The Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Evaluation PHILIPPE MESNARD Translated from the French by Cyrille Guiat
[email protected] 229 PhilippeMesnard 00000Summer bd & Voltaire75012 2004 Paris Totalitarian 10.1080/1469076042000223446 ftmp5107.sgm 1469-0764 Original Taylor 512004 and Article Francis (print)/1743-9647 Francis Movements Ltd Ltd and (online) Political Religions
This article is a critical evaluation of Giorgio Agamben’s recent thought in the field of political philosophy, with a particular focus on the Italian philosopher’s representation of Auschwitz, mostly incarnated through the metaphorical figure of the muselmann. The main argument is that Agamben’s theory of negativity, which is the logical outcome of a considerable philosophical quest spanning over three decades, largely fails the test of temporality. Thus, Agamben openly denies any validity to history and his fascination for the cadaveric figure of the muselmann occults the complexity of life, survival and death inside or outside the concentration camp, a complexity which is portrayed in many historical accounts and eyewitness testimonies of Auschwitz .The conclusion is that Agamben’s abstract aesthetics of disaster is quite symptomatic of contemporary philosophical representations of victims of violence, which tend to be detached from any socio-historical framework of analysis.
The corpus of works which Giorgio Agamben started to publish in the mid-1970s includes many essays, which have been following each other with a constant, annual regularity since 1995. Before that date, his highly philosophical research mostly focused on literature and aesthetics. Since 1995, however, the focus of his thought has clearly shifted towards political philosophy. This is evident in the three volumes which make up Homo Sacer (Moyens sans fins, 1995;1 Homo Sacer, 1997;2 Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz, 19983), in which Agamben explores the political dimension as a foundation, and the founding violence from which the political dimension emanates. In 2000, Agamben published a critical exegesis of Saint Paul’s thought (Le Temps qui reste), and in 2002 a study of the relationship between man and animal (L’Ouvert: De l’homme et de l’animal).4 Even if these two latest books appear to represent another shift in Agamben’s thought, they do in fact pursue similar interrogations through which this philosopher seeks to define and understand man at the crepuscular moment
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 5, No. 1, Summer 2004, pp. 139–157 ISSN 1469-0764 print/1743-9647 online DOI: 10.1080/1469076042000223437 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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of extreme violence generated by exclusion, when there is absolutely no hope of escaping. Although these explorations of violence may seem to be found only in a clearly defined period in Agamben’s work, they should be integrated into a much broader framework, namely his long-term speculation on the conceptual field of the ‘in-between’ and indistinction, a speculation which constitutes the major logical thread in his thought. However, while it is possible to argue that this conceptual field is the matrix through which thought becomes writing, one may also contend that it constitutes a major block upon which Agamben’s political thought stumbles. More precisely, such stumbling occurs in Agamben’s thoughts on Auschwitz, the ultimate symbol of twentiethcentury mass violence, and raises the following questions. Should this failure be interpreted as the logical culmination of a thought at the very moment it comes across politics and history? Or is it only a faux pas which confirms the inability of this thought to envisage politics other than by default? Indistinction It is absolutely necessary, in order to gain insights into Agamben’s work, to bear in mind the fact that his thought, his writings and indeed his very existence owe much inspiration to Heidegger, whose legacy Agamben seeks to perpetuate and enhance. This philosophical affinity is much stronger than other intellectual links between Agamben and Aristotle, Bataille, Benjamin, whose works Agamben edited in Italy, Blanchot, Benveniste or Hegel. Thus, in his introduction to Le language et la mort, a book which is largely an exegesis of Heidegger, Agamben cites a passage which to him best epitomises Das Wesen der Sprache: ‘Le rapport entre mort et langage, un éclair, s’illumine; mais il est encore impensé’.5 To Agamben, this unthought is permeated by the central question asked to mankind by twentieth-century history: what is left of man when mankind has experienced its own destruction? Of course, Agamben is not the only philosopher to have engaged in a constant dialogue with Heidegger’s legacy. However, unlike Lévinas, Arendt and Ricoeur, he does not attempt to emancipate himself from this ontology, which remains in itself characterised by a major ambiguity in its relationship between essence and history and darkened by the ultra-conservative political commitment of the German philosopher. Thus, while Ricoeur has on many occasions engaged critically
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with Sein und Zeit, and while Lévinas, from his Totalité et infini6 to his Autrement qu’être,7 has elaborated an ethic which moves beyond Heidegger’s ontology and postulates the experience of death as an opening to the other through a type of accompanying experience, Agamben takes Heidegger’s thought further and radicalises it by constructing a heuristic apparatus which is both binary and polarised. Thus, whereas Heidegger, in paragraph 76 of Sein und Zeit, leaves the door marginally open to an acknowledgement that history may acquire scientific status if it places itself under the auspices of fundamental temporality, Agamben, in the very first pages of Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz, denies any scientific validity to historiography or any other discipline steeped in vulgar temporality. Following in the footsteps of a major metaphysical tradition, in which essence is postulated as a negative foundation, Agamben’s quest leads him, from the very early stages of his work, to explore the relationship between man and language to the extent that, to him, the human dimension is excluded from the sphere of communication. Thus, in Enfance et histoire, he contends that ‘la constitution du sujet dans et par le langage est … l’expulsion même de cette expérience “muette”’,8 which characterises the relationship between infans and langage. In La Communauté qui vient, he explores an opening between the potentiality of being and the potentiality of not being.9 Challenging the apparent symmetry between these two potentialities, he identifies the pole of ‘veritable power’ which can generate both power and powerlessness. Therefore, to transcend the alienation inherent in choice can be equated to a descent into a ‘zone d’indiscernabilité entre le oui et le non, le préférable et le non préférable’.10 Thus, Agamben’s lexis revolves around adjectives such as powerless, impossible, unspeakable, unrepresentable, undetectable, ‘inconnaissance – ou mieux, ignoscence’, unsavable, unassignable, and his quest for purity and the absolute is clearly placed under the sign of negativity. From Homo Sacer to Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben’s philosophical matrix focuses more precisely on the relationship between violence and politics. He explores the ‘zone d’indifférence’ where, within the body of power itself, ‘les techniques d’individuation et les procédures totalisantes se touchent’,11 and borrows from archaic Roman law a character, ‘homo sacer’, who never actually existed, as Agamben himself acknowledges half-heartedly. To him, the expression ‘homo sacer’ refers to an individual (or group of individuals) whose destruction does not amount to homicide, or whose ban12 or
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radical exclusion does not necessitate legal instruments or normative arguments. Thus, those who kill or ostracise ‘homo sacer’ incur no legal punishment. In Le Temps qui reste, devoted to Saint Paul’s messianism, Agamben focuses on ‘la zone d’indiscernabilité absolue de l’immanence et de la transcendance’,13 in order to demonstrate that messianic time is in fact the paradigm of historical time. In L’Ouvert, he highlights the fact that the physical distinction between man and the other animal species imply ‘zones d’indifférences dans lesquelles il [est] impossible d’établir des identités certaines’.14 Building on Foucault’s work on ‘biopower’, Agamben splits the notion of life in two, thus making a clear distinction between zoé, the natural life of man, and bios, which refers to man’s existence in a collective body. This distinction marks yet another distortion by Agamben: whereas Foucault sees in ‘biopower’ the major orientation of modern politics, the Italian philosopher postulates that this concept is the bare essence of politics as such. Thus, according to Agamben, the concept of ‘biopower’ means that, at the political level, what is at stake is the life itself of the citizen, and not just his existence. In other words, moving beyond the distinction between public and private spheres, political power aims to control the deepest dimension of its subjects, the very dimension which escapes it in principle: ‘l’espace de la vie nue, situé à l’origine en marge de l’organisation politique, finit progressivement par coïncider avec l’espace politique, où exclusion et inclusion, extérieur et intérieur, bios et zoé, droit et fait, entrent dans une zone d’indifférence irréductible’.15 The binary nature of this thought renders it dangerously reversible, because it can lead one to confuse the roles of the couples constructed by Agamben. For example, in Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz, Agamben insists on ‘ce qui rend le jugement impossible, cette “zone grise” où victimes et bourreaux échangent leurs rôles’.16 Further on, he writes: ‘dominateur et esclave se confondent irrémédiablement’,17 and ‘l’indistinction de la discipline et de la jouissance, où l’espace d’un instant les deux sujets coïncident’. Such assertions, echoing the clichés of sadomasochism, do not really hold water when confronted with the reality of the concentration camps. It is, as we argue below, when his discourse is confronted with an empirical reality that Agamben’s thought starts to become problematic to the extent that it is open to a fierce challenge. In a sense, this raises the issue of the rhetorical value of Agamben’s texts. Indeed, can language express what escapes it, especially when this ‘rest’ is subtracted from language and enables man
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to become human? This is an interrogation shared by both negative theology and metaphysics, a legacy which Agamben ‘replays’ constantly. How can we define not the gap itself, but what lies within the gap, this negativity which, despite its entrenchment, can be heard but escapes comprehension? Here again, one has to acknowledge the extreme internal coherence of Agamben’s thought. A Question of Figure This internal coherence can be found not only in the fact that, from his earliest publications to his latest, Agamben uses the same intellectual matrix to think and identify the realm of the ‘in-between’, but also insofar as the writing process constitutes an experimental field which gives its shape and existence to the philosopher’s thought. Thus, one of the most prevalent and remarkable features of Agamben’s work lies in a series of signifiers which epitomise negativity per se, as opposed to the locus of negativity. The conceptual field of indistinction is, at this stage, superseded by a specifically lexical field, as noted by Thomas C. Wall: ‘Each of its brief three or four page sections, fragments, or panels (like in comic books) attempts to link the same thought under various names: “Quodlibet ens”, “Example”, “Ease”, “Manner”, “Halo”, “Shekinah”, “Bartleby”, “Principium Individuationis”, “Image”, Heidegger’s as, the thus, and the rather, among still others’.18 To this list can be added the ‘larva’ and the ‘in-fans’ found in Enfance et Histoire, the ‘muselmann’, the Gorgon and ‘Hurbinek’ in The Remnants of Auschwitz, ‘Christ’ in Le Temps qui reste and the ‘animal’, the ‘tick’ and the ‘savage child’ in L’Ouvert. This plethora of figures epitomises Agamben’s quest and the intimate evolution of the juncture between his thought and his writing. Thus, the expression ‘floating signifier’ used by Lacan to refer to Mauss’s concept of mana, could equally be applied to Agamben’s signifiers. The question which arises at this stage is whether these figure-types facilitate the process of understanding, or whether they obscure it behind the ‘discovery’ and at times ‘sublime’19 effects that they generate in Agamben himself as well as in his faithful followers. In this sense, these figures should be interpreted through their rhetorical function rather than through their referential dimension. Their scope is, in fact, functional rather than veritative, insofar as they act as a sort of catalyst which enables the discourse to start with a negation (the ‘indiscernible’, the ‘unsavable’) in a process which is reminiscent of the frequent
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use of paralipses in series of descriptions.20 Moreover, figures who have proper and generic names (for example, Bartleby, Christ, the muselmann or homo sacer, who is described by Agamben as the main ‘protagonist’ of his book21) are closely related to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call ‘conceptual characters’, that is to say imaginary constructs which have enabled a number of philosophers (Plato, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard) to develop their thought.22 In every case, these figure-types bear a metaphorical function which enables Agamben to avoid predication. As early as in Stanze, he develops a theory of the metaphor postulated as the figure which is used to refer to reality whilst keeping reality at a distance. Contrary to a common interpretation of the metaphor as an interface between proper and improper (one being substituted for the other), Agamben sees the metaphor as a discontinuity, a ‘disjonction et une différence à l’intérieur d’un signifié unique’.23 The metaphor, stemming from an enigma (stanza), is used as a diversion to reach the juncture between presence and absence, life and death, the signifier and the signified. Thus, the metaphor escapes the dilemma of language by moving beyond its antinomies and beyond the reassuring metaphysics of unity. This enigma pertains to a zone of articulation (which he later calls zone of indistinction) between two distinct but irrevocably interrelated worlds. Can the metaphor, however, explain the move from the indiscernible to its expression? Does Agamben’s process of distantiation lead the metaphor to replace reality, to the detriment of the reality that it is supposed to figurate? In other words, does Agamben’s metaphor operate on a self-referential level? These are the crucial questions that arise from the use of Gorgon, inter alia, in Remnants of Auschwitz: ‘Nous n’aurons compris Auschwitz que lorsque nous aurons compris qui est, ou ce qu’est le musulman, lorsque nous aurons appris à regarder avec lui la Gorgone’.24 In this case, Agamben invites his readers to share with him the experience of the ‘muselmann’, and to look at a metaphor that he himself borrowed from Primo Levi’s Naufragés et rescapés. The process of distantiation does not end here, for Agamben immediately embarks on a philological explanation with takes him abruptly from Levi’s Gorgon to the mythical Gorgon of Ancient Greece, from the concentration camp to a painted vase and, in fine, from the metaphor to coercive literality (stylistically caracterised by the frequent use of ‘not … only …’). Without any embarrassment, Agamben jumps from
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one context to the next and moves through time, space and genres. This could be interpreted as a formal trick, if it were not for the fact that Agamben’s approach only retains from Levi’s work its scholarly allusion, and de facto ignores the distress of the death camp survivor. The lack of attention to such distress, which permeates Remnants of Auschwitz, a book which is devoted to the ethics of testimony, offers a blatant contradiction, on a pragmatic level, to Agamben’s ‘purely’ theoretical contentions. If each signifier previously noted can be interpreted as a linguistic trace of something which has been expelled from language, in Agamben’s work these signifiers acquire a purely functional value which form an integral part of the writing process, and their referential dimension is subsumed under their rhetorical function. The question which must be asked at this stage is as follows: is the ‘muselmann’ also the result of a purely theoretical construct which is detrimental to our understanding of reality, as in the case of the use of Gorgon? This is a question which obviously acquires a totally different dimension when one applies a logical, structuralist theory of aesthetics to an historical object which, in the case of Auschwitz, is extremely sensitive. The Flaws of Agamben’s ‘Muselmann’ In his exploration of Auschwitz and his interpretation of Levi’s writings, Agamben postulates that the notion of testimony can be understood only from the viewpoint of the ‘dead witnesses’ perfectly epitomised by the ‘muselmann’. The term ‘muselmann’ was used in Auschwitz to refer to deportees who suffered from clinical exhaustion and multiple, chronic illnesses and came to embody, in the eyes of fellow deportees, what man, subjected to extreme brutality and deprivation and on the verge of death, could become. The ‘muselmann’ was the incarnation of their own fate. Using this figure, Agamben develops the following paradox: since any testimony is, in essence, impossible, and since, therefore, the reality of the death camps is inaccessible, only the impossible figure of the ‘muselmann’ can point to the ethical reality of Auschwitz. Thus, radicalising Levi’s words, Agamben turns the ‘muselmann’ into the ‘integral witness’. Such a contention is naturally reminiscent of the thought discussed earlier: the ‘muselmann’ becomes the ‘epiphanic’ incarnation of what testifies to the existence of the human dimension in man as revealed in Auschwitz, its only resemblance to man being its cadaveric appearance.
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To decipher the meaning of Agamben’s ‘muselmann’, it is necessary to look into the polysemic dimension of this word, which evidently transcends the concentration camp universe. From a purely lexical point of view, first of all, the word ‘muselmann’ is utterly foreign to the Polish language and to the numerous other languages that were spoken in Auschwitz. From a current affairs, contextual point of view (Remnants of Auschwitz was published in 1998), the Muslim, who is linked to political Islam and Palestine, can be seen as the antagonist of the Jew, who is conversely linked to modern Israel and Zionism.25 From an imaginary point of view, the ‘muselmann’ is reminiscent of the numerous texts and pictorial representation of the suffering body of Christ.26 Moreover, Agamben’s theory neglects the complexity of the concentration camp reality, and the crucial differences between the functioning of camps on the one hand, and the extermination centres on the other. While Agamben can on no account whatsoever be linked to or accused of negationist views, he must be criticised for his abusive use of the victims’ representations, a trend which has become fairly general. Thus, the figure of the ‘muselmann’ is a faithful epitome of the ‘screen victim’ syndrome frequently found in mediadriven humanitarian operations: the figure tends to hide the real victims and blur our understanding of what actually happened.27 The Functioning of the Camp Obscured by the ‘Muselmann’ At a seminar on Saint Paul held in Paris in 1999, Agamben advocated what appeared to be a relevant distinction between time, the time of the end and the end in itself. In other words, he urged his audience not to confuse eschatology with messianism. However, as soon as time is no longer conceived of in its transcendental dimension and is envisaged as a materialised, immanent notion, and as soon as Agamben seeks to apply his theory not only to texts but also to historical reality and concentration camps, his thought starts to oversimplify reality itself. The most blatant example of oversimplification is the figure of the ‘muselmann’, who compresses and distorts the complexity of the camp and, in the first instance, the complexity of the multiple temporalities which co-existed within the camp; such temporalities simply cannot be reduced to the mere image of emaciated bodies recycled into a rhetorical figure. Wolfgang Sofski, whose book L’Organisation de la terreur was a source of inspiration to Agamben,28 offers a seminal categorisation of the different temporalities generated by the camp. On the one hand,
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he identifies a planned temporality detached from the past and from the future and deprived of any intimate continuity, in which human beings were brutally dispossessed of both their own personalities and of all spirituality. The crushing monotony of this relationship between time and existence, repeated time and again through the same cycle, was nonetheless disrupted by sudden, unexpected avalanches of violence. This temporality slowly led to the degradation of the self under the yolk of the camp’s organisation and hierarchy, from the kapos to the SS. On the other hand, Sofski identifies rival, precarious temporalities generated by the various forms of resistance (passive or active, individual or collective), and the numerous instances of corruption and irregularity. One could also add to this temporality the idea of temporary salvation as well as the fatal events which took place in special places, such as the Revier (infirmary). Even if Sofski could be criticised for nearly turning the notion of ‘absolute power’ into a myth, for speaking of ‘the’ camp and ‘the’ SS, his rigorous research is seminal in that it acknowledges the heterogeneity of the camp system. The same cannot be said of Agamben, whose quest leads him to ‘find what he is looking for’ in terms of truth, essence and paradigm. Indeed, Agamben grants what is left a paradigmatic value by which the camp becomes the truth of political modernity, the ‘muselmann’ the truth of testimony and Auschwitz the ‘paradigme même du quotidien’.29 Thus, according to Agamben, it is by investigating the exception that one finds not the norm, but the confusion which surrounds norm and exception. The concentration camp is, therefore, posited as the place in which the state of exception has become the rule: it ‘inaugure un nouveau paradigme juridico-politique dans lequel la norme devient indiscernable de l’exception’.30 Borrowing both from Foucault’s model of biopolitical power and from Arendt’s vision of the concentrationary universe, Agamben adopts the assertion that ‘everything is possible’. The camp, he writes, is ‘un espace d’exception où la loi est intégralement suspendue, tout y est vraiment possible’.31 Of course, in Le Système Totalitaire, Arendt cites David Rousset, according to whom ‘normal men do not know that everything is possible’, but in this sentence the assertion ‘everything is possible’ has a very different meaning to that inferred by Agamben. It refers to what normal men are prevented from knowing, precisely because the norm prevents normal men from conceiving that the exception is, in fact, not only possible (literary and artistic creation had always sought to picture possibilities which had never occurred
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in reality), but also realisable (this is what Rousset meant). There is something in the conformity adopted by man in order to be normal which obscures the exceptional and renders it invisible, whereas, in fact, its exceptional nature should render it all the more visible. This is, for instance, reflected in the story of the two CIA agents who, having analysed the aerial photographs of Auschwitz, wrote these words for the very first time: ‘execution wall’, ‘bloc number 11’ and ‘gas chamber’, as they were ‘poussés par le succès de la série télévisée Holocauste, qui n’a su rendre visible les souffrances qu’en les réduisant au kitsch’.32 Thus, these two men saw something radically different from what had been known and identified for the previous 33 years, namely the IG-Farben factories in Monowitz. Faithfulness to conformity (in this case, conformity to strategic objectives) is so powerful that it prevents us from discerning the exception. One can, therefore, contend that conformity to the norm relies on visibility processes which serve to extract the exception from intelligible reality, even when the exception is effectively at work in reality. In this sense, the phenomenon of extraction must be investigated through an exploration of the processes involved. Agamben’s approach, which postulates that this process in itself must be granted a state of exception, obscures the phenomenon altogether. This deliberate lack of an historical outlook33 is the source of other errata and misinterpretations by Agamben. For instance, his interpretation of politics in terms of all or nothing stems from a specific period characterised by the unrivalled rule of a state of terror, which has become the sole articulation between the law and the norm. It is a period in which the law is no more than its own ideological falsification (the rule of racial laws and criminalisation), and the norm has assumed the caricatured appearance of the law. The repressive Nazi regime, built upon the SS apparatus, strengthened by its administrative and legal institutions and cemented by an overwhelming propaganda machine, steered German society through a radical period which was exacerbated by the war and the ‘total war’. Exceptional procedures were widespread throughout the Reich, but no one even tried to pretend that these were the norm.34 By striving to locate in ‘the camp’ what he calls the ‘very paradigm of political space’, Agamben erects an insurmountable frontier around concentration camps which become, in fact, isolated from their surrounding society, and turns them into an exclusive ‘outside’. Consequently, Agamben fails to envisage the global system which surrounded the camps, and included numerous
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social and economic interfaces present on the entire territory of the Third Reich. Agamben’s attempt to locate a paradigm in ‘the’ camp is seriously flawed, because any paradigm must be conceived and constructed from the viewpoint of a whole society. In an echo to a remark made by Martin Broszat to Saul Friedländer, even ‘Auschwitz’ cannot account for the vast apparatus, established on a European level, which gave birth to the concentration and extermination systems. Agamben’s vision of the camp as an absolute space is also flawed: camps were in fact the sordid, random conjunction of selective, unrivalled power and absolute relativity. Let us make another observation here. It could be argued that the camps were structures governed by extremely tight, interwoven sets of rules, interdictions and laws (albeit arbitrary and useless ones), structures in which, therefore, the ‘all is possible’ assertion was difficult to enact. After all, were camps not places where potentialities were so restricted than the very act of creating a potentiality (by drawing, writing, creating or just surviving) was in itself an act of resistance? The ‘all is possible’ was the fate of the most prisoners, but only in the sense that the ‘all’ could reduce them to nothing with the minimal of delay. The ‘all or nothing’ logic favoured by Agamben fails to grasp and envisage the entire range of potentialities. In fact, he reproduces and makes his own the very logic upon which terror is built, a logic which from his early writings carries the idea of the dominated man crushed by the omnipotent ‘all’. This logic is incarnated in the ‘muselmann’: it reveals a purist thought in which politics is envisaged under the exclusive sign of a paradigmatic absolute which discredits any territory which is not political in its essence. This radical vision of politics, also shared by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, can be challenged through a citation by Jacques Rancière, who argues that politics ‘n’est jamais pure, jamais fondée sur une essence propre de la communauté et de la loi’.35 Thus, Agamben is unable to accept that various areas of life can exist and proliferate in the gaps left by the organisation of the camp, and constitute the very life of the camp, as illustrated by the Auschwitz text found in YIVO Bleter: On pourra sans notre aide reconstituer l’histoire d’Auschwitz. Comment on mourait à Auschwitz, il y aura des images, des témoins, des documents pour le raconter. Mais nous voulons ici créer le tableau de comment on ‘vivait’ à Auschwitz. A quoi ressemblait un jour normal, un jour de travail ordinaire au camp.
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Un jour tissé d’un enchevêtrement de vie et de mort, de terreur et d’espoir, de résignation et de volonté de vivre … Nous devons donc raconter nous-mêmes ce qui nous concerne.36 Agamben ignores this reality by establishing his ‘muselmann’ in a rank of supreme dignity and turning him, by the same token, into a symbol of paradoxical all-powerfulness in the face of death. The paradox here lies in the fact that the only resistance offered by this figure is a negative aesthetic of passivity. As a result of this focalisation on the figure of the ‘muselmann’, Agamben’s work ignores the organisation of National Socialist camps and their heterotopic nature. The camps were reminiscent of, and comparable to, ‘outside’ societies and, at the same time, absolutely different from them due to the extreme, omnipresent forms of violence characteristic of the concentration camp world. This violence, however, went far beyond the simple metaphor of ‘subjection’ (Blanchot) found in the ‘muselmann’. Even if camps were ‘death factories’, they cannot be reduced to the ‘end of the chain’ pictured in the very first photographs of death camps which now form an integral part of Western culture and collective awareness. In a way, more than 50 years after the end of the Second World War, Agamben reactualises the ‘dated’ vision found in the documentaries made at the time of the liberation, when our understanding of the camps was still awaiting the hindsight offered later by historiography. Concentration camps were characterised by generalised terror, rather than absolute terror, but they were also complex systems of power strata linked to each other by ‘grey areas’, that is to a mechanical structure which could prove fatal, because of arbitrary rules predominantly handed down through brutality, or vital (for example, being able to slip through the net, to get by, to survive). In addition to these various strata, there existed in the camps a multitude of languages which immediately determined who would survive, at least for a short while. Knowledge or ignorance of German or Polish was crucial. One should also add that, for a long period of time, our understanding of concentration camps was influenced by a mythical vision in which there existed a large, unified camp composed of two poles, resistance and barbarianism, each pole neatly epitomising good and evil. Thus, the resistance took centre stage to the detriment of civilian deportees, Jews and Gypsies, homosexuals and hostages. To move beyond this mythical vision and achieve a profound understanding of the camps, one must investigate the mechanisms at work in the gener-
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alisation of such phenomena as violence, lies, sexual slavery or the humiliation and subjugation of homosexuals and children. It might also prove useful to investigate the logic of chance in the determination of individual fates. Such investigations, however, are hindered by Agamben’s ‘muselmann’, who acts as a screen and becomes one of these phenomena whereby reality is reified into its own representation. Let us now turn our attention to the most spectacular ‘blind spot’ of Agamben’s approach. Those Killed in the Gas Chambers Even if the use of the toponym ‘Auschwitz’ as antonomasia is quite widespread and generally obscures a number of distinctions between the various camps found in Auschwitz, especially in the case of the ‘extermination centres’ destroyed and erased from the map in 1944, Agamben’s approach goes far beyond in its radicalisation of reality. For example, who could really write that ‘la vraie marque d’Auschwitz est le musulman, “nerf du camp” que personne ne peut voir et qui inscrit dans tout témoignage une lacune?’,37 whereas those who cannot be seen are the deportees who perished in the gas chambers? The Auschwitz complex (in the sense of an industrial complex) was divided into three camps. The first, Auschwitz I, was created in the spring 1940 while the second, Auschwitz II, started its operations in October 1941 in the expropriated village of Brzezinka. This is where the ‘extermination centre’ of Auschwitz-Birkenau was located. The first deportees to perish there were Soviet prisoners used in a series of experiments with the insecticide gas known as Zyklon B, and the same chemical was used during the same period in Chelmno, where mass killings of Polish Jews took place. On July 4, the first ‘Selektion’ of Jews was organised on the Judenrampe located between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II. Finally, a third camp was created later, both to minimise the effects of an epidemic which devastated the first camp, and to cover the labour needs of the industrial conglomerate IG-Farben, which hired prisoners, at a cost of three DM per head, from the SS. Auschwitz III was also known as ‘Buna-Monowitz’ or ‘Lager Buna’, and was home to a rubber-processing factory. Primo Levi was sent to this infamous camp. Those sent to Birkenau remained, in fact, outside the camp. They faced an immediate death sentence. Many of those who perished in these gas chambers were Jews. On the other hand, ‘la zauna … signifiait la vie. La vie dans le camp, certes, mais la vie tout de même’.38
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Here lies the paradox: to enter the camp meant provisional salvation. Not to enter the camp meant ending one’s life in the gas chamber and the crematoria located outside the camp’s barbed wires. In this sense, the barbed wire did constitute a frontier, the very frontier that Agamben seeks to erase in his desire to unify and subsume everything (camps, societies, history and modernity) under a single, oversimplified model. This is why he makes such erroneous declarations as: ‘[Dans] les Lager comme Auschwitz, … camp de concentration et camp d’extermination se confondent’.39 The same distortion can be seen when Agamben turns the ‘muselmann’ into ‘le secret absolument intémoignable, l’arche indévoilable du pouvoir’, and when he contends that the same logic of exclusion followed an identical path encompassing the non-Aryan and the Jew, the Jew and the deportee and, finally, beyond the Jewish deportee himself, the ‘muselmann’.40 Such assertions indeed confronted the reality of Birkenau. Yes, some Jews became ‘muselmänner’ before their death, and the atrocious state of stupefaction endured by the ‘muselmann’ and related in all survivors’ testimonies is undeniable. But Agamben’s assertions, building on and distorting Primo Levi’s, refer to a state of alienation, which characterised all deportees and prevented them precisely from knowing the other dimension of cruelty and horror, as found in the extermination centres. Even if all the prisoners held at Auschwitz knew that there was another way of dying, they were unable to imagine it fully. In the camp, at the very bottom of the scale of deportees, were those Jews who had not been exterminated upon their arrival. They quickly became victims of malnutrition, violence and brutality. Nonetheless, after 1941, the fate of the majority of Jews had nothing in common with the fate of the ‘muselmänner’. Before they reached this state, these individuals had remained human beings: they entered the camp, they were registered, they had the chance and hope (albeit very weak and remote) to survive. Then came the time of the weakening of the body, of physical and mental exhaustion and, in many cases, death. The ‘selected’ Jews, those who remained outside the camp, never had this time or these chances. The only time they were given was for taking their clothes off and entering the shower. Despite the fact that many of these Jews arrived at Birkenau in a state of exhaustion which is difficult to imagine, having crossed Europe in the worst possible conditions in terms of hygiene and malnutrition, their condition was radically different from that of the
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‘muselmänner’. Rather than using such examples, if one had to identify a radical metaphor of total destruction, one could speak of those human beings who arrived in Birkenau with their clothes, their cases and their culture, who were still ‘intact’ or, nearly, still in good health. These could be identified as the civilised Europeans, which many of the deportees still considered themselves to be – whereas no one wanted to identify with the ‘muselmann’. This is the most horrible, paradoxical representation of the Judeocide: no process of ‘decivilisation’ was deemed necessary. Even if bursts of violence characterised the ‘Selektions’, this was a violence which was different from that of the camp. In Au Coeur de l’enfer, former Sonderkommando Zalmen Gradowski remembers the abundance of life in the bodies of those who were about to enter the gas chambers.41 For instance, he describes a convoy of women stricken by terror and hopelessness, women who had nothing in common with the emaciated beings wandering in the liberated camps in 1945 and rendered immortal, so to speak, by reporters travelling with the Allied forces. Let us take this analysis forward. One could ask, here, whether Agamben’s inability to grasp the reality of this ‘life’ suggests that his biopolitical theory of zoe/bios, as constructed from Moyens sans fins onwards, is, in reality, both fragile and overambitious. In short, to what extent is ‘bare life’, as epitomised by the ‘muselmann’, the focal figure of a rhetoric of avoidance which precludes this philosopher from understanding social issues, or, rather, from understanding politics insofar as politics can only be apprehended in its articulation to its social environment? Or perhaps are we faced here with a pure philosophical, ideological conception of politics which, through its absolute ambition to crush the social dimension under its Weltanschauung, is reminiscent of the most dangerous conceptions of politics, as illustrated by twentieth-century history, namely the very essence of the totalitarian ideologies criticised by Agamben. What does the exceptional dimension of ‘bare life’ obscure? The very normality of life (see, for instance, the issues raised above by the citation from YIVO Bleter). In many instances, indeed, Gradowski emphasises the utmost liveliness of many victims, which enables us to conceptualise the Western specificity of genocide, with its unique combination of techniques, administration, culture and ideology. This is were we must think in terms of a Birkenau paradox, as opposed to the Auschwitz paradox proposed by Agamben. The paradox of the extermination centres lies in the articulation of the following factors.
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First, the vast majority of the victims were, in physiological and psychological terms, very close to us. Therein rests the first aspect of the paradox: our judgement; perception and cognitive landmarks are entirely destabilised not by the radical strangeness of these ‘living cadavers’, the ‘muselmänner’, but by the striking similarity we share with the victims of Birkenau: these people look astonishingly like us. In this sense, the photographs found by Lily Jacob at the time of the liberation – and published in the Album d’Auschwitz – are remarkable.42 The Hungarian Jews pictured in the album look as if they had been almost photographed in their normal environment. An hour later, they were dead. Another hour later, reduced to ashes. The second part of the paradox is that the direct witnesses of this mass destruction, namely the Sonderkommandos, enjoyed some of the best material (food supplies) conditions to be found in the world of the concentration camp. Here, again, if one was to ignore their experience of the death camps and focus only on their life in the Bunker, one could argue that their ordinary life was quite close to normality in terms of subsistence. In other words, what they experienced in the extermination centres annihilated them psychologically, but not physically. The third dimension of this paradox is what rendered the Sonderkommandos’ existence impossible: they saw with their own eyes tens of thousands of people being murdered and erased from the surface of the earth; they watched the destruction of their own families, relatives, friends and neighbours and the annihilation of their own culture; they endured the constant humiliation of the SS mocking their traditions.43 They witnessed the destruction of their world. Theirs was one of the most horrifying collective experiences: to witness the burying of a whole world which had been abandoned by mankind, by modernity. Agamben’s denigration of the Sonderkommando on the rather simplistic basis that they were an integral part of the bipolar victim/ henchman scheme, precludes any understanding of the ‘grey areas’. His blindness to the many ambiguities of human life, as found in his desire to seek in the ‘muselmann’ an impossible, pure witness, reveals the biaises of this philosopher. He refuses to investigate rationality, and erects a rhetorical edifice which is aimed at the sublime and, in filigrane, reflects his attraction for irrationality; he is fascinated by a type of essentialist monocausalism; he radicalises Heidegger’s ontology. These are some of the features of a philosophy permeated by strong theological motives, even if its expression is to a certain extent secularised.
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Must One Conclude? Agamben could have decided to restrict his research to the margins of the dual problematic of the National Socialist camp system and Judeocide, to revolve around it as he had done until Bartleby ou la creation. In 1995, however, perhaps deeply traumatised by the genocides which took place in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, by the numerous commemorations of the Judeocide and possibly also by the electoral breakthrough, into the political landscape of his own country, of the Movimento Sociale Italiano under its new guise as the ‘National Alliance’, Agamben decided to move toward political philosophy. He started to cenceptualise twentieth-century violence. His irrepressible tendency to reduce the complexity of reality down to its essentialist nature, however, raises a question which transcends Agamben himself, namely the question of the inadequate linkage between, on the one hand, the long philosophical tradition to which Agamben is indebted, and, on the other, modern and contemporary history. For as long as philosophy remains a prisoner of the onto-theology which permeates it, this question will remain formulated as follows: can philosophy investigate the concepts of violence and time without losing its way through an essential quest which distracts, and sometimes totally isolates it from the socio-political issues of our time? Giorgio Agamben is clearly representative of a very contemporary type of philosophy, which is quite in tune with intellectual fashions. In the last five years, ‘Auschwitz’, Saint Paul and the relationship between man and animal have inspired a number of philosophical works whose quality varies greatly. This philosophy also claims to be focused on current affairs, and anchors itself on the Left or extreme Left of the political spectrum. But, perhaps unwittingly, it remains isolated from social questions. To write about transit zones for foreigners at Roissy airport can only remain an intellectual posture, unless this thought leads to an examination of what it would mean, in terms of political action, to reintegrate exclusion, the ‘banned’ and the ‘without’ into common law. A theory of passivity cannot dispense with a theory of action, unless it openly advocates a mystical posture, which Agamben’s thought does not. It would be necessary, for example, to investigate the modes of subjectivity through which the verification of equality (and therefore the acknowledgement and compensation of harm caused) becomes a political figure. This is what Rancière seeks to achieve, whereas Agamben, who is trapped in his style and in his quest
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for a negativity solely constitutive of man, deviates from this trajectory to develop an aesthetics of disaster centred around a fascination for the cadaver. NOTES 1. Translated into English as Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (city: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), translator’s note. 2. Translated into English as Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), translator’s note. 3. Translated into English as Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999), translator’s note. 4. Translated into English as Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), translator’s note. 5. Giorgio Agamben, Le Langage et la mort (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1982), p.13. Translator’s note: this book was translated into English as Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (city: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 6. Translated into English as Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (city: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1980), translator’s note. 7. Translated into English as Lévinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence (city: Duquesne University Press, 1998), translator’s note. 8. Giorgio Agamben, Enfance et histoire (Paris: Payot, 1978), p.61. Translator’s note: this book was translated into English as Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (city: Verso Books, 1996). 9. Translated into English as Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (city: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), translator’s note. 10. Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby ou la création (Paris: Circé, 1995), p.43. 11. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p.14. 12. Agamben borrows this term from Jean-Luc Nancy, with whom he shares many intellectual affiliations and orientations. 13. Giorgio Agamben, Le Temps qui reste (Paris: Payot-Rivages, 2000), p.46. 14. Giorgio Agamben, L’Ouvert. De l’homme à l’animal (Paris: Payot-Rivages, 2002), p.42. 15. Agamben (note 11), p.17. 16. Giorgio Agamben, Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz (Paris: Payot-Rivages, 1999), p.18. 17. Ibid. p.141. 18. Thomas C. Wall, Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot and Agamben (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), p.121. 19. See Longin, Traité du sublime (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1995), translator’s note, unavailable in English. 20. See Philippe Hamon, Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif (Paris: Hachette, 1981), translator’s note, unavailable in English. 21. Agamben (note 11), p.16. 22. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), translator’s note, translated into English as What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 23. Giorgio Agamben, Stanze (Paris: Payot-Rivages, 1981), p.248, translator’s note, translated into English as Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (city: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 24. Agamben (note 16), p.64. 25. It is worth mentioning here that this interpretation was proposed by Agamben himself in one of the seminars he held at the Collège International de Philosophie, but that he did not pursue it in his book.
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26. See Ziva Amishaï-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993). 27. See Philippe Mesnard, La Victime écran: La représentation humanitaire en question (Paris: Textuel, 2002), translator’s note, the expression victime écran translates roughly into English as ‘screen victim’. 28. Wolfgang Sofski, L’Organisation de la terreur (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995), translator’s note, translated into English as The Order of Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 29. Agamben (note 16), p.59. 30. Agamben (note 11), p.183. 31. Giorgio Agamben, Moyens sans fins: Notes sur la politique (Paris: Payot-Rivages, 1995), p.50. 32. Harun Farocki, ‘Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images du monde et inscription de la guerre)’, Trafic 11 (Summer 1994). 33. Agamben (note 16), p.9, deals summarily with historical research on the very first page of Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz, by considering ‘le tableau d’ensemble comme acquis’. 34. Numerous studies on German society under Nazi rule have been published which shed very useful light on the relationship between the norm and the exception. In French, see for instance P. Ayçoberry, La Société allemande sous le IIIème Reich (Paris: Le Seuil, 1998). 35. Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995), p.95. 36. Giorgio Agamben, YIVO Bleter, translated into French by Batia Baum, in ‘Des voix sous la cendre: Manuscrits des Sonderkommandos d’Auschwitz-Birkenau’, Revue d’histoire de la Shoah: Le Monde juif 171 (Jan.-April 2001), p.165. 37. Agamben (note 16), p.105. 38. Tadeusz Borowski, Le Monde de Pierre (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1992), p.145. 39. Agamben (note 16), p.63. 40. Ibid., p.206. 41. In French, Zalmen Gradowski, Au Coeur de l’enfer: Document écrit d’un Sonderkommando d’Auschwitz – 1994, ed. Philippe Mesnard and Carlo Saletti (Paris: Kimé, 2001). 42. L’Album d’Auschwitz, published by Serge Klarsfeld (Paris: Seuil, 1981). 43. Gradowski describes the infamy of the lies produced by the SS. On one occasion, they chose to Jewish festival of Pourim to coincide with a mass killing of Jews in the gas chambers. See Gradowski (note 41), pp.69–72. Agamben, in order to picture for himself the reality of Auschwitz that he seeks to unveil, should have perhaps explored these lies, the structure of these lies rather than the muteness of the ‘muselmann’?
