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to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves. We speak in their
stead, by proxy” (Levi 1989: 83–4).
The witness usually testifies in the name of justice and truth and as such his
or her speech draws consistency and fullness. Yet here the value of testimony
lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot
be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority. The “true”
witnesses, the “complete witnesses,” are those who did not bear witness and
could not bear witness. They are those who “touched bottom”: the Muslims,
the drowned. The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy, as pseudo-witnesses;
they bear witness to a missing testimony. And yet to speak here of a proxy
makes no sense; the drowned have nothing to say, nor do they have instructions
or memories to be transmitted. They have no “story” (Levi 1986: 90), no “face,”
and even less do they have “thought” (ibid.) . Whoever assumes the charge of
bearing witness in their name knows that he or she must bear witness in the
name of the impossibility of bearing witness. But this alters the value of tes-
timony in a definitive way; it makes it necessary to look for its meaning in an
unexpected area.
1.13. It has already been observed that, in testimony, there is something like
an impossibility of bearing witness. In 1983, Jean-François Lyotard published
The Differend, which, ironically repeating the recent claims of revisionists, opens with a logical paradox:
You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situ-
ation such that none of them is now able to tell about it. Most of them disappeared
then, and the survivors rarely speak about it. When they do speak about it, their
testimony bears only upon a minute part of this situation. How can you know that
the situation itself existed? That it is not the fruit of your informant’s imagination?
Either the situation did not exist as such. Or else it did exist, in which case your
informant’s testimony is false, either because he or she should have disappeared,
or else because he or she should remain silent. . . . To have “really seen with his
own eyes” a gas chamber would be the condition which gives one the authority
to say that it exists and to persuade the unbeliever. Yet it is still necessary to prove
that the gas chamber was used to kill at the time it was seen. The only acceptable
proof that it was used to kill is that one died from it. But if one is dead, one cannot
testify that it is on account of the gas chamber. (Lyotard 1988: 3)
A few years later, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub elaborated the notion of
the Shoah as an “event without witnesses.” In 1990, one of the authors further
developed this concept in the form of a commentary on Claude Lanzmann’s
film. The Shoah is an event without witnesses in the double sense that it is
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impossible to bear witness to it from the inside—since no one can bear wit-
ness from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of
voice—and from the outside—since the “outsider” is by definition excluded
from the event:
It is not really possible to tell the truth, to testify, from the outside. Neither is it possible, as we have seen, to testify from the inside. I would suggest that the
impossible position and the testimonial effort of the film as a whole is to be,
precisely, neither simply inside nor simply outside, but paradoxically, both inside
and outside: to create a connection that did not exist during the war and does not exist today between the inside and the outside— to set them both in motion and
in dialogue with one another. (Felman and Laub 1992: 232)
This threshold of indistinction between inside and outside (which, as we
shall see, is anything but a “connection” or a “dialogue”) could have led to a
comprehension of the structure of testimony; yet it is precisely this threshold
that Felman fails to interrogate. Instead of developing her pertinent analysis,
the author derives an aesthetic possibility from a logical impossibility, through
recourse to the metaphor of song:
What makes the power of the testimony in the film and what constitutes in
general the impact of the film is not the words but the equivocal, puzzling re-
lation between words and voice, the interaction, that is, between words, voice,
rhythm, melody, images, writing, and silence. Each testimony speaks to us be-
yond its words, beyond its melody, like the unique performance of a singing.
(Ibid.: 277–78)
To explain the paradox of testimony through the deus ex machina of song
is to aestheticize testimony—something that Lanzmann is careful to avoid. Nei-
ther the poem nor the song can intervene to save impossible testimony; on the
contrary, it is testimony, if anything, that founds the possibility of the poem.
1.14. The incomprehension of an honest mind is often instructive. Primo
Levi, who did not like obscure authors, was attracted to the poetry of Paul Celan,
even if he did not truly succeed in understanding it. In a brief essay, entitled “On
Obscure Writing,” he distinguishes Celan from those who write obscurely out of
contempt for the reader or lack of expressivity. The obscurity of Celan’s poetics
makes Levi think instead of a “pre-suicide, a not-wanting-to-be, a flight from
the world for which a willed death appears as completion.” The extraordinary
operation accomplished by Celan on the German language, which has so fasci-
nated Celan’s readers, is compared by Levi—for reasons worth reflecting on—to
an inarticulate babble or the gasps of a dying man. “This darkness that grows
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from page to page until the last inarticulate babble fills one with consternation
like the gasps of a dying man; indeed, it is just that. It enthralls us as whirlpools
enthrall us, but at the same time it robs us of what was supposed to be said but
was not said, thus frustrating and distancing us. I think that Celan the poet must
be considered and mourned rather than imitated. If his is a message, it is lost in
the ‘background noise: It is not communication; it is not a language, or at the
most it is a dark and maimed language, precisely that of someone who is about
to die and is alone, as we will all be at the moment of death” (Levi 1990: 637).
In Auschwitz, Levi had already attempted to listen to and interpret an inar-
ticulate babble, something like a non-language or a dark and maimed language.
It was in the days that followed the liberation of the camp, when the Russians
moved the survivors from Buna to the “big camp” of Auschwitz. Here Levi’s
attention was immediately drawn to a child the deportees called Hurbinek:
Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked about
three years old, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and had no
name; that curious name, Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by
one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate
sounds that the baby let out now and again. He was paralyzed from the waist
down, with atrophied legs, as thin as sticks; but his ey
es, lost in his triangular and
wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break
loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one
had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive
urgency. (Levi 1986: 191)
Now at a certain point Hurbinek begins to repeat a word over and over
again, a word that no one in the camp can understand and that Levi doubtfully
transcribes as mass-klo or matisklo. “During the night we listened carefully: it was true, from Hurbinek’s corner there occasionally came a sound, a word. It was
not, admittedly, always exactly the same word, but it was certainly an articulated
word; or better, several slightly different articulated words, experimental varia-
tions of a theme, on a root, perhaps even on a name” (Levi 1986: 192). They all
listen and try to decipher that sound, that emerging vocabulary; but, despite the
presence of all the languages of Europe in the camp, Hurbinek’s word remains
obstinately secret. “No, it was certainly not a message, it was not a revelation;
perhaps it was his name, if it had ever fallen to his lot to be given a name;
perhaps (according to one of our hypotheses) it meant ‘to eat,’ or ‘bread’; or
perhaps ‘meat’ in Bohemian, as one of us who knew that language maintained.
. . . Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm—even his—bore the tattoo of
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Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed.
Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine” (ibid.) .
Perhaps this was the secret word that Levi discerned in the “background noise”
of Celan’s poetry. And yet in Auschwitz, Levi nevertheless attempted to listen
to that to which no one has borne witness, to gather the secret word: mass-klo,
matisklo. Perhaps every word, every writing is born, in this sense, as testimony.
This is why what is borne witness to cannot already be language or writing. It can
only be something to which no one has borne witness. And this is the sound that
arises from the lacuna, the non-language that one speaks when one is alone, the
non-language to which language answers, in which language is born. It is neces-
sary to reflect on the nature of that to which no one has borne witness, on this
non-language.
1.15. Hurbinek cannot bear witness, since he does not have language (the
speech that he utters is a sound that is uncertain and meaningless: mass-klo or
matisklo) . And yet he “bears witness through these words of mine.” But not even the survivor can bear witness completely, can speak his own lacuna. This means
that testimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness;
it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language
in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness. The language of testimony
is a language that no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into
what is without language, to the point of taking on a different insignificance—
that of the complete witness, that of he who by definition cannot bear witness.
To bear witness, it is therefore not enough to bring language to its own non-
sense, to the pure undecidability of letters ( m-a-s-s-k-l-o, m-a-t-i-s-k-l-o) . It is necessary that this senseless sound be, in turn, the voice of something or someone that, for entirely other reasons, cannot bear witness. It is thus necessary that
the impossibility of bearing witness, the “lacuna” that constitutes human lan-
guage, collapses, giving way to a different impossibility of bearing witness—that
which does not have language.
The trace of that to which no one has borne witness, which language believes
itself to transcribe, is not the speech of language. The speech of language is born
where language is no longer in the beginning, where language falls away from it
simply to bear witness: “It was not light, but was sent to bear witness to the light.”
2
The Muselmann
2.1. The untestifiable, that to which no one has borne witness, has a name.
In the jargon of the camp, it is der Muselmann, literally “the Muslim.”
The so-called Muselmann, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He
was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions. As
hard as it may be for us to do so, we must exclude him from our considerations.
(Améry 1980:9)
(Again the lacuna in testimony, one which is now consciously affirmed.)
I remember that while we were going down the stairs leading to the baths, they
had us accompanied by a group of Muselmänner, as we later called them—
mummy-men, the living dead. They made them go down the stairs with us only
to show them to us, as if to say, “you’ll become like them.” (Carpi 1993: 17)
The SS man was walking slowly, looking at the Muslim who was coming toward
him. We looked to the left, to see what would happen. Dragging his wooden
clogs, the dull-witted and aimless creature ended up bumping right into the SS
officer, who yelled at him and gave him a lashing on the head. The Muslim stood
still, without realizing what had happened. When he received a second and, then,
a third lashing because he had forgotten to take off his cap, he began to do it on
himself, as he had dysentery. When the SS man saw the black, stinking liquid
begin to cover his clogs, he went crazy. He hurled himself on top of the Muslim
and began kicking his stomach with all his strength. Even after the poor thing
had fallen into his own excrement, the SS man kept beating his head and chest.
The Muslim didn’t defend himself. With the first kick, he folded in two, and
after a few more he was dead. (Ryn and Klodzinski 1987: 128–29)
Two phases must be distinguished in the symptoms of malnutrition. The first
is characterized by weight loss, muscular asthenia, and progressive energy loss
in movement. At this stage, the organism is not yet deeply damaged. Aside
from the slowness of movement and the loss of strength, those suffering from
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789
malnutrition still do not show any symptoms. If one disregards a certain degree
of excitability and irritability, not even psychological changes can be detected.
It was difficult to recognize the point of passage into the second stage. In some
cases it happened slowly and gradually; in others it happened very quickly.
It was possible to ascertain that the second phase began when the starving
individual lost a third of his normal weight. If he continued losing weight, his
facial expression also changed. His gaze became cloudy and his face took on
an indifferent, mechanical, sad expression. His eyes became covered by a kind
of layer and seemed deeply set in his face. His skin took on a pale gray color,
becoming thin and hard like paper. He became very sensitive to every kind of
infection and contagion, especially scabies. His hair became bristly, opaque,
and split easily. His head became longer, his cheek bones and eye sockets be-
c
ame more pronounced. He breathed slowly; he spoke softly and with great
difficulty. Depending on how long he had been in this state of malnutrition,
he suffered from small or large edemas. They appeared on his lower eyelids and
his feet and, then, on other parts of his body depending on the time of day.
In the morning, after his night-time sleep, they were most visible on his face.
In the evening, on the other hand, they most easily could be seen on his feet
and the lower and upper parts of his legs. Being on his feet all the time made
all the liquids in him accumulate in the lower part of his body. As the state of
malnutrition grew, the edemas multiplied, especially on those who had to stand
on their feet for many hours—first on the lower part of their legs, then on their
behinds and testicles and even on their abdomens. The swellings were often
accompanied by diarrhea, which often preceded the development of edemas.
In this phase, they became indifferent to everything happening around them.
They excluded themselves from all relations to their environment. If they could
still move around, they did so in slow motion, without bending their knees.
They shivered since their body temperature usually fell below 98.7 degrees.
Seeing them from afar, one had the impression of seeing Arabs praying. This
image was the origin of the term used at Auschwitz for people dying of mal-
nutrition: Muslims. (Ibid.: 94)
No one felt compassion for the Muslim, and no one felt sympathy for him either.
The other inmates, who continually feared for their lives, did not even judge him
worthy of being looked at. For the prisoners who collaborated, the Muslims were
a source of anger and worry; for the SS, they were merely useless garbage. Every
group thought only about eliminating them, each in its own way. (Ibid.: 127)
All the Muselmänner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or
more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like
streams that run down to the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic
incapacity, or by misfortune, or through some banal incident, they are overcome
before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to
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learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until