Athens to Auschwitz

Thinking the history and future of politics with Agamben

Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men

The ancient Romans doomed the figure of homo sacer by marooning him beyond the laws of the state and its gods; he could be killed ‘without the commission of a homicide’, but he could not be offered as a sacrifice in a ceremony to honour the divine (HS, 83). But homo sacer is also, for Agamben, the ‘name’ of the most basic and the most primordial ‘political relation’ — the relation between life and sovereign, the supreme locus of political authority (HS, 82). Following Schmitt, Agamben conceives sovereignty in terms of the decision: life is the fundamental ‘referent’ of the sovereign’s decision, the surface, the membrane, upon which the power of the sovereign is articulated (HS, 82). In its act of deciding on the life which is its territory, the sovereign includes — inscribes — it within the political order; Agamben thus holds that homo sacer is the ‘secret tie’ of sovereignty and biopolitics (HS, 6). But this life is not a mere natural substrate; it is the scar tissue of the sovereign’s decision — as Agamben remarks, the creation of this ‘biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power’, the historical artefact of its operation (HS, 6). Agamben presents this insight as a ‘completion’ of Foucault, whose writings ‘converge towards’, but ‘never reach’, the nexus of sovereignty and biopolitics (HS, 6). Indeed, Agamben construes homo sacer as the buried complicity that makes it possible to specify precisely where ‘the juridical-institutional and the biopolitical models of power' — at certain moments in Foucault's vacillating genealogical research, they are seperated totally; in the brief analysis of Nazism in the last lecture of Society Must Be Defended, these models actually come together — have always bled into each other (HS, 6).

What is decisive for Agamben, though, is that this life is produced in its nakedness — it is terrifyingly ‘bare’ (HS, 4). Bare life is, paradoxically, ‘excluded’ from the politics in which it is inscribed; the scar tissue of this body is naked because it is devoid of the ‘rights’ and ‘expectations’ of political existence, and so — in this ‘state of exception’ (a notion which Agamben also derives from Schmitt) — it is vulnerable to the arbitrary violence of the sovereign that acts upon it (HS, 124, 159).¹ Nonetheless, the ‘peculiar privilege’ of the naked is that they — entrapped in the relation named homo sacer — are ‘the threshold of articulation’ for the distinction between ‘culture and nature’, or in Aristotelian terms bios and zoē (HS, 7, 181). Political order in the Western world — the community of the life which is human, the life which is ‘qualified’ for participation in politics — exists only because the biopolitical decision of the sovereign constitutes bare life as the ‘original political element’ (HS, 7, 88). In ‘every society’ of the West, this is to say, the prehistory of the human being is a cut, a laceration in life itself: ‘the humanity of living man’ is constitutively slashed from the life which is bare (HS, 139).

This torturous dynamic was first witnessed thousands of years ago: the political relation of homo sacer determined the appearance of the Greek polis, the city of men, upon the crust of Earth. The homines sacres in the Athens sometimes celebrated as a world-historical miracle were, of course, women and slaves; the latter class, according to some estimates, was a quarter of the Athenian population. But this 'paradigm' of sovereignty has since been petrified in all subsequent Western politics as its inner, perverse core (HS, 9). In the political universe Agamben represents, then, the screams of bare life reverberate throughout the entirety of Western political history. Concerning the modern era specifically, Agamben posits that homo sacer — as the constitutive structure of Western politics — is the key to the shared genealogy of and the ‘inner solidarity’ between the contemporary political formations of democracy and fascism — this unity (in large part) reduces the distinction between these projects to mere noise (HS, 10). It is the ‘camp’, however, which most directly expresses the continuity that this endless chatter conceals (HS, 123). Agamben prefaces his own analysis of the camp's horror by remarking that Foucault disappointed the ‘legitimate expectation’ that his great histories of the asylum, hospital and prison, the total institutions of the grand enfermement, would culminate in a genealogy of the concentration camp (HS, 119). Agamben, as mentioned, styles himself as completing Foucault; no doubt, Agamben envisions his dissection of the camp — the culmination of his analysis of sovereignty as a biopolitical order — as a bringing of finality to Foucault’s entire project, interrupted by his tragic death in 1984.

There is an approach to fascism, and its atrocities, that probes what lurks within: answers have included (as I have previously discussed) an instinctual life that hardened, froze, with the tyrannical advance of the world-historical project of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), or the yoke of mummy-daddy, Oedipal desire, that is continually reinscribed by the psychoanalytic priest (Deleuze and Guattari). In an extremely interesting move, Agamben asserts that plumbing the inky depths of the Nazis that condemned millions of human beings to the gas chamber and the smoking chimney is worthless, even ‘hypocritical’ (HS, 171). Whatever was swirling through the countless heads of the Nazi beast is not, or should not be, the target of examination. He considers it ‘more honest and, above all, more useful’ to examine the camp, the Konzentrationslager, as a definite ‘structure’, a shard of the world, where the relation of homo sacer is ‘realised normally’ (HS, 170-71). For Agamben, the inside that really matters was enclosed by the barbed wire of the extermination camp — not the bone of the skull.

On Agamben's account, the Konzentrationslager is an enduring localisation (the word used is ‘materialisation’) of the decision upon bare life which is the essence of sovereign power — and the 'supreme principle’ of the Third Reich, as a 'radically biopolitical state' (HS, 10, 142, 170-71). Inside the extermination camp, the relationship between life and sovereign — this power having entered into a monstrous symbiosis with the camp's contingent of SS troops, as well as its staffs of bureaucrats and physicians — knew absolutely no mediation.² This was where the power of the sovereign 'confronted nothing but pure life', life 'completely deprived' of its rights and its humanity (HS, 171).³ For exactly this reason, the ‘most absolute biopolitical space to have ever been realised’ was Auschwitz (HS, 171). Totally 'transformed' into the scar tissue of bare life, literally anything could be done to the body of the inmate — in the camp ‘everything had become possible' (HS, 171). The destruction unleashed upon them by soldier, bureaucrat and physician, as the incarnations of the sovereign, was truly infinite — even the most heinous torture, the most complete annihilation, simply could not ‘appear’ as a criminal act (HS, 171). Thus, for Agamben, the popular line of inquiry that seeks to crack open Nazi heads — to answer the question of how men could inflict this almost unspeakable evil upon other men — represses the fact that it was not human beings that were eradicated in the camp. Admitting to the provocation, Agamben asserts that the inmates, in whom there was not even a trace of the juridical subjectivity that is constitutive of humanity as participation in politics, were annihilated ‘exactly as Hitler had announced, ‘as lice’, which is to say, as bare life’ (HS, 114). Biopolitics is, in the end, the only register through which the catastrophe of the Holocaust can be properly understood.

For Agamben, the most extreme instance of the bare life that was entrapped in the power relation of Auschwitz was the spectral figure known by the inmates themselves, including Jean Améry and Primo Levi, as der Musselman.⁴ As Agamben points out, Musselmänner are ‘barely named’ in the great works of the Holocaust's historians (RA, 52). But Agamben wants to restore to this figure its singular historical status: while corpse piles are absolutely ancient — as Benjamin saw, they are in a politically decisive sense history itself — der Musselman was a relatively recent and ‘absolutely unprecedented’ apparition of a biopolitics, of sovereign power, absolutely realised (RA, 40). As Agamben puts it, this figure was nothing less than ‘the final biopolitical substance to be isolated in the biological continuum’ (RA, 85). Through his readings of the testimonies provided by Améry, Levi and other survivors, Agamben presents der Musselman as a shambling husk — a mute organic existence where, in an irreversible scandal that is simultaneously epistemological-metaphysical and ethical-political, the categories of alive and dead utterly break down, or rather, infinitely and perpetually ‘pass through each other’ (RA, 48, 55, 58). Musselmänner were the ‘monstrous biological machines’ unbearable to the eyes of even the other inmates — these ‘non-men who march and labour in silence’, these breathing mechanisms in whom the ‘divine spark was dead’ (Levi’s words), terrifyingly represented the ultimate threshold, the line beyond which one’s very personhood no longer existed (RA, 55, 57). ⁵And all that remained in this bottomless abyss was the gas chamber.

Having conceived the camp — the infernal birthplace of der Musselman — in terms of its fundamental structure, Agamben confronts his reader with this: there is no eluding the fact that, today, those of us in the so-called ‘First World’ are all 'in the presence of a camp' (HS, 174). Agamben himself refers to the retribution of the bloated Atlantic (and, one can add, Pacific) ‘liberal democracies' against the migrants who, in desperation, scale their fortifications: brutal detention. As for Agamben's specific examples of such camps, he mentions the confinement of migrants in the football stadiums of his native Italy, as well as the zones d'attentes in the airports of neighbouring France, sites where the suspension of law stands still as those with the 'correct' documents endlessly flow through the smooth, shining terminals. While not denying the historically singular evil of the Nazi camp, an evil which drags us to the terrifying edge of our language, Agamben nonetheless insists that there is a profound structural analogy between these detention facilities and the Konzentrationslager that encrusted the blood-soaked surface of the Third Reich and its imperial conquests. Even if the specific evils (to us, not their perpetrators, 'crimes') inflicted in these camps very meaningfully differ, the decision of the sovereign, in symbiotic relationship with the camps’ personnel, is temporally frozen inside them both, and the abjection of bare life, stripped of rights and humanity, is the consequence (HS, 174). And so — contra Arendt’s figuration of it as the simply ‘insane’ laboratory of ‘total domination’ specific to the so-called, historically anomalous ‘totalitarian’ regimes — the camp for Agamben is the 'matrix' through which the political universe which is coinhabited by liberalism and fascism is revealed with a shattering clarity (OT, 447, 457; HS, 175). A key ideological production of the bourgeosie’s propaganda corps is thus collapsed by Agamben — while Arendt makes it easy to draw a bold line of historico-ontological seperation between liberal democracy and National-Socialism, he does not.

In the disastrous world of 2022, sovereignty is still (largely) incarnated in the border guard, the immigration cop. And, as the acceleration of ecological collapse displaces millions upon millions, the power of this sovereign in police, military or corporate uniform can be expected to become ever more monstrous, gradually deepening the pit of the ‘processing centre’. Can this be avoided? Of course, Agamben is well-aware that particular historical developments in Western modernity intervened in the preparation of the camp; the first of these spaces were erected by the United States and the British Empire in their respective imperial wars against the Spanish and the Boers. But in Agamben's eyes, this does not dissolve the fact that the camp's evil is, in the final analysis, traceable directly back to the establishment of the paradigm of sovereignty, the political relation of homo sacer, at the exact moment that the polis constituted itself. Athens to Auschwitz.⁶ There is thus a desperate need for an entirely new, presently unimaginable, politics — one in which life totally escapes the power of sovereignty, a politics beyond biopolitics. While some have rushed to burn Agamben's life work because of his regrettable public statements on the mass death event of the Coronavirus pandemic, which aligned him with Trump and Bolsanaro (and the capital that these nauseating names stand for), the challenge he issues to constitute politics anew not only endures — it is actually becoming, as the world boils, more urgent. Only with a new politics could this planet, circling around one of the universe's trillions of twinkling stars, become a paradise — a world no longer haunted by the ghosts of bare life, a world where no human being is doomed to the terror of the camp.

(A state election looms in my native Victoria, Australia; pending the total reconstitution of politics, I encourage readers who also live here to vote for, if possible, the Victorian Socialists.)

Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men

1. In other words, the human being — the bare life — doomed by sovereign power to be homo sacer is simultaneously included within and excluded from the Law. Now, as Dolar discusses in A Voice and Nothing More, the literary interpretation of Kafka is a field structured by a great stalemate. For some, the tragic fate of Kafka’s heroes — men such as The Trial’s Josef K. — is the infinite ‘transcendence of the Law’, the fact that it can ultimately only be experienced as an ‘unfathomable, ungraspable deity’; but other interpreters, most notably Deleuze and Guattari, propose that the predicament of Kafka’s universe is an absolute immanence to the Law — its chimerical transcendence, the illusion of an inaccessible ‘interior’, is a metaphysical ruse, and we (and indeed our desire) are always-already utterly captured within its tyranny (VNM, 165-66). Dolar proposes, however, that figures such as Josef K. are exposed (that is, immanent) to ‘the Law as such in its absolute validity’ — but to the extreme, paradoxical point that it crosses over into its lethal antithesis, as when poor Josef is slaughtered ‘like a dog’ in the last lines of The Trial (VNM, 167-68; TT, 271). Which is to say, the Law in Kafka ‘functions as its own permanent transgression’; inclusion within it murderously degenerates into the exclusion of a wholly ‘arbitrary’ destruction of bare life (VNM, 168). The decisive point for Dolar, then, is that the fundamental achievement of Kafka’s fiction was to transform homo sacer (decades before Agamben’s genealogy of Western (bio)politics) into a ‘central literary figure’ (VNM, 168). Accordingly, Dolar suggests that the catastrophes of the twentieth century are anticipated in Kafka’s literary universe — that looming beyond the ‘offices’, ‘registries’ and ‘musty, shabby, dark rooms’ (to use Benjamin’s words) of this universe are the gas chambers and cremation ovens (I, 112). The world Kafka portrays is the shadow of Auschwitz. But, recalling that Agamben’s ambition in interrogating homo sacer as the most archaic political relation is to stage a genealogical critique of the whole rotten edifice of Western politics, we might say that the fiction of a Jew from twentieth-century Prague (who largely wasted his short life working for insurance companies) is conceivable as the basic text of our entire civilisation — functioning comparably to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex for Freud and Homer’s The Odyssey for Adorno-Horkheimer.

2. Esposito’s Bíos — a book that, while it does allude to Agamben a few times, seems determined not to name him; Esposito explicitly dialogues with Foucault in considerable detail — offers a notable examination of the enthusiastic complicity of the German medical profession in National-Socialism as the crucial cipher for this entire political order. Which is to say, for Esposito, the white gown is, in a sense, the ultimate symbol of Nazism — and not the black boots stamping on faces. The obscene political task of Germany’s doctors — having been handed the ‘sceptre of the sovereign’ long before the SS deathsquads — was to preserve the supposed biological health of the Volk by ruthlessly eliminating ‘degenerate life’, to prevent 'the contagion of superior beings by those that are inferior' (B, 113, 116). At first, the doctors liquidated the disabled and the ill; ultimately, in the camps, they supervised the entire extermination process, ‘medically verifying’ every stage of ‘the production of death’ (B, 114). For Esposito, this exposes the radical 'immunitary paradigm' that formed the nucleus of Nazi biopolitics — the paradigm that, after the people of the Soviet Union shattered the spine of the Wehrmacht and as the Western Allies' armies marched across the Rhine, eventually turned against the mass of the German population itself, with a defeated Hitler ultimately ordering this social body's destruction, the razing of its cities (Arendt documents this mutation in some detail in her book on totalitarianism, though Esposito's biopolitical terms are not hers) (B, 116).

3. While this viscerally disturbing short story responds most directly to the mechanised mass murder horrifically epitomised by the Somme and at Verdun, battles which saw tens of thousands of men slaughtered for imperialist powers to exchange patches of mud, Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie) prophetically anticipated the advanced technological format of the totally immediate power relation of the camps, as Adorno suggests. In his story, Kafka imagines a highly elaborate killing-machine whose dancing needles excruciatingly etch (Kafka’s Nietzschean-Foucauldian word is ‘inscribe’) an elaborate design — which appears as an incomprehensible ‘maze of criss-crossing lines’ — onto the naked body of the Condemned (PC, 82). After hours of torture, this man begins to ‘decipher’ in his tormented flesh the meaning of this design — to comprehend the Law in the material texture of his pain (PC, 84). When the Condemned achieves, in his agony, a complete understanding of the text that his bleeding body has become, the killing-machine spears him through the head and casts his corpse into a ditch, where it ‘splashes down onto the blood and water’ (PC, 84). Revealing his critique of the planetary order of colonialism, the Condemned that Kafka presents in his story, a native whose supposed crime was his failure to salute the door of a French captain, will know the Law by deciphering ‘“Honour thy superior!”’ in the labyrinthine text that will be stabbed onto his body by the killing-machine — and so, the hideous power relations of the colony will be enforced (PC, 79). Hence, this machine, this technological terror, is power working directly upon unclothed flesh, upon literally bare life — as did the vast killing factories of the Konzentrationslager scarring the face of Europe, following Agamben's biopolitical analysis.

4. This designation, literally ‘the Muslim’, did not circulate in every Nazi camp; as examples, Musselmänner were called ‘cretins’ in Dachau, ‘donkeys’ in Majdanek, ‘cripples’ in Stutthof (RA, 44). The literal Arabic meaning of the word Muslim is ‘unconditional submission’ to God; on Agamben’s account, der Musselman submitted, too — but in ‘a loss of all will and consciousness’ (RA, 45). Agamben posits that this connection provides ‘the most likely explanation’ for the use of the word by the inmates (RA, 45).

5. Žižek’s Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? offers its own examination of Musselmänner as the ‘key figures’ of the Nazi Konzentrationslager (DSST, 73). For Žižek, der Musselman — that organic texture through which life and death endlessly circulate — is the total suspension in the existential project (or Entwurf) sketched in Heidegger’s Being and Time, that is, the human being’s engaged assumption of and active immersion in their being-thrown-in-the-world (DSST, 77). However, this is not to say that der Musselman — in the agonising conditions of the extermination camp — simply collapsed into the inauthentic, bovine existence of the Heideggerian das Man, the mindless sponge of the they-self. Agamben’s final biopolitical substance is, on Žižek’s account, ‘somewhere else’ altogether, on a ‘zero-level of humanity’ that is ‘beneath’ — not beyond — Good and Evil, ‘tragedy and comedy, sublime and ridiculous, dignity and derision’ (DSST, 79, 86). Banished to a subterranean hell of ‘unspeakable horror’, der Musselman confronts directly ‘the Thing’ that totally resists Symbolisation; the ‘uncanny, intense fixity’ of the Musselmänner gaze testifies to this terrifying underworld confrontation (DSST, 79). The monstrous biological machine cast into this hell was thus reduced to ‘a pure self-relating negativity’, a bottomless Void (DSST, 77). Or, in Žižek’s native Lacanian register, der Musselman embodies (in its tortured, tattooed flesh) ‘the point of the Real’ that forms the ‘background’ for the installation of language, and so represents the ‘gap’, the crack in reality, that ‘we all […] pass through’ in order to be constituted as human beings (DSST, 76-77). Žižek is, of course, well-known for his expositions of Lacan through cinema, particularly the films of Alfred Hitchcock. One could wonder (with Butler, if I am not mistaken) about the theoretical integrity of Lacanian theory as it is made to reappear by Žižek in cinema; but one could also ask, with far more seriousness, about the implications of der Musselman resurfacing through the seminars of Lacan. To me, Žižek’s analysis of this decisive figure, despite its rhetorical power, risks transforming Musselmänner into a simple metaphor for the universe of Lacanian psychoanalysis. And, though Žižek does develop (in his Lacanian terms) an interesting comparison between der Musselman and the victim of the Stalinist show trial, he is clearly less able to illuminate the overall historico-political meaning of der Musselman than Agamben, who — as established above — embeds his analysis of this biopolitical substance’s fabrication in his wider critique of the constitutive terms of political order in the West.

6. In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire has a striking formula for Nazism: the ‘procedures’ of colonialism, its slaughters and its tortures, dragged into the dark heart of Europe (DC, 36). Which is to say, Césaire grasps the Third Reich’s atrocities as the red waves of colonialism turning inward, the planetary massacre recoiling on itself and ‘engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilisation’, leaving ruined cities, corpse piles and ashy skies in its wake (DC, 36). The author of these abominable crimes was the European depraved, ‘brutalised in the true sense of the world’, by the barbarisms of empire (DC, 35). But it was not merely immediate participation in imperial conquest that released the hideous spectres lurking in the European man, that dug up his evil ‘instincts to covetousness, violence [and] hatred’ — it was also his justification of, even simple indifference to, the daily, countless abominations of colonialism, a rape in Senegal, a beheading in Vietnam or a torture in Madagascar (DC, 35). Hence, Césaire’s scorn for the horror struck by Hitler into a certain ‘very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois’ — what really appalls this deeply pathetic figure, Césaire asserts, is not the mortification of the human being as such, but the fact that those bagged in white skin were humiliated by the colonial policies previously reserved for the black and brown masses of tormented humanity (DC, 36). That the very beginning of Western civilisation is identified by Agamben — and indeed by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Nietzschean genealogy of Enlightenment — as the establishment of a logic that would culminate in Auschwitz could be read as profoundly symptomatic (in a strong Freudian sense), a motivated forgetting of the more immediate causes of the death camps in the exterminations wrought in Africa and Asia, America and Australia. This is not to deny the very substantial merits of Agamben and Adorno-Horkheimer's projects (or to collapse these figures into Césaire's pathetic humanist), but to suggest the possibility of a psychoanalysis of these projects' terms.