WHEN THE TIGER LEAPS INTO THE PAST

Abstract

This article examines Giorgio Agamben’s rejection of the religious term Holocaust as a name for the extermination of the Jewish people. Agamben rejects this term (and eventually prefers the term Shoah) in so far as it implies a sacrificial exchange with the divine. He argues that the Jews were not killed as sacrificial victims but as (biopolitical) homines sacri. Yet, in so doing, Agamben also denies the redemptive potential of the term Holocaust, preventing the victims finding a place in public memory. In fact, he overlooks the fact that the “Final Solution” also involved a plan to erase all traces of the extermination itself. This article seeks to challenge Agamben’s view with the help of László Nemes’ film Son of Saul. It argues that Nemes’ film is a unique example of a film about the Holocaust that avoids regression into positions that Agamben criticizes. As such, the film can be regarded as an example of Benjaminian messianic redemption.

Keywords:

• Holocaust
• history
• messianism
• sacrifice
• biopolitics
• fiction

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This article is a result of research programme P6-0014, “Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy,” research project J6-8264, “Europe as a Philosophical Idea and Political Subject,” and research project J6-9392, “The Problem of Objectivity and Fiction in Contemporary Philosophy,” which are funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. I would like to thank Arthur Bradley and the anonymous reviewer for their invaluable comments and suggestions on early versions of this article.

1 Quite surprisingly, although Agamben advocates Benjaminian messianism as a “real state of exception” (see, for instance, Agamben, State of Exception 52–64), he fails to consider the messianic aspect of the term Holocaust itself. Moreover, he tries to separate the term Holocaust from the phenomenon of the camp as neatly as possible. According to Agamben, the messianic moment consists in “revealing” the biopolitical logic of the camp as the essence of sovereign power, while the term Holocaust covers the biopolitical politicization of bare life with the “veil” of sacrifice. However, as I will argue, what Agamben fails to see is that this is not the sole possible understanding of the term Holocaust. In fact, the latter can well function as the means of messianic “revelation” of the biopolitical logic of the camp (without regression into the sacrificial narrative) which would otherwise remain repressed in history. The extermination that took place in death camps also involved a plan to erase all traces of the extermination itself. The messianic aspect of the term Holocaust thus amounts to the recuperation of this repressed past. For plausible analyses of the relation between the messianic and the camp, see also Grumley; Chiesa.

2 For spatial, geographical, and topographical aspects of the extermination camps, see Giaccaria and Minca; Minca.

3 Razac distinguishes between three paradigmatic examples of the political use of barbed wire, that is to say, of the use of the wire for the purpose of the governance over space: the American prairie, the trenches in the First World War, and the concentration camps (Razac, Histoire politique 29–79). In this article, I am referring to the second, revised French edition of the book. The first, much shorter edition is also available in English translation (Razac, Barbed Wire).

4 As Arad reports, the personnel structure in each of the three death camps was the following:

In each of the death camps – in Belzec, in Sobibor, and in Treblinka – a limited number of 20 to 35 Germans were stationed for the purposes of command and supervision, and about 90 to 130 Ukrainians were responsible for guard duties. All physical work in the extermination process was imposed on 700 to 1,000 Jewish prisoners who were kept in each camp. (Arad 377)

5 A similar thesis, although articulated in slightly different terms, can also be found in Jelica Šumič (especially 138–40). For more basic readings of this topic, see Agamben, “Walter Benjamin and the Demonic”; Khatib.

6

From the juridico-political perspective, messianism is therefore a theory of the state of exception – except for the fact that, in messianism, there is no authority in force to proclaim the state of exception; instead, there is the Messiah to subvert its power. (HS 57–58)

7 For more affirmative reading of this “impossibility of representation” in terms of “gesture,” see Chare.

8 Messianic time, however, remains an ambiguous concept. I have developed a critical approach to this concept elsewhere (“Messianism between Religion and Post-Religion: On Giorgio Agamben’s ‘New Politics’”). Moreover, for a more affirmative reading of messianism in the context of the contemporary refugee crisis in Europe, see idem, “Mass Migrations as a Messianic Event?”