Prospectus
Homo Sacer III marks a discursus from the chain of thought that crescendoed across the five volume of II, culminating in a rejection of the ethics of responsibility and an affirmation of the Bartleby mantra "I would prefer not to".
We return to a point of departure from Homo Sacer I where Agamben advanced the curious assertion that the concentration camp is the paradigm of modern biopolitcs, and without much further explanation. Here we see a bit more of he meant by that while also tied into themes illuminated across Homo Sacer II.
Interestingly enough, this volume was published immediately following the first volume with all five volumes of Homo Sacer II emerging after this. Yet we still many anticipatory motifs of what is to come.
But for now we must see what is is for the concentration camp to offer us a model of contemporary life, and how one can make such a case with due reverence.
Homo Sacer III: The Remnants of Auschwitz
Agamben prefaces this volume by noting that while there has been much factual groundwork surrounding the study of the extermination of the Jewish race, there has not been a sufficient consideration of the sheer ethical and political significance of such an attempt extermination.
In fact none of the ethical principles of modernity can stand the test of Auschwitz.
Agamben claims that in the drudgery of the camps, the idea of becoming a witness to such pain can itself be a catalyst to drive one to survive.
We start with our primary conversation partner of this volume with Primo Levi, a survivor and writer on his experiences in Auschwitz who had died possibly by suicide roughly a decade before Agamben wrote this book. He is the quintessential witness for Agamben.
Classical Latin has at least two terms for a witness: testis and superstes. The former is an outsider or third party in a legal suit who stands in as an arbitrating "witness" between the plaintiff and defendant. The latter is one who lived through and survived something, a testimony independent of a legal context.
It a mistake to confused legal and ethical terms in discussing the camps. Law is not directed toward justice but rather to the production of a final judgment. Judgment remains binding even in an unjust case.
Hence the essence of law is the trial.
The Nuremburg trials were an attempt to bring law into play against the perpretrators of the camps. Yet they are surely impotent, empty gesture to effect justice in light of such a catastrophe. After all, only a few hundred were ever tried. What amends were made?
Some like Hans Jonas attempt to erect a postmodern theodicy out of the Holocaust and that God himself cried out in his impotence to try to stop the Holocaust but was unable to due to more fundamental self-willed limitations.
This hand-wringing is hardly an answer, and it hardly suffices to guarantee what some say that this shall never happen again.
Beyond this, the concept responsibility has been rendered null and void by Auschwitz.
Responsibility is derived from spondeo the guarantee of something with respect to someone, for example as in spondeo of the marriage vow. In Roman law, a free man could designate himself a hostage as a guarantee of his obligation. In this way responsibility is not an ethical activity but a legal one, carried out of obligation, and tied to culpability and guilt. It was only later philosophy that imported these legal notions of responsibility and guilt into morality.
In his infamous trial, Eichmman stated that he could have no legal guilt for his role in overseeing the camps, only God could judge him rightly. But this falls into the trap of the sanctimonious gesture where one proclaims moral guilt but without legal or material consequence. It is merely a tool to escape material judgment. As Spinoza has noted, the attempt to elevate these juridical categories to supreme ethical principles renders final evaluation murky and cloudy.
Some like to consider the camps as a form of martyrdom, but this makes no sense. In its original early Christian context, martyrdom was concerned with bearing witness for Christ. There is nothing holy or significant that the victims of the camp bear witness to here.
However, these survivors are like martyrs in that they invoke this reverent sense of remembrance and provides a spiritual meaning for what would be otherwise a meaningless death.
Another ill-fitting term is "holocaust" which was a philological mistake to apply to the camps. Even Wiesel who coined the term, later regretted how it came to be employed as an all-embracing marker. But the history of an incorrect term may still be instructive.
Holocaustos comes from the Greek Septuagint as the term for the whole-burnt sacrifice of Levitical law. The Church Fathers embraced this term polemically to refer to the stubbornness of those stuck in the Mosaic law, i.e. to condemn the Jews who would not convert. It would then gradually acquire the meaning of a supreme, devoted sacrifice.
Agamben recollects backlash he received for a previous article on Auschwitz, a reader chiding him for violating the unsayable nature of Auschwitz. What does it mean to be unsayable?
It cannot be like God's unsayable nature, that refers to the silent adoration (euphemein). This would glorify Auschwitz.
Perhaps it is something like a gap. Testimony has a gap in that those who did not survive cannot bear witness for themselves. Yet these are the true witnesses, those who are silent and unable to speak. The survivors can only speak in their stead by proxy. This has been written upon already by Lyotard Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub.
From this, Agamben would contend that all language falls under this category of witness to an event. The witness without language.
In the camps, these silent sufferers were referred to as Muselmann. It is not clear where thi label came from but most likely refers to how Muslims bow and submit unconditionally to God.
This Muselmann is not human, as it is a reduction to bare life. The Muselmann inhabits an extreme threshold between life and death, between human and inhuman. The Muselmann embodies the problem of trying to apply the traditional ethical categories of dignity, responsibility, and guilt to the camps. What freedom or choice is there here? What does it mean to belong to the human species?
The Muselmann as pure receptivity with zero dignity or responsibility, cannot be called human. Yet one cannot stop there as that is what those who ran the camps would have wanted. We must speak beyond this, the Muselmann thus obliterates all prior Western philosophy.
For example, dignity has a legal origin in Republican Rome which indicated what was proper to one's rank and authority. It was then interiorized into secular, moral philosophy. The Third Reich stripped Jews of such dignity, thus rendering them non-human. Auschwitz thus marked the end of the ethics of dignity.
The survivors demonstrate that though all dignity can be lost, yet life cna still be preserved. The Muselmann is life that survives the human as a non-human. Part of being human is the ability to be destroyed infinitely, to survive beyond what is thought bearable.
Auschwitz in this way is a triumph of death over life, but it is also the denigration of death itself, in the mode of biopolitics. In Foucault's formula, biopolitics is "to make live and let die" as the rites and rituals surrounding death are erased in favor of mechanical procedures and practices.
Racism is the vehicle to reintroduce war into the system of life by dividing people and population as democracy and demography, to be managed. The Muselmann is the final biopolitical substance that lies at the extreme point just before the gas chamber. Bare life beyond the human.
Curiously enough, as Levi recounts, shame was a common emotion or feeling felt by the residents of the camp before the guards or even their liberators. There is also survivor's guilt which is commonly recorded in the testimonies on the camps.
We glorify survival, but this is grounded in an assertion of dignity or overcoming that has no place in Auschwitz. Collective guilt or vindication makes no sense here.
This notion of survivor's guitl comes to us through Hegel who introduces the innocent-guilty person of Greek tragedy. One can think of Oedipus who is guilty of crimes he did not know he was committing.
But Auschwitz is in many ways the opposite of this model. Where the tragic hero feels guilty, the camp survivor is innocent. Where the tragic hero feels innocent, the camp survivor feels guilty.
The paradigm of tragedy has perished after Auschwitz. In this way so too has Nietszche who postulated the eternal return (wish the past to occur infinitely times again) as a way of overcoming resentment. No one can wish for the eternal return of Auschwitz.
What do we do with this shame?
Levinas most astutely defines shame as being's inability to achieve self-distancing. We cannot hide from what is there in front of us though we wish to. Such is the shame of nudity. Heidegger and Benjamin taken together would see shame as an ontological sentiment that traverses our entire being as a fear of being recognized by the thing that repulses us. Shame is thus both a form of being a subject but also being subjected to.
Sadomasochism is the transformation of this shame into pleasure through the indifferentiation of passivity and impassivity thorugh the masochist and sadist respectively. One is both subjecitified and desubjectified.
It is this auto-affection that is the originary structure of modenr subjectivity which Kant introduces through the concept of time. In Kant's framing, time is a purely auto-affective gesture. One which we impress upon ourselves through how we conceptualize it. Yet this does not fully account for the paradoxical nature of being passive with respect to oneself. Spinoza accounts for this in his notion of the immanent cause which is wrapped up in how Hebrew grammar can combined the agent and patient of action into one single being.
The Muselmann is the purely receptive, masochistic pole while the actively passive witness is the sadist.
Keat's letter to John Woodhouse is an exemplary work of desubjectification. He offers four theses:
- The poetic "I" is not identical to itself
- The poet is the most unpoetical thing
- "I am a poet" is not a statement
- To be a poet is to experience desubjectification
Hence desubjectification is the centerpiece of the Western literary tradition and even manifests in Christianity as "speaking in tongues".
This desubjectification of language is critical to a theory of langauge beyond propositional content, to think language through speech acts and enunciation which is concerned to what has taken place rather than what is stated.
In the context of the camps, testimony involves both the silent survivor and the one who bears witness. It is the speechless one who compels the witness to speak.
Testimony thus defies both on the one hand the humanist model which contends that all humans are human and on the other hand the anti-humanist model which argues only some humans are human. It introduces a new model where humans are human insofar as they bear witness to what is not human.
As Benveniste notes, the "I" provides the unitary center of all discourse. The "I" exists as an act of enunciation, the rendering of a subject, the production of consciousness. Binswanger and Kimura Bin both elaborate this theme, but what is key for this subject matter is that Auschwitz creates a rupture between the "I" and the speaking beings. It undermines the possibility of authenticity.
Hence, shame is the originary structure of all subjectivity and consciousness and exists through the event of enunciation. Speaking is thus a paradoxical act of subjectification and desubjectification.
The lesson of Auschwitz is that the human being can survive being human. The first movement is the Muselmann who survives being human and enters a zone of being non-human. This is followed by the survivor who survives being non-human (a Muselmann) and becomes human. Thus it is the one whose humanity is completely destroyed who is truly human. As Blanchot said, man is the indestructible thing that can be infinitely destroyed.
Enunciation refers to things taking place and is nothing other than language's pure reference to itself. Like "Being" that grand, philosophical term, it is the most unique and concrete term there is as it simultaneously refers to the singular and unrepeatable event of discourse but is also the most generic and unassignable.
Benveniste had at the end of his life laid out plans for a metasemantics of enunciation, studying the semiotics of language beyond the semantics of propositional truth-content. But what does this mean?
Ironically, Foucault carried out this project perfectly in his archeological method which is concerned with statements, independent of what they say or who says them. Unfortunately, Foucault neglected to consider the ethical implications of this method which erases the living subject and creates an empty space where the speaker once was. Those who were imprisoned for example now live beneath Foucault's archive of incarceration, a silent disgrace without witness.
This technical notion of archive establishes a relation between what is said and unsaid, and this is to be contrasted with Agamben's technical notion of testimony which is concerned with relations between the inside and outside of language. Foucault's archive presupposes erasing the subject whereas testimony establishes the relation between the possibility of speech and its actualization through the event of enunciation.
This is contingency of language, its ability to not be (i.e. its im-potentiality). One can simply not speak.
In this light, the categories of modality must be rethought, to take into conideration their pivotal role as the ontological operators that determine the biopolitical struggle for Being, to hash the line between the human and inhuman. Such categories are not founded on the subject as Kant would contend, rather the subject is contested between these categories which have the power to bind subjectification and desubjectification.
Classical Latin had another term for witness: the auctor. This was someone who intervened in a case on behalf of a minor, but it could also be a street vendor who was selling wares, or a forensic witness.
What do all these meanings have in common?
In all cases, the auctor is the one who is merging his target's will with his own. As a witness, the auctor is merging their testimony with what is legally certified as reality. They validate what is claimed.
Thus Levi's paradox that the Muselmann bears witness but cannot bear witness now makes sense. The Muselmann is non-human and so cannot bear witness, but it is in fact the one who cannot bear witness who is the absolute witness. This is the dual structure of the auctor as someone who certifies what is already there. This is the double survival of the non-human beyond the human and the human beyond the non-human.
This is encapsulated in Foucault's pithy formula for describing biopolitics. If traditional sovereignty was concerned with the ability "to make die and let live", biopolitics manages the capacity "to let die and make live". It is this distinction which can divide animal or human life from a bare, organic life on the precipice of death as the Muselmann was. It is an anticipation of resuscitation technology.
Testimony stands against the separation of life into these categories.
Arendt was once asked what remains of pre-Hitler Europe, and her answer was that the mother tongue remains. A remnant can be considered not as a numeric proportion of what is left but rather the reduced whole that exists, always in relation to some future messianic or eschatological event.
Language can illustrate this. There are two opposed currents in language: innovation and stabilization. The speaking subject as auctor stands in between the dual demands of anomia and grammar. A dead language is a language without innovation, only grammar. But the auctor may attempt to resuscitate a dead language such as Giovanni Pascoli who wrote Latin poetry in the twentieth century. It is the auctor who can authorize this impossibility of speaking by bearing witness to what is dead.
The witness is the converse of thise. They place themselves in a living language and speak it as if it were dead. This is why the Muselmann demonstrates the impossibility of bearing witness as the foundation of existence as such. One cannot deny Auschwitz now as the Muselmann speaks only on the basis of the impossibility of speaking. It is a testimony that cannot be died.
In closing, Agamben provides excerpts from those witnesses who claim they were once a Muselmann.
It is not an easy thing to comment upon the concentration camps, as one can run many risks in treating on such a topic, especially if one is theorizing about it. Far easier to create art depicting this subject than to construct explanatory models around it.
In spite of this, Agamben does treat this topic with due gravity and consideration, and he is right to call into question the plethora of empty, sanctimonious statements used to wave it away or to arraign it in tragedian ornamentation.
As usual, Agamben does pose many provocative and interesting questions, yet with equal habitude, he really struggles to handle such questions well.
And unfortunately it is the sheer range and degree of Agamben's characteristic deficiencies that make this one of if not the weakest volume in the Homo Sacer corpus.
To start, we must first recognize that even though there is a posture of reverence that Agamben assumes in writing on this topic, yet nonetheless this volume states or does a number of things that are fundamentally distasteful, if taken seriously.
I will consider these briefly not for the sake of harping on negative particulars but because Agamben should be called to account.
One, to reject the term "Holocaust" is an interesting move but reifying the camps only through Auschwitz implicitly casts silence over Dachau, Birkenau, and the vast majority of other concentration camp programs perpetrated under National Socialism. What is the scope of consideration here? Are the camps referred to here exclusively the ones run by Germans? What of the Soviets or other powers who ran their own camps?
It is not necessarily so problematic to focus in on one camp on its own but it is when such universalistic and sweeping claims are surmised from one single camp.
Two, it seems to me that Agamben is twisting Primo Levi's words and quotes to fit his own personally concocted theories. I admittedly say this out of partial ignorance as I have only read Levi in excerpt, but I do not believe this to be a fair reading of Levi's witness as a Holocaust survivor.
From what I understand, Levi is more concerned with memory and the task of communicating such memory even though it is hazy and hard to hash out in strict moral terms.
In fact his iterative attempts to testify to his experiences indicate a genuine desire and sense that one can testify to Auschwitz.
Agamben very selectively frames Levi as one who is saying it is impossible to bear witness, but I really do not think this was what Levi attempted to convey. Of course, I am welcome to correction on this understanding of Levi, but this is something Agamben is very used to doing with other writers.
But if this is true, Agamben is applying his typical "the writer actually means the opposite of what they are saying" logic to Primo Levi, and I find that to be a rather digusting rhetorical ploy to leverage on a Holocaust survivor's writings, especially for the sake of advancing one's own theoretical framework, no matter how well-intentioned he may be in doing so.
Three, intentionally or not, Agamben exonerates the guards and organizers of the camps from restitutory or penal considerations. By saying that the categories of responsibility or guilt no longer make sense after Auschwitz, Agamben ends up saying that those who perpetrated these crimes on the victims cannot truly be held responsible because modern ethics, morality, and law have all collapsed. And perhaps that is his point.
But when paired with his frequent assertions that we need to deactivate the law and that all force of obligation needs to be laid to rest, this does create a very problematic set of questions around how one handles the fact that many individuals willfully and knowingly perpetrated these atrocities.
The conventional cliched responses end up having more to say on this subject even if they are not sufficiently radical enough for Agamben, yet he offers no consideration of what that should look like even though he is advocating for a very radical destruction of ethical considerations.
How he can overlook such a problem is strange to say the least.
Fourth, this is more tangential, but Agamben opens the fourth chapter of this volume by recounting how the linguist Emile Benveniste was attacked on the streets of Paris in 1969 and went missing for weeks. He was found wandering without his papers in a state of aphasia that would haunt him the rest of his life.
The upshot being the ironic paradox of a linguist without language, but this serves to tie Benveniste also the the Muselmann of the camps who lives without language. A non-human that survives the human.
It feels a bit strange to liken Benveniste to a victim of the concentration camp, but the main problem is that this tragic anecdote about Benveniste seems entirely fabricated.
Benveniste suffered a stroke and became aphasic before dying a few years later. Unless Agamben is privy to exclusive biographical knowledge not published anywhere else, this story seems entirely fake.
Again, this is why it feels best to describe Agamben's work here as distasteful and exploitative.
Five, whatever the intent behind it, elevating camp slang like Muselmann or the camp itself to ontological and linguistic foundations of philosophy, particularly in the way Agamben does so, feels disingeuous and degrading to the memory of such an event.
This is an arguable point, but I would contend that to convert Auschwitz into a paradigm does more to reduce it than to elevate it. Particularly in how totalistic and sweeping Agamben tends to be and how this tends to erase the subjects and victims of such experiences. This is ironic given how Agamben critiques Foucault's archeological method for erasing the living subject who speaks, yet he is in some ways even more guilty of such a move given how much more extreme the pressure he applies to shaping the testimonial material to his purposes.
This also results in rather awkward theoretical constructions, as Agamben's persistent shoe-horning of high theory paraphernalia results in bizarre claims or offensive insinuations, such as characterizing the victims of the camps as sado-masochists.
Lastly, Agamben had stated in his previous volume that the camp was the paradigm of modern biopolitics. The point being that in today's global society, we all live as if we are in concentration camps. Although he does not overtly contend it in those exact words again here, the insinuation is recapitulated particularly in his statements about how resuscitation technology produce Muselmann corpses that live.
To say that we all now live in the paradigm of the camp is perhaps his most inexcusable claim, no matter the extreme repulsion one may feel toward contemporary society. You would need significantly more credence and good standing to able to make and commit to such a comment than Agamben does here or elsewehere.
All in all, Agamben's attempts at trying to frame the "beyondness" of the Holocaust end up denigrating and cheapening what did happen there, and the above points are meant to designate some truly disreputable assertions that obscurantist theory can often mask in its jargonistic abstractions.
But let us proceed beyond what is inappropriate to considering what is of value in this volume.
There are a few points, but less than could be hoped for.
Agamben's predilection for contradiction is truly unmeted here as he stumbles through a dizzying series of paradoxical leaps and claims again and again in a way that leaves one more bored than impressed. In previous volumes at least he had limited himself to one or two threads of leaps within one volume, here it is incredibly scattered.
To provide some examples. Agamben equivocates between describing the Muselmann as the one who cannot testify or bear witness but the only one who can. He says the Muselmann is silent and testifies to the impossibility of speaking. And yet the closing pages of the volume are written testimonies of those who claimed to be Muselmann which contradicts his earlier claims. Yet Agamben has made so many contradictory leaps it would not be difficult for him to defend such equivocation from one side of the fence or the other.s
He argues that responsibility and guilt no longer make sense after Auschwitz but then instinctively describes a sort of responsibility that is owed to the survivor in his criticism of how Foucault erases the witness.
He argues that shame is the "originary structure" of all consciousness, yet seems to say that Auschwitz abolishes the ground that produces shame.
To be a survivor is both good and bad. The human survives the non-human, but the human survives the non-human.
The corpse has no inherent respect or dignity it deserves, and yet biopolitics strips the corpse of its dignity.
Auschwitz is the triumph of death over life and of life over death.
The one we will take into consideration is the paradox that language is only possible insofar as one is not able to speak.
This ties into the grander Homo Sacer theme of impotentiality (adynamia), the ability not to actualize, or as he refers to it here as contingency.
The elaboration here is much more linguistically focused and does serve to adumbrate a theme covered in the most recent volumes through a more politically or economically charged ontological lens.
The first grouping of sections from the fourth chapter do orient the gist of Agamben's focus as fulfilling the project of Benveniste and Foucault who were concerned with moving beyond basic signification theory and the analysis of truth proposition content, to understand how language functionally operates in the world.
Hence the focus on enunication and speech act. The fact that language can itself create effects regardless of what is said.
And while this framing does open up new horizons for analysis as Foucault discovered through his work, and Agamben can wield here, it is still constrained by the same limitations.
It has been said that Foucault's discrediting of discursive statements in general should theoretically discredit the mode of his own work which is also carried out through statements with propositional truth content. The model does not hold well when applied to itself.
Agamben attempts to extend the same model to consider the nature of witness as the one who speaks on behalf of that who cannot speak and ties this to dense observation around the nature of the "I" in relation to language. There is of course the uncomfortable insinuation he makes that every speaker of language is a Muselmann, but more directly, he considers testimony as the relation between the potentiality and impotentiality of speech.
Yet if we were to apply Agamben's same model to himself, just as in Foucault, it seems to fall apart as his notions regarding testimony and witness seem to discredit what he is attempting to do with the writings of Holocaust survivors.
We see this also play out with what is arguably the unitary thread of Homo Sacer, the demand to rethink modal categories (i.e. should, would, could). What grows more frustrating with each volume, is that Agamben will reiterate this demand with fervor and conviction again and again but provides no exploration or establishment of such a project, not even a prolegomena.
Our only starting point is a casual reference to Spinoza's idea of immanent cause which is itself grounded in Hebrew's notion of a middle voice. What eludes me as someone not sufficiently familiar with this domain is why Spinoza's Hebrew should occupy a place of ontological supremacy out of all languages, and what is it about Hebrew's notion of reflexive verbs is more profoundly useful than even classical Greek's grammatical structure?
If Agamben were not so intent upon providing cheap profundities which he has no interest in elaborating or working out beyond the level of witticism, this would be more attractive a project to consider.
Admittedly, his project is surpringly synchronized with how all the various themes, questions, and concepts do tie together on some level. But yet such synchronicity is fractured by other disjointed baggage which he never takes time to inventory or review later on.
It is easy to forget in the middle of this dense tome that this project as a whole is ostensibly concerned with "bare life" but yet that phrase has all but disappeared in an analytic capacity, mentioned only as a quasi-nostalgic refrain here and there. For Homo Sacer III which came out very shortly after the first volume, "bare life" receives no mention at all. My summary has interjected the term to make explicit what is its referrent in the Muselmann.
But again what Agamben seems most intent on asserting he is most resistant to exploring. And this is more appropriate a posture for a dogmatician or sophist than a philosopher.