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Giorgio Agamben: Remnants of Auschwitz

I picked up a copy of Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz yesterday afternoon from the Dark Horsey bookshop at the EAF in Adelaide.

Chapter One is entitled 'The Witness', and it concerns those who survived so that they could bear witness to what happened. We rely on their testimony to think through the meaning of Auschwitz. In this chapter Agamben writes:

"Despite the necessity of the [Nuremberg] trials and despite their evident insufficiency (they involved only a few hundred people), they helped to spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome. The judgement had been passed, the proof of guilt definitively established."

I have to acknowledge that is my position. It is a European problem, if there is an ongoing problem. Australia's problem is the mandatory detention camps, not Auschwitz. That was a unique event. We in Australia have to think through the detention camps.

Agamben questions this position. He continues:

"With the exception of the occassional moments of lucidity, it has taken almost half a century to understand that law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself, dragging it to its own ruin."

What we have is a conceptual confusion that, for decades, makes it impossible to think through Auschwitz; a conceptual confusion between law and morality and between theology and law.

When people morally think about the wrongness of Auschwitz they often think in terms of responsibility and guilt. Agamben says that:

"But ethics is the sphere that recognizes neither guilt nor responibility; it is, as Spinoza, knew the doctrine of the happy life. To assume guilt and responsibility---which can, at times, be necessary---is to leave the territory of ethics and enter that of law."

The confusions go deeper than that. Guilt and responsibility evokes Christianity--theology---for me, more so than the law.

Can we say that ethics is limited to the happy or good life. That is the classic conception of ethics. Is there not also the Kantian one, which is concerned with the autonomous person and the moral law? Can we not also say that ethics is concerned with alleviating suffering?

What Agamben is trying to do is delinate an area of ethics of witnessing that is prior to, and before, the legal codification of judgment and responsibility.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 11, 2005 11:52 PM | TrackBack