life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception.
4.3. Only from this perspective can one understand why precisely the laws
concerning eugenics were among the first issued by the National Socialist
regime. On July 14, 1933, a few weeks after Hitler’s rise to power, the law for the
“prevention of the continuance of hereditary disease” was promulgated, stipulat-
ing that “those afflicted with a hereditary disease may be sterilized by a surgical
operation if there is medical evidence to suggest that their descendants will most
likely be afflicted by serious hereditary disorders of the body or the mind.” On
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October 18, 1933, eugenic legislation was extended to marriage by the law for the
“protection of the hereditary health of the German people,” which stated:
No marriage may be performed (1) when one of the betrothed suffers from a
contagious disease that might seriously threaten the spouse or any descendants;
(2) when one of the betrothed is debarred or temporarily a ward; (3) when one
of the betrothed, while not a ward, suffers from a mental illness that might make
the marriage seem undesirable for the national community; (4) when one of the
betrothed suffers from one of the hereditary diseases provided for by the law of
July 14, 1933.
The sense of these laws and the rapidity with which they were issued can-
not be grasped as long as they are confined to the domain of eugenics. What is
decisive is that for the Nazis these laws had an immediately political character.
As such, they are inseparable from the Nuremberg laws on “citizenship in the
Reich” and on the “protection of German blood and honor,” which transformed
Jews into second-class citizens, forbidding, among other things, marriage be-
tween Jews and full citizens and also stipulating that even citizens of Aryan
blood had to prove themselves worthy of German honor (which allowed the
possibility of denationalization to hang implicitly over everyone). The laws au-
thorizing discrimination against the Jews have almost completely monopolized
scholarly interest in the racial politics of the Third Reich. And yet the laws con-
cerning the Jews can only be fully understood if they are brought back to the
general context of National Socialism’s legislation and biopolitical praxis. This
legislation and this praxis are not simply reducible to the Nuremberg laws, to
the deportations to the camps, or even to the “Final Solution”: these decisive
events of our century have their foundation in the unconditional assumption of
a biopolitical task in which life and politics become one (“Politics, that is, giving
form to the life of the people”). Only when these events are brought back to
their “humanitarian” context can their inhumanity be measured.
When its biopolitical program showed its thanatopolitical face, the Nazi
Reich was determined to extend itself over all citizens. Nothing proves this bet-
ter than one of the projects proposed by Hitler in the last years of the war: “After
national X-ray examination, the Fuehrer is to be given a list of sick persons,
particularly those with lung and heart diseases. On the basis of the new Reich
Health Law . . . these families will no longer be able to remain among the public
and can no longer be allowed to produce children. What will happen to these
families will be the subject of further orders of the Fuehrer” (quoted in Arendt,
Origins, p. 416).
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א Precisely this immediate unity of politics and life makes it possible to shed light
on the scandal of twentieth-century philosophy: the relation between Martin Heideg-
ger and Nazism. Only when situated in the perspective of modern biopolitics does this
relation acquire its proper significance (and this is the very thing that both Heidegger’s accusers and his defenders fail to do). The great novelty of Heidegger’s thought (which
did not elude the most attentive observers at Davos, such as Franz Rosenzweig and
Emmanuel Levinas) was that it resolutely took root in facticity. As the publication of
the lecture courses from the early 1920s has by now shown, ontology appears in Hei-
degger from the very beginning as a hermeneutics of factical life ( faktisches Leben) . The circular structure by which Dasein is an issue for itself in its ways of being is nothing
but a formalization of the essential experience of factical life, in which it is impossible to distinguish between life and its actual situation, Being and its ways of Being, and for which all the distinctions of traditional anthropology (such as those between spirit and
body, sensation and consciousness, I and world, subject and properties) are abolished.
For Heidegger, the central category of facticity is not (as it was for Edmund Husserl)
Zufälligkeit, contingency—by which one thing is in a certain way and in a certain place, yet could be elsewhere and otherwise—but rather Verfallenheit, fallenness, which characterizes a being that is and has to be its own ways of Being. Facticity does not mean
simply being contingently in a certain way and a certain situation, but rather means
decisively assuming this way and this situation by which what was given [ ciò che era dote]
( Hingabe) must be transformed into a task ( Aufgabe) . Dasein, the Being-there who is its There, thus comes to be placed in a zone of indiscernability with respect to—and to
mark the definitive collapse of—all traditional determinations of man.
In a text of 1934 that may well even today still constitute the most valuable contribu-
tion to an understanding of National Socialism, Levinas proves himself the first to under-
line the analogies between this new ontological determination of man and certain traits
of the philosophy implicit in Hitlerism. Judeo-Christian and liberal thought, according
to Levinas, strive for the spirit’s ascetic liberation from the bonds of the sensuous and
historico-social situation into which it finds itself thrown, thus ultimately differentiating, in man and his world, between a realm of reason and a realm of the body, to which the
realm of reason is irreducibly opposed. Hitler’s philosophy (in this respect similar to
Marxism) is instead, Levinas argues, founded on an absolutely unconditional assumption
of the historical, physical, and material situation, which is considered as an indissoluble cohesion of spirit and body and nature and culture.
The body is not only a happy or unhappy accident that relates us to the implacable
world of matter. Its adherence to the Self is of value in itself. It is an adherence
that one does not escape and that no metaphor can confuse with the presence of
an external object; it is a union that does not in any way alter the tragic character
of finality. This feeling of identity between self and body . . . will therefore never
allow those who wish to begin with it to rediscover, in the depths of this unity,
the duality of a free spirit that struggles against the body to which it is chained.
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On the contrary, for such people, the whole of the spirit’s essence lies in the fact
that it is chained to the body. To separate the spirit from the concrete forms
with which it is already involved is to betray the originality of the very feeling
from which it is appropriate to begin. The importance att
ributed to this feeling
for the body, with which the Western spirit has never wished to content itself,
is at the basis of a new conception of man. The biological, with the notion of
inevitability it entails, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes
its heart. The mysterious urgings of the blood, the appeals of heredity and the
past for which the body serves as an enigmatic vehicle, lose the character of being
problems that are subject to a solution put forward by a sovereignly free Self. Not
only does the Self bring in the unknown elements of these problems in order to
resolve them; the Self is also constituted by these elements. Man’s essence lies no
longer in freedom but in a kind of bondage. . . . Chained to his body, man sees
himself refusing the power to escape from himself. Truth is no longer for him
the contemplation of a foreign spectacle; instead it consists in a drama in which
man is himself the actor. It is under the weight of his whole existence, which
includes facts on which there is no going back, that man will say his yes or his
no. (“Quelques réflexions” [1934], pp. 205–7)
Though Levinas’s text was written at a time when his teacher’s support of Nazism
was still searing, the name Heidegger appears nowhere. But the note added at the time of
the text’s republication in Critical Inquiry in 1990 leaves no doubt as to the thesis that an attentive reader would nonetheless have had to read between the lines—namely, that
Nazism as an “elemental evil” has its condition of possibility in Western philosophy
itself, and in Heideggerian ontology in particular: “a possibility that is inscribed in the ontology of Being’s care for Being—for the being dem es in seinem Sein um dieses Sein selbst geht [‘for whom Being itself is an issue in its being’]” (“Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” p. 62).
There could be no clearer statement that Nazism is rooted in the same experience of
facticity from which Heidegger departs, and which the philosopher had summarized in
his Rectoral Address in the formula “to will or not to will one’s own Dasein.” Only this essential proximity can explain how Heidegger could have written the following revealing
words in his 1935 course, Introduction to Metaphysics: “The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism have nothing whatever to do
with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between
global technology and modern man); these works have all been written by men fishing
in the troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities’” ( Einführung, p. 152).
From Heidegger’s perspective, National Socialism’s error and betrayal of its “inner
truth” consists in its having transformed the experience of factical life into a biological
“value” (hence the contempt with which Heidegger repeatedly refers to Rosenberg).
While the greatest achievement of Heidegger’s philosophical genius was to have elabo-
rated the conceptual categories that kept facticity from presenting itself as a fact, Nazism
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ended with the incarceration of factical life in an objective racial determination and,
therefore, with the abandonment of its original inspiration.
Yet what, beyond these differences and from the perspective that interests us, is the
political meaning of the experience of facticity? For both Heidegger and National Social-
ism, life has no need to assume “values” external to it in order to become politics: life is immediately political in its very facticity. Man is not a living being who must abolish or transcend himself in order to become human—man is not a duality of spirit and body,
nature and politics, life and logos, but is instead resolutely situated at the point of their indistinction. Man is no longer the “anthropophorous” animal who must transcend
himself to give way to the human being; man’s factical essence already contains the
movement that, if grasped, constitutes him as Dasein and, therefore, as a political being
(“polis signifies the place, the Da, where and how Dasein is insofar as Dasein is historical”
[ Einführung, p. 117]). This means, however, that the experience of facticity is equivalent to a radicalization without precedent of the state of exception (with its indistinction
of nature and politics, outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion) in a dimension in
which the state of exception tends to becomes the rule. It is as if the bare life of homo sacer, whose exclusion founded sovereign power, now became—in assuming itself as a task—explicitly and immediately political. And yet this is precisely what characterizes
the biopolitical turn of modernity, that is, the condition in which we still find ourselves.
And this is the point at which Nazism and Heidegger’s thought radically diverge. Nazism
determines the bare life of homo sacer in a biological and eugenic key, making it into the site of an incessant decision on value and nonvalue in which biopolitics continually turns into thanatopolitics and in which the camp, consequently, becomes the absolute political
space. In Heidegger, on the other hand, homo sacer—whose very own life is always at issue in its every act—instead becomes Dasein, the inseparable unity of Being and ways
of Being, of subject and qualities, life and world, “whose own Being is at issue in its very Being.” If life, in modern biopolitics, is immediately politics, here this unity, which itself has the form of an irrevocable decision, withdraws from every external decision and
appears as an indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a
bare life. In the state of exception become the rule, the life of homo sacer, which was the correlate of sovereign power, turns into an existence over which power no longer seems
to have any hold.
5
VP
5.1. On May 15, 1941, Dr. Roscher, who for some time had been con-
ducting experiments on rescue operations from high altitudes, wrote
to Himmler. He asked whether, considering the importance of his research for
the lives of German pilots, the mortal risk his experiments constituted for VPs
( Versuchspersonen, human guinea pigs) and the fact that nothing of use could be gained from conducting experiments on animals, it might be possible to provide
him with “two or three professional criminals” for his work. By this point the air
war had already entered the stage of high-altitude flying, and the risk of death
would be great if, under these conditions, the pressurized cabin were damaged
or the pilot had to parachute from the plane. The final result of the exchange of
letters between Roscher and Himmler (which is preserved in its entirety) was the
installation at Dachau of a compression chamber to continue the experiments in
a place in which VPs were particularly easy to find. We still possess the records
(furnished with photographs) of the experiment conducted on a 37-year-old
Jewish VP in good heath who was subjected to the equivalent pressure of 12,000
meters of altitude. ‘’After four minutes,” we read, “the VP began to sweat and
to shake her head. After five minutes cramps were produced; between six and
ten minutes breathing accelerated and the VP lost consciousness; between ten
and thirty minutes breathing slowed down to three breaths a minute, and then
ceased altogether. At the same time skin color became strongly cyanotic and
foam appeared around the lips.” Then follows the report of the dissection con-
At the Nuremberg trials, the experiments conducted by German physicians
and scientists in the concentration camps were universally taken to be one of
the most infamous chapters in the history of the National Socialist regime. In
addition to experiments pertaining to high-altitude rescue operations, experi-
ments were also conducted at Dachau on the possibility of survival in ice-cold
water and on the potability of salt water (these experiments, too, were designed
to facilitate the rescue of sailors and pilots who had fallen into the ocean). In
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the cold-water experiments, VPs were held under cold water until they lost con-
sciousness, while researchers carefully analyzed the variations in body tempera-
ture and possibilities of reanimation. Particularly grotesque was the experiment
on so-called animal heat reanimation, in which VPs were placed in a cot between
two naked women who had also been taken from among the Jews detained
in the camps; the documentation tells of a VP who was able to have sexual
relations, which facilitated the recuperation process. The experiments on the
potability of salt water were instead conducted on VPs chosen from among the
prisoners bearing the black triangle (i.e., Gypsies; this symbol of the genocide
of a defenseless population ought to be remembered alongside the yellow star).
These VPs were divided into three groups: one that simply had to abstain from
drinking altogether; one that drank only salt water; and one that drank salt
water mixed with Berkazusatz, a chemical substance that, according to the re-
searchers, lessened the harm of the salt water.
Another important area of experimentation involved inocula tion with pe-
techial fever bacteria and the Hepatitis endemica virus in the hope of producing
vaccines against two infectious diseases that were especially threatening to the
health of German soldiers on the battlefronts, where life was hardest. Experimen-
tation on nonsurgical sterilization by means of chemical substances or radiation,
which was to serve the Reich’s eugenic politics, was, in addition, particularly
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 19