Note: Students are advised to read the book rather than relying on a note like this for only

complete text is the book itself.

Prepared by Mukta Nepali/Hitang, Asst. Professor, Tribhuvan Multiple Campus, Tansen, Palpa

Remnants of Auschwitz by Giorgio Agamben

• How the deportees were led to the gas chambers by a squad of their fellow inmates (the
so called Sonderkommando), who then saw to it that the corpse dragged out and
washed, that their hair and gold teeth were salvaged, and that their bodies were placed
in the crematoria

Chapter One: The Witness

• In the camp, one of the reasons that can drive a prisoner to survive is the idea of
becoming a witness: the truth is that he wants to live at whatever cost, justifying one's
survival in the camp is not that easy, Primo Levi says that "some of my friends, very dear
friends of mine, never speak of Auschwitz; they prefer to remain silent; others, on the
other hand, speak of it incessantly, and I am one of them"

• Primo Levi, a perfect example of the witness, an ex-deportee, returns home, tirelessly
recounts his experience to every just like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, he becomes a
writer so that he can be a witness, he says "I am at peace with myself because I bore
witness" (Lacapra's working through or Freud's mourning)

• "I never appear as a judge," says Levi (Lacapra's middle-voiced position). He prefers to
reside in the gray zone, in which the long chain of conjunction between victims and
executioner comes loose, where the oppressed becomes oppressor and the executioner
in turn appears as victim, the judgment becomes impossible in gray zone in which
victims become executioner and executioners become victims, "no group was more
human than any other, victim and executioner are equally ignoble; the lesson of the
camps is brotherhood in abjection" he says.

• Being judgmental is of no use for it is self-referential, it is not followed by punishment,

rather it is itself a punishment, confusion between law and morality, theology and law,
the concept of responsibility and ethics are problematic there

• Senseless death than a martyrdom, sacrifices of the Hebrews, Holocaust(um)

(completely burned) as an incorrect term to refer to the polemical weapon used against
 Jews to condemn the uselessness of bloody sacrifices, and an extended metaphor to
refer to Christian martyrs to refer to their torture that is equated with Christ's sacrifice

• Language, in order to bear witness, must give way to non-language in order to show the
impossibility of bearing witness (Hurbinek: mass-klo: lacuna), impossibility of bearing
witness
 Chapter 2: The Muselmann
• The untestifiable, that to which no one has borne witness, has a name: der Muselmann,
literally the Muslim, a staggering corpse, the living dead, standing without knowledge of
what happened, image of the term used at Auschwitz for people dying of malnutrition

• Their life is too short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned,
from the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always
identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence, already too empty to really suffer,
one hesitates to call them living: one hesitates t call their death death, in the face of
which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand

• Exposed to extreme situation or limit situation, Muselmann (tortured bodies) goes

beyond what humanity and ethics can define

• Muselmanner is an absolutely new phenomenon, unearable to human eyes, a group of

prisoners crouched on the ground or wandering on foot like ghosts, the sure candidate
for the gas chambers or another kind of death

• Muselmann: "he who has seen the Gorgon" (Levi), which represents the impossibility of
vision, is what cannot be seen, a nonhuman who has seen the Gorgon, walking corpses,
living dead, mummy-men, the limit between life and death, marks the threshold
between the human and the inhuman

• There is a point at which human beings, while apparently remaining human beings,
cease to be humans. This point is the Muselmann.

• The gesture of assuming responsibility is genuinely juridical and not ethical, an absolute
confusion between ethical categories and juridical categories

• The extreme figure of the gray zone is the sonderkommando, the SS used the
euphemism "special team" to refer to this group of deportees responsible for managing
the gas chambers and crematoria, their task was to lead naked prisoners to their death
in the gas chambers and maintain order among them; they then had to drag out the
corpses, stained pink and green by cyanotic acid, and wash them with water; make
them sure that no valuable objects were hidden in the orifices of the bodies; extract
gold teeth from the corpses' jaws; cut the women's hair and wash it with ammonia
 chloride; bring the corpses into the crematoria and oversee their incineration; and
finally empty out the oens of the ash that remained

• Muselmann: the complete witness, an ethical aporia (contradiction), the drowned for
whom the real freedom and choice were practically non-existent, and improbable and
monstrous biological machine, lacking not only all moral conscience, but even sensibility
and nervous stimuli, for whom the human and the inhuman is indistinguishable due to
exposure to extreme form of dehumanization, embodies moral death

• Muselmann: a site of and experiment in which morality and humanity themselves are
called into question, the limit figure of a special kind, in which not only categories such
as dignity and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit lose their meaning

• Beyond help, no dignity and self-respect, being excluded from the human, the radial
refutation of every possible refutation

• Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a
norm

• Levi bears witness t the drowned, speaking in their stead, is the cartographer of this
new terra ethica, the implacable land-surveyor of Muselnannland

• Degradation of death, loss of dignity of death, deprived of dignified death, the idea that
the corpse deserves particular respect, that there is something like a dignity of death,
does not truly belong to the field of death, Heidegger: Being of death is inaccessible

• Muselmann: core of the camp, he whom no one wants to see, and who is inscribed in
every testimony as a lacuna, is the non-human who obstinately appears as human; he is
the human who cannot be told apart from the inhuman

• Therefore, concentration camps were the site of the production of the Muselmann, the
final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum, beyond the
Muselmann lies only the gas chambers

Chapter 3: Shame or on the Subject

• Levi: shame as dominant sentiment of survivors, a sense or feeling of guilt

• Weisel: "I live, therefore, I am guilty, I am here because a friend, an acquaintance, an

unknown person died in my place."

• Ella Lingens: "I live because others died in my place"

• Beyond good and evil (ethics) lies a shame that is not only without guilt but even
without time

• Shame (flush) also of having to die, for having been chosen to be killed (to die in place of
another), fore bearing witness to the horror

• Levinas: shame is grounded in our being's (Heidegger: Being is the totality of beings,
here, subjectivity) incapacity to move away and break form itself (inability to flee from
oneself)

• What appears in shame is therefore precisely the fact of being chained to oneself, the
radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide oneself from oneself, the intolerable
presence of the self to itself

• What is shameful is our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves, it revels the totality
of our existence (Being), what shame discovers is the Being that discovers itself

• In shame, the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it
becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion (void) as a subject, this double
movement, which is both subjectification and desubjectification is shame

• Heidegger: shame is an emotive totality that determines his whole Being, thus a kind of
ontological sentiment, Being carries with itself shame, the shame of Being (subjectivity).
Shame should be considered in tandem with disgust

• Benjamin: the predominant feeling in disgust is the fear of being recognized by what
repulses us, whoever experiences disgust has in some way recognized himself in the
object of his loathing and fears being recognized in turn, the man who experiences
disgust recognizes himself in an alterity that cannot be assumed – that is, he subjetifies
himself in an absolute desubjetification – shame emerges out of this

• Shame in sadomasochism (passive subject, the masochist, is so overtaken by his own

passivity, which infinitely transcends him, that he abdicates his condition as a subject by
fully subjecting himself to another subject, the sadist: desubjectifiction of subjectivity,
activity and passivity coincide in the subject, passive subject actively feels (sovereign) its
own being passive, to what is affected by its own receptivity)
• Therefore, shame is passivity, a form of subjectivity, actively feeling its own being
passive, the most emotive tonality of subjectivity, intimacy with subjectivity itself

• Therefore, subjectivity has the form of subjectification and desubjectification; and at the
bottom, shame; flush is the remainder that , in every subjectification, betrays a
desubjectification and that, in every desubjetification, bears witness to a subject

• Shame is truly something like the hidden structure of all subjetivity and consciousness

• The drowned are the complete witness: the human being is the inhuman; the one
whose humanity is completely destroyed is the one who is truly human

• The witness is the remnant who bears witness to the humanity wholly destroyed
 Chapter 4: The Archive and Testimony
• Testimony: evidence of the witness, survivors: pseudo witness, Muselmann (Jews
selected to be killed): complete witness but cannot bear witnesse

• Survivors bearing witness on behalf of Muselmann is problematic, impossibility of

bearing witness

• So, can the testimony be archived?

• archive: formation and transformation of statements

• Testimony: formation of truth

• Testimony is archived for future generation

• Saussure/Derrida – Language - unreliable, thus, unrepresentable

• Subjectivity: inability to bear witness; Muselmann created by Auschwitz is the

destruction of subjectivity