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ABSTRACT
In this paper, I explore Primo Levi’s command to his readers to ‘consider if’ the Muselmann is still a human, suggesting that such consideration requires an ongoing bracketing of resolution of the question it raises. Next I draw a connection between the bracketing of judgment of camp inmates that both Levi and Lawrence Langer call for, in Levi’s idea of ‘the gray zone’ and Langer’s idea of ‘choiceless choice.’ While the terms point to different phenomena, they share the idea that while we must dwell on and consider the testimonies of the camps, we are in no position to pass judgment on those who were there. Finally I turn to Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz to argue that while Agamben’s book offers perhaps the most sustained reflection on the Muselmann in print, and might be seen as fulfilling Levi’s command to ‘consider if,’ he refuses to bracket resolution of the question of the Muselmann’s humanity and merges the conflicting options Levi commands us to continue considering.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the two anonymous reviewers whose helpful suggestions guided the revision of this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jennifer L. Geddes, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, is the author of Kafka’s Ethics of Interpretation: Between Tyranny and Despair (Northwestern University Press, 2016), editor of Evil After Postmodernism: Histories, Narratives, Ethics (Routledge, 2001), and coeditor (with John Roth and Jules Simon) of The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). She was also the founding Editor of The Hedgehog Review. She has published numerous articles in the areas of Holocaust Studies, evil and suffering, religion and literature, and ethics, and on such figures as Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Charlotte Delbo, Jean Améry, Mario Vargas-Llosa, Emmanuel Levinas, and others.
Notes
1 For an exploration of the role of identification in Holocaust testimonies, see Robert Eaglestone’s The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
2 Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 3.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 4.
5 Rosette C. Lamont, translator’s preface to Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. vii.
6 Lawrence Langer, introduction to Delbo, Auschwitz and After, p. xvii.
7 Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, “Auschwitz and the Remains of Theory: Toward an Ethics of the Borderland,” Symploke, vol. 11, nos. 1–2 (2003): p. 25.
8 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous (New York: Columbia, 1998), p. 91.
9 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier Books, 1993), p. 11.
10 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 11. While this paper focuses on the original Italian title of Levi’s work, Se questo è un uomo, translated as If This Is a Man, I quote from the American edition, titled Survival in Auschwitz.
11 Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, p. 40. There are echoes of Levi’s poem near the end of The Reawakening, when Levi describes arriving in Turin:
My house was still standing, all my family was alive, no one was expecting me. I was swollen, bearded and in rags, and had difficulty making myself recognized. I found my friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting my story … . But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my glance fixed to the ground, as if searching for something to eat or to pocket hastily or to sell for bread. [Primo Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 207]
12 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 11, 130, 15, 90.
13 Levi and Rothberg, “Auschwitz and the Remains of Theory,” pp. 26–27.
14 Ian Thomson, Primo Levi: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), p. 235.
15 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 26.
16 Ibid., p. 51.
17 Ibid., p. 55.
18 Ibid., p. 150.
19 Lawrence L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 33.
20 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 171.
21 Ibid., p. 87.
22 Ibid., p. 160.
23 Ibid., p. 9.
24 It is interesting to note that Langer begins his essay ‘The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps’ with the word ‘Suppose,’ a word akin to Levi’s ‘Consider,’ and like Levi, he asks us to imagine something counter to the worlds we know. He takes the somewhat familiar world of Dante’s Hell and asks us to reimagine it: Dante’s journey through the Inferno ending not with entrance into Purgatorio, but with a ‘barbed wire fence, posted with warnings reading “No trespassing. Violators will be annihilated”’ [Langer, “The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps,” in John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (St. Paul: Paragon House, 1989), p. 222].
25 See, for example, Lawrence L. Langer, Using and Abusing the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
26 Langer, Preempting the Holocaust, p. 1.
27 We would be wise to note that Langer says he has ‘not corrective vision of [his] own to provide, other than the opinion that the Holocaust experience challenged the redemptive value of all moral, community, and religious systems of belief’ (Langer, Preempting the Holocaust, p. 1).
28 Ibid., p. xiv.
29 Ibid., p. xvii.
30 Joan Miriam Ringelheim asks what seems to be a similar question of the term, ‘Is it not meaningless as well?’ and further suggests that ‘it obfuscates the very material conditions Langer wants to illuminate.’ Her question is motivated not by its contradictory nature, but rather by the fact that it uses the language of choice to talk about a situation of ‘oppression and domination; it is about the power and the lack of power to act meaningfully, not about choice and freedom’ (Joan Miriam Ringelheim, “The Unethical and the Unspeakable: Women and the Holocaust,” Simon Wiesenthal Annual, vol. 1, chap. 4: <http://www.museumoftolerance.com/education/archives-and-reference-library/online-resources/simon-wiesenthal-center-annual-volume-1/annual-1-chapter-4.html>).
31 Langer, Preempting the Holocaust, p. 196.
32 Langer, “The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps,” p. 225.
33 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 47.
34 Ibid., p. 48.
35 Langer, “The Dilemma of Choice in the Deathcamps,” p. 224.
36 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 46.
37 Adam Brown, “Confronting ‘Choiceless Choices’ in Holocaust Videotestimonies: Judgement, ‘Privileged’ Jews, and the Role of the Interviewer,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (2010): p. 81.
38 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p. 58.
39 Langer, Preempting the Holocaust, p. xvii.
40 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 11.
41 Ibid., pp. 11, 12.
42 Ibid., p. 12.
43 Ibid., p. 70.
44 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 90; for more discussion of Levi’s reference to this image of evil, see Jennifer L. Geddes, “Evil, Images, and (In)Humanity During and After the Holocaust.” Nordisk judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies, vol. 29, no. 1 (2018): pp. 25–38.
45 Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 43.
46 Ibid., pp. 43–44.
47 Ibid., p. 44.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., p. 59.
50 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 17.
51 Agamben follows this description of the gray zone with recourse to the authority of ‘the survivors’: ‘It is about this above all that the survivors are in agreement’ (Ibid.). This kind of homogenizing claim, drawing on the authority of the survivors to buttress his statements, is repeated often in the work, for example: ‘This is precisely what concerns the survivor’ (Ibid.); ‘If this is true – and the survivor knows that it is true’ (Ibid., 19); ‘The survivors are unanimous in this’ (Ibid., p. 26); ‘Survivors are also in agreement on this’ (Ibid., p. 27); ‘The survivors agree about this’ (Ibid., p. 33).
52 Ibid., p. 21.
53 Hints of Agamben’s fusion, or lumping together, of executioner and victim come early in his work. When he laments the lack of ‘human understanding’ we have of what happened during the extermination of the Jews, he notes that ‘even the sense and reasons for the behavior of the executioners and the victims, indeed very often their very words, still seem profoundly enigmatic’ (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 11) and that ‘many testimonies – both of executioners and victims – come from ordinary people, the “obscure” people who clearly comprised the great majority of the camp inhabitants’ (Ibid.,, p. 13).
54 Adam Brown, Judging “Privileged” Jews: Holocaust Ethics, Representation, and the “Grey Zone” (Brooklyn: Bergahn Books, 2013), p. 196.
55 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 81–82.
56 Ibid., p. 82.
57 Ibid., p. 63.
58 Ibid., pp. 13, 69.
59 Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, p. 57.
60 Dominick LaCapra, “Approaching Limit Events: Siting Agamben,” in Michael F. Bernard-Donals (ed.), Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 273.
61 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 105–106.
62 Levi and Rothberg, “Auschwitz and the Remains of Theory,” p. 26.