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at me. . . . Who are these people? What do they want of me? Are they waiting
for me? How do they recognize me? . . . For it’s obvious they are outcasts, not
just beggars; no, they are really not beggars, there is a difference. They are human
trash, husks of men that fate has spewed out. Wet with the spittle of fate, they
stick to a wall, a lamp-post, a billboard, or they trickle slowly down the street,
leaving a dark, filthy trail behind them. . . . And how did that small, gray woman
come to be standing at my side for a whole quarter of an hour in front of a store
window, showing me an old, long pencil that pushed infinitely slowly up out of
her wretched, clenched hands. I pretended that I was busy looking at the display
in the window and hadn’t noticed a thing. But she knew I had seen her; she knew
I was standing there trying to figure out what she was doing. For I understood
quite well that the pencil in itself was of no importance: I felt that it was a sign,
a sign for the initiated, a sign only outcasts could recognize; I sensed that she
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was directing me to go somewhere or do something. And the strangest part was
that I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that there actually existed some kind of secret
language which this sign belonged to, and that this scene was after all something
that I should have ex pected . . . . Since then, hardly a day has passed without a
similar encounter. Not only in the twilight, but at noon, in the busiest streets, a
little man or an old woman will suddenly appear, nod to me, show me something,
and then vanish, as if everything necessary were now done. It is possible that one
fine day they will decide to come as far as my room; they certainly know where
I live, and they’ll manage to get past the concierge. (Rilke 1983: 38–41)
What interests us here is less that Malte expresses the fundamental ambi-
guity of Rilke’s gesture, which is divided between the consciousness of having
abandoned every recognizable human aspect and of attempting to elude this
situation at any cost, and by which every descent into the abyss becomes merely
a preface to the predictable ascent into the hauts lieux of poetry and nobility.
What is decisive, rather, is that when confronted with the outcasts, Malte real-
izes that his dignity is a useless comedy, something that can only induce them
to “grin a little and wink” at him. The sight of them, the intimacy they suggest,
is so unbearable to Malte that he fears they may one day appear at his house to
bring shame upon him. This is why he takes refuge in the Bibliothèque Nationale,
among his fellow poets, where the outcasts will never be admitted.
Perhaps never before Auschwitz was the shipwreck of dignity in the face of
an extreme figure of the human and the uselessness of self-respect before abso-
lute degradation so effectively described. A subtle thread ties Malte’s “husks of
men” to the “husk-men” of whom Levi speaks. The young poet’s small shame
before the vagrants of Paris resembles a meek messenger who announces the
great, unprecedented shame of the survivors in the face of the drowned.
2.13. The paradoxical ethical situation of the Muselmann must be considered.
He is not so much, as Bettelheim believes, the cipher of the point of no return
and the threshold beyond which one ceases to be human. He does not merely
embody a moral death against which one must resist with all one’s strength, to
save humanity, self-respect, and perhaps even life. Rather, the Muselmann, as Levi describes him, is the site of an experiment in which morality and humanity themselves are called into question. The Muselmann is a 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.
If one establishes a limit beyond which one ceases to be human, and all or
most of humankind passes beyond it, this proves not the inhumanity of human
beings but, instead, the insufficiency and abstraction of the limit. Imagine
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that the SS let a preacher enter the camp, and that he tried with every possible
means to convince the Muselmänner of the necessity of keeping their dignity
and self-respect even at Auschwitz. The preacher’s gesture would be odious; his
sermon would be an atrocious jest in the face of those who were beyond not only
the possibility of persuasion, but even of all human help (“they were nearly al-
ways beyond help” (Bettelheim 1960: 1561). This is why the prisoners have always
given up speaking to the Muselmann, almost as if silence and not seeing were the only demeanor adequate for those who are beyond help.
Simply to deny the Muselmann’s humanity would be to accept the verdict
of the SS and to repeat their gesture. The Muselmann has, instead, moved into
a zone of the human where not only help but also dignity and self-respect have
become useless. But if there is a zone of the human in which these concepts
make no sense, then they are not genuine ethical concepts, for no ethics can
claim to exclude a part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that
humanity is to see.
2.14. Years ago, a doctrine emerged that claimed to have identified a kind
of transcendental condition of ethics in the form of a principle of obligatory
communication. It originated in a European country that more than any other
had reasons to have a guilty conscience with respect to Auschwitz, and it soon
spread throughout academic circles. According to this curious doctrine, a speak-
ing being cannot in any way avoid communication. Insofar as, unlike animals,
they are gifted with language, human beings find themselves, so to speak, con-
demned to agree on the criteria of meaning and the validity of their actions.
Whoever declares himself not wanting to communicate contradicts himself, for
he has already communicated his will not to communicate.
Arguments of this kind are not new in the history of philosophy. They mark
the point at which the philosopher finds himself at a loss, feeling the familiar
ground of language somehow giving way beneath him. In his proof of the “stron-
gest of all principles,” the principle of non-contradiction, in Book Gamma of the
Metaphysics, Aristotle is already compelled to take recourse to such argumentation. “Some, owing to a lack of training,” he writes, “actually ask that it be demon-
strated; for it is lack of training not to recognize of which things demonstration
ought to be sought, and of which not. In general, it is impossible that there should
be a demonstration of everything, since it would go on to infinity and, therefore,
not be a demonstration. . . . But even this [the principle of non-contradiction]
can be demonstrated, in the manner of a refutation, if only the disputant says
something. If he says nothing, it is ridiculous to look for a statement in response
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to someone who says nothing; such a person, insofar as he is such, is altogether
similar to a vegetable” (Aristotle 1993: 8, translation emended).
Insofar as they are founded on a tacit presupposition (in this case, that some-
one must speak), all refutations necessarily leave a res
idue in the form of an ex-
clusion. In Aristotle, the residue is the plant-man, the man who does not speak.
It suffices for the adversary simply and radically to cease speaking for the refuta-
tion to lose its force. Not that the entry into language is something that human
beings can call into question as they see fit. Rather, the simple acquisition of
speech in no way obliges one to speak. The pure pre-existence of language as the
instrument of communication—the fact that, for speaking beings, language al-
ready exists—in itself contains no obligation to communicate. On the contrary,
only if language is not always already communication, only if language bears
witness to something to which it is impossible to bear witness, can a speaking
being experience something like a necessity to speak.
Auschwitz is the radical refutation of every principle of obligatory commu-
nication. This is so not only because, according to survivors’ testimonies, any at-
tempt to induce a Kapo or an SS to communicate often ended in a beating; nor is
it the case simply because, as Marsalek recalls, in certain camps the place of com-
munication was taken by the rubber whip, ironically renamed der Dolmetscher,
“the interpreter.” Nor because “not being talked to” was the normal condition in
the camp, where “your tongue dries up in a few days, and your thought with it”
(Levi 1989: 93).
The decisive objection is different. It is, once again, the Muselmann. Let us
imagine for a moment that a wondrous time machine places Professor Apel in-
side the camp. Placing a Muselmann before him, we ask him to verify his ethics
of communication here too. At this point, it is best, in every possible way, to
turn off our time machine and not continue the experiment. Despite all good
intentions, the Muselmann risks once again being excluded from the human.
The Muselmann is the radical refutation of every possible refutation, the destruction of those extreme metaphysical bulwarks whose force remains because they
cannot be proven directly, but only by negating their negation.
2.15. It is not surprising that the concept of dignity also has a juridical origin.
This time, however, the concept refers to the sphere of public law. Already in
the Republican era, the Latin term dignitas indicates the rank and authority that inhere in public duties as well as, by extension, those duties themselves. It is thus
possible to speak of dignitas equestre, regia, imperatoria. From this perspective, a reading of the twelfth book of the Codex Iustinianus, entitled De Dignitatibus,
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is particularly instructive. Its task is to assure full respect for the orders of the
various “dignities” (not only the traditional ones of the senators and consuls, but
also those of the prefect to the praetorian, of the provost to the sacred cubiculum,
of the casket masters, decans, epidemetics, the metats, and the other degrees of
Byzantine bureaucracy). It takes care to forbid access to duties ( porta dignitatis)
for those whose lives did not correspond to an appropriate rank (for example,
those marked by public censorship or infamy). But the construction of a genuine
theory of dignities is the work of medieval jurists and canonists. In a now classic
book entitled The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Ernst Kantorowicz showed how legal science is strictly bound to theology in the formulation of one of the cardinal points of the theory of sovereignty: the perpetual
character of political power. Dignity is emancipated from its bearer and becomes
a fictitious person, a kind of mystical body that accompanies the royal body of
the magistrate or the emperor, just as Christ’s divine person doubles his human
body. This emancipation culminates in the principle so often repeated by medie-
val jurists that “dignity never dies” ( dignitas non moritur, Le Roi ne meurt Jamais) .
The simultaneous separation and unity of dignity and its bodily bearer finds
clear expression in the double funeral of the Roman Emperor (and, later, in
that of the kings of France). Here a wax image of the dead sovereign, which
represented his “dignity,” is treated as a real person, receives honors and medical
attention, and is burned in a solemn funeral rite ( junus imaginarium) .
The work of the canonists develops along lines parallel to those of the jurists.
They construct a corresponding theory of the various ecclesiastical “dignities”
that culminates in the De dignitate sacerdotum treatises used by officiates. On the one hand, the priest’s rank is elevated beyond that of angels, insofar as during
the mass, his body becomes the place of Christ’s incarnation. On the other
hand, however, the ethics of dignity is emphasized, that is, the need for the
priest to behave as befits his lofty position (thus to abstain from mala vita, for example, and not to handle the body of Christ after having touched female
pudenda). And just as public dignity survives death in the form of an image, so
priestly sanctity survives through the relic (“dignity” is the name that, above all
in France, indicates the relics of the holy body).
When the term “dignity” is introduced into treatises of moral philosophy,
the model developed by legal theory is simply followed, point by point, in order
to be interiorized. In Rome as in the Middle Ages, the rank of the magistrate
or priest is accompanied by a particular bearing and external appearance (from
the beginning, dignitas also indicates the physical appearance adequate to an elevated condition and, according to the Romans, corresponds in man to feminine
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venustas) . A pale image of dignity is thus spiritualized by moral philosophy and, then, usurps the place and name of the missing “dignity.” And just as law once
emancipated the rank of the persona ficta from its bearer, so morality—with an
inverse and specular gesture—liberates the bearing of the individual from the
possession of a duty. A “dignified” person is now a person who, while lacking
a public dignity, behaves in all matters as if he had one. This is clear in those
classes which, after the fall of the ancien régime, lose even the last public prerog-
atives that absolute monarchy had given them. And, later, it can be observed in
the lower classes, which are by definition excluded from every political dignity
and to which all kinds of educators begin to teach lessons on the dignity and
honesty of the poor. Both classes are compelled to live up to an absent dignity.
The correspondence is often even linguistic: dignitatem amittere or servare, which indicated the loss or continuation of a duty, now becomes “to lose” or “to keep”
dignity, to sacrifice or save, if not rank, then at least its appearance.
When referring to the legal status of Jews after the racial laws, the Nazis also
used a term that implied a kind of dignity: entwürdigen, literally to “deprive of dignity.” The Jew is a human being who has been deprived of all Würde, all dignity: he is merely human—and, for this reason, non-human.
2.16. In certain places and situations, dignity is out of place. The lover, for
example, can be anything except “dignified,” just as it is impossible to make love
while keeping one’s dignity. The ancients were so convinced of this impossibility
that
they maintained that even the name of amorous pleasure was incompatible
with dignity ( verbum ipsum voluptatis non habet dignitatem), and they classified erotic matters under the comic genre. (Servius informs us that Book Four of
the Aeneid, which brings tears to the eyes of modern readers, was considered a perfect example of the comic style.)
There are good reasons for this impossibility of reconciling love and dignity.
Both in the case of legal dignitas and in its moral transposition, dignity is something autonomous with respect to the existence of its bearer, an interior model
or an external image to which he must conform and which must be preserved at
all costs. But in extreme situations—and love, in its own way, is also an extreme
situation—it is not possible to maintain even the slightest distance between real
person and model, between life and norm. And this is not because life or the
norm, the internal or the external, in turn takes the upper hand. It is rather be-
cause they are inseparable at every point, because they no longer leave any space
for a dignified compromise. (St. Paul knows this perfectly when, in the Letter to
the Romans, he defines love as the end and fulfillment of the Law.)
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This is also why Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of
dignity and conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were re-
duced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It itself is the only norm; it is
absolutely immanent. And “the ultimate sentiment of belonging to the species”
cannot in any sense be a kind of dignity.
The good that the survivors were able to save from the camp—if there is any
sense in speaking of a “good” here—is therefore not dignity. On the contrary,
the atrocious news that the survivors carry from the camp to the land of human
beings is precisely that it is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagina-
tion, that there is still life in the most extreme degradation. And this new knowl-
edge now becomes the touchstone by which to judge and measure all morality
and all dignity. The Muselmann, who is its most extreme expression, is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where