent of the camp, these processes were held in more-or-less stable
alignment. However, in Agamben’s analysis, the fragile balance of these four
modalities is shifted decisively in the space of the camp in such a way that
impossibility subordinates possibility and necessity subordinates contingency.
The resultant “catastrophe of the subject”[iii]
reaches its nadir in Auschwitz’s production of the Muselmann.
It is therefore necessary for testimony to offer a way out
of this violent rupture between subjectification and desubjectification, whose
warping of the modal categories remains, according to Agamben, a working model
for government today. Testimony, however, does not simply allow the subject to
return to the original alignment of modalities; rather, it represents a total
break from the modalities, generated through the structure and content of
testimony.[iv]
Agamben explains, “In the Muselmann, biopower sought to produce its final secret: a survival
separated from every possibility of testimony, a kind of absolute biopolitical
substance that, in its isolation, allows for the attribution of demographic,
ethnic, national, and political identity… With its every word, testimony
refutes precisely this isolation of survival from life.”[v]
Thus, testimony allows him to conclude with a fragile imperative to bear
witness to the inhuman within oneself, so that the two can never be separated
again.
By way of conclusion, Agamben then notes that the witness is
comparable to the messianic concept of the “remnant”: “So the remnants of
Auschwitz—the witnesses—are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the
drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them.”[vi]
This statement is a deliberate reference to a passage from Paul’s Letter to the
Romans that, appropriately enough, serves as an epigraph for the book: “Even so
then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of
grace….and so all Israel shall be saved” (Rom 11:5, 26).
[i]
See Algirdas Julien Greimas, Structural
Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald
Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). See
also the cogent discussion in Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 46-49, 82-83, 165-169,
253-257.
[ii] Agamben, Remnants,147-148.
[iii]
Ibid., 148.
[iv]
For this imaginative graphic arrangement, I am indebted to the novel use of the
Semiotic Square in Davina C. Lopez, Apostle
to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
2008), see esp. 147-152.
[v] Agamben, Remnants, 156-157.
[vi]
Ibid., 164.
