V.1
Critiques of
Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz
Agamben’s book is a thoughtful and, for the most part,
meticulously argued work, a moving contribution to the discourses of
continental philosophy, political theory, ethics, and Holocaust studies.
Agamben carefully integrates survivors’ testimonies and critical theory into a
complex and thoroughly engaging reflection on the place of Auschwitz in the cultural
memory of the postmodern West and with regard to individual responsibility.
Above all, Remants of Auschwitz is a
brave work that refuses to retreat from the most difficult questions regarding
the extermination, refining along the way theories of subjectivity and
political power in order to found a fragile ethical imperative for the
post-Auschwitz world.
However, Agamben’s book has not avoided, and indeed should not
avoid, criticism for some of its more problematic aspects. In his monograph on
Agamben, Leland de la Durantaye calls Remnants
of Auschwitz both Agamben’s “most daring” and “most flawed” book, a
paradoxical statement that summarizes the majority response to the book in
American academia.[i] Largely,
the negative response to the book focuses on Agamben’s method, which, in the
eyes of some critics, made a paradigm out of the Muselmann that ignores the historical context and material
conditions of the camp. And while Durantaye agrees with other reviewers of this
work that Agamben stretches the credibility of his method by using the Muselmann as a confirmation of his
analysis of the homo sacer, an
assessment with which I am personally inclined to agree, he also argues that
the shortcomings of Agamben’s paradigmatic approach should not totally nullify
the value of the book.[ii]
Therefore, though Durantaye sides with several readers who have noted its
fundamental problems, his close reading is generally sympathetic and goes some
way toward correcting some of the more egregious misreadings of some of
Agamben’s more hostile interlocutors.
To repeat, the negative response to this book largely
focuses on Agamben’s paradigmatic method rather than Agamben’s conclusions or the
content of the book. For example, Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, in an
otherwise largely positive review, share the assessment that Agamben’s scope is
simultaneously too narrow and too broad—too narrow because he focuses solely on
the Muselmann as the key to reading
all testimony, and too broad because, by employing the Muselmann as a
transhistorical paradigm, he runs the risk of forgetting the specific
historical and material circumstances of the camps.[iii]
Similarly, Nicholas Chare mourns the loss of context in Agamben’s careful
selection among several survivors’ accounts, contending that Agamben’s
overlooks the essential materiality of the language of testimony, and questions
Agamben’s “unnecessary” emphasis on the Muselmann
as the ethical center of all testimony, noting that this figure is “an extreme
example of a more general process.”[iv]
(61) Catherine Mills, additionally, points out that Agamben’s paradigmatic
method comes dangerously close to treating the atrocities of the camp and the
current biopolitical norm of modern government as if they were the inevitable
results of various traditions or concepts of Western thought rather than
terrible mutations of such traditions and concepts.[v]
A more extreme form of the same critique can be found in J.
M. Bernstein’s response to the book, in which he argues that Agamben
“aestheticizes” witnessing to the extent that his fragile ethical imperative
borders on “pornography.”[vi]
In the ensuing discussion, which tenuously links the “extraordinary and
excruciating” war photography by James Nachtwey to Agamben’s book, Bernstein
vaguely concludes, “[T]here is something photographic about Agamben’s practice
of one by one removing from consideration the historical, the political and
above all the moral frames through reference to which some understanding of the
meaning of the Muselmann might be
achieved.”[vii]
I cannot help but feel that Bernstein would be well-served by another, slower
reading of Agamben’s book and a more critical examination of his own terms. It
is simply not sufficient to posit “something photographic”—much less something
“pornographic”—about Agamben’s work without a much more rigid attempt to
theorize photography or pornography as technologically mediated social
categories. In fact, I would argue that Bernstein, with his deliberately
provocative vocabulary and his repeated insistence that he has exposed some
hidden perversity in Agamben’s work, comes much closer to producing
“pornography” than Agamben. Agamben’s paradigmatic approach, though obviously
problematic, is neither aesthetic nor pornographic in even the loosest senses
of the terms.
[i] Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 248. See 268-272
for a good summary of the various critical responses to the book.
[ii]
Ibid., 271-272.
[iii] Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, “Auschwitz and the
Remains of Theory: Toward an Ethics of the Borderland,” Symplokē 11.1 (2003), 29.
[iv] Nicholas Chare, “The Gap in Context: Giorgio
Agamben’s ‘Remnants of Auschwitz,’” Cultural
Critique 64 (2004), 61.
[v] Catherine Mills, The
Philosophy of Agamben (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 87.
[vi] J. M. Bernstein, “Bare Life, Bearing Witness:
Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror,” Parallax
10.1 (2004), 3.
[vii]
Ibid., 10, 12.
