(J. M. Bernstein) Intact and Fragmented Ethics After Auschwitz

Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics "After Auschwitz"
Author(s): J. M. Bernstein
Source: New German Critique, No. 97, Adorno and Ethics (Winter, 2006), pp. 31-52
Published by: Duke University Press
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Intact and Fragmented Bodies:
Versions of Ethics "after Auschwitz'
J. M. Bernstein
The Drowned and the Saved

In Negative Dialectics Theodor W. Adorno opens the second section, "Medi
tations and Metaphysics," with this declaration: "A new categorical impera
tive has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts
and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will
happen."1 Although up to this juncture Adorno has offered no concrete policy
proposals or action-oriented political recommendations, he has been building
a reflective critique of atemporal reason, and hence he has been providing
immanently good reasons for us to transform our usual habits of thought and
action. The demand to arrange our thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will
not repeat itself, in this context, therefore already includes a highly elaborated
specification of the form of reasoning that Adorno thinks is capable of respond
ing to the exigencies of an event like Auschwitz. This specification involves
a rearrangement of the relation between universal and particular whereby cer
tain objects and events can become orientational for rationality generally; it
also involves a contention that, specifically, the sufferings of others are among
those particulars that have remained unacknowledged by universalistic rea
son and that thus deserve to become orientational for ethical reflection.
1. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1973), 365. Hereafter cited as ND.
New German Critique 97, Vol. 33, No. 1, Winter 2006

DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2005-004 ? 2006 by New German Critique, Inc.
31
32 Ethics "afterAuschwitz"
Since the argument for a transformation of reason had been, until the
moment when Auschwitz entered into the account, fully reflective, reason
immanently criticizing itself, the introduction of the fact of Auschwitz into the
argument demands a shift in rational register. The rational demand for trans
formation becomes both bodily and ethical, which is exactly what Adorno goes
on to state: "Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new
imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum?bodily, because
it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which
individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of
mental reflection. It is in the unvarnished materialistic motive only that moral
ity survives" (ND, 365). Appropriately contextualized within the history of
reason, our horror at the suffering of the drowned and the saved is itself the
moral addendum implied by the new imperative. Hence the rational force of
the imperative is just the acknowledgment of the suffering itself or, better, the
converse: even to begin to acknowledge the character of the suffering of Holo
caust victims must include the acceptance of the new imperative if our relation
to the event of Auschwitz is to avoid piety and duplicity. What the new impera
tive calls for is a new conception of culture that would entail a singular and
massive transformation in the structures of authority governing everyday life,
and therefore a new self-understanding of how culture can be formative for us.
Elsewhere, I have tried to reconstruct the details of this argument.2 None
theless, however reconstructed, it contains patent and disconcerting lacunae.
First, and most evidently, apart from saying that metaphysics must be respon
sive to the Holocaust or become utterly bankrupt, Adorno never specifies what
kind of relation to that event philosophy must have. Second, although he pre
sumes that the Holocaust was in some sense bound up with enlightened rea
son, and hence with the sacrifice of the particular to the universal, Adorno
never works out precisely what the relation was. Third, elsewhere in his writ
ings Adorno pursues the thesis that such a sacrifice includes the idea that the
living is sacrificed to what is already dead, and in "Dying Today" he argues
that since Auschwitz fearing death means fearing worse than death, namely,
the systematic production of the death-in-life that was the essence of the
rationality of the camps (ND, 368-73). While it is evident that Adorno means
his remarks to urge us toward a deeper respect for our animality, our living
being, nowhere in Negative Dialectics does he provide the positive terms for
such respect; at most, we get a Utopian gesture: "But what hope clings to, as in
2. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 2001), chaps. 8-9.
J. M. Bernstein 33
Mignon's song, is the transfigured body" (400). Finally, one might reasonably
complain that Adorno never synthesizes these thoughts about death, dying,
and animality with his contention that a new categorical imperative has been
imposed on us. The business about a bodily sensation of a moral addendum
hardly amounts to the terms for affirming our vital animality.
These four issues are directly addressed in Giorgio Agamben's Remnants
of Auschwitz in a conceptual scheme that at first glance appears quite close to
Adorno's; it is almost as if Agamben's book were designed to fill in the missing
arguments in Adorno's account.3 To provide a quick overview of how this
might be, I begin with a famous passage from Primo Levi's The Drowned and
the Saved that is pivotal for Agamben's argument:
I must repeat?we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncom
fortable notion, of which I have become conscious little by little.... We sur
vivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those
who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom.
Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about
it or have returned mute, but they are the "Muslims," the submerged, the
complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general signifi
cance. They are the rule, we are the exception.. . . We who were favored by
fate tried, with more or less wisdom, to recount not only our fate, but also that
of others, the submerged; but this was a discourse on "behalf of third par
ties," the story of things seen from close by, not experienced personally.
When the destruction was terminated, the work accomplished was not told
by anyone, just as no one ever returned to recount his own death. Even if they
had paper and pen, the submerged would not have testified because their
death had begun before their body. Weeks and months before being snuffed
out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, compare and
express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy.4
These terrible words express a piercing sense of survivor's guilt: a shame

at having survived, and with that shame the sense that one's experience is
thereby inauthentic, less true than the reality suffered by the many, as if only the
extreme in suffering represented by the fate of the Muselm?nner, the Muslims
or mummy-men, the living dead, could provide the condition of truth for the
words spoken in their stead. They alone are "the complete witnesses, the ones
whose deposition would have a general significance," which is to say that there
3. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999). Hereafter cited as RA.
4. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus,
1989), 63-64.
34 Ethics " after Auschwitz"
is no general significance, no true claiming, apart from their witnessing of their

fate. But of course, they, the living dead, being dead, witnessed nothing.
Now Agamben is among those who claim that the Muselmann repre
sents the exemplary instance of the Shoah's meaning. We might reconstruct
the claim's underlying logic in this way: since the Muselmann represents both
the farthest reach of the camps in their systematic and administrative strip
ping away of human qualities from their victims and thus, simultaneously, the
destruction of the human to its farthest reach, then the Muselmann becomes
the limit case of the human. Because this limit case is equivalent to the liv
ing dead, then what would be revealed if we could fully, truly, and authenti
cally witness this horrific remnant is the ethical claim of the dead, and it is
only that claim in its interlocking of the meaning of the camps and the limit
case of the human that can deliver to us what the Shoah signifies for our com
prehension of human life generally. Only the speech of the living dead is true
speech, only the speech of those who have been systematically deprived of
the power of speech is true speech, and only in relation to this truth might
any other truths have worth from henceforth.
That Levi's claim that the Muselm?nner are the only "complete wit
nesses" is so evidently a direct consequence of the survivor's guilt that per
meates the passage as a whole might make us doubt the attempt to erect their
fates into a position of epistemic privilege. Is there not an all-too-perfect fit
between the survivor's sense of worthlessness and the exorbitant epistemic
ethical worth ascribed to the drowned? Let us put aside those doubts for now,
since my focus is Agamben's text, not Levi's. In broad terms, it is palpable
that the construction of the position of the Muselm?nner as providing a posi
tion of epistemic privilege (the idea of true witnesses), of historical privilege
(as the true meaning of the camps), and of ethical privilege (what it means to
acknowledge the human) quickly ties together three of the four problematic
items in Adorno's account. The last, the question of life, I shall come to directly.
Since Remnants of Auschwitz can be read as almost a commentary on the pas
sage from Levi, for Adorno's sake it deserves our attention. Although it is
everywhere extremely proximate to what needs saying on these topics, I shall
suggest that the very reasons that draw Agamben's account to our attention?
his construction of the position of the Muselm?nner?become the grounds
for refusing it.
The Destruction of the Human

Even to suppose that there might be something exemplary about the suffer
ings of the Muselm?nner requires a wider frame of reference. In her book on
J. M. Bernstein 35
its origins Hannah Arendt elaborates how totalitarianism as a whole, and the
camps as the most consequential institution of totalitarian rule, realize the
rationalization of reason with its ascetic hatred of life that has been, at least,
the dynamic element of modernity.5 In a perfect totalitarian government,
Arendt says, where all men have become One Man, "where every single act
is the execution of a death sentence which Nature and History have already
pronounced ... no separate principle of action separate from its essence would
be needed at all."6 The idea of reducing reality to One Man is the exact mirror
image, in political terms, of the scientific drive to provide a unified account
of the material world. What might initially appear reasonable for science is
madness for politics. So the goal of totalitarian rule, which was tested and
put into practice in the camps, is the striving to organize the infinite plurality
and differentiation of human beings as if all were just one individual: total
domination. To bring this about requires reducing each person "to a never
changing identity of reaction, so that each of these bundles of reactions can
be exchanged at random for any other," or, what is the same, to create a situ
ation in which the individual would be "nothing other than a specimen of the
species" (OT, 438, 465).7 In brief, the principle needed is the creation of the
complete exchangeability and hence fungibility of all human beings, which
is precisely what Adorno claims is the mechanism for actualizing the logic
of identity thinking. The camps are the true central institution of totalitarian
organizational power because they put into practice that reduction of the many
to the one.
Now what is startling is Arendt's contention that the "insane mass manu
facture of corpses is preceded by the historically and politically intelligible
5. Agamben's own framing occurs in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Hereafter cited as HS.
Since I think that the philosophical argument about sovereignty in this text is conceptually con
fused, and much of it historically suspect, I shall borrow from the sources, especially Arendt, that
Agamben himself borrows from, turning back to his text only to begin framing the question of life.
Needless to say, Agamben's conception of the political logic of the camps is a reworking of Arendt's
pioneering account.
6. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958), 467. Hereafter
cited as OT
7. Adorno suggests exactly the same idea when he states that "in the concentration camps it was
no longer an individual who died, but a specimen?this is a fact bound to effect the dying of those
who escaped the administrative measure" (ND, 362). Arendt and Adorno understood one another
not at all; nonetheless, I would hazard that nothing comes closer to a critical theory account of
Nazism than The Origins of Totalitarianism. My hints in this essay are part of a longer attempt to
spell out that thesis.
36 Ethics "after Auschwitz"
preparation of living corpses" (447). "Intelligible" because this preparation

follows a comprehensible logic: the destruction of the juridical person (447),
followed by the murder of the moral person (451), followed by the destruction
of unique identity, the spontaneity through which a person might still call
an action "mine" (453). While in Remnants Agamben focuses on this final
destruction, for Arendt only the conclusion of the destruction of the human
that begins with the ruin of the juridical and moral persons can create systemic
significance for that destruction, where such destructions are themselves encap
sulations of the logic of totalitarianism. For present purposes, a quick review
of the threefold process of destruction will have to suffice.
Destroying the juridical person required depriving the Jews of all their
political and civil rights. But this creation of rightless persons takes on an exor
bitant form in the camps. It involved, first, making certain categories of person
outside the protection of law and hence, through denationalization, exposing
individuals to lawlessness; it also involved placing the camps themselves, just
like the military prison in Guant?namo, outside the normal penal system and
putting there inmates not covered by juridical procedures in which a definite
crime entails a predictable penalty. So into the camps were placed nonagents,
that is, individuals with no capacity for normal or criminal action: Jews, carri
ers of diseases, gypsies, representatives of dying classes, and so on. Apart from
some "natural" characteristics, these individuals were innocent. What thus
made the operation of the camps a question of terror is just that: one was cho
sen, experimented on, punished, forced to labor not for any reason pertaining
to one's active life, not for anything one had done, but just because of who, in
some reductive sense, one was. The insult of racial profiling, for example, is just
this: one is subject to treatment independent of one's doings; one's innocence
is the condition for one's greater guilt.
Murdering the moral person demanded destroying human solidarity
through incapacitating the operation of conscience. Arendt argues that a condi
tion of moral meaning is that we be able to give death meaning, which in part
means that the difference between life and death is the necessary minimum
form through which we recognize the value of others. If my action contravenes
the boundary conditions of life and death, then the minimum conditions for
conscientious action are defeated. All previous forms of warfare and tyranny
recognized this difference: "The Western world has hitherto, even in its dark
est periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be remembered as a self
evident fact that we are all men (and only men)_The concentration camps,
by making death itself anonymous ..., robbed death of its meaning as the end
of a fulfilled life" (OT, 452). Anonymity is one aspect of destroying death?
J. M. Bernstein 37
of making death not the worst thing a human might suffer. What went along
with it was engendering situations that demonstrated that one could not judge
in accordance with the boundary conditions for moral intelligibility of life
and death, for instance, situations in which one's choice was always between
murder and murder: "Choose which of your children will die; if you fail to
choose, then both die. If you commit suicide, both die." A situation constructed
so that individuals might be forced to become the weapon of death for what
they love most or, at least, for other innocents like themselves makes all actions
and choices morally in vain. It equally demonstrates how utilitarianism?a
logic in which morally qualitative individuality gives way before quantitative
considerations?is a sacrificial logic in which the boundary condition that
makes morality intelligible in the first instance has already disappeared,
since, bluntly, the only form of deliberating left is quantitative: the logic of a
world without the possibility of conscientious action, morality in the absence
of morality.
The destruction of individuality is the crudest of the camp's practices.
It begins with the removal of all distinguishing characteristics: clothing, hair,
even one's proper name. In the early days of the camps, Arendt avers, this
destruction depended on torture and sadistic treatment, of continually reduc
ing individuals to their suffering bodily selves. But this phase ended when
the SS took over administering the camps: "The old spontaneous bestiality
gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies,
calculated to destroy human dignity, death was avoided or postponed indefi
nitely" (OT, 454; emphasis mine). The camps, Arendt claims, were transformed
from playgrounds for sadists into drill grounds. Punishment became mecha
nized routine; starvation and relentless laboring left just the empty husk,
"ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pav
lov's experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to
their own death, and which do nothing but react" (455).
For Agamben, this structuring of camp life itself belongs to an even
wider frame of reference, namely, the historico-philosophical transformation
of the relation between politics and life that he began elaborating in Homo
Sacer. Although this work's argument is subtle and complex, the line of thought
that we need to extricate from it here is familiar. It begins with the Greek sepa
ration of zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living
beings (animals, men, gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of liv
ing proper to an individual or a group. While Western ethics and politics have
been about the good life?some notion of bios above and beyond the mere fact
of living?Aristotle recognized zoe as having its own goodness:
This [life according to the good] is the greatest end both in common for all
men and for each man separately. But men also come together and maintain
the political community in view of simple living, because there is probably
some kind of good in the mere fact of living itself. If there is no great dif
ficulty as to the way of life, clearly most men will tolerate much suffering
and hold on to life [zoe] as if it were a kind of happiness [eu meria, beauti
ful day] and a natural sweetness.8
From the beginnings of political thought, the good life was separated
from the mere fact of life, whose goodness appears not as an authoritative
claim but, rather, like the weather or the charms of the palate, as a contingent
occurrence beyond reason or the laws of society. To express this idea in a Kant
ian register, from the beginning a radical division was instituted between two
sources of value: the sweetness of life, happiness, and the rational authority of a
way of life, the good life.
From the moment that men began to institute political forms of society,
there arose the necessity and the desire to marginalize the rational authority
of the claim of happiness. In considering the meaning of Plato's ideal city in
light of the experience of Greek tragedy, Henry Harris encapsulates this mar
ginalization in these words: "The City of Reason must 'kill its father' by wip
ing out whatever constitution has been established by [mere] custom; and incest
is inevitable if no citizen knows his or her natural siblings. But this only helps
us to understand Hegel's view that the Republic expresses Greek Sittlichkeit.
In Hegel's reading parricide and incest are poetic metaphors for what human
nature does to itself (logically) when it becomes political."9 The emergence
of the political requires the systematic severing of nature's authority. Sever
ing that authority, however, could not succeed if the claims of bare life were
simply left outside the political, passed over and ignored. Rather, analogous
to the case of moral goodness, the fate of bare life was to be included in the
polis through its exclusion (HS, 7), again analogous to how Kant includes the
claims of desire by excluding them (as authoritative claims).10 In Arendt 's
reconstruction of Greek political life this occurs by separating the private
sphere dedicated to the necessities of life, the minimum of bare life, which
she calls labor, from the public, political world of action, a world held as a
8. Aristotle, Politics, 1278b.23?31, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Basic Works, ed. Richard
McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).
9. H. S. Harris, Hegel's Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 217.
10. Only, of course, to include them later in his conception of the "highest good," in which hap
piness is given in proportion to virtue. Consider this Kant's acknowledgment of the return of the
repressed.
J. M. Bernstein 39
common space of appearances that emerges solely through words and deeds.11
For Agamben, this structure of the inclusive exclusion of bare life is constitu
tive not just of the political but of the political as the deepest expression of
Western metaphysics. Identifying the inclusive exclusion of bare life with the
severing of nature's authority provides the needed depth to Agamben's thesis,
allowing it to be separated from his more speculative claims about the notion
of the homo sacer itself (the sacred man who may be killed [that is his mode
of inclusion] but not sacrificed [his mode of exclusion]).
The second broad thesis orienting Homo Sacer elaborates and radical
izes one of Foucault's thoughts: "For millennia man remained what he was for
Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence.
Modern man is an animal whose politics call his existence as a living being
into question."12 Foucault is here insinuating his conception of modernity as
biopolitics, the transformation of the sovereign state's interests from a power
over life and death to an intrinsic concern with human life as such. This admin
istering and calculating of biological life occurs when the individual as a sim
ple living body becomes what is at stake in a society's political strategies.
When the state cares about birthrates and the physical well-being or not of its
citizens, when population shifts matter, when in general the nation's health
and biological life become a focus for sovereign power, then, at that juncture,
however obliquely and indirectly, bare life is brought within the bounds of
the state's interest: "The entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis?the politi
cization of bare life as such?constitutes the decisive event of modernity and
signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of
classical thought" (HS, 4).
Now, as Andrew Norris rightly notes, the "bare life that politics sloughs
off is never precisely defined by Agamben";13 rather, and this forms the pivot
that connects Homo Sacer with Remnants, the Muselmann exemplifies bare
life, the best case of the homo sacer. This is not an accidental identification,
since Agamben equally believes that the Nazi death camps are the fundamen
tal paradigm of biopolitical power: we need to read the state through the lens
of the camps rather than vice versa. For Agamben, this thesis is intimately
connected with an implausible account of the meaning of sovereignty that he
11. Labor and action are mediated, so to speak, in Arendt's scheme by work: the fabrication of
things in accordance with ideas.
12. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Pantheon, 1978), 143.
13. Andrew Norris, "The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Gior
gio Agamben's Homo Sacer," Radical Philosophy, no. 119 (2003): 11.
borrows from Carl Schmitt.14 But we need not follow Agamben's analysis of
sovereignty to come to think that there is something exemplary about the
camps and hence about the instance of the Muselmann. If I was right in my
contention above that, beginning with Greek democracy, modern moral
political thought is premised on denying nature's authority and that the
notion of bare life as the rationalized remnant of life's sweetness has been,
always, included through exclusion, and if we then think that Arendt's analy
sis of totalitarianism demonstrates how modernity's rationalization of reason
comes to entail the administration of life as it is carried out in the camps,
then we might equally recognize that this inclusive exclusion comes to its
fullest expression in the camps. I am unsure what the relation between bare
life and sovereignty has been, but at least from the perspective of Adorno's
critical theory, enlightened reason has from the start equated the living with
the nonliving; it is just this that is involved in making reason?with its drive
to lawlikeness, universality, and abstraction?sovereign and hence in suppress
ing the claim of bare life in favor of the good life.15 The good life becomes,
as enlightened reason develops and becomes hegemonic, one that, in its far
thest reach, does not live. Even if it is true that from the perspective of politi
cal sovereignty, the administration of living is a departure from premodern
forms of sovereignty, as Foucault and Agamben suppose, this state of affairs
is a natural continuation of the overall inner developmental trajectory of West
ern reason and rationality; biopower is nothing but the political form of the
suppression of animal life that enlightened reason has been aiming at all
along: biopower is mythical fear radicalized.16 Arendt's threefold destruction
of the human as a mimesis of the destruction of sensuous nature into qualita
tiveless mathematical formulas is meant to demonstrate precisely the moder
nity and novelty of totalitarian rule. Hence, in this setting, it becomes deeply
plausible to begin thinking of the living dead, the Muselmann, as the exem
plary instance of life that does not live, of a living that has been usurped by
the demands of instrumental reason or bureaucratic rationality, and so as the
locus for the claim of bare life, zoe, against the good life, bios. Some deep
thoughtlessness, that of reason itself, is thus staked out in that interconnec
tion of the irrational rationality of the camps and its most extreme product,
the drowned.
14. In "The Exemplary Exception" Norris does an excellent job of showing just how curious
and wrongheaded is Agamben's attachment to Schmitt.
15. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 11.
16. Ibid.
J. M. Bernstein 41
Witnessing Bare Life

Bare life, I have been suggesting, is the rationalized remnant of the claim of
the living being as living, the sweetness of life. And this rationalized remnant
is indeed produced through inclusion by exclusion; however, pace Agamben,
the mechanism of that process is to assimilate the living to the nonliving by
establishing the authority of abstract, enlightened reason. It is, again, the City
of Reason that severs the claim of life in the first instance, which makes the
emergence of biopower the realization of reason (and perhaps, by that fact, the
realization of state sovereignty). If parricide and incest are poetic metaphors
for what human nature does to itself logically when it becomes political, this is
because the political in its demanding sense becomes a work of disillusioned
rationality: reason without ends or purpose. Biopower makes the metaphori
cal literal; such is modernity.
Again, Remnants takes its cue from the idea that Levi's survival is most
properly construed as the pure desire to bear witness. Witnessing here is beyond
judgment because the situation was one in which "victim and executioner are
equally ignoble; the lesson of the camps is a brotherhood in abjection"?a
scary phrase. Agamben claims that we should not confuse the ethical with the
legal and that the great temptation of modern moral theory has been to con
flate the two, reducing the ethical to the legal in order that we can make judg
ments (RA, 18-19), but judgments, in a legal setting, need not be either true
or just. While the law needs to terminate in a judgment because that is what
its procedures are for, the judgments that result, as recent worries about the
death penalty demonstrate, can be remote from truth or justice. Similarly with
responsibility, which is "irremediably contaminated by law" (20): responsi
bility and guilt express simply two aspects of legal imputability. Levi, Agam
ben contends, discovered at Auschwitz an area "independent of every estab
lishment of responsibility," not because it is an area of impunity but, on the
contrary, because it is "a responsibility that is infinitely greater than any we
could ever assume. At the most, we can be faithful to it, that is, assert its unas
sumability" (21). Even apart from the question of unassumability, this, in a
Nietzschean vein, too quickly allows responsibility and guilt to be unequivo
cally identified with the legal (22, 24), rather than asking what responsibility
would become if it were not bound to the demand for judgment in its juridi
cal sense. But Agamben is at least broaching the thought that the ethical, if it
is to come to be, must distinguish itself from the moralizing of morality, the
incessant desire to stand in the space of moral truth and render judgment. Surely,
the sight of the Muselmann lodges an ethical claim, and surely that claim does
not concern the rendering of a moral judgment as normally understood.
Following the lines of Levi's demand for witness, Agamben's strategy

is to ratchet up the difficulty of this demand to the point at which only his
take on it emerges as compelling. The difficulties in thinking through what it
is to acknowledge the Muselmann are severe. In contending that judgment,
responsibility, and guilt are idle here, Agamben is in effect sidelining the most
obvious and natural moral modes of attending to the Muselmann. Against Levi
himself now, Agamben urges that the idea of speaking by proxy "makes no
sense; the drowned have nothing to say, nor do they have instruction or memo
ries to be transmitted. They have no 'story,' no 'face,' and even less do they
have 'thought' " (RA, 34). From this view emerges the idea of Shoshana Fel
man and Dori Laub that the Shoah is an event without witnesses "in the double
sense that it is impossible to bear witness from the inside?since no one can
bear witness from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance
of voice?and from the outside?since the 'outsider' is by definition excluded
from the event" (35). The Felman-Laub construction of an unwitnessed event
shifts the demand for witnessing into an aporia: a demand to truly inhabit the
devastation that is the Muselmann, which as such, as devastation, is uninhab
itable but which, because of the demand for habitation, makes each external
accounting a falsification.
For Agamben, the goal is not to dissolve the aporia of witnessing what
cannot be witnessed but to deepen it and make it more precise, to draw closer
to the Muselmann, to make visible the invisible being who has no story or
face or thought to offer us. The Muselm?nner were the living dead, those in
whom "the divine spark [was] dead... already too empty to really suffer" (44);
hence they are the limit of the human, the "complete witnesses" to the horror,
which "makes it forever impossible to distinguish man and non-man" (47).
Why should we think of the Muselm?nner as this limit? Because they are the
terminus, the quintessential result of the organization of the camps: the pure
consequences of the "triumph" of bureaucratic power over life, life becom
ing nothing other than what it is made by the eclipse of the human subject as
possessing a normatively constituted intentional comportment to the world.
Wolfgang Sofsky says this well: "[Power] erects a third realm, a limbo between
life and death. Like the pile of corpses, the Muselm?nner document the total
triumph of power over the human being. Although nominally alive, they are
nameless hulks. In the configuration of their infirmity, as in organized mass
murder, the regime realizes its quintessential self."17 Hence what is figured in
17. Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 294.
y. M. Bernstein 43
the Muselmann is that limit as itself a practice, as itself a form of life, indeed
the very paradigm of daily life (RA, 49).
This is underlined by the prisoners' attempts to hide their sickness and
exhaustion; in so doing, they were covering over the Muselmann "who at
every moment was emerging.... everyone in the camp recognizes himself in
his disfigured face" (52). The Muselmann is thus the paradigm and exem
plary figure of the meaning of the extermination camps, the one on whom we
must rest our gaze, impossibly: "That at the 'bottom' of the human being
there is nothing other than an impossibility of seeing?this is the Gorgon,
whose vision transforms the human being into a nonhuman. That precisely
this inhuman possibility of seeing is what calls and addresses the human, the
apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away?this and nothing
else is testimony" (54). The thought that what is offered is an apostrophe, an
address to us who are not there, is lovely but perplexing, since the question is
whether the Muselmann is indeed addressing us. What would it be for such
a being to address us, and in what sense can we not turn away? What is this
insistent demand of the inhuman on the human? And in what sense, exactly,
is the perception of him impossible?
It is at this juncture that, rather than harbor an ethical concern or engage
ment, one might become skeptical at what Agamben is presenting. At no point
does his account veer off from the space of impossible sight to the wider ter
rain: from the victim to the executioners, to the nature of the camps, to ethical
dispositions of those set on reducing the human to the inhuman. Just the inhu
man itself fills Agamben's gaze and hence ours; such is ihz pure desire to bear
witness.18 To claim that what is occurring is an address feels both right, there is
something horrific before our eyes, and untoward: what could such a being ask
of us that has nothing to do with judgment or responsibility or guilt? If there is
to be such a thing as testimony, we still are no closer to what that could amount
to; on the contrary, the anxiety must be that by apparently denying all medi
ations we will be struck as dumb as the victims, becoming what we behold.
What Agamben now wants to say, in partial response to queries like this,
is that ethics is possible only if we can recognize the inhuman in the human
that the Muselmann represents, and we must recognize this waste or garbage
18. In essence, this is the compelling critique of Agamben offered by Claudine Kahan and
Philippe Mesnard, Giorgio Agamben ? l'?preuve dAuschwitz (Paris: Kim?, 2001). In an earlier
version of the present essay, "Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Hor
ror," Parallax 30 (2004): 2-16,1 argue that Agamben's strategy involves an aestheticizing of the
Muselmann. For a related set of criticisms of Agamben see Debarati Sanyal, "A Soccer Match in
Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism," Representations, no. 79 (2002): 1-27.
of the human because it is in each of us. What is to be so acknowledged or

recognized or witnessed is not quite like recognizing someone's dignity, since
it is precisely human dignity that disappears in the extreme figure of the Musel
mann, who "has ... moved into a zone of the human where not only help but
also dignity and self-respect have become useless. But if there is a zone of the
human in which these concepts make no sense, then they are not genuine ethi
cal concepts, for no ethics can claim to exclude a part of humanity, no matter
how unpleasant or difficult that humanity is to see" (RA, 63-64). If even dig
nity and self-respect lose their grip here, then ethical recognition cannot be
bound to them. For this thought to succeed, Agamben must say that dignity
is in principle separable from the biological being. Dignity, he claims, is a nor
mative model of how we should comport ourselves at all costs and hence is
external to the life of its bearer. But in an extreme situation "it is not possible
to maintain even the slightest distance between the real person and model,
between life and norm. . . . they are inseparable at every point" (69).
At least part of what Agamben is here pressing is the Nietzschean com
plaint that the Christian disposition of moral discourse, our idea of morality
and normativity, derives from the imposition of a model of the human whose
authority depends on its separation from, and hence ultimate indifference to,
the claim of life itself. And this fact becomes both palpable and intolerable
when what lie before us are not moral agents but, as they must be designated
from the perspective of moral autonomy, moral patients: those who have lost
or never possessed the independence of reason and will that constitutes the
true domain of the moral: animals, children, the aged, the Muselmann. If moral
patients are conceived as only deficient modes of moral agency, as remnants,
remainders when the source of the moral is removed, then the life of the moral
patient cannot be recognized and acknowledged as lodging a claim. This seems
to me just, yet when Agamben finally presses his thought to its natural conclu
sion, he says something that I find all but unintelligible: "The bare life to which
human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It
itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent. And 'the ultimate sentiment
of belonging to the species' cannot in any sense be a kind of dignity . . . that
there is still life in the most extreme degradation. And this new knowledge
becomes the touchstone by which to judge and measure all morality and all
dignity" (69; emphasis mine). This is grotesque.
It is also the turning point in Agamben's argument. He contends, over
and again, that the Muselm?nner are impossible to gaze on. While the terrible
sight of heaped and naked bodies stacked atop one another is an ancient
spectacle, satisfying to the powerful, "the sight of the Muselm?nner is an abso
/. M. Bernstein 45
lutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes" (51). In Agamben's han

dling, this unseeable sight is both reified and translated into a theoretical trope.
The reification and the translation go together. By claiming that the degraded
form of the Muselmann conforms to nothing, fails nothing, is ultimate, a sub
lime negation of the human, indeed in some perverse sense absolute and per
fect in being undecipherable, Agamben prepares it for theoretical translation.
So he identifies the degraded being with, say, the phonemic remnants of lan
guage that it emits in its desperation, and then takes those remnants to be the
"non-language to which language answers, in which language is born" (38).
Or, as he puts the thought later: "The subject is thus the possibility that lan
guage does not exist, does not take place?or, better, that it takes place only
through its possibility of not being there, its contingency" (146). For Agam
ben, through a complex set of transfers, the figure of the Muselmann becomes
the desubjectified subject, where desubjectification is the chaos of language
before language, what is left of the speaking being after all form is torn away
from it. But if the Muselmann figures the other side of language, then he is a
metaphysical trope, the perfectly inhuman that is the possibility of the human:
"The mode of Being of this T,' the existential status of the speaking-living
being is thus a kind of ontological glossolalia, an absolutely insubstantial chat
ter in which the living being and the speaking being, subjectification and desub
jectification, can never coincide" (129). Just to complete Agamben's argument,
testimony is the ethos of the disjunction between the living being and the
speaking being; it is literally, so to speak, Levi's impossible speaking for the
drowned who cannot speak and are the only true witnesses (130). Witness
ing, testimony, thus turns out not to be of or to Auschwitz or even, finally, to
the Muselmann; rather, it is the metaphysically privileged revelation of the
desubjectified moment of all language that the Muselmann represents.
Even this is not the end of the matter, since this metaphysical conceit is
finally turned into an epistemological conceit. What Agamben wants, appar
ently, is the absoluteness of witnessing: "In the Muselmann, the impossibility
of bearing witness is no longer a mere privation. Instead, it has become real;
it exists as such. If the survivor bears witness not to the gas chambers or to
Auschwitz but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only on the basis of the impos
sibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz?that to
which it is not possible to bear witness?is absolutely and irrefutably proven"
(164). The "proof" of Auschwitz, whatever that dubious phrase means, con
cerns neither the gas chambers nor a set of dehumanizing practices, nor even
the result of all that, but that result become a metaphysical sign, the sign of
another metaphysics, that of the inhuman in the human.
Dignity and the Bodily Ego

There are moments when Adorno identifies the nonidentical?as that which
is the refuse of identifying practices or as what does not fit the ideal catego
ries and concepts of rationalized reason?with diffuse nature, as if once every
thing fully compatible with rational form were hygienically gathered together,
only diffuse, heterogeneous nature would remain. I do not suppose that it would
be utterly wrong to identify the Muselmann with the moment of diffuse nature,
but for Adorno this would require one further thought: diffuse nature is not
the other of identity thinking as such, the living being in abstraction from the
speaking being, but rather what identity thinking does to nature, to the human.
This is to say, however, that the Muselmann represents not the life that has
been excluded from reason but, rather, what remains once reason is utterly
abstracted from its being the reason of a living being and then, in a second
gesture, reapplied to what remains. Rationalized reason repudiates its own
embeddedness in life, reasoning as an aspect of the human form of life, and in
its formalization becomes the perfected logic of dead nature; it is this logic,
with its perfect indifference not just to human dignity and human autonomy
but to the life of the human, that becomes the practices and procedures that
Arendt identifies as systematically producing the final destruction of the human.
The logic of the camps does not produce naked life, zoe without bios', on the
contrary, it is zoe in the image of that which does not live, not bare life but life
in the image of nonlife, the reduction of life, as nearly as possible, to thing and
machine, organic life approaching its inorganic limit.
But this points to a general problem with Agamben's theory: it veers
between the extremes of bare life as the goodness of living beyond the good
life?hence the sweetness of life, its urgency and vitality, so simply zoe in
abstraction from bios?and as, more violently in the manner of biopower,
life denuded of even the meaning of life itself, the fragmented body that is
the product of a reasoning perfectly indifferent to its being alive, its aliveness.
But veering is not quite accurate: the ambiguity in the phrase "bare life" or
"naked life," la nuda vita, permits Agamben to reduce the sweetness of life to
the machine life, the death-in-life of the Muselmann, by substituting the latter
for the former where the former is the metaphysical fact, the emphatic life of
the human, that is driven to all but extinction in the latter. Agamben's privi
leging of the Muselmann as the inhuman within the human displays him as if
his suffering were exemplary of what sovereign reason excludes, rather than
exemplary of what is excluded and then, in a second stroke, dominated. The
original exclusion of zoe from Western reason is what makes the reason that
develops the perfected image of the residue of qualitativeless nature. The bio
J. M. Bernstein 47
power exemplified by camp life is the realization of that reason as it is imposed

on the human. How could what results from that be the inverse, the passive
side, the desubjectified version of the human? Was not the logic of the camps
the consistent nonrecognition of even the animal in the human animal? Agam
ben's ambiguity is patent, for example, when he argues: "It is the capacity, this
almost infinite potentiality to suffer that is inhuman?not the facts, actions,
or omissions. And it is precisely this capacity that is denied by the SS" (RA,
11). The "potentiality to suffer" raises, through its denial, the living body's
normative claim, and it is that claim, surely, that the SS denied, and not the fact
that there was an almost limitless potential to fragment the self?that fact they
knew perfectly well. Agamben's construction would thus appear to repudiate
the very thing it meant to salvage: zoe.
However, even if this criticism is correct, it leaves unanswered two fur
ther challenges that Agamben offers. It does not explain our aversion or disgust
at the Muselmann, why he cannot be looked on or seen, and it does not answer
Agamben's demand that we acknowledge the inhuman in the human on its
own terms and not in terms of some supersensuous, Platonic model of human
dignity. To explain the not-to-be-seen of the Muselmann, we shall need to
answer the problem of dignity.
What is curious in Agamben's claim that the inhuman is the human with
out dignity is his acceptance of the Platonic-Kantian conceit that there truly
ever was or could have been a disembodied, atemporal, and purely ideal moral
concept of the human (and so a model of human dignity), rather than the ascetic
priest imagining or fantasizing this separation of the human from the animal.
But if there never has been, in truth, a conception of human dignity separate
from human animality, then the very idea of human dignity must have been all
along, and despite itself, bound to the animal, indeed a figure of the animal,
the animal idealized (and only thereby repudiated).
Although detailing such a conjecture would be immensely difficult,
we can see the force of it through a?slightly?perverse reconstruction of an
utterly familiar idea of Jacques Lacan's. Apart from purely functional opera
tions of our bodies (heart pumping, cells reproducing, stomach digesting,
etc.), it is impossible to quite separate the speaking being from the living being,
but this has everything to do with the kind of living being we are. Humans
are born prematurely, organically incomplete; the infant's intrauterine orga
nization is insufficient for coordinating its bodily movements and sensory
systems. Not only does the human infant not yet possess an organized body
under its control sufficient for satisfying minimal survival needs?unlike, say,
a foal, which comes into the world already bodily complete and fully capable
48 Ethics "after Auschwitz"
of self-movement?but the human will be forever organically incomplete in the

sense that its instinctual systems and hardwiring will never be sufficient on
their own for attaining bodily completeness and independent movement. The
first incompleteness will require the long period of dependence of the human
infant on its adult caregivers; the second incompleteness will entail the human
infant attaining or realizing its body not through physical maturation alone
but through a complex process in which physical maturation itself occurs
through and as a component of socialization.
Lacan contends that the infant attains its body through an essentially
two-stage process.19 In the first, or mirror, phase, which occurs by six to eight
months, the infant's visual perception has developed in excess of its motor
coordination, so that it is able to become visually fascinated by the sight of
its own image in the mirror. For the infant, its seen image (or the image of its
mother) possesses a unity and a completeness that stand in stark contrast to
the discomforts of feeding and its lack of coordination, its lack of sureness
about its boundaries, its incapacity for self-movement. As Charles W. Bonner
nicely states the idea: "Through its reflection in actual mirrors and the meta
phorical mirror of its mother's image and reactions, the infant is for the first
time able to imagine itself as a corporeal unity or gestalt, henceforth allow
ing it to experience its body parts and movements as integrated and coordi
nated in a way not yet physically possible."20 This should not be regarded as
an arbitrary genetic hypothesis on Lacan's (and Freud's) part. Human prema
turity entails that the intactness, completeness, unity, and self-movement of
the animal body that are necessary for any animal being to negotiate the physi
cal world are not given but socially attained by humans. That is, we must attain
or achieve the body we already are, and the body that we do attain through
socialization must approximate the idea of complete embodiment (intactness,
unity, coordination, self-movement, etc.) that occurs naturally for the animal.
Thus the image of the complete body that forms the original model or idea
of the ego also, at the same time, enables the functional demands of animal
embodiment to enter into the structure of the infant's psychological life and
hence into the development sequence through which humans are formed.
The bodily ego is also the image of the self as animal, since it renders the self
19. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the T as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic
Experience," in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7.
20. Charles W. Bonner, "The Status and Significance of the Body in Lacan's Imaginary and
Symbolic Orders," in The Body, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 235. Although there
are hints elsewhere in the large Lacan literature, Bonner's careful exposition showed me how I
might adopt Lacan's theory for my purposes.
J. M. Bernstein 49
in terms of the intact and self-moving embodiment that is, at least, our idea of
animal embodiment. Now exactly what we are to achieve in relation to this
image/idea is in some sense indeterminate, because, again, we are organically
incomplete permanently: the kind of organic completeness we manage is
never completely factual, like the animal's, but always normative and therefore
mediated. This is why it is both correct and necessary to say that the mother's
image bestows on the infant a completeness it does not have.
For Lacan, the significant psychoanalytic narrative concerns how the
imaginary order of immediacy, unity, and completeness must give way,
through entry into the symbolic order, to difference, multiplicity, incom
pleteness, and mediation. While this alteration might be necessary within
the order of desire, it masks something essential about maturation, namely,
that in some sense we do and must achieve some version of bodily intact
ness, completeness, and self-movement. Not only do we achieve these ends,
but we do it so thoroughly that it is common to regard these achieved states
as themselves natural rather than social accomplishments, as independent
achievements rather than mediated states forever dependent on the recogni
tion of others. From this angle of vision, the entry into language is not a break
from the imaginary order but rather the manner through which its normative
image of (animal) wholeness becomes satisfied. So we come to have owner
ship over our bodies, to be able to claim "this" body as "mine," through a
coordinated series of physical developments and social accomplishments in
which those around me mark off my body as mine according to the demands
for self-movement and physical integrity. I require not only the possibility of
relative self-movement (what becomes idealized in competing conceptions
of independence and moral autonomy) but such movement as to free my
body from systematic physical interferences that would cause it pain (and
that become idealized in the moral norms regulating social interaction from
the negative commandments against murder and rape through the positive
duties of aid and beneficence); that is, each social construction of embodi
ment must reconstruct the coherence of the animal body to acknowledge suf
ficiently the hardwired psychophysiology of pleasure and pain that regulates
a body's relation to its physical and social environment. It is just this fact
that makes the imagined body the normative realization of the animal body:
no matter how thoroughly mediated, our bodies are animal bodies subject
to the liabilities of animal existence: its needs, pains, and pleasures. This is
what I mean when I say that it is a transcendental or functional requirement
that any society recapitulate in a normative mode the completeness of the
animal body.
So the original model of the integrity of the self or ego is necessarily writ
ten in the image of the intact or complete body. But if we are the kinds of beings
who come to have the body we already are, then the idea of the self or person
can be nothing other than a reiteration of the idea of the body's integrity at the
level of reflection: the subject that has a body is accorded the integrity of the
body it has because it necessarily is that body. Therefore the so-called dignity
of the person has never been anything other than the integrity of the body
it is in a reflective and normative mode, even when it has been given names
that deny the body altogether: soul, subject, moral person, autonomous will?
all nothing other than wildly mediated reimaginings of the body's integrity.
The body is truly the sense of all senses, because the stamp of the imaginary
body is indelible in any possible set of social norms that is not immanently
self-defeating, since what the imaginary is of is the animal body we each must
achieve to survive. One might say that the animal body's authority is perpetual
in its (symbolic) eclipse. In a sense, it is just the narrative of that eclipse and
then the return of the repressed that Hegel repeats in his accounts of the master
and slave and the unhappy consciousness, and that Nietzsche tracks down as
pervasive in his genealogies of the formations of self-denial we call morality.
Although it is terribly abbreviated, if this hypothesis is anything like cor
rect, it allows for direct and simple criticisms of Agamben's scheme. It is evi
dent that there is literally nothing unseeable about the Muselmann; hence the
sense in which the Muselmann cannot be seen is normative: he represents what
must never be seen, that is, the dismembered body, the body in fragments,
the body that fails the ideal form of animal embodiment. Something of this
is implied by Arendt's depicting the Muselm?nner as "ghastly marionettes."
If the Muselmann corresponds to anything, it would be a procedurally ren
dered version of the Lacanian real, but the real is a retroactive determination
of the premature, fragmented body from within the frame of its imaginary
and symbolic articulation. But this is exactly to deny that the Muselmann is
a norm within himself, that he is the only norm; on the contrary, our horror
and disgust are infused with our sense of the normative overlap between the
minimum of psychophysical coherence and completeness, on the one hand,
and some notion of dignity, on the other, since, again, the latter is simply the
normative inscription of the former. The Muselmann is a being that has been
normatively undone, in that the camp procedures are nothing but systematic
forms of misrecognition, that is, orderings of existence that systematically
deny to the individual the ideals of intactness, self-movement, physical integ
rity, and so forth; they are symbolic forms, sets of practices, that consistently
negate rather than realize the imaginary ideal that every symbolic order must
/. M. Bernstein 51
satisfy. Because those norms are not acknowledged, the individual's animal
being is not acknowledged, and therefore the minimum necessary conditions
for human dignity collapse.21 The Muselmann might well be described as a
desubjectified subject, yet such a subject is not the living being in the absence
of the speaking being but the negation of the normative integrity of the living
being that occurs through the negation of the speaking being.22
This is why I framed the account of the Muselmann in terms of Arendt's
three-part analysis of the destruction of the human. Seen from the opposing
angle, we can now recognize that the symbolic ideas of the active individual,
the moral person, and the juridical person are a complex of symbolic forms
and practices through which the original imaginary idea of the intact, self
moving being becomes socially actual; they are the forms of recognition through
which the infant attains to the possibilities of intactness, completeness, and
self-movement originally envisaged in the mirror image. The persuasiveness
of Arendt's account derives from its allowing us to comprehend the logic of the
camps as, terrifyingly, almost exactly a step-by-step undoing of the develop
mental path through which the individual becomes a full social agent. Through
out history, the norms that hold the human in place, give us a place or standing
in the world with respect to one another, have been ignored, abridged, trans
gressed, abrogated, canceled, rendered nil; nothing is more human. The ter
rible genius of the camps was that they constructed an order of daily practice
through which the normative constitution of the human was undone piece
meal in a mirror image of the construction of the subject until only the exter
nal form remained, a form lacking everything that it in its original imaginary
idealization implicated and demanded.
Some argument along these lines is necessary if anything like Adorno's
urgent thesis that the Enlightenment equates the living with the nonliving is
going to have explanatory force with respect to the Holocaust. But even if
this argument could be elaborated in far greater detail than I do here, making
compelling both the general relation between animality and the human animal
and how that relation was undone in the logic of the camps as a realization of
21. To demonstrate this thesis, I would need to show how my normative claims tally with, for
example, the account of the logic of camp life found in Sofsky, Order of Terror.
22. I have not found an adequate explanation of why Agamben made, and continues to make,
such a crude mistake. One hypothesis worth testing is that despite his acknowledgment of the
necessity of animality to the human, the scaffolding of his theory so thoroughly depends on a Hei
deggerian conception of language that animality keeps being overturned in favor of something
more closely approximating the standard Christian model of the speaking animal. Certainly, noth
ing in Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer
sity Press, 2004), explicitly contradicts that hypothesis.
modernity's rationalization of reason, we would still be left with the first lacuna
in Adorno's account, namely, an account of the relation between philosophy
and the Holocaust. But perhaps the real lesson of the failure of Agamben's
conception of witnessing is that there is no perfected expression of this rela
tion and that the attempt to construct such a relation?making some feature of
the event of the Nazi genocide of the Jews somehow metaphysically or episte
mologically or ethically privileged?amounts to a denial of the event. Adorno's
unwillingness to make Auschwitz into a metaphysical trope or a philosopheme
is perhaps his most fervent lesson: events take on whatever significance they
can have through the ongoing quality of our response to them, and no gener
alization can relieve us of that responsibility. But that responsibility is noth
ing other than to judge and reflect, to make something ofthat terrible event, to
arrange our thoughts and actions so that nothing similar will occur: a demand
that we have thus far failed to satisfy.

(J. M. Bernstein) Intact and Fragmented Ethics After Auschwitz

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(J. M. Bernstein) Intact and Fragmented Ethics After Auschwitz

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Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics "After Auschwitz"

The Drowned and the Saved

New German Critique 97, Vol. 33, No. 1, Winter 2006

2. J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University

These terrible words express a piercing sense of survivor's guilt: a shame

is no general significance, no true claiming, apart from their witnessing of their

The Destruction of the Human

preparation of living corpses" (447). "Intelligible" because this preparation

Witnessing Bare Life

Following the lines of Levi's demand for witness, Agamben's strategy

of the human because it is in each of us. What is to be so acknowledged or

lutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes" (51). In Agamben's han

Dignity and the Bodily Ego

power exemplified by camp life is the realization of that reason as it is imposed

of self-movement?but the human will be forever organically incomplete in the

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