they remained “humans”; they did not experience the inhuman. Perhaps never
was this radical incapacity to “be able” expressed with such blind clarity as in
Himmler’s speech of October 4, 1943:
Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses lie there, or when 500 corpses
lie there, or when 1,000 corpses lie there. To have gone through this and—apart
from a few exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent,
that has made us great. That is a page of glory in our history which has never
been written and which will never be written. . . . (Hilberg 1979: 648)
It is not by chance, then, that the SS showed themselves to be almost with-
out exception incapable of bearing witness. While the victims bore witness to
their having become inhuman, to having borne everything that they could bear,
the executioners, while torturing and killing, remained “honest men”; they did
not bear what they nevertheless could have borne. And if the extreme figure of
this extreme potentiality to suffer is the Muselmann, then one understands why the SS could not see the Muselmann, let alone bear witness to him. “They were so weak; they let themselves do anything. They were people with whom there
was no common ground, no possibility of communication—this is where the
contempt came from. I just couldn’t imagine how they could give in like that.
Recently I read a book on winter rabbits, who every five or six years throw
themselves into the sea to die; it made me think of Treblinka” (Sereny 1983: 313).
2.22. The idea that the corpse deserves particular respect, that there is some-
thing like a dignity of death, does not truly belong to the field of ethics. Its
roots lie instead in the most archaic stratum of law, which is at every point
indistinguishable from magic. The honor and care given to the deceased’s body
was originally intended to keep the soul of the dead person (or, rather, his image
or phantasm) from remaining a threatening presence in the world of the living
(the larva of the Latins and the eidōlon or phantasma of the Greeks). Funeral rites served precisely to transform this uncomfortable and uncertain being into
a friendly and potent ancestor with whom it would then be possible to establish
well-defined cultic relations.
The ancient world was, however, familiar with practices that aimed at ren-
dering impossible any reconciliation with the dead. Sometimes it was simply
a matter of neutralizing the hostile presence of the phantasm, as in the hor-
rid mascalismos ritual, in which the extremities of the corpse of a killed person (hands, nose, ears, etc.) were cut off and strung along a little cord, which was
then passed under the armpit so that the dead person could not take revenge for
814
HOMO SACER III
the offenses he suffered. The deprivation of burial (which is at the origin of the
tragic conflict between Antigone and Creon) was also a form of magic revenge
exerted on the corpse of the dead person, who was thus eternally condemned
to remain a larva, incapable of finding peace. This is why in archaic Greek and Roman law, the obligation to hold a funeral was so strict that in the absence of a
corpse, it was stipulated that a colossus— a kind of ritual double of the deceased (usually a wooden or wax effigy)—be burned in its place.
In firm opposition to these magical practices stand both the philosopher’s
statement that “the corpse is to be thrown away like dung” (Heraclitus, fr. 96)
and the evangelical precept that enjoins the dead to bury the dead (of which
there is an echo, in the Church, in the prohibition of certain Franciscan spiritual
currents regarding the officiation of funeral rites). It is even possible to say that
from the beginning, the link and alternating contrast of this double heredity—a
magico-juridical one and a philosophico-messianic one—determine the ambi-
guity of our culture’s relation to the question of the dignity of death.
Perhaps nowhere does this ambiguity emerge as forcefully as in the episode in
The Brothers Karamazov in which the corpse of Starets Zosima gives off an intolerable stench. For the monks who crowd around the cell of the holy Starets are soon
divided among themselves. Faced with the dead body’s obvious lack of dignity—
which, instead of emitting a saintly odor, begins to decompose indecently—the
majority calls into question the saintliness of Zosima’s life; only a few know that
the fate of the corpse does not authorize any consequences on the plane of ethics.
The smell of putrefaction that blows over the heads of the incredulous monks in
some way evokes the nauseating odor that the crematorial ovens—the “ways of
heaven”—dispersed over the camps. Here too, for many, this stench is the sign of
Auschwitz’s supreme offense against the dignity of mortals.
2.23. The ambiguity of our culture’s relation to death reaches its paroxysm after
Auschwitz. This is particularly evident in Adorno, who wanted to make Ausch-
witz into a kind of historical watershed, stating not only that “after Ausch witz
one cannot write poetry” but even that “all post-Auschwitz culture, including its
urgent critique, is garbage” (Adorno 1973: 367). On the one hand, Adorno seems
to share Arendt’s and Heidegger’s considerations (for which otherwise he has no
sympathy whatsoever) regarding the “fabrication of corpses”; thus he speaks of
a “mass, low cost production of death.” But on the other hand, he scornfully
denounces Rilke’s (and Heidegger’s) claims for a proper death. “ Rilke’s prayer for
‘one’s own death,’” we read in Minima Moralia, “is a piteous way to conceal the fact that nowadays people merely snuff out” (Adorno 1974: 233).
REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ
815
This oscillation betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of
Auschwitz with certainty. Auschwitz stands accused on two apparently contra-
dictory grounds: on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph
of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Nei-
ther of these charges—perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely
legal gesture—succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in
point. It is as if there were in Auschwitz something like a Gorgon’s head, which
one cannot—and does not want to—see at any cost, something so unprece-
dented that one tries to make it comprehensible by bringing it back to categories
that are both extreme and absolutely familiar: life and death, dignity and indig-
nity. Among these categories, the true cipher of Auschwitz—the Muselmann,
the “core of the camp,” he whom “no one wants to see,” and who is inscribed in
every testimony as a lacuna—wavers without finding a definite position. He is
truly the larva that our memory cannot succeed in burying, the unforgettable
with whom we must reckon. In one case, he appears as the non-living, as the
being whose life is not truly life; in the other, as he whose death cannot be called
death, but only the production of a corpse—as the inscription of life in a dead
area and, in death, of a living area. In both cases, what is called into question is
the very humanity of man, since man observes the fragmentation of his privi-
leged tie t
o what constitutes him as human, that is, the sacredness of death and
life. The Muselmann is the non-human who obstinately appears as human; he is
the human that cannot be told apart from the inhuman.
If this is true, then what does the survivor mean when he speaks of the Musel-
mann as the “complete witness,” the only one for whom testimony would have
a general meaning? How can the non-human testify to the human, and how can
the true witness be the one who by definition cannot bear witness? The Italian
title of Survival in Auschwitz, “If This Is a Man,” also has this meaning; the name
“man” applies first of all to a non-man, and the complete witness is he whose
humanity has been wholly destroyed. The human being, Levi’s title implies, is the one who can survive the human being. If we give the name “Levi’s paradox” to the
statement that “the Muselmann is the complete witness,” then understanding
Auschwitz—if such a thing is possible—will coincide with understanding the
sense and nonsense of this paradox.
2.24. Michel Foucault offers an explanation of the degradation of death in
our time, an explanation in political terms that ties it to the transformation of
power in the modern age. In its traditional form, which is that of territorial
sovereignty, power defines itself essentially as the right over life and death. Such
816
HOMO SACER III
a right, however, is by definition asymmetrical in the sense that it exerts itself
above all from the side of death; it concerns life only indirectly, as the abstention
of the right to kill. This is why Foucault characterizes sovereignty through the
formula to make die and to let live. When, starting with the seventeenth century
and the birth of the science of police, care for the life and health of subjects be-
gins to occupy an increasing place in the mechanisms and calculations of states,
sovereign power is progressively transformed into what Foucault calls “bio-
power.” The ancient right to kill and to let live gives way to an inverse model,
which defines modern biopolitics, and which can be expressed by the formula
to make live and to let die. “While in the right of sovereignty death was the point in which the sovereign’s absolute power shone most clearly, now death instead
becomes the moment in which the individual eludes all power, falling back on
himself and somehow bending back on what is most private in him” (Foucault
1997: 221). Hence the progressive disqualification of death, which strips it of
its character as a public rite in which not only individuals and families but the
whole people participates; hence the transformation of death into something to
be hidden, a kind of private shame.
The point at which the two models of power collide is the death of Franco.
Here the person who incarnated the ancient sovereign power of life and death
for the longest time in our century falls into the hands of the new medical,
biopolitical power, which succeeds so well in “making men live” as to make
them live even when they are dead. And yet for Foucault the two powers, which
in the body of the dictator seem to be momentarily indistinguishable, remain
essentially heterogeneous; their distinction gives rise to a series of conceptual
oppositions (individual body/population, discipline/mechanisms of regula-
tion, man-body/man species) that, at the dawn of the modern age, define the
passage from one system to the other. Naturally, Foucault is perfectly aware
that the two powers and their techniques can, in certain cases, be integrated
within each other; but they nevertheless remain conceptually distinct. Yet this
very heterogeneity becomes problematic when it is a matter of confronting the
analysis of the great totalitarian states of our time, in particular the Nazi state.
In Hitler’s Germany, an unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make
live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power
to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics.
From the Foucaultian perspective, this coincidence represents a genuine para-
dox, which, like all paradoxes, demands an explanation. How is it possible that
a power whose aim is essentially to make live instead exerts an unconditional
power of death?
REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ
817
The answer Foucault gives to this question in his 1976 College de France
course is that racism is precisely what allows biopower to mark caesuras in the
bio logical continuum of the human species, thus reintroducing a principle of
war into the system of “making live.” “In the biological continuum of the human
species, the opposition and hierarchy of races, the qualification of certain races as
good and others, by contrast, as inferior, are all ways to fragment the biological
domain whose care power had undertaken; they are ways to distinguish different
groups inside a population. In short, to stabilize a caesura of a biological type
inside a domain that defines itself precisely as biological” (Foucault 1997: 227).
Let us try to further develop Foucault’s analysis. The fundamental caesura
that divides the biopolitical domain is that between people and population,
which consists in bringing to light a population in the very bosom of a people,
that is, in transforming an essentially political body into an essentially biolog-
ical body, whose birth and death, health and illness, must then be regulated.
With the emergence of biopower, every people is doubled by a population;
every democratic people is, at the same time, a demographic people. In the Nazi Reich, the 1933 legislation on the “protection of the hereditary health of the
German people” marks this caesura perfectly. The caesura that immediately fol-
lows is the one by which, in the set of all citizens, citizens of “Aryan descent”
are distinguished from those of “non-Aryan descent.” A further caesura then
traverses the set of citizens of “non-Aryan descent,” separating Jews ( Volljuden)
from Mischlinge (people with only one Jewish grandparent, or with two Jewish
grandparents but who neither are of Jewish faith nor have Jewish spouses as of
September 15, 1935). Biopolitical caesuras are essentially mobile, and in each
case they isolate a further zone in the biological continuum, a zone which corre-
sponds to a process of increasing Entwürdigung and degradation. Thus the non-
Aryan passes into the Jew, the Jew into the deportee ( umgesiedelt, ausgesiedelt),
the deportee into the prisoner ( Häftling), until biopolitical caesuras reach their final limit in the camp. This limit is the Muselmann. At the point in which the Häftling becomes a Muselmann, the biopolitics of racism so to speak transcends race, penetrating into a threshold in which it is no longer possible to establish
caesuras. Here the wavering link between people and population is definitively
broken, and we witness the emergence of something like an absolute biopolit-
ical substance that cannot be assigned to a particular bearer or subject, or be
divided by another caesura.
It is then possible to understand the decisive function of the camps in the
system of Nazi biopolitics. They are not merely the place of death and extermina-
tion; they are also, a
nd above all, the site of the production of the Muselmann, the
818
HOMO SACER III
final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum. Beyond
the Muselmann lies only the gas chamber.
In 1937, during a secret meeting, Hitler formulates an extreme biopolitical
concept for the first time, one well worth considering. Referring to Central-
Western Europe, he claims to need a volkloser Raum, a space empty of people.
How is one to understand this singular expression? It is not simply a matter of
something like a desert, a geographical space empty of inhabitants (the region
to which he referred was densely populated by different peoples and national-
ities). Hitler’s “peopleless space” instead designates a fundamental biopolitical
intensity, an intensity that can persist in every space and through which peoples
pass into populations and populations pass into Muselmänner. Volkloser Raum,
in other words, names the driving force of the camp understood as a biopolitical
machine that, once established in a determinate geographical space, transforms
it into an absolute biopolitical space, both Lebensraum and Todesraum, in which human life transcends every assignable biopolitical identity. Death, at this point,
is a simple epiphenomenon.
3
Shame, or On the Subject
3.1. At the beginning of The Reawakening, Levi describes his encounter
with the first Russian advance guard that, at around noon on Jan-
uary 27, 1945, reached the camp of Auschwitz, which the Germans had aban-
doned. The arrival of the Russian soldiers, which marks the prisoners’ definitive
liberation from the nightmare, takes place not under the sign of joy but, curi-
ously enough, under that of shame:
They were four young soldiers on horseback, who advanced along the road that
marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten-guns. When they
reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and
throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered
huts and at us few still alive. . . . They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they
seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 127