V.2
Critiques of
Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz
Though the critiques mentioned above are all completely
valid, with the exception of Bernstein’s, I feel that they somewhat
misunderstand Agamben’s fundamental intention, which is not to compose the
authoritative material, technical, or juridico-institutional history of the
camps. In an interview, Agamben himself
iterates this point with regard to the questionability of his use of the Muselmann as a paradigm: “I am not an historian.
I work with paradigms. A paradigm is something like an example, an exemplar, a
historically singular phenomenon. As it was with the panopticon for Foucault,
so is the Homo Sacer or the Muselmann or the state of exception for
me. And then I use this paradigm to construct a large group of phenomena and in
order to understand an historical structure….”[i]
This statement reminds the incautious reader that, as a
philosophical work, Agamben’s book needs to be approached with a different
sensibility and sensitivity than one would approach a work that purports to be
historical or sociological or anthropological. However, though critiques such
as those rehearsed above misinterpret Agamben’s intention, they do locate a
problematic aspect of Agamben’s book: the clarity of Agamben’s argument
certainly suffers in this book from the dual-functionality of the Muselmann. When Agamben used the
paradigmatic method in earlier works like Homo
Sacer, he was able to maintain a much clearer distinction between
historical fact and his own interpretation of historical fact. In this book,
Agamben’s discretion fails him, and the Muselmann
as a historical being begins to blur and merge with the Muselmann as an abstract category.
Other readers of Remnants
of Auschwitz have focused on what they see as a fundamental pessimism in
Agamben’s philosophical outlook; however, I find that such critiques are
largely unfounded. Jean-Philipe Deranty, for instance, has chosen to base his
critique in the immediate concern of grounding political action. For Deranty,
Agamben’s ethics of disempowerment leads to a disempowered praxis that is
rendered incapable of achieving any of its revolutionary goals, noble though
they are. Agamben’s insistence that we systematically rethink all categories of
politics, history, community, and law leads Deranty to conclude, “[D]espite its
amazing sophistication and erudition, Agamben’s philosophy only leads to an
evanescent theory of praxis that has little to say and indeed is not really
interested in having anything to say to and about real practices.”[ii]
However, it is my contention that Deranty misunderstands Agamben’s insistence
on an ethical employment of language and, consequently, misreads Agamben’s philosophy
as nihilistic (a common misreading). In this book and in others, Agamben shows
his readers that language is a site of political struggle, a struggle that the
left must recognize as essential if it is to offer an alternative form of politics.
To use language radically, moreover, does not conflict with other, larger
revolutionary goals but rather reinforces such goals and prevents a
counter-hegemonic discourse and praxis from simply reinscribing systems of
injustice through an unimaginative inversion of the existing power structures.
In the final analysis, Deranty’s insistence that Agamben’s ethics of
disempowerment is fundamentally pessimistic, as well as his insistence that one
exclude Agamben’s ideas from consideration and look elsewhere for praxis,
simply further divides an already fragmented left and prevents a
multi-dimensional praxis from emerging from that state of fragmentation.
[i] Giorgio Agamben, interview by Ulrich Raulff, The German Law Journal 5.5 (2004), 610.
Durantaye summarizes Agamben’s method accurately in writing, “[A]s with all of
Agamben’s paradigms, [the Muselmann]
is a figure through which we might be able to try to understand ‘a historical
structure’ full of relevance for our ‘present situation’” (270).
[ii] Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Witnessing the Inhuman:
Agamben or Merleau-Ponty,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 107.1 (2008), 184.
