The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  However the war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will

  be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world will not

  believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians,

  but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with

  you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will

  say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed. . . . We will be

  the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers. (Levi 1989: 11–12)

  4.10. With its every word, testimony refutes precisely this isolation of sur-

  vival from life. The witness attests to the fact that there can be testimony because

  there is an inseparable division and non-coincidence between the inhuman and

  the human, the living being and the speaking being, the Muselmann and the

  survivor. Precisely insofar as it inheres in language as such, precisely insofar as

  it bears witness to the taking place of a potentiality of speaking through an

  impotentiality alone, its authority depends not on a factual truth, a conformity

  between something said and a fact or between memory and what happened,

  but rather on the im memorial relation between the unsayable and the sayable,

  between the outside and the inside of language. The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely in the name of an incapacity to speak—that is, in his or her being a subject. Testimony thus guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its exteriority

  with respect to the archive—that is, the necessity by which, as the existence of

  language, it escapes both memory and forgetting. It is because there is testimony

  only where there is an impossibility of speaking, because there is a witness only

  where there has been desubjectification, that the Muselmann is the complete

  witness and that the survivor and the Muselmann cannot be split apart.

  It is necessary to reflect on the particular status of the subject from this per-

  spective. The fact that the subject of testimony—indeed, that all subjectivity, if

  to be a subject and to bear witness are in the final analysis one and the same—is

  a remnant is not to be understood in the sense that the subject, according to one of the meanings of the Greek term hypostasis, is a substratum, deposit, or sediment left behind as a kind of background or foundation by historical processes

  of subjectification and desubjectification, humanization and inhumanization.

  Such a conception would once again repeat the dialectic of grounding by which

  one thing—in our case, bare life—must be separated and effaced for human life

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  to be assigned to subjects as a property (in this sense, the Muselmann is the way in which Jewish life must be effaced for something like an Aryan life to be produced). Here the foundation is a function of a telos that is the grounding of the

  human being, the becoming human of the inhuman. It is this perspective that

  must be wholly called into question. We must cease to look toward processes of

  subjectification and desubjectification, of the living being’s becoming speaking

  and the speaking being’s becoming living and, more generally, toward historical

  processes as if they had an apocalyptic or profane telos in which the living being

  and the speaking being, the inhuman and the human—or any terms of a histor-

  ical process—are joined in an established, completed humanity and reconciled

  in a realized identity. This does not mean that, in lacking an end, they are con-

  demned to meaninglessness or the vanity of an infinite, disenchanted drifting.

  They have not an end, but a remnant. There is no foundation in or beneath them; rather, at their center lies an irreducible disjunction in which each term, stepping forth in the place of a remnant, can bear witness. What is truly historical

  is not what redeems time in the direction of the future or even the past; it is,

  rather, what fulfills time in the excess of a medium. The messianic Kingdom is

  neither the future (the millennium) nor the past (the golden age): it is, instead,

  a remaining time.

  4.11. In an interview in 1964 given on German television, Arendt was asked

  what remained, for her, of the pre-Hitlerian Europe that she had experienced.

  “What remains?” Arendt answered, “The mother tongue remains” ( Was bleibt?

  Die Muttersprache bleibt) . What is language as a remnant? How can a language survive the subjects and even the people that speak it? And what does it mean to

  speak in a remaining language?

  The case of a dead language is exemplary here. Every language can be con-

  sidered as a field traversed by two opposite tensions, one moving toward inno-

  vation and transformation and the other toward stability and preservation. In

  language, the first movement corresponds to a zone of anomia, the second to the grammatical norm. The intersection point between these two opposite currents

  is the speaking subject, as the auctor who always decides what can be said and

  what cannot be said, the sayable and the unsayable of a language. When the

  relation between norm and anomia, the sayable and the unsayable, is broken in the subject, language dies and a new linguistic identity emerges. A dead language

  is thus a language in which it is no longer possible to oppose norm and anomia,

  innovation and preservation. We thus say of a dead language that it is no longer

  spoken, that is, that in it it is impossible to assign the position of a subject. Here

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  the already-said forms a whole that is closed and lacking all exteriority, that

  can only be transmitted through a corpus or evoked through an archive. For

  Latin, this happened at the time of the definitive collapse of the tension between

  sermo urbanus and sermo rusticus, of which speakers are already conscious in the Republican age. As long as the opposition was perceived as an internal polar

  tension, Latin was a living language and the subject felt that he spoke a single

  language. Once the opposition breaks down, the normative part becomes a dead

  language (or the language Dante calls grammatica) and the anomic part gives birth to the Romance vernaculars.

  Now consider the case of Giovanni Pascoli, the Latin poet of the beginning

  of the twentieth century, that is, a time when Latin had already been a dead

  language for many centuries. In his case an individual succeeds in assuming the

  position of subject in a dead language, thus lending it again the possibility of

  opposing the sayable and the unsayable, innovation and preservation that it is

  by definition lacking. At first glance one could say that insofar as he establishes

  himself in it as a subject, such a poet genuinely resurrects a dead language. This is

  what happened in cases where people followed the example of an isolated auctor,

  as in the Piedmontese dialect of Forno, when, between 1910 and 1918, one last

  speaker passed his language on to a group of young people who began to speak

  it; or in the case of modern Hebrew, in which a whole community placed itself

  in the position of a subject with respect to a language that had become purely

  religious. But in this case the situation is more complex. To the degree to which a

  poet who writes in a dead language remains isolated and continues to speak and


  write in his mother tongue, it can be said that in some way he makes a language

  survive the subjects who spoke it, producing it as an undecidable medium—or

  testimony—that stands between a living language and a dead language. In a kind

  of philological nekuia, he thus offers his voice and blood to the shadow of a dead language, so that it may return—as such—to speech. Such is this curious auctor,

  who authorizes an absolute impossibility of speaking and summons it to speech.

  If we now return to testimony, we may say that to bear wit ness is to place

  oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it, to es-

  tablish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language as if

  it were living—in any case, outside both the archive and the corpus of what has

  already been said. It is not surprising that the witness’ gesture is also that of the

  poet, the auctor par excellence. Hölderlin’s statement that “what remains is what the poets found” ( Was bleibt, stiften die Dichter) is not to be understood in the trivial sense that poets’ works are things that last and remain throughout time.

  Rather, it means that the poetic word is the one that is always situated in the

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  position of a remnant and that can, therefore, bear witness. Poets—witnesses—

  found language as what remains, as what actually survives the possibility, or

  impossibility, of speaking.

  To what does such a language bear witness? To something—a fact or an

  event, a memory or a hope, a delight or an agony—that could be registered in

  the corpus of what has already been said? Or to enunciation, which, in the ar-

  chive, attests to the irreducibility of saying to the said? It bears witness to neither

  one nor the other. What cannot be stated, what cannot be archived is the lan-

  guage in which the author succeeds in bearing witness to his incapacity to speak.

  In this language, a language that survives the subjects who spoke it coincides

  with a speaker who remains beyond it. This is the language of the “dark shad-

  ows” that Levi heard growing in Celan’s poetry, like a “background noise”; this

  is Hurbinek’s non-language ( mass-klo, matisklo) that has no place in the libraries of what has been said or in the archive of statements. Just as in the starry sky

  that we see at night, the stars shine surrounded by a total darkness that, accord-

  ing to cosmologists, is nothing other than the testimony of a time in which the

  stars did not yet shine, so the speech of the witness bears witness to a time in

  which human beings did not yet speak; and so the testimony of human beings

  attests to a time in which they were not yet human. Or, to take up an analogous

  hypothesis, just as in the expanding universe, the farthest galaxies move away

  from us at a speed greater than that of their light, which cannot reach us, such

  that the darkness we see in the sky is nothing but the invisibility of the light of

  unknown stars, so the complete witness, according to Levi’s paradox, is the one

  we cannot see: the Muselmann.

  4.12. The remnant is a theologico-messianic concept. In the prophetic books

  of the Old Testament, what is saved is not the whole people of Israel but rather

  only a remnant, which is indicated in Isaiah as shear yisrael, the remnant of Israel, or in Amos as sherit Yosef, the remnant of Joseph. The paradox here is that the prophets address all of Israel, so that it may turn to the good, while at the same

  time announcing to the whole people that only a remnant of it will be saved

  (thus in Amos 5:15: “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in

  the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant

  of Joseph;” and in Isaiah 10: 22: “For although thy people be as the sand of the

  sea, yet a remnant of them shall be saved”).

  What are we to understand here by “remnant”? What is decisive is that, as

  theologians have observed, “remnant” does not seem simply to refer to a nu-

  merical portion of Israel. Rather, remnant designates the consistency assumed by

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  Israel when placed in relation with an eskhaton, with election or the messianic event. In its relation to salvation, the whole (the people) thus necessarily posits itself as remnant. This is particularly clear in Paul. In his Letter to the Romans,

  Paul makes use of a series of Biblical citations to conceive of the messianic event

  as a series of caesuras dividing the people of Israel and, at the same time, the

  Gentiles, constituting them each time as remnants: “Even so then at this present

  time also [literally ‘in the time of now,’ en to nun kairo, Paul’s technical expression for messianic time] there is a remnant according to the election of grace”

  (Romans 11: 5). The caesuras do not, however, merely divide the part from the

  whole (Romans 9: 6–8: “For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel. Neither,

  because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, in Isaac shall

  thy seed be called. That is, They which are the children of the flesh, these are not

  the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed”).

  The caesuras also divide the non-people from the people, as in Romans 9: 25–6:

  “As he saith also in Osee, I will call them my people, which were not my people;

  and her beloved, which was not my beloved. And it shall come to pass, that in

  the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they

  be called the children of the living God.” In the end, the remnant appears as a

  redemptive machine allowing for the salvation of the very whole whose division

  and loss it had signified (Romans 11: 26: “And so all Israel shall be saved”).

  In the concept of remnant, the aporia of testimony coincides with the aporia

  of messianism. Just as the remnant of Israel signifies neither the whole people nor

  a part of the people but, rather, the non-coincidence of the whole and the part,

  and just as messianic time is neither historical time nor eternity but, rather, the

  disjunction that divides them, so the remnants of Auschwitz—the witnesses—

  are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They

  are what remains between them.

  4.13. Insofar as it defines testimony solely through the Muselmann, Levi’s paradox contains the only possible refutation of every denial of the existence of

  the extermination camps.

  Let us, indeed, posit Auschwitz, that to which it is not possible to bear wit-

  ness; and let us also posit the Muselmann as the absolute impossibility of bearing witness. If the witness bears witness for the Muselmann, if he succeeds in bringing to speech an impossibility of speech—if the Muselmann is thus constituted

  as the whole witness—then the denial of Auschwitz is refuted in its very foun-

  dation. In the Muselmann, the impossibility of bearing witness is no longer a mere privation. Instead, it has become real; it exists as such. If the survivor bears

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  witness not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only on the basis of an impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz—that to which it is not possible to bear witness—is

  absolutely and irrefutably proven.

  This means that the phrases, “I bear witness for the Muse
lmann” and “the Muselmann is the whole witness” are not constative judgments, illocutive acts,

  or enunciations in Foucault’s sense. Rather, they articulate a possibility of speech

  solely through an impossibility and, in this way, mark the taking place of a lan-

  guage as the event of a subjectivity.

  4.14. In 1987, one year after Primo Levi’s death, Zdzislaw Ryn and Stanslaw

  Klodzinski published the first study dedicated to the Muselmann. The article,

  published in Auschwitz-Hefte bearing the significant title “At the Border Between Life and Death: A Study of the Phenomenon of the Muselmann in the Concentration Camp,” contains eighty-nine testimonies, almost all of former Auschwitz

  prisoners. They had been asked to respond to a questionnaire on the origin of the

  term, the Muselmänner’s physical and psychological traits, the circumstances that produced “Muselmannization,” the behavior of functionaries and other prisoners

  with respect to Muselmänner, and Muselmänner’s death and chances of survival.

  The testimonies collected in the article do not add anything essential to what

  we already knew, except for one particularly interesting point, which calls into

  question not simply Levi’s testimony, but even one of his fundamental presuppo-

  sitions. One section of the monograph (Ryn and Klodzinski 1987: 121–24) is en-

  titled Ich war ein Muselmann, “I was a Muselmann.” It contains ten testimonies of men who survived the condition of being Muselmänner and now seek to tell of it.

  In the expression “I was a Muselmann,” Levi’s paradox reaches its most extreme formulation. Not only is the Muselmann the complete witness; he now

  speaks and bears witness in the first person. By now it should be clear that this

  extreme formulation—“I, who speak, was a Muselmann, that is, the one who cannot in any sense speak”—not only does not contradict Levi’s paradox but, rather,

  fully verifies it. This is why we leave them—the Muselmänner— the last word.

  I can’t forget the days when I was a Muselmann. I was weak, exhausted, dead tired.

  I saw something to eat wherever I looked. I dreamt of bread and soup, but as soon as I woke up I was unbearably hungry. The food I’d been given the night before (my portion

  of bread, fifty grams of margarine, fifty grams of jam, and four potatoes cooked with their skins on) was a thing of the past. The head of the barrack and the other inmates who had positions threw out their potato-skins, sometimes even a whole potato. I used