How do you explain the unexplainable? How can someone bear witness to something not only unbelievable, but unexperienced? And if it is experienced, how can it be explained?
One of the most perplexing elements of the Holocaust is its simultaneous historicization and mythologization. The latter term does not refer to its non-existence, but a shroud of language that narrates what cannot be directly understood. It is simultaneously something that must be remembered, indefinitely, so that its horrors may not repeat. However, at the same time, it is considered as a singularly unique event (often its comparison to other twentieth-century genocides or massacres is decried as diminishing its importance). If it is absolutely unique, how can it be described in historical terms? Instead, the Holocaust becomes a core mythologme for modern theology: theodicy. As Ellie Wiesel famously painted in Night: the Jewish boy hung from the gallows was a kind of judgement on God. The question of modern theology is how God could be good, or omnipotent, or all wise, if he permitted the Holocaust to occur. The Trial (as in Kafka's novel) becomes definitive for coming to terms with history and theology, ethics and civilization. God survives this ordeal, but as the powerless one, the one who weeps, the one unable to act. And thus as men cry out "may It never happen again!", the juridical-order of The Camp continues to spread across the world. The Trial upon The Holocaust continues indefinitely, without resolution or clarity.
But what, exactly, is being judged? And what would resolution look like? Often, the resolution is that this judgement is assumed at a collective level, in a theological key. Germany, as well as most of the West, performed rituals of humility, to recognize that they had failed and now had the obligation to never let It happen again. But what does guilt without punishment mean? Ironically, Adolf Eichmann took this defense in his trial at Jerusalem. He wanted to kill himself so the German people may be relieved of the weight of guilt, that he knew his actions were guilty before the eyes of God, but, at the same time, he was not guilty of the assembled court in Israel. Similarly, phenomena such as white guilt continue to generate a sense of guiltiness without any particular law or penalty. While some have compared this disposition to something almost medieval, this claim is misguided. At least in Roman Catholicism, there are means to concretely put an end to one's sin, one's guilt and debt (interestingly the same word - schuld - in German). Instead, this new disposition, this obligation to always remember, where morality is entirely constructed around a Trial that has no end (history moving into mythos), marks a break with the past. Instead, no resolution may come and the mythological glory only continues. Even the framework of "Holocaust" is peculiar, given its reference to an immolated sacrifice before God. In this case, the sacrifice becomes a permanent fixture. There is a Trial, but no sentence; there is guilt, but no expiation. It is a new theology.
But what language can this new theology speak? Many Holocaust survivors lament that they cannot, in fact, bear witness of what happened because they bear the guilt of survival. It was those who perished in the Camp, by starvation or bullet, fire or gas, which could speak. And those who survived cannot speak. If this disposition marks out the entrance into history, and language, of the event of the Holocaust, then it can never be spoken. Yet, whether it is Israeli containment of Palestinians, the incoherence of an American "overflow facility" at the border, or the Australian compulsory quarantine zones, the event of The Camp continues to exist. It is, as Agamben describes elsewhere, a moment of indistinction and exception: excluded from the polity at the same time that it is captured entirely within its power. If The Camp cannot be described, trapped within the logic of The Trial (Judgement looming but never rendered), then what took place will never be understood. It is, as Josef K discovered, a glorious baroque edifice that has unlimited power, incapable of direct action and murderous in indirect confrontation. While no language may exist for the Holocaust, its repetition continues.
The figure that best represents the impotent living, the man without speech, was the Musselman. Called "Muslims" because of their complete subjection (from the belief that Islam was fatalist), the Musselmaner had lost all shreds of their humanity. They did not speak. They did not think. A faceless mass of workers whose only concern was sheer survival, from meal to meal, moment to moment. Addressed by a guard, they remained speechless. Beaten for insolence, they urinated and defecated themselves without shame or awareness. Without a will or consciousness, the Musselmaner persevered without end. There was no "after" The Camp. There was an eternal present, a complete collapse into a zone indistinguishable between man and beast. This transformation is part of the nightmare of the camp, yet they can't speak of what took place. The Musselman becomes the ultimate form of modernity's biopolitics:
"At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at times a political limit or an anthropological concept, the Musselmann is an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously pass through each other. This is why the Musselmann's 'third realm' is the perfect cipher of the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed and all embankments flooded" (48)
This eternal present, this totalized immanence, where everything is everything (and thus nothing), marks out the true horror of the Camp. The Musslemanner have no past and no future, they are creature of The Camp, pathetically clawing to survival until it simply slips away. They become indescribable and unbearable. Their state of un-living reveals the pure extraction of biological subsistence from anything distinctly human. And it is this figure, buried within the theodicy of theologians, that marks out the modern god. Wiesel's narration spoke better than he knew: the suffocating (but not quite dead) teen, the un-living, had become the fully immanent god. The world was a camp and God was the God of the un-living. Like the Greek Gorgon, the Event could be gestured at through a euphemism, but direct analysis would paralyze and remove a man from the world of speech, from his humanity. If this takes place, how can anyone bear witness to this possibility?
But this is the purpose of language. Speaking is always, in itself, a bearing witness to a reality that exists outside the parameters of speech. Whether it is a social bond, a discrete object, another subject, language constantly exhausts itself in its own impotence. But then the Musselmann, who cannot speak, cannot bear witness to what is beyond language, language at its very limit. In parallel terms, the Musselmann is also beyond all dignity within human society. Opposition to mistreatment emerges from a claim to rank, that one is treated as if one is in another place. A king objects to being treated as a servant, a slave blushes in his treatment as a noble. The man in line for McDonald's believes he is entitle to a certain caliber of service, in possession of the rank as patronizing customer. But within The Camp, all questions of dignity are drowned. The Musslemann simply receives abuse, simply consumes, simply survives day to day. But what kind of human being is one that does not have a place, except in the "non-place" of The Camp? In both of these cases - language and dignity - a pure form of de-humanized life emerges. A dog cannot cease being a dog, a cat cannot cease being a cat. Yet in mankind, there lays a real risk that the unique calling of a man may be erased. The Camp becomes an alchemical experiment. For just as human beings experience, through their lives, a coming-to-be as mature and fulfilled, so too may this process be reversed. The Musselmann is the residue, the remnant, of The Camp.
Perhaps strangely, if this figure cannot quite be called a human being - it being like a zombie in a state of un-living - then it can not be said to die. And what is a human being? Within Western history, the rise of the modern era coincided with the shift from territorial sovereignty towards a national sovereignty. The House of Bourbon (kings of France) shifted towards the Napoleonic (Emperor of the French). Nationality had an integral connection with birth (natio) and thus began the process of bio-politics. Sovereignty had always included the right over life and death (the differentiation between judicial execution and illicit murder), but the rites of a polity now referred to a citizenship connected to the appearance of a life. However, the obvious ambiguities (who is "French"?) require legal definitions, that the law grants and recognizes the citizenship of this individual, to person them within the law. But this process could work in reverse: the law may strip you of citizenship and reduced to a different legal category. As Hannah Arendt noticed in the national tumults and movements after World War One, these national constitutions could say nothing to peoples who lacked a state. If the nation-state only existed for the nation that constituted it, then what becomes of foreigners who lack a legally constituted land of their own? Democracy also required demography. Thus National Socialists were only radical in their commitment to this system of government. They would produce a state that was entirely democratic, entirely popular, where no remainder was left between people and populace. The fabrication of corpses that emerged from The Camp was the residue of a machine accomplishing its end.
"Beyond the Muselmann lies only the gas chamber" (85)
The above is the shadow cast from the modern phenomena of nation-state, democracy, and human rights. Mere existence is not sufficient to frame questions of justice. Since The Trial, and its juridical apparatus of producing guilt, has completely subsumed ethics, it is impossible to think life beyond what the letter of the law represents. Human Rights may seem benign to many liberal minded, but as much as it sketches out what it is to be a Human in the abstract and basic sense, it also suggests the loss or deprival of said rights. The legal prescription is not denotative, but creative, a cloaked imperative about what must be done. Thus the regime of Human Rights has simultaneously produced an infinite flood of Identity Politics. It is not enough to condemn murder, but the death of protected minorities becomes important for the preservation of this or that sub-group. In a majority of minorities, the infinite proliferation of groups means an infinite proliferation of means of removal. The law thus must increasingly determine what constitutes a man or woman, a religion, a sexual preference, and so on. Conservatives lamenting trans-gender bathrooms, and liberals panicking over penis inspection tests for athletes, both participate in the same bio-political logic of governance. The body becomes the site of what constitutes a person, which constantly swaps between bio-medical realities (surgeries, hormones, chromosomes, etc.) and the fictitious legal personage the law creates (man/woman, religion, sex preference, and so on). The constant swap back and forth will inevitably produce a remnant that require classification or exclusion. Is it any wonder that the primary out-label in use is privative? The "unvaccinated" is a designation that verged on the de-peopling of citizens, moving them beyond the protective guard of the law. The Musselman is the visible remainder of this process, of what life looks like beyond all aspects of peopling, mere biological susbsistence, a vegetable man.
This process of de-humanizing is the subjection of shame. A man is not stripped if he is naked, he must be clothed in order to receive the degrading, the removal from his place, his dignity. Thus, as Carl Schmitt recognized in the exception, only the possibility of degradation establishes the significance of the grade. The law's power is only visible when it ceases to function, when it is suspended to carry out a punishment. In antiquity, often the violence of the law could only take place outside the polity, outside the boundary that separate the domain of men from beasts. It is the process of removal, such as Christ being led out in a reverse royal procession, that separated what was man and what was left of man. But if the man is left behind, who experiences this subjection? The subject (literally what is sub-ject, cast beneath) is the remainder behind all grades, the one who can bear witness of what he is (or experiences) outside of his role. It's no surprise that the importance of this subject coincided with the rise of the nation-state, a position that became increasingly interiorized and psychologized. It was precisely the brave cogito that found its full expression in the Aufklarung imperative Sapere Aude, the call for all to recognize and assume their subjection. Simultaneously, the subject (like the citizen) remains sovereign and servant, the subject and a subject. One is The People and subject to The People. The sovereign man stands alone, naked, to act, but is infinitely crushed beneath the Moral Imperative of Universal Law.
Shame then emerges out of this infinite subjection, which also generates the sum-zero pleasure of duty. Obedience to a law that generates bliss threatens to undo the very fabric of pure obedience. In this way, a perverse form of Kantian ethics is the S&M chamber. The masochist submissive cannot admit the pleasure of subjection without ruining the rules of the game. The role-play requires dominance and submission, where the subjected is simultaneously the subject (who commands the game to go on). While grotesque, the dimensions of S&M unveil the same mechanism of the "turn to the subject" and the transcendental formalism of Enlightened modernity. What is simultaneously in control and controlled requires an infinite movement between the two, as much as The People governs and is governed. The Subject must subject itself to the Law through a self-duplication. The absolute subject (who is in perfect conformity to the universal law) calls and commands its own subjectification to obedience. The "self" is the remainder of this process, of what should and must obey. In the S&M scenario, the masochist and the sadist both require duplication (the subjected masochist who also controls the scenario, the subject sadist who also be subject to the masochist's whim). This split allows the game to continue, even as it remains an irresolvable contradiction. Democracy too requires the self-same serious moment of inner and outer subjection, even as the People (as subject) remains triumphant. Every electoral loss must be received without soreness ("we'll win next time"), or else the game's dimensions would begin to crumble. Electoral losers, like the self, are what remain, which both constitute the game and remain a threat to it.
But what remains at the center of this exchange? Stripped of the eroticizing rules, what is S&M besides two bodies faced with their own actions and preferences? Stripped of the glorious hue of "the system works", what is mass democracy but government through corporate advertising? Shame is what occurs when the lights turn on, the game ends, the social relations dissolve. What is revealed at the heart of this swirling movement is a void, though one ascribed with the will to continue the dance. But rather than suspend the game, shame is also a means to preserve its ongoing. The moment of exclusion, the production of the remnant, is to remove one from the game. The guilty self, charged of crime, is degraded, removed from citizenship. The Musselman has not simply been shorn of his German citizenship or even his second-class Jewishness, he has been removed from humanity. And what is this? The paradox is fundamental to all subjectivity, which has only become most pronounced in the modern era with the exaltation of the 'I'. But what is an 'I'? It is worth a lengthy citation:
"Once stripped of all extra-linguistic meaning and constituted as a subject of enunciation, the subject discovers that he has gained access not so much to a possibility of speaking as to an impossibility of speaking - or, rather, that he has gained access to being always already anticipated by a glossolalic [speaking in tongues] potentiality over which he has neither control nor mastery. Appropriating the formal instruments of enunciation, he is introduced into a language from which, by definition, nothing will allow him to pass into discourse. And yet, in saying 'I,' 'you,' 'this,' 'now...,' he is expropriated of all referential reality, letting himself be defined solely through the pure and empty relation to the event of discourse. The subject of enunciation is composed of discourse and exists in discourse alone. But, for this very reason, once the subject is in discourse, he can say nothing; he cannot speak.
'I speak' is therefore just as contradictory a statement as is 'I am a poet.' For not only is the 'I' always already other with respect to the individual who lends it speech; it does not even make sense to say that this I-other speaks, for insofar as it is solely sustained in a pure event of language, independent of every meaning, this I-other stands in an impossibility of speaking - he has nothing to say. In the absolute present event of discourse, subjectification and desubjectification coincide at every point, and both the flesh and blood individual and the subject of enunciation are perfectly silent." (116-117)
The problem of democracy is fundamentally a problem of language. For in saying 'I', there is a duplication between speaker and the subject now entered into discourse. What this means is that, behind the language-game of role-play, there emerges two figures that cannot relate: the body and the linguistic figure. The one sustains the latter, but cannot be brought to coincide with it, anymore than flesh and blood people could ever be represented within the democratic sovereign of We, The People. Every time we say 'I', the moment has already passed and the subject of speech is no longer within the present. However, rather than the rabid effort to make the two coincide (which the absolute subject of the moral imperative erases all remnants of biological failure), the two must reach a dialectical stand-still. Here the possibility of testimony emerges:
"Testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one speak and where the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in his own speech, such that the silent and the speaking, the inhuman and the human enter into a zone of indistinction in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the 'imagined substance' of the 'I' and, along with it, the true witness" (120)
The witness avoids the discursive see-saw between humanism and ethno-narcissism, between all humans are human and some humans are human. In both instances, the impossibility to establish the human-being often meltdown. The humanistic crusade of National Socialism, to preserve humanity as humanity, met the inhumanity of liquidating those who could not (or should not) carry on the masquerade. The witness (in Greek, martyr) is the one who shares what happened, to gesture towards the world outside of discourse. It is not a question of establishing guilt or culpability, only to reveal the truth. What took place at Auscwitz was inhuman, and it is precisely in the possibility of speaking the impossible that man's linguistic nature is fulfilled. To move off from Holocaust, it is also the importance for how the New Testament Gospels were recorded. While tradition preserves the names of the (likely) authors, the importance is not in an authorial 'I' dictating to the hearer. Instead, it is a bearing witness to the coming of the Christ and the fulfillment of an otherwise impossible task. How was it that the people of God would kill God? How could the fount of blessing be cursed? The only knowledge of this event is from those who cannot bear witness bearing witness. It is only in the indirect gesture that what cannot be said can be said.
In contrast to post-modern theorists of democracy, such as Derrida, which have shrunk back from the fulfillment of their thought into infinite deferral, the witness confronts the concrete limits of language. Symbols do not infinitely cycle in a game of indistinct references. The result of this fashionable academic theology is nothing but the masochistic acceptance before the sadistic imperative. The impotent suffering god is simply to sacralize what took place in Auschwitz, the transformation of the Musselmanner into a Holocaust. In a sick irony, it's those Christian theologians who most agonize over the Holocaust's theodicy are those who agree with what the National Socialist camp commanders had accomplished. Derridean theology, one that sees the dead god of vegetation, agree that The Camp could successfully dehumanize and push what was fundamentally human into oblivion. The past gives way to an eternal present, and what took place can never be re-membered.
But against this process of destruction, the martyr is a resurrection from the dead. If the Musselman is the remnant of this process of dehumanization, the survivor is the one who can bear witness to what befell him, even as he has ceased. The animalized body has not ceased, only that the logos or reasoned imagination of the speaker may testify what had happened. The entire stakes of humanity are unveiled:
"The human being is the speaking being, the living being who has language, because the human being is capable of not having language, because it is capable of its own in-fancy. Contingency not one modality among others, alongside possibility, impossibility, and necessity: it is the actual giving of a possibility, the way in which a potentiality exists as such. It is an event (contingit) of a potentiality as the giving of a caesura between a capacity to be and a capacity not to be. In language, this giving has the form of subjectivity. Contigency is possibility put to the test of a subject" (146)
In other terms, it is precisely because the process from baby to adult - from the speechless to speaking, from irrational to rational - may fail or reversed, mankind hangs in the balance. However, precisely because the Human project requires the conjuncture (the full entanglement between the two) and such is demanded, the Human gives birth to the Inhuman. The constant effort to resolve this contradiction ends in a lowest-common-denominator. Governments exist to maintain this state of conjunction, which is also a mere hair-breadth from dehumanization. To maintain the vegetable man of the Musselman becomes, effectively, the ground floor for all modern politics. Identity politics becomes a fantastic rendering, like an S&M game, of what this plant like subsistence could be "as if", and thus these scenarios require codification in law to exist as life. But government may as well restrict or remove these, such as in the case of a lockdown or medical mandate. All of the lifestyles, supposedly codified, melt away before this primary injunction to survive. If this logic is accepted, its complete perfection appears in The Camp.
Opposed to this view, the suspension between the phonetic body and the logical subject mean that, fundamentally, there is no ultimate coinherence. In a mystical turn, Agamben would even express that the tongue as such does not speak, but Language itself speaks through the animal-like body. The result is that the pure speech-act, the one that reveals this dialectical stand-still, is witness. The story of what occurred, that can reveal the contingency of the human being between its humanity and animality, allow a different kind of existence. Life is not the same thing as survival, that the mind, in its reason and imagination, can be reduced to what is necessary. Like Christian martyrs in the past, it would be preferable to die in the truth than be conformed into a false or unbecoming life. As St. Ignatius of Antioch pleaded with the Roman Christians who wanted to rescue him:
"If you keep silent about me, I will become a word of God; but if you love me in a purely human manner, I will become a meaningless sound. Allow me to become a sacrifice to God; let my blood be spilled while there is still an altar at hand." (Epistle to the Romans, 2)
Everyone who picks up and reads this letter may recognize what Ignatius had, in fact, achieved. He suffered imprisonment and arrest for his life as truth. Mere survival would reduce it to the burble of the gibbering ape, which every bio-politics threatens to do, suspended between men as men and men not quite as men. Hence why the abortion debate often rotates around questions of the baby's brain activity, heart-beat, movement, and so on. The passage from non-life to life, as much as babe to adult, becomes a question of coinherence around an increasingly thin definition of what constitutes life and what constitutes human. Instead of a polity constituted around the freedom of the un-identifiable and un-governable living how they are, it becomes a question of increasingly strict measures to preserve a humanized animality that is, at its core, Musselman.
The theology of the immanent dead god, the full corruption of a hyper-Christian theology, must depart before it sacralizes the continued Camp that continues to appear in modern politics. The Deistic architect (a god believed in by both Jefferson and Hitler) has died, but its corpse continues to pulsate in the constipated agnosticism of post-modern theology. Instead, the resurrected Logos, the ever-present Kingdom of God within, may put a permanent end to the machine. The S&M role-play of mass democracy breaks down: where individuals may come to terms that there is no We, The People, as much as the imagined rules obscures the shame between two in bed. The forgiveness of once-and-for-all Christ may put away the perversion, the regimentation, the government, and open up a new form of politics. Thus the truth of The Camp may be historicized and put away from the ex-Musselmann who learn to speak, not as the 'I' of the camp-dweller but as the one who remembers. The God who is all in all, in whom all live, move, have their being, and speak, is the one who remains. The Remnant - the Christ dead and yet alive, hands pierced with nails - means that no matter what, man may go on speaking. We all may look on him whom was pierced and weep. A life, beyond gradation and degradation, may appear.
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