Remnants of Muslims: Reading Agamben’s Silence

A crush. A surge. Muslims. Skeletons. Skeletons. You do not see them.

Just as you do not see the paper but the words written on it.

—Ka-Tzetnik¹

I. Ironical names

Giorgio agamben’s formulations of “the state of exception” and “bare life” have become touchstones for analyses of sovereign violence and biopolitics, yet it seems to have escaped note that Agamben’s use of these terms is marked by a peculiar oversight. While Agamben’s Eurocentrism has been redressed by scholars such as Achille Mbembe (“Necropolitics,” 2003), Ranjana Khanna (Algeria Cuts, 2008), Michael Rothberg (Multidirectional Memory, 2009), and Sylvie Thénault (Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale, 2012), even his most careful readers do not comment on Agamben’s treatment of a word that he takes from Primo Levi as the key to understanding politics and ethics after World War II.² In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben designates the Nazi concentration camp as the “new biopolitical nomos of the modern” and singles out an epithet that had previously appeared only in texts written by or about survivors of the camps: “Now imagine the most extreme figure of the camp inhabitant,” he urges in the final passages of Homo Sacer. “Primo Levi has described the person who in camp jargon was called ‘the Muslim,’ der Muselmann—a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely apathetic (hence the ironical name given to him).”³

Agamben’s parenthetical “hence the ironical name” communicates but does not resolve anxiety about applying a variation of the Arabic word “muslim” to such radically dehumanized Jewish men. The logic of Agamben’s “hence” is opaque at best. The “irony” to which he refers is surely the renaming of “Jew” as “Muslim.” His diction implies either that he considers the association between absolute apathy and Muslims to be self-evident, or that he assumes that such an association would have appeared self-evident to those who assigned the epithet; calling this substitution “ironic” also suggests that a defining antagonism distinguishes “Jew” from “Muslim.” While these associations and distinctions invite careful historical reflection, neither in Homo Sacer nor in his subsequent Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive does Agamben demonstrate such reflection, nor does he clarify just what is “ironic” about such a substitution.⁴ My reading of Agamben begins with this silence.

Indeed, it appears that the Homo Sacer project relies on Agamben’s not investigating this particular “irony” so that he can appropriate the term “muselman”⁵ as proper name for the lost witnesses to the Shoah and master figure of “bare life.” Agamben’s thesis that Auschwitz was a site of unprecedented biopolitical experimentation where “the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on earth was realized” requires this spectral image of the “muselman,” which he describes as a limit of a radically new kind.⁶ Agamben understands Auschwitz as the final step in a systematic procedure that reduced “Jew” to bare life called “Muselmann,” a term that he uses to designate “not so much a limit between life and death . . . [but] the threshold between the human and the inhuman” (RA 55). This threshold orients Agamben’s argument concerning modern state violence and the paradox of testimony: “in Auschwitz,” he writes, “ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the ‘complete witness,’ makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man” (RA 47). What Levi’s text leaves opaque and uncertain, Agamben clarifies, defines, and hyperbolizes so that the “Muslim” appears in Remnants of Auschwitz sheared of its many other semantic valences and ambiguities. In Agamben’s text the word designates an ontological rather than historical condition of unwitnessable life subject to absolute power of the modern state. He positions the “muselman” as key to the “hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live.”⁷

My aim is neither to produce a comprehensive geneaology of this word nor to solve the problem of its unsettling appearance at Auschwitz,⁸ but rather...