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Chapter 3 If This Is a Man Life after Auschwitz No one wants to see the Muselmann. —Aldo Carpi in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben recounts the story of Aldo Carpi, a professor of painting who survived the Nazi Lager because the SS became aware of his artistic talents and commissioned paintings from him. Amid the horror of the camp, Carpi painted family portraits of his captors from photographs, Italian landscapes, and Venetian nudes. The ability to reproduce the activities and the landscapes of his former life enabled Carpi to survive the Lager. His current life, however, was of no interest to those who held the power to end it at any moment. “No one wants camp scenes and figures,” Carpi wrote in his diary, “no one wants to see the Muselmann.”1 The SS may have had no desire for the aesthetic contemplation of the Muselmänner, but they were surrounded by these prisoners who had often become completely disconnected from relational and linguistic life. Primo Levi describes the Muselmänner as “the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection” (that is, those doomed to be chosen for the gas chambers), and depicts them as “drowned” figures occupying a zone that hesitates between life and death.2 For Agamben, in contrast, the Muselmann is the limit figure of the human, a zone of complete indistinction between “vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics” where the border that purports to separate the human from the inhuman breaks down.3 It is hardly surprising that the SS men whose daily lives were devoted to reducing people to such a condition had no desire to hang their images on walls. Yet, Agamben suggests that the “impossibility of gazing on the Muselmann ” is not restricted to those who brought such a being into existence. 73 74 / CATASTROPHE AND REDEMPTION Citing Elias Cannetti, he writes that while a pile of dead bodies is an “ancient spectacle” that has often provided satisfaction to those in power, the Muselmänner is “an absolutely new phenomenon” that is simply unbearable to look upon.4 There are many reasons why we may wish not to gaze on the figures produced by such an “experiment,” and why, in attempting to understand the Nazi camps, we may instead wish to follow Jean Améry who suggests that, as “hard as it may be for us to do so, we must exclude him from our considerations.”5 Améry’s point is not that we should avert our eyes from the horror of the camps, of which he was only too well aware, but that one who has been reduced to the condition of a “staggering corpse” has been absolutely dehumanized, and so can no longer tell us anything about his own topic of concern—the power of the human intellect.6 In Agamben’s view, in contrast, the stakes in the attempt to comprehend this realm at the border of the human are high: “we will not understand Auschwitz,” he writes, “if we do not first understand who or what the Muselmann is.”7 The Muselmann is thus one of those exemplary, or “paradigmatic ” figures (“example” in Greek is para-deigma: “that which is shown alongside”),8 by way of whose isolation Agamben aims to make disparate historical phenomena intelligible. The question of how we are to understand Auschwitz is not merely of historiographical interest but has political and ethical consequences, as it concerns not only the interpretation of the past but the way in which this past continues to structure the present. The trauma of World War II, as he understands it, is not simply an event that occurred in the past, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub suggest. Rather it must be understood as a “history which is essentially not over,” and which continues to reverberate and evolve in the present.9 Any attempt to understand our time must therefore remain attentive to the ways in which it is marked by Auschwitz, and to the fact that “the past,” to borrow Moishe Postone’s phrase, “does not simply pass,” but persists, structuring the horizon of possibility in which we think and act today.10 Such an understanding of Auschwitz raises questions about the historical narrative in which it is positioned. Among them, the following are of particular importance: What is the specificity (by which I do not mean the sacralized uniqueness) of Auschwitz? What possibilities did it bring into the...

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