The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  in these most evil crimes without either knowing or willing them. The right of

  our deeper consciousness today would consist in recognizing that since he had

  neither intended nor known these crimes himself, they were not to be regarded

  as his own deeds. But the Greek, with his plasticity of consciousness, takes re-

  sponsibility for what he has done as an individual and does not cut his purely

  subjective self-consciousness apart from what is objectively the case. . . . But they

  do not claim to be innocent of these [acts] at all. On the contrary, what they did,

  and actually had to do, is their glory. No worse insult could be given to such a

  hero than to say that he had acted innocently. (Ibid.: 1214, 1215)

  Nothing is further from Auschwitz than this model. For the deportee sees

  such a widening of the abyss between subjective innocence and objective guilt,

  between what he did do and what he could feel responsible for, that he cannot

  assume responsibility for any of his actions. With an inversion that borders on

  parody, he feels innocent precisely for that which the tragic hero feels guilty, and

  guilty exactly where the tragic hero feels innocent. This is the sense of the specific

  Befehlnotstand, the “state of compulsion that follows an order” of which Levi speaks in discussing the Sonderkommando members, which makes any tragic

  conflict at Auschwitz impossible. The objective element, which for the Greek

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  hero was in every case the decisive question, here becomes what renders decision

  impossible. And since he cannot master his own actions, the victim seeks shelter,

  like Bettelheim, behind the prestigious mask of innocent guilt.

  The ease with which the executioners invoke the tragic model, not always

  in bad faith, provokes distrust in their capacity truly to give reasons for Ausch-

  witz. It has been observed many times that the Nazi functionaries’ recourse to

  Befehlnotstand was in itself impudent (among others, cf. Levi 1989: 59). And yet it is certain that at least from a certain point onward, they invoked it not so

  much to escape condemnation (the objection was already dismissed during the

  first Nuremberg trial, given that the German military code itself contained an

  article authorizing disobedience in extreme cases) as, rather, to make their sit-

  uation appear in terms of a tragic conflict, which was to their eyes clearly more

  acceptable. “My client feels guilty before God, not the law,” Eichmann’s lawyer

  repeated in Jerusalem.

  An exemplary case is that of Fritz Stangl, the commander of the Treblinka

  extermination camp, whose personality Gitta Sereny patiently sought to recon-

  struct through a series of interviews held in the Düsseldorf prison, published

  under the significant title Into that Darkness. Until the end, Stangl stubbornly

  maintained his innocence for the crimes attributed to him, without questioning

  them in the slightest as to their factual accuracy. But during the last interview

  on June 27, 1971, a few hours before he died from a heart attack, Sereny remarks

  that Stangl’s last resistances have crumbled and that something like a glimmer of

  ethical conscience appears “in that darkness”:

  “My conscience is clear about what I did, myself,” he said, in the same stiffly

  spoken words he had used countless times at his trial, and in the past weeks, when

  we had always come back to this subject, over and over again. But this time I said

  nothing. He paused and waited, but the room remain ed silent. “I have never in-

  tentionally hurt anyone, myself,” he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis,

  and waited again—for a long time. For the first time, in all these many days, I

  had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both

  hands as if he was holding on to it. “But I was there,” he said then, in a curiously

  dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an

  hour to pronounce. “So yes,” he said finally, very quietly, “in reality I share the

  guilt. . . . Because my guilt . . . my guilt . . . only now in these talks . . . now that

  I have talked about it for the first time. . . .” He stopped.

  He had pronounced the words “my guilt”: but more than the words, the

  finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face.

  After more than a minute he started again, a half-hearted attempt, in a dull

  voice. “My guilt,” he said, “is that I am still here. That is my guilt.” (Sereny 1983: 364)

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  It is remarkable to hear this allusive evocation of a tragic conflict of a new

  kind, one so inextricable and enigmatic as to be justly dissolved only by death,

  from a man who had directed the killing of thousands of human beings in gas

  chambers. It does not signify the emergence of an instance of truth, in which

  Stangl “became the man whom he should have been” (ibid.: 366), as Sereny,

  solely concerned with her dialectic of confession and guilt, seems to think. In-

  stead, it marks the definitive ruin of his capacity to bear witness, the despairing

  collapse of “that darkness” on itself. The Greek hero has left us forever; he can no

  longer bear witness for us in any way. After Auschwitz, it is not possible to use a

  tragic paradigm in ethics.

  3.7. The ethics of the twentieth century opens with Nietzsche’s overcoming

  of resentment. Against the impotence of the will with respect to the past, against

  the spirit of revenge for what has irrevocably taken place and can no longer be

  willed, Zarathustra teaches men to will backward, to desire that everything re-

  peat itself. The critique of Judeo-Christian morality is completed in our century

  in the name of a capacity fully to assume the past, liberating oneself once and

  for all of guilt and bad conscience. The eternal return is above all victory over

  resentment, the possibility of willing what has taken place, transforming every

  “it was” into a “thus I wanted it to be”— amor fati.

  Auschwitz also marks a decisive rupture in this respect. Let us imagine

  repeating the experiment that Nietzsche, under the heading “The Heaviest

  Weight,” proposes in The Gay Science. “One day or one night,” a demon glides

  beside a survivor and asks: “Do you want Auschwitz to return again and again,

  innumerable times, do you want every instant, every single detail of the camp

  to repeat itself for eternity, returning eternally in the same precise sequence in

  which they took place? Do you want this to happen again, again and again for

  eternity?” This simple reformulation of the experiment suffices to refute it be-

  yond all doubt, excluding the possibility of its even being proposed.

  Yet this failure of twentieth-century ethics does not depend on the fact that

  what happened at Auschwitz is too atrocious for anyone ever to wish for its

  repetition and to love it as destiny. In Nietzsche’s experiment, the horror of

  what happened appears at the start, indeed, so much so that the first effect of

  listening to it is, precisely, to “gnash one’s teeth and curse the demon who has

  spoken in such way.” Nor can one say that the failure of Zarathustra’s lesson

  implies the pure and simple restoration of the
morality of resentment—even if,

  for the victims, the temptation is great. Jean Améry was thus led to formulate a

  genuine anti-Nietzschean ethics of resentment that simply refuses to accept that

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  “what happened, happened” (Améry 1980: 72). “Resentments as the existential

  dominant of people like myself,” he writes,

  are the result of a long personal and historical development . . . . My resentments

  are there in order that the crime become a moral reality for the criminal, in

  order that he be swept into the truth of his atrocity. . . . In two decades of con-

  templating what happened to me, I believe to have recognized that a forgiving

  and forgetting induced by social pressure is immoral. . . . Natural consciousness

  of time actually is rooted in the physiological process of wound-healing and

  became part of the social conception of reality. But precisely for this reason it is

  not only extramoral, but also anti moral in character. Man has the right and the

  privilege to declare himself to be in disagreement with every natural occurrence,

  including the biological healing that time brings about. What happened, hap-

  pened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to mortals and intellect. . . .

  The moral person demands annulment of time—in the particular case under

  question, by nailing the criminal to his deed. Thereby, and through a moral

  turning-back of the clock, the latter can join his victim as a fellow human being.

  (Ibid.: 64, 70, 72)

  There is nothing of this in Primo Levi. Naturally he rejects the title of “the

  forgiver” which Améry attributes to him. “I am not inclined to forgive, I never

  forgave our enemies of that time” (Levi 1989: 137). And yet for him, the impossi-

  bility of wanting Auschwitz to return for eternity has another, different root, one

  which implies a new, unprecedented ontological consistency of what has taken

  place. One cannot want Auschwitz to return for eternity, since in truth it has never

  ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself. This ferocious, implacable experience appears to Levi in the form of a dream:

  It is a dream within other dreams, which varies in its details but not in its content.

  I am seated at the dinner table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in

  the countryside—in a surrounding that is, in other words, peaceful and relaxed,

  apparently without tension and suffering. And yet I feel anguish, an anguish that

  is subtle but deep, the definite sensation of some threat. And, in fact, as the dream

  continues, bit by bit or all of a sudden—each time it’s different—everything falls

  apart around me, the setting, the walls, the people. The anguish becomes more

  intense and pronounced. Everything is now in chaos. I’m alone at the center of

  a gray, cloudy emptiness, and at once I know what it means, I know that I’ve

  always known it: I am once again in the camp, and nothing outside the camp

  was true. The rest—family, flowering nature, home—was a brief respite, a trick

  of the senses. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over; and in the outer

  dream, which continues relentlessly, I hear the sound of a voice I know well: the

  sound of one word, not a command, but a brief, submissive word. It is the order

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  at dawn in Auschwitz, a foreign word, a word that is feared and expected: “Get

  up,” Wstawac. (Levi 1988: 245–55, translation emended)

  In the version recorded in the poem At an Uncertain Hour, the experience has the form not of a dream, but of a prophetic certainty:

  Sognavamo nelle notti feroci

  sogni densi e violenti

  sognati con anima e corpo:

  tornare, mangiare; raccontare.

  Finché suonava breve e sommesso

  il comando dell’alba:

  “Wstawac”;

  e si spezzava in petto il cuore.

  Ora abbiamo ritrovato la casa,

  il nostro ventre è sazio,

  abbiamo finito di raccontare.

  È tempo. Presto udremo ancora

  il comando straniero:

  “Wstawac.”

  In savage nights, we dreamt teeming, violent dreams with our body and soul: to

  go back, to eat—to tell. Until we heard the brief and submissive order of dawn:

  Wstawac. And our hearts were broken in our chests.

  Now we have found our homes again; our bellies are full; we have fin-

  ished telling our tales. It’s time. Soon we will once again hear the foreign order:

  Wstawac. (Levi 1988: 530)

  In this text, the ethical problem has radically changed shape. It is no longer

  a question of conquering the spirit of revenge in order to assume the past, will-

  ing its return for eternity; nor is it a matter of holding fast to the unacceptable

  through resentment. What lies before us now is a being beyond acceptance and

  refusal, beyond the eternal past and the eternal present—an event that returns

  eternally but that, precisely for this reason, is absolutely, eternally unassumable.

  Beyond good and evil lies not the innocence of becoming but, rather, a shame

  that is not only without guilt but even without time.

  3.8. Antelme clearly bears witness to the fact that shame is not a feeling of

  guilt or shame for having survived another but, rather, has a different, darker and

  more difficult cause. He relates that when the war was nearing its end, during

  the mad march to transfer prisoners from Buchenwald to Dachau, as the Allies

  were quickly approaching, the SS shot to death all those who would have slowed

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  down the march because of their physical condition. At times the decimation

  would take place by chance, in the absence of any visible criterion. One day it

  was a young Italian’s turn:

  The SS continues. “Du komme hier! ” Another Italian steps out of the column, a

  student from Bologna. I know him. His face has turned pink. I look at him closely.

  I still have that pink before my eyes. He stands there at the side of the road. He

  doesn’t know what to do with his hands. . . . He turned pink after the SS man said

  to him, “Du komme hier! ” He must have glanced about him before he flushed; but yes, it was he who had been picked, and when he doubted it no longer, he turned

  pink. The SS who was looking for a man, any man, to kill, had found him. And

  having found him, he looked no further. He didn’t ask himself: Why him, instead

  of someone else? And the Italian, having understood it was really him, accepted this

  chance selection. He didn’t wonder: Why me, instead of someone else? (Antelme

  1992: 231–32)

  It is hard to forget the flush of the student of Bologna, who died during the

  march alone at the last minute, on the side of the road with his murderer. And

  certainly the intimacy that one experiences before one’s own unknown murderer

  is the most extreme intimacy, an intimacy that can as such provoke shame. But

  whatever the cause of that flush, it is certain that he is not ashamed for having

  survived. Rather, it is as if he were ashamed for having to die, for having been

  haphazardly chosen—he and no one else—to be killed. In the camps, this is the

  only sense that the expression “to die in place of another” can have: everyone


  dies and lives in place of another, without reason or meaning; the camp is the

  place in which no one can truly die or survive in his own place. Auschwitz also

  means this much: that man, dying, cannot find any other sense in his death than

  this flush, this shame.

  In any case, the student is not ashamed for having survived. On the contrary,

  what survives him is shame. Here, too, Kafka was a good prophet. At the end of

  The Trial, at the moment in which Josef K. is about to die “like a dog,” and in which the knife of the executioner turns twice in his heart, something like shame

  arises in him; “it was as if his shame were to survive him.” What is Josef K.

  ashamed of ? Why does the student from Bologna blush? It is as if the flush on

  his cheeks momentarily betrayed a limit that was reached, as if something like a

  new ethical material were touched upon in the living being. Naturally it is not

  a matter of a fact to which he could bear witness otherwise, which he might also

  have expressed through words. But in any case that flush is like a mute apostro-

  phe flying through time to reach us, to bear witness to him.

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  3.9. In 1935, Levinas provided an exemplary analysis of shame. According

  to Levinas, shame does not derive, as the moral philosophers maintain, from

  the consciousness of an imperfection or a lack in our being from which we take

  distance. On the contrary, shame is grounded in our being’s incapacity to move

  away and break from itself. If we experience shame in nudity, it is because we

  cannot hide what we would like to remove from the field of vision; it is because

  the unrestrainable impulse to flee from oneself is confronted by an equally cer-

  tain impossibility of evasion. Just as we experience our revolting and yet un-

  suppressible presence to ourselves in bodily need and nausea, which Levinas

  classifies alongside shame in a single diagnosis, so in shame we are consigned to

  something from which we cannot in any way distance ourselves.

  What appears in shame is therefore precisely the fact of being chained to one-

  self, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide oneself from oneself,

  the intolerable presence of the self to itself. Nudity is shameful when it is the

  obviousness of our Being, of its final intimacy. And the nudity of our body is not