human temporality is generated through the self-presence and presence to the
world that the act of enunciation makes possible, how human beings in general
have no way to experience the “now” other than by constituting it through the
insertion of discourse into the world in saying “I” and “now.” But precisely for
this reason, precisely because it has no other reality than discourse, the “now”—as
shown by every attempt to grasp the present instant—is marked by an irreducible
negativity; precisely because consciousness has no other consistency than lan-
REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ
843
guage, everything that philosophy and psychology believed themselves to discern
in consciousness is simply a shadow of language, an “imagined substance.” Sub-
jectivity and consciousness, in which our culture believed itself to have found its
firmest foundation, rest on what is most precarious and fragile in the world: the
event of speech. But this unsteady foundation reaffirms itself—and sinks away
once again—every time we put language into action in discourse, in the most
frivolous chatter as in speech given once and for all to oneself and to others.
There is more: the living being who has made himself absolutely present to
himself in the act of enunciation, in saying “I,” pushes his own lived experiences
back into a limitless past and can no longer coincide with them. The event of
language in the pure presence of discourse irreparably divides the self-presence
of sensations and experiences in the very moment in which it refers them to a
unitary center. Whoever enjoys the particular presence achieved in the intimate
consciousness of the enunciating voice forever loses the pristine adhesion to the
Open that Rilke discerned in the gaze of the animal; he must now turn his eyes
inward toward the non-place of language. This is why subjectification, the pro-
duction of consciousness in the event of discourse, is often a trauma of which
human beings are not easily cured; this is why the fragile text of consciousness
incessantly crumbles and erases itself, bringing to light the disjunction on which
it is erected: the constitutive desubjectification in every subjectification. (It is
hardly astonishing that it was precisely from an analysis of the pronoun “I” in
Husserl that Derrida was able to draw his idea of an infinite deferral, an originary
disjunction—writing—inscribed in the pure self-presence of consciousness.)
It is therefore not surprising that when something like consciousness ( sun-
eidēsis, sunnoia) makes its appearance in the work of Greek tragedians and poets, it appears as the inscription of a zone of non-consciousness in language and of
silence in knowledge, which has an ethical rather than logical connotation from
the beginning. Thus in Solon’s Eunomia, Dikē has the form of a mute con science ( sigōsa sunoide), and for the tragedians consciousness can also be attributed to an inanimate object which, by definition, cannot speak: the sleepless bed in Electra
and the rocky cavern in Philoctetus (cf. Agamben 1991: 91). When a subject ap-
pears for the first time as a consciousness, it thus has the form of a disjunction
between knowing and saying. For the one who knows, it is felt as an impossi-
bility of speaking; for the one who speaks, it is experienced as an equally bitter
impossibility to know.
3.19. In 1928, Ludwig Binswanger published a study bearing the significant
title The Vital Function and Internal History of Life. Introducing into psychiatric
844
HOMO SACER III
terminology a phenomenological vocabulary that is still imprecise, Binswanger
develops the idea of a fundamental heterogeneity between the plane of the phys-
ical and psychical vital functions that take place in an organism and in personal
consciousness, in which the lived experiences of an individual are organized into
an inner unitary history. In the place of the old distinction between the psy-
chic and the somatic, Binswanger proposes the much more decisive distinction
between the “functional modality of the psycho-somatic organism, on the one
hand, and the internal history of life on the other.” This allows him to escape the
confusion “between the concept of psychic function and the spiritual content of
psychic lived experiences,” which is both “inherent in the psychic term and by
now scientifically unsound.”
In a later work (which Foucault commented on), Binswanger compares this
duality to the opposition between dreaming and waking. “Dreaming, man—to
use a distinction I have drawn elsewhere—is ‘life-function; ‘ waking, he creates
‘life history.’ . . . It is not possible—no matter how the attempt is made—to
reduce both parts of the disjunction between life-function and life-history to a
common denominator, because life considered as function is not the same as life
considered as history” (Binswanger 1963: 247–48).
Binswanger limits himself to noting this opposition and to suggesting that
the psychiatrist ought to take account of both points of view. But he indicates
an aporia so radical that the very possibility of identifying a unitary terrain of
consciousness is called into question. Consider, on the one hand, the contin-
uous flow of vital functions: respiration, circulation, digestion, homeothermy
(but also sensation, muscular movement, irritation, etc.) and, on the other
hand, the flow of language and of the conscious “I,” in which lived experiences
are organized into an individual history. Is there a point in which these two
flows are unified, in which the “dreaming” of the vital functions is joined to
the “waking” of personal consciousness? Where, and how, can a subject be
introduced into the biological flow? Is it possible to say that at the point in
which the speaker, saying “I,” is produced as a subject, there is something
like a coincidence between these two series, in which the speaking subject can
truly assume his own biological functions as his own, in which the living being
can identify himself with the speaking and thinking “I”? In the cyclical de-
velopment of bodily processes as in the series of consciousness’ intentional
acts, nothing seems to consent to such a coincidence. Indeed, “I” signifies pre-
cisely the irreducible disjunction between vital functions and inner history,
between the living being’s becoming a speaking being and the speaking being’s
sensation of itself as living. It is certainly true that the two series flow along-
REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ
845
side one another in what one could call absolute intimacy. But is intimacy not
precisely the name that we give to a proximity that also remains distant, to a
promiscuity that never becomes identity?
3.20. The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura Bin, director of the Psychiatric Hos-
pital of Kyoto and translator of Binswanger, sought to deepen Heidegger’s anal-
ysis of temporality in Being and Time with reference to a classification of the
fundamental types of mental illness. To this end he made use of the Latin for-
mula post festum (literally, “after the celebration”), which indicates an irreparable past, an arrival at things that are already done. Post festum i
s symmetrically distinguished from ante festum (“before the celebration”) and intra festum (“during the celebration”).
Post festum temporality is that of the melancholic, who always experiences
his own “I” in the form of an “I was,” of an irrecoverably accomplished past with
respect to which one can only be in debt. This experience of time corresponds in
Heidegger to Dasein’s Being-thrown, its finding itself always already abandoned
to a factual situation beyond which it can never venture. There is thus a kind of
constitutive “melancholy” of human Dasein, which is always late with respect to itself, having always already missed its “celebration.”
Ante festum temporality corresponds to the experience of the schizophrenic,
in which the direction of the melancholic’s orientation toward the past is in-
verted. For the schizophrenic, the “I” is never a certain possession; it is always
something to be attained, and the schizophrenic therefore always lives time in
the form of anticipation. “The ‘I’ of the schizophrenic,” Kimura Bin writes, “is
not the ‘I’ of the ‘already been’; it is not tied to a duty. In other words, it is not
the post festum ‘I’ of the melancholic, which can only be spoken of in terms of a
past and a debt. . . . Instead, the essential point here is the problem of one’s own
possibility of being oneself, the problem of the certainty of becoming oneself
and, therefore, the risk of possibly being alienated from oneself” (Kimura Bin
1992: 79). In Being and Time, the schizophrenic’s temporality corresponds to the primacy of the future in the form of projection and anticipation. Precisely
because its experience of time originally temporalizes itself on the basis of the
future, Dasein can be defined by Heidegger as “the being for whom, in its very
Being, Being is always at issue” and also as “in its Being always already anticipat-
ing itself.” But precisely for this reason, Dasein is constitutively schizophrenic; it always risks missing itself and not being present at its own “celebration.”
One might expect the temporal dimension of intra festum to correspond to
a point between the melancholic’s irreparable self-loss and the schizophrenic’s
846
HOMO SACER III
advance absence at his own ceremony, a point in which human beings would
finally gain access to a full self-presence, finding their dies festus. But it is not so.
The two examples of intra festum Kimura Bin provides have nothing celebratory
about them. In the first case, obsessive neurosis, the adherence to the present
takes the form of an obsessive reiteration of the same act with the intention,
so to speak, of procuring proof of being oneself, of not always having missed
oneself. In other words, the obsessive type seeks through repetition to document
his own presence at a celebration that constantly eludes him. The constitutive
self-loss characteristic of intra festum temporality is even clearer in Kimura Bin’s second example: epilepsy, which he presents as the “original landscape” of insanity—a particular form of self-loss achieved through a kind of ecstatic excess
over presence. According to Kimura Bin, the decisive question for epilepsy is:
“Why does the epileptic lose consciousness?” His answer is that in the point in
which the “I” is about to adhere to itself in the supreme moment of celebration,
the epileptic crisis confirms consciousness’ incapacity to tolerate presence, to
participate at its own celebration. In Dostoevsky’s words, which he cites at this
point: “There are instants that last no longer than five or six seconds, in which
all of a sudden you hear the presence of eternal harmony, and in which you have
reached it. It is not earthly. But I do not want to say that it is heavenly either;
only that in his earthly form man is incapable of tolerating it. He must either be
physically transformed or die” (ibid.: 151).
Kimura Bin does not offer an example of epileptic temporality in Being and
Time. And yet it is possible to suppose that it concerns the instant of decision, in which anticipation and having been, schizophrenic temporality and melancholic
temporality coincide, and the “I” comes to itself in authentically assuming its
own irreparable past (“its anticipation of its most extreme and ownmost possi-
bility is a return to its own having been”). The silent and anguished decision that
anticipates and assumes its own end would then be something like Dasein’s epileptic aura, in which Dasein “touches the world of death in the form of an excess, an excess that is both an overflowing and a source of life” (ibid.: 152). In any case,
according to Kimura Bin, man seems necessarily to dwell in a disjunction with
respect to himself and his own dies festus. Almost as if living beings were constitutively divided on account of having become speaking beings, of having said
‘I,’ and as if time were nothing other than the form of this disjunction. And as
if this disjunction could be mastered only in the epileptic excess or the moment
of authentic decision, which represent something like the invisible architraves
sustaining the ecstatico-horizonal edifice of time, keeping it from caving in on
Being-There’s spatial situation, its There.
REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ
847
From this perspective, Auschwitz marks the irrecoverable crisis of authentic
temporality, of the very possibility of “deciding” on the disjunction. The camp,
the absolute situation, is the end of every possibility of an originary temporality,
that is, of the temporal foundation of a singular position in space, of a Da. In
the camp, the irreparability of the past takes the form of an absolute imminence;
post festum and ante festum, anticipation and succession are parodically flattened on each other. Waking is now forever drawn into the inside of the dream: “Soon
we will again hear / the foreign command: / Wstawac! ”
3.21. It is now possible to clarify the sense in which shame is truly some-
thing like the hidden structure of all subjectivity and consciousness. Insofar as it
consists solely in the event of enunciation, consciousness constitutively has the
form of being consigned to something that cannot be assumed. To be conscious
means: to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed. (Hence both guilt
as the structure of conscience in Heidegger and the necessity of the unconscious
in Freud.)
Consider the old philosophical definition of man as zōon logon echōn, the living being who has language. The metaphysical tradition has interrogated this
definition with regard both to the living being and to logos. And yet what has
remained unthought in it is the echōn, the mode of this having. How can a living being have language? What can it mean for a living being to speak?
The preceding analyses have sufficiently shown the sense in which speaking
is a paradoxical act that implies both subjectification and desubjectification, in
which the living individual appropriates language in a full expropriation alone,
becoming a speaking being only on condition of falling into silence. The mode
of Being of this “I,” the existential status of the speaking-living-being is thus
a kind of ontological glossolalia, an absolutely insubstantial chatter in which
the living being and the speaking being, subjectification and desubjectification,
&n
bsp; can never coincide. This is why metaphysics and the Western reflection on lan-
guage—if they are two different things—have constantly sought to articulate
the relation between the living being and the speaking being, to construct a link
securing communication between what seems incommunicable, giving consis-
tency to the “imagined substance” of the subject and its ungraspable glossolalia.
This is not the place to show how this articulation has been generally sought
in the site of an “I” or a Voice—as a silent voice of conscience that appears to
itself in inner discourse, on the one hand, and on the other, as an articulated
voice, phōnē enarthos, in which language is securely joined to the living being by being inscribed in its very voice. And yet in the final analysis this Voice is always
848
HOMO SACER III
a mythologeme or a theologoumenon; nowhere, in the living being or in language, can we reach a point in which something like an articulation truly takes
place. Outside theology and the incarnation of the Verb, there is no moment
in which language is inscribed in the living voice, no place in which the living
being is able to render itself linguistic, transforming itself into speech.
It is in this non-place of articulation that deconstruction inscribes its “trace”
and its différance, in which voice and letter, meaning and presence are infinitely differed. The line that, in Kant, marked the only possible way to represent
the auto-affection of time is now the movement of a writing on which “the
‘look’ cannot ‘abide’” (Derrida 1973: 104). But precisely this impossibility of
conjoining the living being and language, phōnē and logos, the inhuman and the human—far from authorizing the infinite deferral of signification—is what
allows for testimony. If there is no articulation between the living being and
language, if the “I” stands suspended in this disjunction, then there can be
testimony. The intimacy that betrays our non-coincidence with ourselves is
the place of testimony. Testimony takes place in the non-place of articu lation.
In the non-place of the Voice stands not writing, but the witness. And it is
precisely because the relation (or, rather, non-relation) between the living being
and the speaking being has the form of shame, of being reciprocally consigned
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 132
