The Omnibus Homo Sacer

by Giorgio Agamben

  root of these apparently heterogeneous meanings?

  As to the meanings of “seller” and “adviser,” a quick examination of the

  relevant texts suffices to confirm their substantial pertinence to the term’s funda-

  mental meaning. The seller is said to be auctor insofar as his will, merging with that of the buyer, validates and legitimates the property at issue. The transfer

  of property thus appears as a convergence of at least two parties in a process

  in which the right of the acquirer is always founded on that of the seller, who

  thus becomes the buyer’s auctor. When we read in the Digest (50, 17, 175, 7) non debeo melioris condicioni esse, quam auctor meus, a quo ius in me transit, this simply means the following: “My right to property is, in a necessary and sufficient

  fashion, founded on that of the buyer, who ‘authorizes’ it.” In any case, what is

  essential is the idea of a relationship between two subjects in which one acts as

  auctor for the other: auctor meus is the name given by the buyer to the current seller, who renders the property legitimate.

  “The meaning of ‘he who advises or persuades’ also presupposes an analo-

  gous idea. It is the author who grants the uncertain or hesitant will of a subject

  the impulse or supplement that allows it to be actualized. When we read in

  Plautus’s Miles, “quid nunc mi auctor es, ut faciam? ,” this does not simply mean,

  “What do you advise me to do?” It also means, “To what do you ‘authorize’ me,

  in what way do you complete my will, rendering it capable of making a decision

  about a certain action?”

  From this perspective, the meaning of “witness” also becomes transparent,

  and the three terms that, in Latin, express the idea of testimony all acquire

  their characteristic physiognomy. If testis designates the witness insofar as he intervenes as a third in a suit between two subjects, and if superstes indicates

  the one who has fully lived through an experience and can therefore relate it to

  others, auctor signifies the witness insofar as his testimony always presupposes

  something—a fact, a thing or a word—that preexists him and whose reality and

  force must be validated or certified. In this sense, auctor is opposed to res ( auctor magis . . . quam res . . . movit, the witness has greater authority than the witnessed

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  thing [Liv. 2, 37, 8]) or to vox ( voces . . . nullo auctore emissae, words whose validity no witness guarantees [Cicero, Coel. 30]). Testimony is thus always an act of an “author”: it always implies an essential duality in which an insufficiency or

  incapacity is completed or made valid.

  It is thus possible to explain the sense of the term auctor in the poets as

  “founder of a race or a city,” as well as the general meaning of “setting into

  being” identified by Benveniste as the original meaning of augere. As is well known, the classical world is not acquainted with creation ex nihilo; for the ancients every act of creation always implies something else, either unformed

  matter or incomplete Being, which is to be completed or “made to grow.” Every

  creator is always a co-creator, every author a co-author. The act of the auctor

  completes the act of an incapable person, giving strength of proof to what in

  itself lacks it and granting life to what could not live alone. It can conversely be

  said that the imperfect act or incapacity precedes the auctor’s act and that the imperfect act completes and gives meaning to the word of the auctor-witness.

  An author’s act that claims to be valid on its own is nonsense, just as the survi-

  vor’s testimony has truth and a reason for being only if it is completed by the

  one who cannot bear witness. The survivor and the Muselmann, like the tutor and the incapable person and the creator and his material, are inseparable; their

  unity-difference alone constitutes testimony.

  4.7. Let us return to Levi’s paradox: “the Muselmann is the complete witness.”

  It implies two contradictory propositions: 1) “the Muselmann is the non-human,

  the one who could never bear witness,” and 2) “the one who cannot bear witness

  is the true witness, the absolute witness.”

  The sense and nonsense of this paradox become clear at this point. What is

  expressed in them is nothing other than the intimate dual structure of testimony

  as an act of an auctor, as the difference and completion of an impossibility and possibility of speaking, of the inhuman and the human, a living being and a

  speaking being. The subject of testimony is constitutively fractured; it has no

  other consistency than disjunction and dislocation—and yet it is nevertheless

  irreducible to them. This is what it means “to be subject to desubjectification,”

  and this is why the witness, the ethical subject, is the subject who bears witness

  to desubjectification. And the unassignability of testimony is nothing other than

  the price of this fracture, of the inseparable intimacy of the Muselmann and the

  witness, of an impotentiality and potentiality of speaking.

  Levi’s second paradox, according to which “the human being is the one

  who can survive the human being,” also finds its true sense here. Muselmann

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  and witness, the inhuman and the human are coextensive and, at the same

  time, non-coincident; they are divided and nevertheless inseparable. And this

  indivisible partition, this fractured and yet indissoluble life expresses itself

  through a double survival: the non-human is the one who can survive the

  human being and the human being is the one who can survive the non-human.

  Only because a Muselmann could be isolated in a human being, only because

  human life is essentially destructible and divisible can the witness survive the

  Muselmann. The witness’ survival of the inhuman is a function of the Musel-

  mann’s survival of the human. What can be infinitely destroyed is what can

  infinitely survive.

  4.8. Bichat’s central thesis is that life can survive itself and that life is, indeed,

  constitutively fractured into a plurality of lives and therefore deaths. All the Re-

  cherches physiologiques sur la vie et sur la mort are founded on Bichat’s observation of a fundamental fracture in life, which he presents as the co- presence of two

  “animals” in every organism. First there is the “animal existing on the inside,”

  whose life—which he calls “organic” and compares to that of a plant—is nothing

  but a “habitual succession of assimilation and excretion.” Then there is “the ani-

  mal living on the outside,” whose life—which is the only one to merit the name

  “animal”—is defined by its relation to the external world. The fracture between

  the organic and the animal traverses the entire life of the individual, leaving

  its mark in the opposition between the continuity of organic functions (blood

  circulation, respiration, assimilation, excretion, etc.) and the intermittence of

  animal functions (the most evident of which is that of dreaming- waking); be-

  tween the asymmetry of organic life (only one stomach, one liver, one heart) and

  the symmetry of animal life (a symmetrical brain, two eyes, two ears, two arms,

  etc.); and finally in the non-coincidence of the beginning and end of organic

  and animal life. Just as in the fetus organic life begins before that of animal life,

  so in getting old
and dying it survives its animal death. Foucault has noted the

  multiplication of death in Bichat, the emergence of a moving or detailed death,

  which divides death into a series of partial deaths: brain death, liver death, heart

  death. . . . But what Bichat cannot accept, what continues to present him with

  an irreducible enigma is not so much this multiplication of death as organic

  life’s survival of animal life, the inconceivable subsistence of “the animal on the

  inside” once the “animal on the outside” has ceased to exist. If the precedence of

  organic life with respect to animal life can be understood as a process of devel-

  opment toward more and more elevated and complex forms, how is it possible

  to explain the animal on the inside’s senseless survival?

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  The passage in which Bichat describes the gradual and inexorable extinction

  of animal life in the indifferent survival of organic functions constitutes one of

  the most intense moments in the Recherches:

  Natural death is remarkable in that it puts an almost complete end to animal

  life long before organic life ends. Consider man, who fades away at the end of a

  long period of old age. He dies in details: one after another, his external functions

  come to an end; all his senses cease to function; the usual causes of sensation no

  longer leave any impression on him. His sight grows dim, confused, and ends by

  not transmitting the image of objects; he suffers from geriatric blindness. Sounds

  strike his ear in a confused fashion, and soon his ear becomes completely insensi-

  tive to them. At this point, the cutaneous layer, hardened, covered with calluses

  partially deprived of blood vessels, and now inactive, allows for only an obscure

  and indistinct sense of touch. Habit, in any case, has blunted all sensation. All

  the organs that depend on the skin grow weak and die; hair and body hair grow

  thin. Without the fluids that nourished it, most hair falls out. Odors now leave

  only a light impression on his sense of smell. . . . Isolated in the middle of nature,

  partially deprived of his sensitive organs, the old man’s brain is soon extinguished.

  He no longer perceives much of anything; his senses are almost incapable of

  being exercised at all. His imagination fades away and disappears. His memory

  of present things is destroyed; in a second, the old man forgets what was just

  said to him, since his external senses, which have grown weak and are, as it were,

  dead, cannot confirm what his spirit thinks it grasps. Ideas escape him, while the

  images traced by his senses no longer retain their imprint. (Bichat 1986: 200–201)

  An intimate estrangement from the world corresponds to this decline of ex-

  ternal senses, an estrangement that closely recalls the descriptions of the Musel-

  mann in the camps:

  The old man’s movements are seldom and slow; he leaves only with great cost

  the condition in which he finds himself. Seated beside the fire that is heating

  him, he spends his days concentrating on himself, alienated from what surrounds

  him, in the absence of desires, passions, sensations—almost without speaking,

  since nothing pushes him to break his silence. He is happy to feel that he still

  exists, for almost every other feeling has vanished. . . . It is easy to see, from what

  we have said, that in the old man external functions are extinguished one after

  another and organic life continues even after animal life has almost fully come

  to an end. From this point of view, the condition of the living being about to

  be annihilated by death resembles the state in which we find ourselves in the

  maternal womb, or in the state of vegetation, which lives only on the inside and

  is deaf to nature. (Ibid.: 202–203)

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  The description culminates in a question that is truly a bitter confession of

  powerlessness in the face of an enigma:

  But why is it that, when we have ceased to exist on the outside, we continue to

  live on the inside, when senses, locomotion, and so forth are above all designed

  to place us in relation to bodies that nourish us? Why do these functions grow

  weaker than internal ones? Why is their cessation not simultaneous? I cannot

  succeed in fully solving this enigma. (Ibid.: 203–204)

  Bichat could not have foretold that the time would come when medical

  resuscitation technology and, in addition, biopolitics would operate on precisely

  this disjunction between the organic and the animal, realizing the nightmare of

  a vegetative life that indefinitely survives the life of relation, a non-human life

  infinitely separable from human existence. But, almost as if a dark foreboding of

  this nightmare suddenly crossed his mind, he imagines a symmetrical possibility

  of a death turned upside down, in which man’s animal functions survive while

  his organic functions perish completely:

  If it were possible to imagine a man whose death, affecting only internal functions

  (such as circulation, digestion, secretions, and so forth), permitted the subsis-

  tence of the set of functions of animal life, this man would view the end of his

  organic life with indifference. For he would feel that the worth of his existence

  did not depend on organic functions, and that even after their “death” he would

  be capable of feeling and experiencing everything that until then had made him

  happy. (Bichat 1986: 205–206)

  Whether what survives is the human or the inhuman, the animal or the

  organic, it seems that life bears within itself the dream—or the nightmare—of

  survival.

  4.9. As we have seen, Foucault defines the difference between modern bio-

  power and the sovereign power of the old territorial State through the crossing of

  two symmetrical formulae. To make die and to let live summarizes the procedure

  of old sovereign power, which exerts itself above all as the right to kill; to make

  live and to let die is, instead, the insignia of biopower, which has as its primary objective to transform the care of life and the biological as such into the concern

  of State power.

  In the light of the preceding reflections, a third formula can be said to in-

  sinuate itself between the other two, a formula that defines the most specific

  trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: no longer either to make die or to make live, but to make survive. The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists

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  in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually in-

  finite survival. In every case, it is a matter of dividing animal life from organic

  life, the human from the inhuman, the witness from the Muselmann, conscious life from vegetative life maintained functional through resuscitation techniques,

  until a threshold is reached: an essentially mobile threshold that, like the bor-

  ders of geopolitics, moves according to the progress of scientific and political

  technologies. Biopower’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the

  absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoē and bios, the inhuman and the human—survival.

  This is why in the camp, the Muselmann— like the body of the overcoma-

  tose person and the neomort attac
hed to life-support systems today—not only

  shows the efficacy of biopower, but also reveals its secret cipher, so to speak its

  arcanum. In his De arcanis rerum publicarum (1605), Clapmar distinguished in the structure of power between a visible face ( jus imperii) and a hidden face ( arcanum, which he claims derives from area, jewel casket or coffer). In contemporary biopolitics, survival is the point in which the two faces coincide, in which

  the arcanum imperii comes to light as such. This is why it remains, as it were,

  invisible in its very exposure, all the more hidden for showing itself as such. In

  the Muselmann, biopower sought to produce its final secret: a survival separated from every possibility of testimony, a kind of absolute biopolitical substance

  that, in its isolation, allows for the attribution of demographic, ethnic, national,

  and political identity. If, in the jargon of Nazi bureaucracy, whoever participated

  in the “Final Solution” was called a Geheimnisträger, a keeper of secrets, the Muselmann is the absolutely unwitnessable, invisible ark of biopower. Invisible

  because empty, because the Muselmann is nothing other than the volkloser Raum, the space empty of people at the center of the camp that, in separating all life

  from itself, marks the point in which the citizen passes into the Staatsangehörige

  of non-Aryan descent, the non-Aryan into the Jew, the Jew into the deportee

  and, finally, the deported Jew beyond himself into the Muselmann, that is, into a bare, unassignable and unwitnessable life.

  This is why those who assert the unsayability of Auschwitz today should

  be more cautious in their statements. If they mean to say that Auschwitz was

  a unique event in the face of which the witness must in some way submit his

  every word to the test of an impossibility of speaking, they are right. But if,

  joining uniqueness to unsayability, they transform Auschwitz into a reality ab-

  solutely separated from language, if they break the tie between an impossibility

  and a possibility of speaking that, in the Muselmann, constitutes testimony, then they unconsciously repeat the Nazis’ gesture; they are in secret solidarity with

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  the arcanum imperii. Their silence threatens to repeat the SS’s scornful warning to the inhabitants of the camp, which Levi transcribes at the very start of The

  Drowned and the Saved: