The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  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

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  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).

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  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

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  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?

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  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

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  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