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1. Seeing the Impossibility of Seeing or the Visibility of the Undead: Giorgio Agamben's Gorgon.................. 1

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Seeing the Impossibility of Seeing or the Visibility of the Undead: Giorgio Agamben s Gorgon

Author: Buch, Robert

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Abstract: In his Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben situates the so-called Muselmann of the Nazi death

camps in two iconographic traditions, that of the Medusa and that of the Christian vera icon. The Muselmann is

blind to himself and invisible to others; yet, this figure of blindness and suffering undergoes a transfiguration. As

the "true image" of man, he affords us insight into the violence at the hidden center of Western (bio)politics. A

similar dialectics of blindness and revelation is at work in Homo Sacer. I argue that the structural blind spot of

Agamben's construal of bare life (of which the Muselmann is perhaps the most prominent instantiation) is

revealed in the unresolved tension between claims about the putative continuity of Western biopolitics, from

Antiquity to the present, and the crisis it it supposed to have entered in the twentieth century. [PUBLICATION

ABSTRACT]

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Full text: Headnote

ABSTRACT: In his Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben situates the so-called Muselmann of the Nazi

death camps in two iconographic traditions, that of the Medusa and that of the Christian vera icon. The

Muselmann is blind to himself and invisible to others; yet, this figure of blindness and suffering undergoes a

transfiguration. As the "true image" of man, he affords us insight into the violence at the hidden center of

Western (bio)politics. A similar dialectics of blindness and revelation is at work in Homo Sacer. I argue that the

structural blind spot of Agamben's construal of bare life (of which the Muselmann is perhaps the most prominent

instantiation) is revealed in the unresolved tension between claims about the putative continuity of Westernbiopolitics, from Antiquity to the present, and the crisis it it supposed to have entered in the twentieth century.

Keywords: Giorgio Agamben, blindness, Homo Sacer, Medusa, Muselmann, Remnants of Auschwitz, vera icon

At the center of Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive stands the figure of

the witness, more specifically: the paradox of witnessing. After a brief acknowledgment of the recent historical

scholarship on the Holocaust, the author contends that the camps' ethical and political implications, whose truth

always "transcends" the mere facts, still remains to be uncovered, irrespective of the extensive research efforts

of the past decades. This is why Agamben's "running commentary" of a few testimonies charts a "new ethical

territory."1 His investigation aims at chastizing those who "understand too much and too quickly" and at

countering the "cheap mystifications" advanced by others (13). But despite the rather disparaging comments on

the ostensible "sacralization" of Auschwitz and the worn topos of "unsayability" (157), what takes centerstage

with the philosopher's interest in the paradox of witnessing is something rather similar to what he condemns.

The "unsayable," it seems, is just displaced onto another level of analysis. According to a remark by Primo Levi,

who has coined the locution of the "paradox of witnessing," all testimonies (especially one's own) are always

incomplete. The survivor explains that only those who died-the drowned rather than the saved-could speak of

the real extent of the camp's horror. To bear witness is, as Agamben concludes, to bear witness to the

impossibility of bearing witness. What had been a realization of the limits of the witnesses' proper perspective in

Levi (and, above all, an expression of the survivor's feelings of shame and guilt for inevitably speaking also in

the names of those killed) is declared to be the fundamental structure of all testimony. In Levi's account, the

true, the "complete" witnesses would be those who had touched the bottom of the abyss, those who had looked

at the Gorgon. The subjects of this description are the so-called Muselmnner, those inmates of the

concentration camps who, because of starvation and physical exertion, had reached a state of extreme apathy.

02 June 2014 Page 1 of 12 ProQuest
http://search.proquest.com/docview/233506987?accountid=15618http://sfx.is.cuni.cz/sfxlcl3?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&genre=article&sid=ProQ:ProQ:sciencejournals&atitle=Seeing%20the%20Impossibility%20of%20Seeing%20or%20the%20Visibility%20of%20the%20Undead:%20Giorgio%20Agamben%27s%20Gorgon&title=The%20Germanic%20Review&issn=00168890&date=2007-04-01&volume=82&issue=2&spage=179&au=Buch,%20Robert&isbn=&jtitle=The%20Germanic%20Review&btitle=&rft_id=info:eric/&rft_id=info:doi/http://sfx.is.cuni.cz/sfxlcl3?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&genre=article&sid=ProQ:ProQ:sciencejournals&atitle=Seeing%20the%20Impossibility%20of%20Seeing%20or%20the%20Visibility%20of%20the%20Undead:%20Giorgio%20Agamben%27s%20Gorgon&title=The%20Germanic%20Review&issn=00168890&date=2007-04-01&volume=82&issue=2&spage=179&au=Buch,%20Robert&isbn=&jtitle=The%20Germanic%20Review&btitle=&rft_id=info:eric/&rft_id=info:doi/http://search.proquest.com/docview/233506987?accountid=15618


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Most of them were unable to survive this condition; indeed, these "Muslims" were often considered all but dead,

both by their fellow inmates and by the guards. It is this figure that gains an emblematic status in Agamben's

reflections on Auschwitz. The Muselmann becomes the paradigmatic case of the necessary incompleteness

and inadequacy of witnessing. (But what would a "complete" testimony possibly be?) It is this gap inscribed in

any act of bearing witness that any true testimony needs to reflect.

The Muselmann is a being that has been stripped of all humanity. Yet it is precisely in this lack, in this absoluteprivation and bareness, in the complete dehumanization that has taken place that a new ethical material

appears. The insights Agamben hopes to bring out lay hidden in this "material"; once properly understood,

these insights will necessitate a fundamental revision of our received ethical categories such as dignity,

responsibility, guilt, and judgment in light of the originary juridicopolitical structure of the death camps.2

According to Agamben, both etymological accounts and the approaches of various disciplines to the figure have

not led very far. Agamben therefore starts from somewhere else. The Muselmann is not only mute and

apathetic, but also remains largely invisible. The author will make him step forward from obscurity to then let

him disappear again, not without noting that there is a profound similarity between the Muselmann and his

beholders, who do not want to, or cannot, for this very reason, "see" him. In a series of steps-maneuvers that

are not always easy to follow-the philosopher demonstrates how visibility and invisibility pass into one another.

In what follows, I take a closer look at Agamben's portrait of this impossible figure on the threshold between life

and death. As we shall see, the portrait stands in a remarkable mythological and iconographic lineage, claiming

a proximity both to the "absolute," the blinding and lethal image of the Medusa and to the dazzling epiphany of

the "true image," to the indisputable evidence of the Christian vera icon. Agamben's vivid evocation of the

Muselmann's invisibility is part of his larger project, namely to disclose the arcana imperii of modern

(bio)politics. I also argue that the ambiguities and blind spots in our received views of politics, which Agamben

wants to bring to light, involve a certain degree of blindness on the interpreter's part, vis--vis the logic of the

political he puts forth. This is a blindness that is less the result of inescapable aporias, paradoxes, and

indeterminacies, but rather the consequence of an unresolved tension in Agamben's own construal of bare life.

THE GORGONIZATION OF THE MUSELMANN

The utterances of two survivors frame the brief section I wish to discuss (50-54). It begins with a quote from the

journal of Aldo Carpi, a painter and professor of art, who was interned for a year, from 1944 to 1945, in the

concentration camp Gusen. "Nobody," wrote Carpi, "wants to see the Muselmann" (50). Levi, Agamben's

primary informant throughout the book, writes of the Muselmnner that they had looked at the Gorgon, referring

not only to their inexpressive and dead gaze but also to the extreme discomfort their sight caused those who

saw them. The intolerability of this vision is confirmed by a moment in the first documentary film on Bergen-

Belsen. As some ghostly figures enter the frame of the picture, the camera-which had lingered on the piles of

dead bodies at some length-abruptly turns away, as though it was quite literally impossible to bear the sight ofthe Muselmann. Not eschewing a certain pathos, Agamben wrote "we will not understand what Auschwitz is if

we do not first understand who or what the Muselmann is-if we do not learn to gaze with him upon the Gorgon"

(52). In this way, three problematic forms of invisibility are made to converge: the unwillingness of the camp

inmates to look at the Muselmann, the dead gaze of the Muselmnner themselves, and the failure of posterity to

recognize the true meaning of this figure.

Levi's mention of the Gorgon gives rise to a scholarly excursus, inscribing the intolerable sight into a

mythological and iconographic horizon that results in the conjunction of the impossibility to look at the Gorgon

with its opposite: the compulsive urge to look at her. (Agamben's source is a study by the French classicist

Franoise Frontisi-Ducroux.) As is well known, the Medusa's face in Greek mythology is what cannot be looked

at; whoever looks at her is turned to stone. At the same time, representations of the Medusa were an extremely

popular subject of the visual arts; her portrait was ubiquitous. The most salient feature of these visual

representations is that her image is always facing the beholder. The portrait's "frontality," as Frontisi-Ducroux



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puts it, breaks with the iconographic tradition that represented heads and faces always in profile. The Medusa's

head imposes itself on the beholder; it seems to have turned to him, as if to confront him directly and to thereby

"address" him; a representational peculiarity that Frontisi-Ducroux compares to the rhetorical trope of

apostrophe, a mode of interpellation. In Agamben's paraphrase of these observations the Medusa's "anti-face"

becomes something like an "absolute image" (53), that which one cannot possibly not see. The compulsion to

see and the proscription on seeing thus coincide in this figure. This amalgamation makes possible areformulation of what it means to gaze at the Gorgon; that is, what it means to invoke the Gorgon in connection

with the camps. (Again, according to Agamben, this is the first step toward understanding the meaning of the

Muselmann and consequently of the camps themselves.)

If to see the Gorgon means to see the impossibility of seeing, then the Gorgon does not name something that

exists or that happens in the camp, something that the Muselmann, but not the survivor, would have seen.

Rather, the Gorgon designates the impossibility of seeing that belongs to the camp inhabitant, the one who has

"touched bottom" in the camp and has become a non-human. The Muselmann has neither seen nor known

anything, if not the impossibility of knowing and seeing. [. . .] That at the "bottom" of the human being there is

nothing other than an impossibility of seeing-this is the Gorgon, whose vision transforms the human being into a

non-human. (54)

The experience of the Muselmann is not an experience of something. What he saw is not anything to which

outsiders would not have access. The experience that he embodies is, yet again, that of a privation: the inability

or impossibility to see. It is precisely this impossibility he is supposed to have seen, as Agamben suggests. But

in what sense is the impossibility of seeing, or, rather, seeing the impossibility of seeing, the defining feature of

being human and of the nonhuman? Is the nonhuman the person who has stopped seeing, or rather the one

who realizes that he has ceased to see and thus the one who becomes aware of his own blindness? Does this

realization mark the passage from human to nonhuman, or is it the other way around; that is to say, is it

precisely in this transition in which the human persists, in the beyond of the human?

The connection of ideas in this passage is difficult because the Muselmann himself becomes the subject of

seeing (of the seeing that sees the impossibility of seeing). He seems to be the subject of a blindness privy to

insights that remain otherwise inaccessible. In this sense, he would not be that different from the blind seers of

antiquity and their special lucidity, but the insight of his is, in turn, just blindness.

It remains unclear whether the puzzling effect of these remarks is intentional or whether it is a consequence of

the rhetorical momentum of the passage. It also has to do with the alternation and combination of literal and

figurative modes of speaking that are characteristic of Agamben's writing. Carpi's remark that the camp inmates

avoided the sight of the Muselmnner (the camera movement confirms this quasi-instinctual reflex) is correlated

to the scientific and philosophical helplessness in the face of this figure. Levi's use of the term Gorgon-a term

that he uses only in passing-is neither particularly mysterious nor ambiguous. It is a rather conventionalmetaphor that tries to capture the "faceless presence," as Levi puts it elsewhere (qtd. in Agamben 44), of the

Muselmnner. There is no hint that would suggest that "the 'core' of the camp" lies hidden here as Agamben

claims (51). The recourse to Frontisi-Ducroux's description of the two defining features of classical

representations of the Medusa (verbal and visual) allows Agamben to give his finding a paradoxical twist:

looking at the Medusa means looking at what it is impossible to see and yet has to be seen. Although Levi's use

of the term is metaphorical it seems of a much lesser reach than Agamben suggests; whereas Frontisi-

Ducroux's investigation, for its part, was concerned, quite literally, with ancient representations of the Gorgon.

The distinctions between its literary and its pictorial representations, which Frontisi-Ducroux is careful to keep

apart, are made to coincide in a paradoxical unity, as Agamben is precisely interested in the dynamics of, and in

the incessant alternation between, visibility and invisibility.

The impossibility of seeing that the figure is supposed to instantiate is not primarily that of the Muselmann. It

serves, above all, to critically expose the tendency of avoiding the Muselmann, of ignoring the silent injunction



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to see and to realize the nature of the experiment conducted at Auschwitz. His ostensible inability to see is our

inability to see him.

It is not difficult to "see" that Agamben's recourse to blindness taps into a rich cultural reservoir of images and

myths. In Western cultural history, blindness typically figures as an ambivalent affliction, as both a stigma and a

distinction. The twist it receives in Agamben's treatment is that the privileged access to truth so frequently

attributed to the blind is turned back on itself to culminate in an insight that seems to consist in the veryblindness that was supposed to be overcome. By contrast, what appears absent from Agamben's invocation of

blindness is its radical inversion, the miraculous healing of the blind, typical of the Early Christian imagery of

blindness, and itself an image of the unlikely revival of the dead. As Moshe Barash comments in his study on

blindness, both as a motif in art history and as a philosophical trope, "[T]he Healing of the Blind is not only an

image of salvation from the darkness to light; it is also specifically the message that conversion to Christianity,

the religion of salvation, assures redemption, bliss, and eternal life" (55). At the same time, Agamben's usage of

the blind figure does not really depart from some of the other possibilities afforded by the image. As in parts of

the tradition that is recapitulated in Barash's study, the Muselmann's blindness in Remnants of Auschwitz

serves above all as a metaphor of the ignorance of those looking at the figure: blindness as the blindness of

those who think themselves seeing.

The blindness at work in these passages relates back to antiquity, to the Medusa, but the image of the

Muselmann is also assimilated to another one of the Western tradition's "absolute images." Preceding the

section on the connection between Muselmann and Gorgon, Agamben described "the space of the camp [. . .]

as a series of concentric circles that, like waves, incessantly wash up against a central non-place, where the

Muselmann lives" (51-52). It is in this connection that he compares the topology of the camp to that of Dante's

Inferno and indeed the Paradiso. This "faceless center" has been "painted in our image" (qtd. in Remnants 52).

The unwillingness to acknowledge this likeness testifies to a secret resemblance; our unacknowledged fear to

recognize ourselves in the emaciated features of the figure. In contradistinction to the metaphorical and literal

invisibility, laid out in the following paragraphs, the Muselmann appears as an image, in Dante's words, "pinta

della nostra effige." Indeed it is, as Agamben puts it, "the true likeness of man" (52) that emerges at the point of

utter debasement and privation, at the opaque and impenetrable center of the camp. In the spirit of paradoxical

interlacing and indetermination, which seem to constitute the characteristic movement of Agamben's thought,

one could say that invisibility itself has taken on the form of an image both. Figuratively, as an allegory (of our

incapacity to acknowledge and see the true meaning of the Muselmann), and nonfiguratively, as a sort of icon.

In spite of Agamben's insistance on the unknownness of the Muselmann, in spite of our willful ignorance of him,

we are quite capable of picturing this haunting figure. He, in fact, conjures up a long-standing iconographic

tradition. As unreal and ghostly as the figure may be, the Muselmann becomes the epitome of suffering, giving

rise to all sorts of associations: first and foremost to that of the suffering Christ, but also to similar figures inother religions who seek salvation through radical privation and ascesis. In an altogether different area, and

closer to the present, one might feel reminded of Alberto Giacometti's sculptures or some of the characters in

the theater of Samuel Beckett. In addition to these associations with various instances of art-historical, literary,

and religious imagery, one cannot fail to "see" the ubiquitous images of refugees in the modern news media (or,

for example, the Bosnian Muslim inmates of the Serbian concentration camps).

Agamben's "gorgonization" of the Muselmann results in a paradox: standing in the twilight, ceaselessly

alternating between visibility and invisibility, the spectral figure of the Muselmann seems to have undergone a

true transformation. It is precisely in his nonhumanity, unanimously agreed on by all witnesses, that the human

appears; it is in the unimaginable state of reduction, in the atrophied "ethical material," where we see him. The

sacral seems to return in the somatic; the Muselmann appears surrounded by a sort of halo; "the true likeness

of man" conjures up the figure of redemption. The horrifying sight of the Medusa is superimposed with, or gives

way to the cloth, bearing, in a quasi-indexical manner, the imprint of Christ's face: the "vera icon," the true



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image, itself a visual artifact that hovers on the elusive threshold between visibility and invisibility.3 The

passages in question effect an astonishing metamorphosis of different traditions. The Muselmann's radical

passivity, his powerlessness or impotentiality, to borrow a concept that is important to Agamben, recalls the

gloria passionis of the Christian tradition.4 In this example of extreme suffering a reversal seems to be

imminent; it seems to contain a special kind of knowledge, perhaps a revelation.

SOVEREIGN POWER'S "ORIGINARY" ACTIVITYAs evident as these connotations seem to be, they are in fact strangely at odds with Agamben's Homo Sacer

series, for he repeatedly insists that "bare life," which is nowhere as manifest as in the Muselmann, is never

sacred life, at least not in the usual sense of the term sacred. "Bare life" is not subject to any divine laws; killing

the homo sacer is not an act of sacrifice. His death does not entail any kind of symbolic transformation, and his

killing is not the site of a transfiguration. (These ideas also explain Agamben's indignation over the use of the

term holocaust in connection with the Nazi death camps.5)Agamben is indeed at great pains to undo any

connection to theories of religious sacrifice. In many respects, the homo sacer is the opposite of religious

immolation. He is markedly different, for instance, from the Girardian figure of the scapegoat whose primary

purpose is to divert the internal violence with which any community has to deal. The death of homo sacer is not

a means of increasing social cohesion, nor does the figure stand in any relation to any kind of transcendence.

His death, or rather the possibility of killing him with impunity, does not serve any symbolic function, but it

reveals a structural moment of the political, indeed the originary, activity of sovereign power: the inscription of

life into the political order, "the entry of zo [i.e., life as such] into the sphere of the polis" (Homo Sacer 4).

As is well known, it is exactly this sphere that Homo Sacer, the first book in the series by the same name,

explores. It is a zone in which conventional distinctions collapse, opposites come to coincide, and differences

seem to pass into each other ceaselessly. As in Remnants of Auschwitz, the figure at its center, homo sacer or

bare life, is difficult to bring into view. At first glance, the difficulty in appreciating the insight Agamben seeks to

convey seems to consist in the paradoxical topology in which "bare life" is caught up. The logic of the exception

and the inclusive exclusion, placing homo sacer both inside and outside the political order, makes him indeed

hard to "see." Agamben's language of contradictory coincidences-of which blindness and seeing are just one

example (much less prominent in Homo Sacer but present nonetheless)-tends to obscure the figure as much as

it brings it to light. As I said in the beginning, the difficulty in making out homo sacer has to do with a certain

ambiguity in Agamben's own revision of our conception of the political. This difficulty is not only an effect of the

paradox of the exception and the "zone of indistinction," in which a host of antithetical concepts come to

converge, but also constitutes something like the proper blind spot of his far-reaching reinterpretation of the

foundations of modern politics. It has to do with the alleged nexus between modern biopolitics and bare life,

invariably described as a relation of "implication" and "opposition" ("the inclusive exclusion," in which what is

included and what is excluded become indistinguishable), and, more specifically, with the ambiguouscharacterization of sovereign power's principal activity, namely "the production of bare life," as "originary,"

simultaneously arch and telos. As a consequence, it is difficult to decide whether "the biopolitical turn of

modernity" (153), which Agamben seeks to expose, is part and parcel of the "fundamental structure of Western

metaphysics" (8) or whether the operation targeting bare life has in effect gone awry and entered a lasting crisis

in the present. As suggestive and compelling as Agamben's investigations have proved to many of his readers,

the resistance with which his insights have been met has less to do with a reluctance to confront "how much

blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all 'good things'" (as Nietzsche once put it [62]), but much more with

certain tensions at the core of his own project.6

Homo Sacer presents bare life in seemingly countless metamorphoses, starting with the enigmatic archaic

Roman legal figure, which provides the book with its title, and ending with the Muselmann, the protagonist of the

series' penultimate volume, Homo Sacer III.7 Other figures include the so-called devotus of Roman history,

"who consecrates his own life to the gods of the underworld in order to save the city from grave danger" (96);



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the wargus, or wolf-man; and the Friedlos of ancient Germanic law. Modern incarnations comprise the stateless

persons and the refugee, "life not worthy of living" of Nazi eugenics ("lebensunwertes Leben"); and the

Versuchspersonen, the involuntary subjects of modern-day experimental medicine. What do these avatars of

bare or sacred life, as it is also called, have in common? They may be killed and yet not sacrificed, to use what

is perhaps the book's most prominent formula. They have been excluded both from the human and from the

divine jurisdiction. Their violent death falls neither in the domain of religion nor in that of the law. Yet, theyremain bound to the political order from which they have been expelled in that this order is considered to be

founded on the difference between political life (bios) and life as such (zo). It is an exclusion that,

paradoxically, connects what it separates. Sovereign power is the agency that effects and preserves this

separation. Its mark consists precisely in determining what is bare life and what therefore must be excluded

from the polis. In a further twist, the sovereign exercises his power not by destroying bare life but by abandoning

it, stripping it of the rights to which the members of the political order are titled. This is why it would be a

misunderstanding to regard bare life as something that precedes the political order or to think of it as some kind

of substratum. Bare life is not identical with natural life, even though the introductory pages of Homo Sacer

seem to suggest as much at times.8 It is the outcome of a peculiar operation, in which sovereign power retracts

itself. The "effect of a privation" bare life is what comes into view once the protective shield of the

juridicopolitical order has been lifted.9

Now sovereign power and bare life are both said to be subject to, and bound up with one another in, the logic of

exception. Cast out of the political order, bare life nonetheless maintains itself in a relation to that order.

Sovereign power occupies a similarly "exceptional" space, both inside and outside, "the threshold on which

violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence" (32), both active and passive in that it applies

itself precisely by not applying, exerting its force by annulling itself. But the ostensible analogy with respect to

the logic (and paradox) of exception gives way to what seems to be a much closer affinity. As noted earlier, the

establishment of political order is incumbent on sovereign power's placing bare life hors la loi, by withdrawing

from it. But whereas sovereign power captures bare life in the exception, it is no less captivated itself by what it

abandons. Banning bare life, sovereign power removes and transfixes it. But the ban also seems to work the

other way around, leaving sovereign power under the spell of the life that may be killed but not sacrificed. Note

that the old Germanic term ban, which Agamben opposes to our received ideas about the contractual

beginnings of the social order, not only "designates both exclusion from the community and the command and

insignia of the sovereign" (28) but also a form of attachment that cannot be undone, as though bound by a

charm, as in the German gebannt sein, which means to be under a spell. Bare life and sovereign power are not

merely both subject to the logic of exception, independently from one another, but are in fact "the two poles of

sovereign exception" (110). At times, we seem to be dealing with a kind of structural analogy that has its roots

in the logic of exception. 10 At times, the two seem to be conjoined in a more intimate bond, suggesting somekind of complicity and even "symbiosis." On other occasions, "the secret tie uniting power and bare life" (6) is

said to achieve a degree of approximation in which life and politics become virtually indistinguishable.

In spite of such temporary convergence of bare life and sovereign power, typically the former is designated as

the "element" or "referent" of the latter whose "originary activity" consists in the production of bare life. (At one

point it is even identified, if only in passing, as the "Urphnomen of politics" [109]). Although "originary activity"

suggests both a past foundation and a possibility that somehow persists in any political order, it also suggests

that the decision over bare life has to be constantly renewed. Indeed, "the foundation is not an event achieved

once and for all but is continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision" (109). Why

this is the case remains somewhat of a puzzle, not just in and of itself, but also in view of Agamben's

subsequent discussion of modern biopolitics. 11 The term originary refers to the ground and principle, but also

designates its telos and task, indeed the very vocation of biopolitics, setting the fateful course of Western

political history. Why is the politicization of life that marks the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century,



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noted with so much more alarm if "the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign

power" (6) in any case. That is, as Agamben claims in concluding his book, if "Western politics is a biopolitics

from the very beginning" (181)? Apparently, the inscription of life into the political order has increased

dramatically in modernity and so has the necessity to sort out the life that does not qualify. That is why in the

present, as the author claims, virtually anyone can become a homo sacer. The "originary activity" has gone from

the exception that decides over the norm to becoming that norm itself. As with a number of other concepts(notably, law and violence, life and politics, nomos and physis, constituting power and sovereign power),

Agamben performs a peculiar inversion of antithetical terms. Taking his cues from Carl Schmitt, he inverts the

common understanding of "state of exception" and its opposite, the "normal situation." Rather than amounting to

an irregular occurence, a possibility out of the ordinary, the exception does not merely suspend the rule

temporarily; instead, "through the state of exception, the sovereign 'creates and guarantees the situation' that

the law needs for its own validity" (17). The validity or force of the law ultimately hinges on its capacity to revoke

the order it establishes and safeguards. Because that possibility is the exception, the exception is effectively

what founds the order, deciding on the normal situation (Schmitt 19-21).

Homo Sacer does not elaborate on why the exception, which by this model has always been the more decisive

term of the categorial pair, becomes so pervasive in modernity. A possible explanation can be extrapolated,

however, from the author's discussion of the rise (and decline) of the nation-state and its new modes of

"inscribing" bare life into the political order, of organizing and regulating the passage from bare life to political

life, from subject to citizen. In Agamben's view, sovereign power's continual preoccupation with bare life is

reconfirmed in the link between birth and nation on which he takes the nation-state to be founded. Qua birth, the

subject immediately becomes citizen. This transformation of subjects into citizens is stipulated in the declaration

of rights, "All men are created equal": that is to say, all men enjoy the same rights. But, as Hannah Arendt

(Agamben's major source of inspiration in this connection) noted, it is only as citizens that we are entitled to the

rights that the declaration of rights proclaims to be universal (369-84). After all, having been born is effectively a

trait shared by all human beings. Yet, the state does not enforce its laws on behalf of life as such, even though

that is what the various declarations of rights seem to declare, but on behalf of its citizens. Although prominently

invoked, bare life is in fact that which is always made to disappear yet always returns. This seems to bring

about the compulsive urge to repeat and reassert the foundational gesture of the political. "One of the essential

characteristics of modern biopolitics (which will continue to increase in our century) is its constant need to

redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside" (131).13 Bare

life is the vanishing ground of citizenship whose rights and privileges are in constant need of being defended

against the onslaught of those seeking to have a share in them.

In a sense, the "fiction [. . .] that birth immediately becomes nation" (128; emphasis in original) seems the best

illustration so far of Agamben's thesis regarding the "inscription" of life into the political order. In their majority,all previous instances-homo sacer himself; vitae necisque potestas, the Roman pater's right to kill his son; the

"devotee"; the werewolf; and so forth-seemed to constitute legal oddities indeed. (The exception to this series is

the British law of habeas corpus that Agamben regards as the first harbinger of the biopolitical turn of

modernity.)14 By comparison, the way in which the nation-state is concerned with the life of its citizens

constitutes both the most literal and the most topical exemplification of the continuous intertwining of zo and

bios that is supposed to take place wherever political communities are established. But what brings about the

enduring crisis that is supposed to mark our present, the unprecedented proliferation of bare life that resists this

kind of inscription? Again, on the one hand, it appears as though bare life and sovereign power come together

in a kind of symbiosis by which where there is sovereign power, there must be bare life (which is to say, a life

that can be singled out for elimination). On the other hand, the book seems to suggest that the "production of

bare life" has reached a critical point with the foundation of the modern nation-state and with the declarations of

the rights it purported to afford its citizens. (It is when he speaks of this crisis, which is still with us, that



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Agamben conjures up a politics that would no longer be based on the continual inscription of bare life in the

political order, suggesting that there is some way by which the irreducible link between politics and life can be

undone.)

Agamben identifies two phenomena that are symptomatic of the "biopolitical fracture" (179) that characterizes

the modern age, and in particular the twentieth century: refugees and so-called stateless persons, people

stripped of their citizenship. So that we may understand the significance of these phenomena, he reminds usthat the relation between birth and citizenship was determined by two important criteria: ius soli and ius

sanguinis. As noted earlier, the mere fact of birth, shared by all, is, in reality, not enough to become a citizen.

One has to be born from parents who are of a certain nationality and within the boundaries of a certain territory.

In the wake of World War I, these two criteria are threatened by two interrelated developments: "the immense

increase of refugees and stateless persons" as well as "the contemporaneous institution by many European

states of juridical measures allowing for the mass denaturalization and denationalization of large portions of

their own populations" (132). In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, one of Agamben's interlocutors

throughout Homo Sacer and, as noted previously, an important source for the passages in question, has

provided us with a fairly detailed discussion of "the absolute nakedness of being human and nothing but

human," the dilemma resulting from the retreat of the state and its "force of law" in the aftermath of World War I

(377). Arendt's reflections apropos of the so-called indsirables anticipate Agamben's central insight, namely,

that the law can be fatefully effective precisely by suspending itself, by denying those who most need it its

protection.

The massive appearance of refugees and stateless persons-whether as a consequence of the redrawing of

state boundaries in the wake of World War I or of various states' denationalization and denaturalization

campaigns that resulted in the establishment of the first concentration camps-disturbs the "birth-nation link"

(128), while at the same time revealing its unacknowledged premise, for the inclusion effected by the

"inscription" into the political order could not proceed unless some other element was excluded. On the one

hand, the two phenomena seem to mark the beginning of a crisis in the operations of biopolitics; on the other

hand, they simply seem to instantiate what the inclusive exclusion had always been about, from the beginning.

Agamben's chapter "Biopolitics and the Rights of Man" remains the only place in which he comes close to

delineating a possible etiology of a crisis that is asserted many times but rarely specified in the book, except to

reiterate that the exception has become and continues to be the rule in our day, echoing one of Benjamin's

famous theses on the concept of history. The author's interest in the "hidden matrix and nomos of the political

space" (166), in the "apriori of politics," as Guelen called it (58), tends to be in the way of a more sustained

engagement with the specific historical circumstances, in which the problems he identifies come into being. In

view of his propensity to conceive of bare life in terms of the history of metaphysics, it does not come as a

surprise that Agamben himself sees little hope for changing "the political destiny of the West" (188).15 For themost part, the author keeps the descriptions of the biopolitical relation at the origin of Western politics as neutral

as possible. Because bare life exceeds our received ethical categories, compassion and sentimentality are

therefore out of place. Attempts at "saving" bare life, as in modern-day humanitarian interventions, are charged,

somewhat condescendingly, with an unacknowledged complicity with the powers which produce it. International

aid agencies and humanitarian organizations "can only grasp human life in the figure of bare life or sacred life"

(133), thus partaking, willingly or not, in the fateful mechanism that reduces human beings to refugees, boat

people, or "displaced" persons.

"[I]ndeterminate and impenetrable," the sight of bare life prompts "stupor" and "astonishment" (182). In other

passages, Agamben sounds a more apocalyptic note, painting the turn that the depicted dynamic has taken in

the twentieth century as nothing less than "an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe" (188). These passages

seem to come close to a call for action, a demand to end, or at least disrupt, the fatal mechanisms producing

the homo sacer. But it remains open what a "form of life" would look like that did not lend itself to the continual



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production (that is, separation and elimination) of bare life.

Agamben's "bare life" has hit a nerve in the academic readership. Homo Sacer confronts us with the evidence

of its ubiquitous presence. Yet the sweeping claims regarding the "tenacious correspondence between the

modern and the archaic which one encounters in the most diverse spheres," flagged at the beginning of the

book (6), tend to supersede any attempt to specify the conditions of the phenomenon in view and to mark the

potential limitations of its conceptualization in terms of sacred life. Hence, the reader has the peculiarimpression of "seeing" the figure without ever fully apprehending it.

Undoubtedly, part of the appeal of Agamben's Homo Sacer project stems from the fact that it presents its

readers with a new narrative both of the foundation of the political and its current crisis. The philosopher's

reflections revolve around a kind of primal scene-the relation of ban in which power seizes life by placing it in

the exception- and its modern permutations. I have argued that the difficulty in understanding the connection

between homo sacer as a foundational figure, revealing the originary political activity, and its modern avatars,

revealing its crisis, pertains to a structural indeterminacy in Agamben's narrative despite the overwhelming

evidence that the author adduces. The rhetoric and imagery of blindness he mobilizes with such remarkable

effect apropos of the Muselmann was supposed to highlight the widespread inability to appreciate the secret

attraction tying law to life (and vice versa) but also the failure to register the latest disturbances in the production

and inscription of bare life. Agamben tends to treat the nexus between the hidden foundations conditioning

Western politics and its modern crisis as more or less self-evident. Indeed, the two accounts are meant to

illuminate one another. The failure to grasp either one will result in failing to make sense of the other. If we do

not see how sovereign power is inextricably bound up with bare life, we will not comprehend the biopolitical

dimension of our present. If we fail to recognize the Nazi death camps as symptomatic of modern biopolitics's

escalation and crisis, we will have missed the pattern informing Western conceptions of the political, "from the

very beginning" (181).

In Agamben's account, Auschwitz is no longer the cipher of a singular and incommensurable event but rather a

new paradigm, a paradigmatic site that necessitates a fundamental revision of political semantics. The

categories of political and moral thought are put to the test and "reconfigured" in light of the camps. The

confrontation with the Muselmann is a case in point. To take the full measure of our humanity, we are

summoned before his dead gaze. It is not in the individual features of the other's face whose distress elicits our

compassion but rather in the inexpressive, the lifeless sight of the "Muslim" that we are to glimpse what it is to

be human. Just as the camp is the site of utter indifferentiability where all the differences and distinctions have

collapsed, the spectral figure of the Muselmann is the emblematic embodiment of such "absolute indistinction,"

which in another paradoxical twist coincides with the "final biopolitical substance" that forms the obsessional

kernel of modern biopower's thanatopolitics (Homo Sacer 171; Remnants 85).

University of ChicagoFootnote

NOTES

1. Debarati Sanyal has taken Agamben to task for some of these rather cavalier claims. In a similar vein, see

LaCapra. For a reading that tries to do more justice to the philosophical aspirations of Agamben's work,

although not uncritically, see Vogt.

2. In an interesting discussion based on many of the same primary texts Agamben uses (and actually a few

more), Todorov reaches the opposite conclusion, namely an ethics that takes into account and is based on the

very experience of the camps.

3. On the history of the "vera icon" and its spectral materiality, see Belting.

4. On the tradition of gloria passionis, see Auerbach 67-82.

5. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see LaCapra 277-78.

6. Such tensions are invariably the subject of critical engagements with Agamben's work, even the sympathetic



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ones. (See, for example, Geulen or Norris, Politics). To the best of my knowledge, the reasons for the particular

crisis that the relation between bare life and sovereign power enters in modernity remain largely underexplored

in the critical literature.

7. So far, the only other volume in the series is State of Exception.

8. Agamben does not always distinguish "natural" zo from bare life. But this apparent inconsistency has to do

precisely with the fact that the distinction between zo and bios is what is disappearing in bare life: "Neitherpolitical bios nor natural zo, sacred life is the zone of indistinction in which zo and bios constitute each other

in including and excluding each other" (90). Earlier, he had insisted on the difference: "Not simply natural life,

but life exposed to death (bare or sacred life) is the originary political element" (88).

9. I owe the term effect of a privation to Ldemann 234.

10. The relation is also described as a kind of "symmetry between the body of the sovereign and homo sacer"

(102). Agamben develops this connection apropos of Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies: "the sovereign and

the homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign

is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to

whom all men act as sovereigns" (84; cf. 82).

11. On Agamben's indebtedness to and departure from Foucault's concept of biopower, see Ldemann;

Sarrasin.

12. On Agamben's relation to Schmitt, see Geulen 123-27; Norris, "The Exemplary Exception" 267-70.

13. The paragraph continues, "Once it crosses over the walls of the oikos and penetrates more and more

deeply into the city, the foundation of sovereignty-nonpolitical life-is immediately transformed into a line that

must be constantly redrawn" (131).

14. For a critique of Agamben's use of the concept of habeas corpus, see Fitzpatrick 55.

15. On one of the last pages of Homo Sacer, bare life is assimilated to "pure being" the "on haplos" of

Aristotelian metaphysics (182).

References

WORKS CITED

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford:

Stanford UP, 1998.

_____. Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive (Homo Sacer III). Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.

New York: Zone, 1999.

_____. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken, 2004.

Auerbach, Erich. Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Trans. Ralph

Manheim. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.Barash, Moshe. Blindness. The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought. London: Routledge, 2001.

Belting, Hans. Das echte Bild. Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen. Munich: Beck, 2006.

Fitzpatrick, Peter. "Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law." Norris, Politics 49-73.

Frontisi-Ducroux, Franoise. Du masque au visage: aspects de l'identit en Grce ancienne. Paris: Flammarion,

1995.

Geulen, Eva. Giorgio Agamben zur Einfhrung. Hamburg: Junius, 2003.

LaCapra, Dominick. "Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben." Witnessing the Disaster. Ed. Michael F.

Bernard-Donals and Richard R. Glejzer. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 262-304.

Ldemann, Susanne. "Biopolitik und die Logik der Ausnahme. Zu Giorgio Agambens Konstruktion des 'bloen

Lebens.'" Das Politische. Figurenlehre des sozialen Krpers nach der Romantik. Ed. Uwe Hebekus. Munich:

Wilhelm Fink, 2003. 330-47.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale. New York:



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Vintage, 1967.

Norris, Andrew. "The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agamben's Homo

Sacer." Norris, Politics 262-83.

_____, ed. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer. Durham: Duke UP,

2003.

Sanyal, Debarati. "A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism." Representations79 (Summer 2002): 1-27.

Sarrasin, Philipp. "Agamben-oder doch Foucault?" Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie 51 (2003): 348-53.

Schmitt, Carl. Politische Theologie. 1922. Berlin: Duncker, 1993.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Trans. Arthur Denner and

Abigail Pollak. New York: Holt, 1996.

Vogt, Eric. "S/Citing the Camp." Norris, Politics 74-106.

AuthorAffiliation

Robert Buch is an assistant professor in Germanic studies at the University of Chicago. He is currently working

on a study on representations of violence in late twentieth-century literature and art, titled "The Legacy of

Laocoon." His recent articles focus on Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and the question of ekphrasis.

Subject: Testimony; Politics; Concentration camps; Blindness; Ethics;

Publication title: The Germanic Review

Volume: 82

Issue: 2

Pages: 179-196,200

Number of pages: 19

Publication year: 2007

Publication date: Spring 2007

Year: 2007

Publisher: Taylor & Francis Inc.

Place of publication: Washington

Country of publication: United States

Publication subject: Literature

ISSN: 00168890

CODEN: GRMRAQ

Source type: Scholarly Journals

Language of publication: English

Document type: Feature

Document feature: References

ProQuest document ID: 233506987

Document URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/233506987?accountid=15618

Copyright: Copyright Heldref Publications Spring 2007

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