The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  dignity ends. And Levi, who bears witness to the drowned, speaking in their

  stead, is the cartographer of this new terra ethica, the implacable land- surveyor of Muselmannland.

  2.17. We have seen that to be between life and death is one of the traits con-

  stantly attributed to the Muselmann, the “walking corpse” par excellence. Confronted with his disfigured face, his “Oriental” agony, the survivors hesitate to

  attribute to him even the mere dignity of the living. But this proximity to death

  may also have another, more appalling meaning, one which concerns the dignity

  or indignity of death rather than of life.

  As always, it is Levi who finds the most just and, at the same time, most

  terrible formula: “One hesitates,” he writes, “to call their death death.” It is the

  most just formula, for what defines Muselmänner is not so much that their life

  is no longer life (this kind of degradation holds in a certain sense for all camp

  inhabitants and is not an entirely new experience) but, rather, that their death is

  not death. This—that the death of a human being can no longer be called death

  (not simply that it does not have importance, which is not new, but that it can-

  not be called by the name “death”)—is the particular horror that the Muselmann

  brings to the camp and that the camp brings to the world. But this means—and

  this is why Levi’s phrase is terrible—that the SS were right to call the corpses

  Figuren. Where death cannot be called death, corpses cannot be called corpses.

  2.18. It has already been observed that what defines the camp is not simply

  the negation of life, that neither death nor the number of victims in any way

  exhausts the camp’s horror, and that the dignity offended in the camp is not

  that of life but rather of death. In an interview given to Günther Gaus in 1964,

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  Hannah Arendt thus described her reaction upon learning the truth about the

  camps, in all its details:

  Before that we said: Well, one has enemies. That is entirely natural. Why shouldn’t

  a people have enemies? But this was different. It was really as if an abyss had

  opened. This ought not to have happened. And I don’t just mean the number of

  victims. I mean the method, the fabrication of corpses and so on—I don’t need

  to go into that. This should not have happened. Something happened there to

  which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can. (Arendt 1993: 13–14)

  Every sentence here is charged with a meaning so awful as to compel whoever

  speaks to have recourse to phrases that stand halfway between euphemism and

  the unprecedented. First of all, the curious expression repeated in two versions,

  “this should not have happened,” appears at first glance to have at least a resentful

  tone, which is surprising given its origin on the lips of the author of the most

  courageous and demystifying book on the problem of evil in our time. The im-

  pression grows as one reads the final words: “Something happened there to which

  we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us ever can.” (Resentment, Nietzsche

  said, is born from the will’s impossibility to accept that something happened,

  from its incapacity to reconcile itself to time and to time’s “so it was.”)

  Arendt identifies what should not have happened and nevertheless happened

  immediately afterward. It is something so appalling that, having named it, Arendt

  makes a gesture bordering on reluctance or shame (“I don’t need to go into that”):

  “the fabrication of corpses and so on.” Hilberg informs us that the definition of extermination as a kind of fabrication by “conveyor belt” ( am laufenden Band )

  was used for the first time by a physician of the SS, F. Entress. Since then, it has

  been repeated countless times, often out of context.

  In each case, the expression “fabrication of corpses” implies that it is no

  longer possible truly to speak of death, that what took place in the camps was

  not death, but rather something infinitely more appalling. In Auschwitz, people

  did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans

  whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production. And, according to a

  possible and widespread interpretation, precisely this degradation of death con-

  stitutes the specific offense of Auschwitz, the proper name of its horror.

  2.19. Yet it is not at all obvious that the degradation of death constitutes the

  ethical problem of Auschwitz. Whenever Auschwitz is approached from this

  perspective, certain contradictions arise inevitably. This is already the case with

  those authors who, many years before Auschwitz, denounced the degradation of

  death in our time. The first of these authors, of course, is Rilke, who may even

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  constitute the unexpected, more or less direct, source of Entress’s expression con-

  cerning the chain production of death in the camps. “Now there are 559 beds to

  die in. Like a factory [ fabrikmässig], of course. With production so enormous,

  each individual death is not made very carefully; but that isn’t important. It’s the

  quantity that counts” (Rilke 1983: 8–9). And in the same years, Péguy, in a pas-

  sage that Adorno evoked concerning Auschwitz, spoke of the loss of the dignity

  of death in the modern world: “the modern world has succeeded in swallowing

  what is perhaps the hardest thing in the world to swallow, since it is something

  that in itself, almost in its texture, has a kind of special dignity, something like a

  particular incapacity to be swallowed: death.”

  Rilke opposes “serial” death to the “proper death” of good old times, the

  death that everyone carried within him just “as a fruit has its core” (ibid.: 10),

  the death that “one had” and that “gave to each person special dignity and silent

  pride.” The entire Book of Poverty and Death, written in the shock of Rilke’s stay in Paris, is dedicated to the degradation of death in the big city, where the

  impossibility of living becomes the impossibility of bringing to fruition one’s

  own death, the “great death each of us has within us” (Rilke 1995: 90). It is

  remarkable, though, that if one excludes the obsessive recourse to imagery of

  childbirth and abortion (“we give birth to our own stillborn death” [ibid.: 91])

  and bitter and ripe fruit (“this death hangs green, devoid of sweetness, / like a

  fruit inside them / that never ripens” [ibid.: 90]), proper death distinguishes

  itself from the other kind of death only by the most abstract and formal predi-

  cates: proper/improper and internal/external. Faced with the expropriation of

  death accomplished by modernity, the poet reacts according to Freud’s scheme

  of mourning; he interiorizes the lost object. Or, as in the analogous case of mel-

  ancholy, by forcing to appear as expropriated an object—death—concerning

  which it makes no sense to speak either of propriety or impropriety. Nowhere

  does Rilke say what renders Chamberlain Brigge’s death a “princely” and proper

  death, with the one exception that the Old Brigge dies precisely in his house,

  surrounded by his servants and his dogs. Rilke’s attempt to give back “a special dignity” to death leaves an impression of such ind
ecency that in the end, the

  peasant’s dream to kill his suffering lord “with a dung fork” seems to betray

  the poet’s own repressed desire.

  2.20. Before Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Arendt’s teacher in Freiburg

  in the mid-twenties, had already used the expression “fabrication of corpses” to

  define the extermination camps. And, curiously enough, for Heidegger the “fab-

  rication of corpses” implied, just as for Levi, that it is not possible to speak of

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  death in the case of extermination victims, that they did not truly die, but were

  rather only pieces produced in a process of an assembly line production. “They

  die in masses, hundreds of thousands at a time,” reads the text of Heidegger’s lec-

  ture on technology given in Bremen under the title “The Danger” ( Die Gefahr).

  Do they die? They decease. They are eliminated. They become pieces of the

  warehouse of the fabrication of corpses. They are imperceptibly liquidated in

  extermination camps. . . . But to die ( Sterben) means: to bear death in one’s own Being. To be able to die means: to be capable of this decisive bearing. And we

  are capable of it only if our Being is capable of the Being of death. . . . Every-

  where we face the immense misery of innumerable, atrocious deaths that have

  not died [ ungestorbener Tode], and yet the essence of death is closed off to man.

  (Heidegger 1994: 56)

  Not without reason, a few years later, the objection was raised that for an

  author implicated even marginally in Nazism a cursory allusion to the extermi-

  nation camps after years of silence was, at the very least, out of place. What is

  certain, however, is that the victims saw the dignity of death to be so negated

  for them that they were condemned to perish—according to an image recalling

  Rilke’s reference to “aborted deaths”—in a death that is not dead. But what, in

  the camp, could a dead death have been, a death borne in its very Being? And

  is there truly any sense at Auschwitz in distinguishing a proper death from an

  improper death?

  The fact is that, in Being and Time, death is assigned a particular function. Death is the site of a decisive experience that, under the name “Being-

  towards-death,” expresses perhaps the ultimate intention of Heidegger’s ethics.

  For in the “decision” that takes place here, everyday impropriety—made up

  of chatter, ambiguities, and diversions and in which man finds himself always

  already thrown—is transformed into propriety; and anonymous death, which

  always concerns others and is never truly present, becomes the most proper

  and insuperable possibility. Not that this possibility has a particular content,

  offering man something to be or to realize. On the contrary, death, considered

  as possibility, is absolutely empty; it has no particular prestige. It is the simple

  possibility of the impossibility of all comportment and all existence. Precisely for this reason, however, the decision that radically experiences this impossibility

  and this emptiness in Being-towards-death frees itself from all indecision, fully

  appropriating its own impropriety for the first time. The experience of the mea-

  sureless impossibility of existing is therefore the way in which man, liberating

  himself of his fallenness in the world of the “They” ( das Man), renders his own factical existence possible.

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  Auschwitz’s position in the Bremen lecture is therefore all the more signif-

  icant. From this perspective, the camp is the place in which it is impossible to

  experience death as the most proper and insuperable possibility, as the possibility

  of the impossible. It is the place, that is, in which there can be no appropriation

  of the improper and in which the factual dominion of the inauthentic knows

  neither reversal nor exception. This is why, in the camps (as in the epoch of the

  unconditional triumph of technology, according to the philosopher), the Being

  of death is inaccessible and men do not die, but are instead produced as corpses.

  Yet one may still wonder if Rilke’s model, which rigidly separates proper from

  improper death, did not produce a contradiction in the philosopher’s thinking.

  In Heidegger’s ethics, authenticity and propriety do not hover above inauthentic

  everydayness, as an ideal realm placed above reality; instead, they are “an emended

  apprehension of the improper” in which what is made free are simply the factual

  possibilities of existence. According to Hölderlin’s principle often invoked by

  Heidegger, “where there is danger, there grows the saving power,” precisely in the

  extreme situation of the camp appropriation and freedom ought to be possible.

  The reason for which Auschwitz is excluded from the experience of death

  must be a different one, a reason that calls into question the very possibility of

  authentic decision and thus threatens the very ground of Heidegger’s ethics. In

  the camp, every distinction between proper and improper, between possible and

  impossible, radically disappears. For here the principle according to which the

  sole content of the proper is the improper is exactly verified by its inversion,

  which has it that the sole content of the improper is the proper. And just as in

  Being-towards-death, the human being authentically appropriates the inauthen-

  tic, so in the camp, the prisoners exist everyday anonymously toward death. The

  appropriation of the improper is no longer possible because the improper has

  completely assumed the function of the proper; human beings live factually at

  every instant toward their death. This means that in Auschwitz it is no longer

  possible to distinguish between death and mere decease, between dying and

  “being liquidated.” “The free person,” Améry writes thinking of Heidegger, “can

  assume a certain spiritual posture toward death, because for him death is not

  totally absorbed into the torment of dying” (Améry 1980: 18). In the camp this

  is impossible. And this is so not because, as Améry seems to suggest, the thought

  of ways of dying (by phenol injection, gas, or beating) renders superfluous the

  thought of death as such. Rather, it is because where the thought of death has

  been materially realized, where death is “trivial, bureaucratic, and an everyday

  affair” (Levi 1989: 148), both death and dying, both dying and its ways, both

  death and the fabrication of corpses, become indistinguishable.

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  2.21. Grete Salus, an Auschwitz survivor whose words always sound true,

  once wrote that “man should never have to bear everything that he can bear,

  nor should he ever have to see how this suffering to the most extreme power no

  longer has anything human about it” (Langbein 1988: 96). It is worth reflecting

  on this singular formulation, which perfectly expresses the specific modal status

  of the camp, its particular reality, which, according to survivors’ testimony, ren-

  ders it absolutely true and at the same time unimaginable. If in Being- towards-

  death, it was a matter of creating the possible through the experience of the

  impossible (the experience of death), here the impossible (mass death) is pro-

  duced through the full expe
rience of the possible, through the exhaustion of

  its infinity. This is why the camp is the absolute verification of Nazi politics,

  which, in the words of Goebbels, was precisely the “art of making possible what

  seems impossible” ( Politik ist die Kunst, das unmöglich Scheinende möglich zu machen) . And this is why in the camp, the most proper gesture of Heidegger’s ethics—the appropriation of the improper, the making possible of existence—

  remains ineffectual; this is why “the essence of death is closed off to man.”

  Whoever was in the camp, whether he was drowned or survived, bore every-

  thing that he could bear—even what he would not have wanted to or should not

  have had to bear. This “suffering to the most extreme power,” this exhaustion of

  the possible, nevertheless has nothing “human” about it. Human power borders

  on the inhuman; the human also endures the non-human. Hence the survivor’s

  unease, the “unceasing discomfort . . . that . . . was nameless,” in which Levi dis-

  cerns the atavistic anguish of Gene sis, “the anguish inscribed in every one of the

  ‘tohu-bohu’ of a deserted and empty universe crushed under the spirit of God

  but from which the spirit of man is absent: not yet born or already extinguished”

  (Levi 1989: 85). This means that humans bear within themselves the mark of the

  inhuman, that their spirit contains at its very center the wound of non-spirit,

  non-human chaos atrociously consigned to its own being capable of everything.

  Both the survivor’s discomfort and testimony concern not merely what was

  done or suffered, but what could have been done or suffered. It is this capacity,

  this almost infinite potentiality to suffer that is inhuman—not the facts, actions,

  or omissions. And it is precisely this capacity that is denied to the SS. The executioners unanimously continue to repeat that they could not do other than as they

  did, that, in other words, they simply could not; they had to, and that is all. In German, to act without being capable of acting is called Befehlnotstand, having to obey an order. And they obeyed kadavergehorsam, like a corpse, as Eichmann said. Certainly, even the executioners had to bear what they should not have

  had (and, at times, wanted) to bear; but, according to Karl Valentin’s profound

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  witticism, in every case “they did not feel up to being capable of it.” This is why