The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame

  we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time

  we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not

  know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime, at the fact that such

  a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the

  world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak

  or null, and should not have availed in defence. (Levi 1986: 181–82, translation

  slightly emended)

  More than twenty years later, while writing The Drowned and the Saved, Levi once again reflects on this shame. Shame now becomes the dominant sentiment

  of survivors, and Levi tries to explain why this is so. It is therefore not surprising

  that, like all attempts at explanations, the chapter of the book entitled “Shame”

  is ultimately unsatisfying. This is all the more so given that the chapter immedi-

  ately follows Levi’s extraordinary analysis of the “gray zone,” which, consciously

  keeping to the inexplicable, recklessly refuses all explanation. Faced with the

  Kapos, collaborators, “prominent ones” of all kinds, the accursed members of the Sonderkommando and even Chaim Rumkowski, the rex Judaeorum of the

  819

  820

  HOMO SACER III

  Lodz ghetto, the survivor ended with a non-liquet: “I ask that we meditate on

  the story of ‘the crematorium ravens’ with pity and rigor, but that judgment of

  them be suspended” (Levi 1989: 60). But in his chapter on shame Levi seems

  hastily to lead his subject back to a sense of guilt: “many (including me) experi-

  enced ‘shame,’ that is, a feeling of guilt” (Levi 1989: 73). Immediately afterward,

  in seeking to discern the roots of this guilt, the very author who had only a little

  earlier fearlessly ventured into an absolutely unexplored territory of ethics now

  submits himself to a test of conscience so puerile that it leaves the reader uneasy.

  The wrongs that emerge (having at times shaken his shoulders impatiently when

  faced with the requests of younger prisoners, or the episode of the water that he

  shared with Alberto but denied to Daniele) are, of course, excusable. But here

  the reader’s unease can only be a reflection of the survivor’s embarrassment, his

  incapacity to master shame.

  3.2. The survivor’s feeling of guilt is a locus classicus of literature on the camps.

  Bettelheim expressed its paradoxical character:

  the real issue . . . is that the survivor as a thinking being knows very well that he

  is not guilty, as I, for one, know about myself, but that this does not change the

  fact that the humanity of such a person, as a feeling being, requires that he feel

  guilty, and he does. One cannot survive the concentration camp without feeling

  guilty that one was so incredibly lucky when millions perished, many of them

  in front of one’s eyes. . . . In the camps one was forced, day after day, for years,

  to watch the destruction of others, feeling—against one’s better judgment—that

  one should have intervened, feeling guilty for having often felt glad that it was

  not oneself who perished. (Bettelheim 1979: 297–98)

  Wiesel formulates the same kind of aporia in the apothegm “I live, therefore

  I am guilty,” adding immediately afterward: “I am here because a friend, an ac-

  quaintance, an unknown person died in my place.” Ella Lingens offers a similar

  explanation, as if the survivor could live only in the place of another: “Does not

  each of us who has returned go around with a guilt feeling, feelings which our

  executors so rarely feel—‘I live, because others died in my place?’” (Langbein

  1972: 539).

  Levi also experienced this kind of sentiment. And yet he does not fully ac-

  cept its consequences; he fights tenaciously against it. The conflict finds expres-

  sion as late as 1984, in his poem “The Survivor:”

  Dopo di allora, ad ora incerta,

  Quella pena ritorna,

  E se non trova chi lo ascolti,

  REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ

  821

  Gli brucia in petto il cuore.

  Rivede i visi dei suoi compagni

  Lividi nella prima luce,

  Grigi di polvere di cemento,

  Indistinti per nebbia,

  Tinti di morte nei sonni inquieti:

  A notte menano le mascelle

  Sotto la mora greve dei sogni

  Masticando una rapa che non c’è.

  “Indietro, via di qui, gente sommersa,

  Andate. Non ho soppiantato nessuno,

  No ho usurpato il pane di nessuno,

  Nessuno è morto in vece mia. Nessuno.

  Ritornate alla vostra nebbia.

  Non è mia colpa se vivo e respiro

  e mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni.”

  Since then, at an uncertain hour, that punishment comes back. And if it doesn’t

  find someone who will listen to it, it burns his heart in his chest. Once again

  he sees the faces of the other inmates, blueish in the light of dawn, gray with

  cement dust, shrouded in mist, painted with death in their restless sleep. At night

  their jaws grind away, in the absence of dreams, chewing on a stone that isn’t

  there. “Get away from here, drowned people, go away. I didn’t ursurp anyone’s

  place. I didn’t steal anyone’s bread. No one died in my stead. No one. Go back

  to your mist. It isn’t my fault if I live and breathe, eat and drink and sleep and

  wear clothes.” (Levi 1988: 581)

  The citation from Dante in the last verse bears witness to the fact that what

  is at issue in this text is not simply the disavowal of responsibility. The citation

  comes from the thirty-third canto of the Inferno (v. 141), which describes Dante’s encounter with Ugolino in the traitors’ pit. It contains a double, implicit reference to the problem of the guilt of the deportees. On the one hand, Dante’s

  “dark well” is the place of traitors, in particular those who have betrayed their

  own relatives and friends. On the other hand, in a bitter allusion to his own sit-

  uation as a survivor, the cited verse also refers to someone whom Dante believes

  to be alive, but who is only apparently living, since his soul has already been

  swallowed by death.

  Two years later, when he writes The Drowned and the Saved, Levi once again asks himself the following question: “Are you ashamed because you are alive in

  place of another? And in particular, of a man more generous, more sensitive,

  822

  HOMO SACER III

  more useful, wiser, worthier of living than you?” But this time too the answer is

  doubtful:

  You cannot block out such feelings: you examine yourself, you review your mem-

  ories, hoping to find them all, and that none of them are masked or disguised. No,

  you find no obvious transgressions, you did not usurp anyone’s place, you did not

  beat anyone (but would you have had the strength to do so?), you did not accept

  positions (but none were offered to you . . .), you did not steal anyone’s bread;

  nevertheless you cannot exclude it. It is no more than a supposition, indeed the

  shadow of a suspicion: that each man is his brother’s Cain, that each one of us

  (but this time I say “us” in a much vaster, indeed, universal sense) has usurped


  his neighbor’s place and lived in his stead. (Levi 1989: 81–82)

  Yet the same generalization of the accusation (or, rather, the suspicion) some-

  how blunts its edge; it makes the wound less painful. “No one died in my stead.

  No one” (Levi 1988: 581). “One is never in the place of another” (Levi 1989: 60).

  3.3. The other face of the survivor’s shame is the exaltation of simple survival

  as such. In 1976, Terrence Des Pres, professor at Colgate University, published

  The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. The book, which had an immediate and notable success, set out to show that “survival is an experience

  with a definite structure, neither random nor regressive nor amoral” (Des Pres

  1976: v) and, at the same time, to “render visible that structure” (ibid.). In the

  final analysis, Des Pres’s anatomical dissection of life in the camps reveals that

  in the final analysis life is survival and that in the extreme situation of Ausch-

  witz, the very nucleus of “life in itself” comes to light as such, freed from the

  hindrances and deformations of culture. Des Pres does, at a certain point, in-

  voke the specter of the Muselmann as a figure representing the impossibility of

  survival (“the empirical instance of death-in-life” (ibid.: 99]). But he criticizes

  Bettelheim’s testimony for having undervalued the prisoners’ anonymous and

  everyday fight to survive, in the name of an antiquated ethics of the hero, of the

  one who is ready to renounce his life. For Des Pres, the true ethical paradigm of

  our time is instead the survivor, who, without searching for ideal justifications

  “chooses life” and fights simply to survive. The survivor, he writes,

  is the first of civilized men to live beyond the compulsions of culture; beyond a

  fear of death which can only be assuaged by insisting that life itself is worthless.

  The survivor is evidence that men and women are strong enough, mature enough,

  awake enough, to face death without mediation, and therefore to embrace life

  without reserve. (Ibid.: 245)

  REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ

  823

  The life that the survivor chooses to “embrace without reservations,” the “small,

  additional, added-on life” (ibid.: 24), for which he is ready to pay the highest price,

  reveals itself in the end to be nothing other than biological life as such, the simple,

  impenetrable “priority of the biological element.” With a perfect vicious circle

  in which to continue is nothing other than to go backward, the “additional life”

  disclosed by survival is simply an absolute a priori:

  Stripped of everything but life, what can the survivor fall back upon except some

  biologically determined “talent” long suppressed by cultural deformation, a bank

  of knowledge embedded in the body’s cells. The key to survival behavior may

  thus lie in the priority of biological being. (Ibid.: 228)

  3.4. It is not surprising that Bettelheim reacted to Des Pres’s book with indig-

  nation. In an article that appeared in The New Yorker following the publication

  of The Survivor, Bettelheim reaffirms the decisive importance of the survivor’s feeling of guilt:

  It will be startling news to most survivors that they are “strong enough, mature

  enough, awake enough . . . to embrace life without reserve,” since only a pitifully

  small number of those who entered the German camps survived. What about the

  millions who perished? Were they “awake enough . . . to embrace life without

  reserve” as they were driven into the gas chambers? . . . What about the many

  survivors who were completely broken by their experience, so that years of the best

  psychiatric care could not help them cope with their memories, which continue to

  haunt them in their deep and often suicidal depression? . . . What of the horrible

  nightmares about the camps which every so often awaken me today, thirty-five

  years later, despite a most rewarding life, and which every survivor I have asked has

  also experienced? . . . Only the ability to feel guilty makes us human, particularly

  if, objectively seen, one is not guilty. (Bettelheim 1979: 296, 313)

  Despite their polemical tones, the two adversaries are in fact not as far apart

  as they seem; they are, more or less consciously, both prisoners of a curious

  circle. On the one hand, the exaltation of survival constantly requires reference

  to dignity (“There is a strange circularity about existence in extremity: survi-

  vors preserve their dignity in order ‘not to begin to die’; they care for the body

  as a matter of ‘moral survival’” [Des Pres 1976: 72]). On the other hand, the

  assertion of dignity and the feeling of guilt have no other sense than survival

  and “the life instinct” (“those prisoners who blocked out neither heart nor rea-

  son . . . those prisoners survived” [Bettelheim 1960: 158); “Our obligation—not

  to those who are dead, but to ourselves, and to those around us who are still

  alive—is to strengthen the life drives” [Bettelheim 1979: 102]). And it is certainly

  824

  HOMO SACER III

  not an accident that Bettelheim ends by accusing Des Pres of the same “ethics

  of heroism” with which Des Pres had earlier criticized Bettelheim: “[Des Pres’s

  book] makes heroes out of these chance survivors. By stressing how the death

  camps produced such superior beings as the survivors . . .” (ibid.: 95).

  It is as if the symmetrical gestures of the two opposite figures of the survivor—

  the one who cannot feel guilty for his own survival and the one who claims in-

  nocence in having survived—betrayed a secret solidarity. They are the two faces

  of the living being’s incapacity truly to separate innocence and guilt—that is,

  somehow to master its own shame.

  3.5. It is uncertain whether the correct explanation for the survivor’s shame

  is that he feels guilty for being alive in the place of another. Bettelheim’s thesis

  that the survivor is innocent and yet as such obliged to feel guilty is itself already

  suspect. To assume guilt of this kind, which inheres in the survivor’s condition

  as such and not in what he or she as an individual did or failed to do, recalls

  the common tendency to assume a generic collective guilt whenever an ethical

  problem cannot be mastered. Arendt observed that the surprising willingness of

  post-war Germans of all ages to assume collective guilt for Nazism, to believe

  themselves guilty for what their parents or their people had done, betrayed an

  equally surprising ill will as to the assessment of individual responsibilities and

  the punishment of particular crimes. Analogously, at a certain point the German

  Protestant Church publicly declared itself “complicit before the God of Mercy

  for the evil that our people did to the Jews.” But the Protestant Church was not

  so ready to draw the inevitable consequence that this responsibility in reality con-

  cerned not the God of Mercy but the God of Justice and should have called for

  the punishment of those preachers guilty of having justified anti- Semitism. The

  same can be said for the Catholic Church, which, even recently in the declaration

  of the French episcopate, showed itself willing to recognize its own collective

  guilt toward the Jews. Yet this very church has ne
ver wanted to admit the precise,

  grave, and documented omissions of Pope Pius XII with respect to the persecu-

  tion and extermination of Jews (in particular, with respect to the deportation of

  Roman Jews in 1943).

  Levi is perfectly convinced that it makes no sense to speak of collective guilt

  (or innocence) and that only metaphorically can one claim to feel guilty for

  what one’s own people or parents did. When a German writes him, not without

  hypocrisy, that “the guilt weighs heavily on my poor betrayed and misguided

  people,” Levi responds that “one must answer personally for sins and errors,

  otherwise all trace of civilization would vanish from the face of the earth” (Levi

  REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ

  825

  1989: 177–78). And the only time Levi does speak of collective guilt, he means

  it in the only sense possible for him, that is, as a wrong committed by “almost

  all the Germans of the time”: of not having had the courage to speak, to bear

  witness to what they could not not have seen.

  3.6. But another reason leads one to distrust that explanation. More or less

  consciously and more or less explicitly, it claims to present the survivor’s shame

  as a tragic conflict. Beginning with Hegel, the guilty-innocent person is the fig-

  ure through which modern culture interprets Greek tragedy and, concomitantly,

  its own secret contradictions. “In considering all these tragic conflicts,” Hegel

  writes, “we must above all reject the false idea that they have anything to do with

  guilt or innocence. The tragic heroes are just as much innocent as guilty” (Hegel

  1975: 1214). The conflict of which Hegel speaks, however, is not merely a matter

  of consciousness, in which subjective innocence is simply opposed to objective

  guilt. What is tragic is, on the contrary, for an apparently innocent subject to

  assume unconditionally objective guilt. Thus in Oedipus Rex

  what is at issue . . . is the right of the wide awake consciousness, the justification

  of what the man has self-consciously willed and knowingly done, as contrasted

  with what he was fated by the gods to do and actually did unconsciously and

  without having willed it. Oedipus has killed his father; he has married his mother

  and begotten children in this incestuous alliance; and yet he has been involved