The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 9/10)

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.

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[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.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 8/10)

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.

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[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.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 7/10)

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).

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[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.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 6/10)

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]

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[i] Ibid., 104-105.

[ii] Ibid., 115-116.

[iii] Ibid., 116-117; italics original.

[iv] Ibid., 128.

[v] Ibid., 145.

[vi] Ibid., 146-147.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 5/10)

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.

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[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.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 4/10)

IV.1

Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz

Agamben begins his book with a prefatory reflection on the state of Holocaust studies. He argues that while sufficient attention has been paid to the specific historical and material circumstances, enough to establish a “general framework” for current and future studies, there is insufficient understanding of its “contemporary relevance” due to limited investigations into the continued “ethical and political significance” of the extermination of the Jews during World War II.[i] Though one could easily dispute the totalizing nature of Agamben’s claim—nearly all literature on the camps grapples in some way with the ethical and political significance of the extermination—Agamben seems to be right to suggest that the aura of unsayability surrounding the camps limits the ability for critical dialogue to trace precisely these problems. An investigation into the ethical and political significance of the camps for people living today (and in the near future when there will no longer be anyone alive who experienced firsthand the horrors of the Nazi camps) is therefore essential.

Agamben believes that such an investigation must take as its locus the written and verbal accounts of the survivors of the camps, and he positions his own book as “a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony.”[ii] At the very center of testimony, Agamben discovers an “essential lacuna”: “the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to.”[iii] This potent discovery made Agamben realize that all formulations of ethics in contemporary society are rendered inadequate when faced with this gap, and his critical intervention must take shape as a tireless rethinking of ethical categories. Therefore, in response to the crisis of ethics in the postmodern world, Agamben declares the modest intention of his book: “For my own part, I will consider myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves.”[iv] In the four chapters that follow, Agamben offers a moving commentary on the testimony of Auschwitz survivors, focusing especially on the implications of Primo Levi’s 1987 book The Drowned and the Saved.

Agamben’s first chapter, “The Witness,” introduces the fundamental paradox of witnessing Auschwitz. Termed “Levi’s paradox,” it is taken from an unsettling but incontrovertible statement in Levi’s book: “We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses.”[v] This is the “lacuna” Agamben refers to in the preface, the fundamental lack that constitutes all testimony on Auschwitz—the only ones who can bear witness are the ones who did not witness the ultimate horror of the camps; the only ones who witnessed the ultimate horror of the camps cannot bear witness. Thus, it is the vocation of the witness to bear witness for the true witness, that is to say the one who cannot bear witness.

This chapter also begins Agamben’s engagement with issues in ethics. Though later chapters will develop ethics as integrally bound to testimony and subjectivity in what I call the “fragile ethics of testimony,” in this chapter he lays the groundwork for those later reflections by attempting to separate ethics as a philosophical vocation from law (and, because it is “contaminated” by law, religion as well).[vi] The goal of law is judgment, and judgment, Agamben notes, is essentially self-referential in the sense that it is concerned exclusively with guilt or non-guilt rather than “the good” or “the ethical.”[vii] Consequently, Agamben argues that it is a mistake to think that the trials of Nuremberg have allowed society to “overcome” Auschwitz, for a juridical framework, which can only arrive at a simple, ultimately meaningless verdict of the guilt or non-guilt of an indicted party, cannot exhaust the ethical problem posed by the camps.[viii] It is essential, therefore, that one not confuse ethical categories with juridical or legal categories like “responsibility” or “guilt” when discussing the ethics of testimony.

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[i] Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 11.

[ii] Ibid., 13.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid. Alex Murray has helpfully summarized Agamben’s approach to ethics in two necessarily interwoven positions: first, in its linguistic/historical operation, ethics deals with trying to find a way of “remembering and representing those to whom the greatest injustice was done”; and second, in its political operation, ethics is engaged in a thorough critique of the power structures that authorize injustice as well as an attempt to found a “new idea of community” (117).

[v] Cited Agamben, Remnants, 33.

[vi] Ibid., 18.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid., 19-20.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 3/10)

III.

The Homo Sacer and the Sovereign Exception:

Some Preliminary Notes on Agamben’s Political Philosophy

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is at once a standalone volume and the inaugural volume of a series of books that also bears the name Homo Sacer (of which Remnants of Auschwitz is the third volume, though it was the second to be published). Agamben begins the book, first published in Italian in 1995, with a reference to two words for “life” in ancient Greek, zoē (natural or biological life) and bios (“the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group”), a basic lexical distinction that allowed for Aristotle’s well-known definition of the human as a “political animal” (that is, an animal with the additional capacity for politics).[i] Agamben notes that in most ancient systems of law, only bios, the qualified life of human beings, is formally legislated, while zoē as such was excluded—excluded from, yet always already implicated by, the polis.[ii] And it is precisely this originary moment of the politicization of natural life that, for Agamben, marks the beginning of biopolitics, a political structure organized around the control and maintenance of biological life.

Drawing on the work of Foucault, Agamben sees the mass production of “bare life” (a form of life that results from the violent separation or extraction of zoē from bios) as the concealed operation of modern politics, common to the totalitarian states of the twentieth century and today’s liberal democracies. However, whereas Foucault sees the inclusion of biological life as specific to the modern era of governmentality,[iii] Agamben shows how this inclusion, which is operative even in the earliest juridico-institutional systems, ensures that the “production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”[iv] For Agamben, this mass production of bare life is prefigured by the homo sacer (literally “sacred human”), a figure in ancient Roman law who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed.”[v] In other words, the homo sacer is one who is deprived of both a political and religious identity and therefore may be killed with total impunity; it is the ban from any form of political contact or legal intervention that, paradoxically, brings this one under the fullest manifestation of the law’s power.

The juridical mechanism that allows for this paradoxical “inclusive exclusion” is the state of exception, or the sovereign ability to suspend any and every law in a time of political crisis.[vi] The state of exception must not be understood as a measure “external” to the law; rather, the sovereign exception is originarily present as a “virtual rupture”—the capacity within every law to be suspended by the sovereign.[vii] For this reason, Agamben takes seriously the controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception.”[viii] In this way, Agamben’s work examines the political implications when the state of exception becomes a working paradigm of government rather than a provisionary measure, at which point the exception to the rule and the rule itself enter into a “zone of indistinction.”[ix]

This is why Agamben dedicates an entire book to the question of Auschwitz; for, contrary to Foucault, who explored the operations of biopower through such social institutions as the psychiatric hospital (Madness and Civilization) and, most famously, the prison (Discipline and Punish), Agamben chillingly concludes that the paradigm of modern government is, rather than Foucault’s omnipresent panopticon, the camp.[x] The camp, Agamben argues, is the structure that “normalizes” or “realizes normally” the state of exception, and the legal and juridical processes through which the Jewish people and other ethnic minorities were interred in concentration camps in Nazi Germany, are, in fact, still in operation today.[xi] To understand what is at stake for people living under this political paradigm, then, Agamben argues that one must examine the most violent, extreme historical example of the sovereign exception and the production of bare life; one must commit to an investigation into the circumstances of the Nazi death camps. As Agamben notes, Hitler’s ascension to power was immediately followed by the suspension of all the articles of the Weimar Constitution ensuring individual liberties. Consequently, “The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.”[xii]

It is with this context and perspective in mind that I turn to my reading of Remnants of Auschwitz.

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[i] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1, 7. An analogous distinction, one that will be essential to Remnants of Auschwitz, presents itself between voice (belonging to most biological life) and language (belonging only to humans).

[ii] Ibid., 2.

[iii] See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). In defining loosely the concept of “biopower,” Foucault notes, “…Starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species” (1).

[iv] Ibid., 6. See also 82-83.

[v] Ibid., 8. This use of the term “sacred” in homo sacer is potentially misleading to the modern reader because of the subsequent sedimentation of modern anthropological understandings of the category “sacred.” The homo sacer is sacred in the sense that s/he already belongs to the gods of the underworld. This explains both the unpunishability of the act of murdering the homo sacer (whose death is now of practical rather than moral importance) as well as the unsacrificeability of the homo sacer (“to sacrifice” in the ancient context literally meant “to make holy”; because the homo sacer is already sacred, s/he cannot be made holy and therefore cannot be sacrificed). See pp. 71-74.

[vi] Ibid., 26-27.

[vii] Ibid., 37.

[viii] Cited ibid., 11. This statement will be more fully explicated and theorized in a later work, The State of Exception , trans. Kevil Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); see esp. the preliminary discussion (1-4) and the brief history of its usage as a governing paradigm (11-22).

[ix] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 26.

[x] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 119, 123.

[xi] Ibid., 170. Examples of contemporary manifestations of the camp abound: In State of Exception, written only two years after September 11, Agamben focuses on the USA Patriot Act and illegal (or, more precisely, “non-legal”) internment of suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay (see esp. 3-4). However, as Agamben himself would point out, the only necessary step to transform a sports stadium or gated community into a camp, whether in the United States or elsewhere, would be an executive decision.

[xii] Agamben, State of Exception, 2.