"...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"
"perhaps never before Auschwitz was the shipwreck of dignity in the face of an extreme figure of the human and the uselessness of self-respect before absolute degradation so effectively described"
"...Auschwitz marks the end and ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It is itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent"
"...what defines the camp is not simply the negation of life... neither death nor the number of victims in any way exhausts the camp's horror...the dignity offended in the camp is not that of life but rather of death"
"In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production"
"...the decisive function of the camps in the system of Nazi biopolitics. They are not merely the place of death and extermination; they are also, and above all, the site of the production of the Muselmann, the final biopolitical subtance to be idolated in the biological continuum. Beyond the Muselmann lies only the gas chamber"
The Power of Life
12 years ago
Is this from a paper of yours? As tragic and monumental as Auschwitz was, I think that Adorno, Agamben and others sometimes go too far (for instance this idea that poetry is not possible after Auschwitz) because they conveniently forget about things like the genocide of the American Indians and various slave trades and colonial projects.
ReplyDeleteNah I was just reading the book for a class I'm auditing and thought I share some of his more thoughtful observations. Adorno went too far with his poetic claim, Agamben doesn't say anything as audacious. He actually advocates the impossible testimony of the survivors and those who died and the 'muselmann' that were an aporetic gray area of humanity. This is probably my favorite work by him, one may claim that he favors Auschwitz, perhaps, but i think he just see's Auschwitz as a paradigmatic example one available for Europeans. It would be our responsibility to talk about the American genocide.
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