new light on the extermination itself, making it in some way even more atro-
cious. Before being a death camp, Auschwitz is the site of an experiment that
remains unthought today, an experiment beyond life and death in which the Jew
is transformed into a Muselmann and the human being into a non-human. And
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.
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2.7. One of the paraphrases by which Levi designates the Muselmann is “he
who has seen the Gorgon.” But what has the Muselmann seen, and what, in the
camp, is the Gorgon?
In an exemplary study that draws on literature, sculpture, and vase painting,
François Frontisi-Ducroux has shown how the Greeks conceived of the Gorgon,
that horrid female head covered with serpents whose gaze produced death and
which Perseus, with Athena’s help, had to cut off without seeing.
First of all, the Gorgon does not have a face in the sense expressed by the
Greek term prosopon, which etymologically signifies “what stands before the eyes, what gives itself to be seen.” The prohibited face, which cannot be seen because
it produces death, is for the Greeks a non-face and as such is never designated by
the term prosopon. Yet for the Greeks this impossible vision is at the same time
absolutely inevitable. Not only is the Gorgon’s non-face represented innumer-
able times in sculpture and vase painting; the most curious fact concerns the
mode of the Gorgon’s presentation. “Gorgo, the ‘anti-face,’ is represented only
through a face . . . in an ineluctable confrontation of gazes . . . this antiprosopon
is given over to the gaze in its fullness, with a clear demonstration of the signs
of her dangerous visual effects” (Frontisi-Ducroux 1995: 68). Breaking with the
iconographical tradition by which the human figure is drawn in vase painting
only in profile, the Gorgon does not have a profile; she is always presented as a
flat plate, without a third dimension—that is, not as a real face but as an abso-
lute image, as something that can only be seen and presented. The gorgoneion,
which represents the impossibility of vision, is what cannot not be seen.
But there is more. Frontisi-Ducroux establishes a parallel between this fron-
tality, which breaks with the iconographical convention of vase painting, and
apostrophe, the rhetorical figure by which the author, rupturing narrative con-
vention, turns to a character or directly to the public. This means that the im-
possibility of vision of which the Gorgon is the cipher contains something like
an apostrophe, a call that cannot be avoided.
But then “he who has seen the Gorgon” cannot be a simple designation for
the Muselmann. 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, and 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 be-
come a non-human. The Muselmann has neither seen nor known anything, if not
the impossibility of knowing and seeing. This is why to bear witness to the Musel-
mann, to attempt to contemplate the impossibility of seeing, is not an easy task.
REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ
797
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. That precisely this inhuman impossibility of seeing is
what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from which human beings
cannot turn away—this and nothing else is testimony. The Gorgon and he who
has seen her and the Muselmann and he who bears witness to him are one gaze;
they are a single impossibility of seeing.
2.8. That one cannot truly speak of “living beings” when referring to Muselmän-
ner is confirmed by all the witnesses. Améry and Bettelheim define them as “walk-
ing corpses” (Améry 1980: 9, Bettelheim 1979: 106). Carpi calls them “living dead”
and “mummy-men” (Carpi 1993: 17); “one hesitates to call them living,” writes
Levi (1986: 90). “Finally, you confuse the living and the dead,” writes a witness of
Bergen-Belsen. “Basically, the difference is minimal anyhow. We’re skeletons that
are still moving; and they’re skeletons that are already immobile. But there’s even a
third category: the ones who lie stretched out, unable to move, but still breathing
slightly” (Sofsky 1997: 328n2). “Faceless presences” or “shadows,” in every case
they inhabit “the limit between life and death”—to cite the title of Ryn’s and
Klodzinski’s study dedicated to the Muselmann, which today remains the sole monograph on the subject.
But this biological image is immediately accompanied by another image,
which by contrast seems to contain the true sense of the matter. The Muselmann
is not only or not so much a limit between life and death; rather, he marks the
threshold between the human and the inhuman.
The witnesses are in agreement about this too. “Non-men who march and
labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them” (Levi 1986: 90).”They had to
give up responding to it [the environment] at all, and become objects, but with
this they gave up being persons” (Bettelheim 1960: 152). There is thus a point
at which human beings, while apparently remaining human beings, cease to be
human. This point is the Muselmann, and the camp is his exemplary site. But what does it mean for a human being to become a non-human? Is there a humanity of human beings that can be distinguished and separated from human beings’
biological humanity?
2.9. What is at stake in the “extreme situation” is, therefore, “remaining a
human being or not,” becoming a Muselmann or not. The most immediate and
common impulse is to interpret this limit experience in moral terms. It was thus
a question of trying to preserve dignity and self-respect, even if in the camp
dignity and respect could not always be translated into corresponding actions.
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Bettelheim seems to imply something of the kind when he speaks of a “point of
no return” beyond which the prisoner became a Muselmann:
To survive as a man not as a walking corpse, as a debased and degraded but still
human being, one had first and foremost to remain informed and aware of what
made up one’s personal point of no return, the point beyond which one would
never, under any circumstances, give in to the oppressor, even if it meant risking
and losing one’s life. It meant being aware that if one survived at the price of
overreaching this point one would be holding on to a life that had lost all its
meaning. It would mean surviving—not with a lowered self-respect, but without
any. (Bettelheim 1960: 157)
Naturally, Bettelheim realized that in the extreme situation, real freedom
and choice were practically non-existent and often amounted to the degree of
inner awareness with which one obeyed an order:
This keeping informed and aware of one’s actions—though it could not alter
the required act, save in extremities—this minimal distance from one’s own
behavior, and the freedom to feel differently about it depending on its character,
this too was what permitted the prisoner to remain a human being. It was the
giving up of all feelings, all inner reservations about one’s actions, the letting go
of a point at which one would hold fast no matter what, that changed prisoner
into moslem . . . . Prisoners who understood this fully, came to know that this,
and only this, formed the crucial difference between retaining one’s humanity
(and often life itself) and accepting death as a human being (or perhaps physical
death). (Bettelheim 1960: 158)
For Bettelheim, the Muselmann is therefore the one who has abdicated his
inalienable freedom and has consequently lost all traces of affective life and hu-
manity. This passage beyond the “point of no return” is such a disturbing experi-
ence and, for Bettelheim, becomes such a criterion of moral distinction between
human and non-human as to deprive the witness not only of all pity, but also of
lucidity, bringing him to mistake what ought never to be confused. Thus Höss,
the commander of Auschwitz condemned in Poland in 1947, is transformed for
Bettelheim into a kind of “well fed and well clothed” Muselmann.
While his physical death came later, he became a living corpse from the time he
assumed command of Auschwitz. That he never became a “moslem” was because
he continued to be well fed and well clothed. But he had to divest himself so
entirely of self respect and self love, of feeling and personality, that for all practi-
cal purposes he was little more than a machine functioning only as his superiors
flicked the buttons of command. (Bettelheim 1960: 238)
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799
To his eyes, the Muselmann also becomes an improbable and monstrous bio-
logical machine, lacking not only all moral conscience, but even sensibility and
nervous stimuli. “One might even speculate,” Bettelheim writes,
as to whether these organisms had by-passed the reflex arc that once extended
from external or internal stimulus via frontal lobes to feeling and action. . . .
Prisoners entered the moslem stage when emotion could no longer be evoked
in them. . . . Despite their hunger, even the food stimulus reached their brain
clearly enough to lead to action. . . . Other prisoners often tried to be nice to
them when they could, to give them food and so forth, but they could no longer
respond to the emotional attitude that was behind someone’s giving them food.
(Bettelheim 1960: 152, 156)
Here the principle according to which “no one wants to see the Muselmann”
involves the survivor as well. Not only does he falsify his own testimony (all the
witnesses agree that no one in the camps “was good to the Muselmänner”), he does not realize that he has transformed human beings into an unreal paradigm,
a vegetative machine. The sole goal of this paradigm is to allow at any cost for
the distinction of what, in the camps, has become indistinguishable: the human
and the inhuman.
2.10. What does it mean “to remain human”? That the answer is not easy
and the question itself needs to be considered is implicit in the survivor’s warn-
ing: “Consider if this is a man.” At issue is not a question, but an injunction
(“I command these words to you” [Levi 1986: 11]) that calls into question the
very form of the question—as if the last thing one can expect here is a statement
or a denial.
Instead, it is necessary to withdraw the meaning of the term “man” to the
point at which the very sense of the question is transformed. It is remarkable
that Levi’s and Antelme’s testi monies, which were both published in 1947, seem
to engage in an ironic dialogue on this subject even in their titles, If This Is a Man and The Human Species. For Antelme, at issue in the camps was an “almost biological” claim to belong to the human species, the final sentiment of belonging
to a species: “the negation of our quality as men provokes an almost biological
claim of belonging to the human species [ espèce]” (Antelme 1992: 5–6, transla-
tion slightly emended).
It is important that Antelme uses the technical term espèce here instead of
referring to the more familiar one of le genre humain. For it is a matter of bio-
logical belonging in the strict sense (the “almost” is a euphemism of sorts, a
slight scruple before the unimagined), not of a declaration of moral or political
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solidarity. And precisely this is what must be “considered,” and considered not
as a question of dignity, as Bettelheim seems to think. The task is so dark and
enormous as to coincide with the one set by the SS: to take seriously the law of
the camp, “pigs, not men.”
Of the heroes we know about, from history or from literature, whether it was love
they cried forth, or solitude, or vengeance, or the anguish of being or of non-being,
whether it was humiliation they rose up against, or injustice—of these heroes
we do not believe that they were ever able to express as their last and only claim
an ultimate sense of belonging to the human race. To say that one felt oneself
contested as a man, as a member of the human species—may look like a feeling
discovered in retrospect, an explanation arrived at afterwards. And yet it was that
we felt most constantly and immediately, and that—exactly that—was what the
others wanted. (Ibid.: translation slightly emended)
What is the “ultimate” sense of belonging to the human species? And does
such a sense exist? For many, the Muselmann seems to constitute nothing other
than an answer to this question.
2.11. Levi begins to bear witness only after dehumanization has been
achieved, only once it no longer makes any sense to speak of dignity. He is the
only one who consciously sets out to bear witness in place of the Muselmänner,
the drowned, those who were demolished and who touched bottom. It is im-
plicit in many testimonies that at Auschwitz everyone somehow set their human
dignity aside. But perhaps nowhere is this expressed as clearly as in the passage
in The Drowned and the Saved in which Levi evokes the strange desperation that
overcame the prisoners at the moment of liberation: “Just as they felt they were
again becoming men, that is, responsible. . . .” (Levi 1989: 70). The survivor is
therefore familiar with the common necessity of degradation; he knows that
humanity and responsibility are something that the deportee had to abandon
when entering the camp.
It is important that certain individuals—pious Chaim, taciturn Szabo, sage
Robert, courageous Baruch—did not give in. But testimony is not for them;
it is not for the “better ones.” And even if they had not died—but “the best all died” (ibid.: 82)—they would not be the witnesses; they would not be able to
bear witness to the camp. Perhaps to something else—their own faith, their own
strength (and this is precisely what they did, in dying) —-but not to the camp.
The “complete wit
nesses,” those for whom bearing witness makes sense, “had al-
ready lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves”
(ibid.: 84). To speak of dignity and decency in their case would not be decent.
REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ
801
When one of his friends tried to convince him that his survival was providen-
tial, that he had been “marked, chosen,” Levi responds with contempt—“Such
an opinion seemed monstrous to me” (ibid.: 82). Levi suggests that to claim that
a recognizable good was kept at Auschwitz, that something precious was in the
camp and carried out into the normal world, is not acceptable and does not bear
witness to the good. This too is the meaning of the thesis that it is not the “best,
those predestined to do good, the bearers of a message” who survive (ibid.: 82).
The survivors are not only “worse” in comparison with the best ones—those whose
strength rendered them less fit in the camp—they are also “worse” in comparison
with the anonymous mass of the drowned, those whose death cannot be called
death. This is the specific ethical aporia of Auschwitz: it is the site in which it is
not decent to remain decent, in which those who believed themselves to preserve
their dignity and self-respect experience shame with respect to those who did not.
2.12. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke provides a famous description of the shame that comes from having preserved decency and dignity.
Encountering some vagrants in the streets of Paris, Malte recognizes that, despite
his apparent dig nity and clean collar, the vagrants identify him as one of them:
True, my collar is clean, my underwear too, and I could, just as I am, walk into
any café I felt like, possibly even on the grand boulevards, and confidently reach
out my hand to a plate full of pastries and help myself. No one would find that
surprising; no one would shout at me or throw me out, for it is after all a genteel
hand, a hand that is washed four or five times a day. . . . Though there are still
one or two individuals, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel for example, or on the
rue Racine, who are not fooled, who don’t give a damn about my wrists. They
look at me and know. They know that in reality I am one of them, that I’m only
acting. . . . And they don’t want to spoil my fun; they just grin a little and wink
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