Giorgio Agamben and the End of Judaism III
The Camp
Hi All, this is where things get dark, and the next bits will not be much better. I advise discretion to those sensitive to distressing things. Parts I & II should be read prior to this:
While Agamben claims to maintain the particularity of all the various instances which he draws together as a paradigm, the actuality of the referents often disappears, or are revealed to have not been examined in enough detail to have been deployed as they have been in the first place. This leads us into the historical event which spurs his initial project. While much is troubling in his treatment of the Shoah, a list of factual inaccuracies does little to illuminate the problems. Thus, rather than providing that, I will instead investigate the Agamben’s construction of such: “the Camp” as paradigm.
But first, I wish to contextualize this concept’s deployment. I have pointed out that the internal diversity of Jewish thought is absent from his announcement of Judaism’s end, Jessica Whyte has identified further issues. While some of Whyte’s criticisms have been labelled “uncharitable,” particularly her connection between Zionism and Messianism, this itself does not do justice to the care and nuance with which Whyte frames this.1 Whyte’s point is an acute one: that the connection between catastrophe and redemption in the Jewish tradition is resonant and contested, and this history, particularly in the wake of the Shoah is not univocal. As a result of their history, these ideas have a form – and a politics – in the present. Thus, Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlin which she identifies with Agamben’s messianism: that “where danger is, grows the saving power also,” carries within it a second level of danger – the danger of saving power misidentified, and implications unexamined.2 The question is one of what saving power, be it “messianic,” “redemptive,” revolutionary or otherwise is; of who is saved, who is not, and of how one identifies such parties. This issue is generalizable to a far greater level than it may initially appear, particularly regarding his often highly selective and misleading quotations from Ancient and Medieval Jewish literature, including those routinely invoked by ethno-nationalist extremists.3
To this end, Whyte disputes Agamben’s analysis of the French Revolution, which is artificially delimited to the context of the development of European political thought, eliding that it was directly related to the Haitian revolution, the first successful slave revolt in modern history.4 Likewise, she criticises Remnants of Auschwitz for the use of the absolute abjection of the Muselmann – the internee brutalised into abject silence and passivity – as the exemplar revealed by Auschwitz, eliding the possibility of political action within the camp. As she writes, “this matters because, to the extent that he treats the camp as the paradigm of the modern, this exclusion tends to generate a particularly limited picture of the possibilities for politics in the present.” This can be fruitfully compared to Walter Benjamin’s criticism of historiography which is “meant to cover up the revolutionary moments in the occurrence of history.”5 While acknowledging the desperation and difficulty of such, Whyte recounts the testimony of Zelman Lewental regarding the Sonderkommando uprising of October 7, 1944, which included the arson of a crematorium. Agamben directly cites Lewental without mentioning either this or the plan for an aborted uprising in June the same year.6 Whyte continues:
It is presumably to avoid this form of judgment—and the language of dignity that pervades even Lewantal’s testimony—that Agamben avoids the question of resistance in the camps. And yet, as Levi writes in The Black Hole of Auschwitz, it is ‘of the utmost importance that the seed of European resistance against Fascism nonetheless took root within this inhuman situation’ […] In failing to treat this political activity inside the Lager, Agamben misses a crucial opportunity […] to move away from the metaphysical understanding of the human as a zoon politikon that marks the Western political tradition. The […] existence of the Muselmann teaches us too clearly that there is a realm of the human in which there is no possibility for politics. And yet, it also shows us that within this desperate situation, some were able [..] to act politically […] This means that rather than being an innate aspect of human life, politics is necessarily contingent.7
While Whyte focuses on the possibility of political action, I would suggest that this also points toward the heterogeneity of the camp which Agamben utilizes as the vehicle for the assertion of a transhistorical homogeneity. It is important to recognize the heterogeneity of testimony from both those who survived and those who did not. That it is the Sonderkommando Lewenthal who demonstrates both the contingency of politics – clearly meant in the subjective sense, though one could add also in the objective, for which life is a precondition – and the heterogeneity of the camp leads us to Agamben’s reading of Primo Levi, as it is these figures who represent the “gray zone” of Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, central to Agamben’s analysis of the camp.8 However, his account of the “gray zone” as that “in which the ‘long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner’ comes loose, where the oppressed becomes oppressor and the executioner in turn appears as victim” is markedly different from that of Levi, in which it is defined by very different terms: coercion and collaboration.9 The question is not one of “an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility” but rather and area of extreme implication, in which the dehumanisation of the victim extends to the moral degradation of the victim who is coerced into collaboration in their own debasement – something that is not mutual. The implication that the oppressor becomes the victim of the victim, rather than of himself and the broader structure in which he is implicated is absent from Levi.10 Instead, Levi’s analysis is, in itself, an acknowledgement of heterogeneity and of the maintenance of difference in the face of its complication – the horror is not undecidable, responsibility does not evaporate; it is, rather, too acute. As Levi writes:
I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. […] I know that in the Lager, and more generally on the human stage, everything happens, and that therefore the single example proves little. Having said all this quite clearly, and reaffirmed that confusing the two roles [i.e. victim and murderer] means wanting to becloud our need for justice at its foundation, a few more remarks should be made.
It remains true that in the Lager and outside, there exist grey, ambiguous persons, ready to compromise. The extreme pressure of the Lager tends to increase their ranks; they are the rightful owners of a quota of guilt […] and besides this they are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt. […] In reality, in the enormous majority of cases, their behaviour was rigidly preordained. In the space of a few weeks or months the deprivations to which they were subjected led them to a condition of pure survival, a daily struggle against hunger, cold, fatigue and blows in which the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero.11
This leads into Levi’s discussion of the Sonderkommandos, who are part of the horror by their implication alongside their SS masters, just as the horror of the crematoria is accentuated by their placement beside IG Farben plants, other heavy industry worked by slave labour, a major railway hub, and the town with the Polish name of Oświęcim, renamed and reshaped into an ideal Nazi settlement which was to be a model for the “Germanification” of Eastern Europe in the Nazi expansion into their newly-purged Lebensraum.12
Agamben explicates the camp as “an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility”13 primarily by, on one hand, the complete breakdown of distinction between fact, law and life,14 or on the other, the necessarily silent witness of the Muselmann who renders all previous ethics obsolete, such that even the testimony of other survivors can be brushed aside when they “do not add anything essential.”15 While Agamben claims that his method is characterized by a motion “from the particular to the particular,”16 the initial particular is constructed by way of the continual elision of its particularity, and the latter is so general as to not be able to defined by “the nature of the crimes committed in it,” to the point where it can be defined in a near-esoteric manner “as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live,” conspicuously including the first person common plural pronoun.17 Agamben claims that this analogical method aims “to make intelligible series of phenomena whose kinship had eluded or could elude the historian's gaze” but the level to which it renders the particulars of which it makes use illegible themselves is the axis of its own failure, which, in turn, calls into question the results which are explicated by this method.18 The universalism of the “we” used in these descriptions is uncanny, given the marked situational difference between an Italian citizen and refugees crossing the Mediterranean by boat, those in Calais, Jenin, Somalia, Syria, Gaza or on either side of the Myanmar-Bangladesh border – and those situations are likewise distinct from the industrialized death of the Nazi extermination complexes, which were likewise distinct from internment and work camps. The horror of a history – and a present – that contains all these things is not illuminated by their conflation into one undifferentiated horror, the experience of which is then claimable by all as identical to modern life as such. The horror consists as much in the marked difference between these situations, between the relative normalcy of life in Tel Aviv in such close proximity to West Bank villages terrorized by extremist settlers, between those in border towns in the American south and those fleeing horror only to be interned and abused by US border authorities. One would never say the situation of one population and another here were indistinguishable from one another.
Here we see a pattern which has been repeated by non-Jewish intellectuals for the past 60 years: the expiation of guilt and complicity through the appropriation of the standpoint of the survivor. The Shoah becomes myth, less a historical event than a cypher for morality, with those complicit on one side and victims on the other. By turning the testimony of the victim into a universal, moral-subjective position accessible to all, the danger of implication on the other side – of complicity – is alleviated, and the sin of history symbolically atoned for. However, in order to achieve this goal, the particularity of the victim – and the particularity of the victim’s testimony – must be removed. While for others like Blanchot this primarily occurs by confronting the limits of language and collapsing into the indeterminacy of the unspeakable, for Agamben this comes through the collapse of categorical distinction and the elevation of the idea of witness to a theological category laden with messianic implication.19 Thus, he makes the leap from the absolute abasement and degradation of the Muselmann, as both “witness” and “remnant,”20 to the messianic vision of Paul of Tarsus, who:
in his Letter to the Romans [..] 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.21
These remnants are, according to Agamben, impossible to conceive of as numerical.22 Thus, via a secular appropriation of Christian theology in response to Shoah, after dismissing all previous responses to this event as insufficient (often on the basis of their relation to law), not only can this event be generalized as a universal experience rather than that of a particular violence, but so too can the biblical sources from which the idea of the remnant emerges: the ethnic cleansing of the Northern Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians, and the destruction of Judah and razing of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Just as Jesus’ death atones for the sins of the Christian and liberates them from the bonds of the law, so too the silent, abstracted witness of the abased Jew points to human freedom, absolving the intellectual of the responsibility of wrestling with historical or contemporary complicity. The death of so many Jews is the emptying of the symbol of the Jew into an abstract “remnant” that can be anyone, and something that, essentially, represents nothing. This too is the assertion of an end of Judaism. Through this pseudo-Pauline conception of the remnant the survivor is universalised, the witness is universalised, the atrocity is universalised as the metric by which everything is to be measured, and, in so doing, the particularities of the event are eliminated in order to turn the genocide of one particular group by another into the revelatory presentation of an object-lesson, a cypher by which the present is to be interpreted: “the camp as nomos of the modern.” The Shoah is turned into the self-revelation of the Being of beings, itself a kind of secular political-messianic event, rather than the extermination of two thirds of Europe’s Jews.
next post:
Daniel McLoughlin, "Rethinking Agamben: Ontology and the Coming Politics," Law and Critique 25, no. 3 (2014/11/01 2014), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-014-9143-7, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-014-9143-7. 323.
Whyte, Catastrophe and redemption : the political thought of Giorgio Agamben., 76-95.
The most glaring mis-citations are drawn from secondary texts by Gershom Scholem, including citing a paraphrase of Moshe Cordovero as quotation, "The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin," in Potentialities : collected essays in philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)., 163-8. For prooftexts shared with the Religious right, these include the Baraitot of the birthpangs of the Messiah, cited in ibid. 167-8; These passages are alluded to in the context of redemptive violence by the father of far-right, religious Zionist ethno-nationalism, Meir Kahane, see Magid, Meir Kahane. 156. They are also alluded to in the terrorist apologetic by R. Yitzchak Ginsburgh, ברוך הגבר, a defence of the Cave of Patriarchs massacre in 1994. In an antinomian gesture comparable to the messianic annulment of the Torah described by Agamben, R. Ginsburgh is reported to have taught that it is permissible to disobey halachic authorities, justified by quotation of Psalm 119:126: עת לעשות לה' הפרו תורתך “it is time to act for ה', for they have made void your Torah;” meaning that “one’s worship of God may actually lead to the transgression of religious law […] actions that are contrary to the Halacha may be considered the sublime manifestation of religious faith.” Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount : Who Will Build the Third Temple?, 140.
Whyte, Catastrophe and redemption, 42.
Benjamin, Arcades., N9a,5, 474.
Remnants of Auschwitz, in Agamben, Omnibus., 767.
Whyte, Catastrophe and redemption, 92-4. Emphasis original.
Primo Levi, The drowned and the saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Michael Joseph, 1988)., 22-51. Remnants of Auschwitz, in Agamben, Omnibus., 775-8, 819-20, 850.
Remnants, in Agamben, Omnibus., 775.
Ibid.; Levi, The drowned and the saved., 29-32.
Ibid. 32-3.
Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law : Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)., 31-5.
Remnants, in Agamben, Omnibus., 775.
Homo Sacer, in ibid. 139-44.
Remnants, in ibid., 773-5; 871, which extends to dismissing part of Levi’s testimony, in ibid. 819-20. Note that the imputation that ethics has been “irremediably contaminated by law” itself imputes any Jewish response that relates to the law of Torah, and the language of “contamination” in this context is particularly unsettling.
Agamben, "What is a Paradigm?." 19.
Giorgio Agamben, "What is a Camp?," in Means without end: notes on politics, Theory out of bounds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 37. Emphasis mine. Cf. Whyte, Catastrophe and redemption, 12-4.
Agamben, "What is a Paradigm?." 31.
See Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law. 112-23.
Remnants, in Agamben, Omnibus. 859.
Ibid. 870.
Ibid. 869.