Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Agamben's moving text on the Nazi death camps asks what happens to speech when the deracinated subject speaks. Although some say that Auschwitz makes witnessing impossible, Agamben shows how the one who speaks bears this impossibility within his own speech, bordering the human and the inhuman. Agamben probes for us the condition of speech at the limit of the human, evoking the horror and the near unspeakability of the inhuman as it witnesses in language its own undoing."
—Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley

Product Description

In this book the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben looks closely at the literature of the survivors of Auschwitz, probing the philosophical and ethical questions raised by their testimony. "In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors' testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics." --Giorgio Agamben

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Zone Books (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 189095117X
• ISBN-13: 978-1890951177
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #101,826 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting, Captivating, Unspeakable, April 25, 2005

By	Lost Lacanian (Lost-in, CA) - See all my reviews

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I read this book after having read Agamben's big book "Homo Sacer." I found the analysis of bare life (homo sacer) in that book to be so fascinating that I picked up "Remnants," to see where else Agamben might go. This book is some of the most compelling theory I have read to date. The book has three major categories of analysis: the witness, the musselman (literally, the muslim), and shame. Each of these three categories have to do with the inhuman quality of being human and the speakability of that which is unspeakable. Indeed, Agamben deploys subtle thought in order to construct these internal contradictions that actually played on in the extreme case of Auschwitz. As one might expect from the title, this book is haunting. The testimonials given of the Musselman are particularly disturbing. Indeed, the experiences of Auschwitz is unspeakable. Perhaps, most startling is that Agamben argues our modern political paradigm is basically a sedated Auschwitz in which all of us can be turned into Musselmen, indeed, the musselman is that inhuman potential within our humanity. In short, this book is haunting, captivating, yet, unspeakable in the topics it tackles and the issues with which it wrestles. If you are not acquainted with Agamben, then, you might first be taken off guard by his verse and thesis style. But once you get in the flow, the form of his writing adds to its content.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Difficult to read, but worth it, April 5, 2008

By	R. Caverly (Downingtown, Pa. United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Remnants of Auschwitz is one of Agamben's earlier works, but his cutting intelligence definitely still shows. The subject matter is the concentration camp, and more specifically, the language of the experience that follows the survivors back into the civilized world. Drawing extensively on the memoirs of Primo Levi, Agamben examines the Musselman (the Muslim), the most desperate of those interred at the concentration camps. He examines the shame of the survivors for having survived, and the powerful sympathy that they felt towards those who had to clean up the bodies in the gas chambers. Among all these threads of inquiry are the heart wrenching stories that will stay with you long after you put down this book.

I will not lie to you - this book is difficult to read. It's subject matter is the most powerful experience of the 20th century. However, Agamben's demystification of the concentration camp serves its purpose; we, as humans, should learn from this tragedy, not bury it in the past.

8 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars lost-lacanian truly lost, February 3, 2006

By	M. Berg (Mpls, MN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Having read Lost-Lacanian's review of Agamben's 'Remnants' and then read the book, I must say that Agamben did not live up to his reviewers opinion of him. The book's argument is compelling in places, but by no means intruiging overall, and far from new. If Agamben aims to adjust ethical terms by using auschwitz as limit situation (which is by no means wrong) he can only do so by 'correcting' actual survivors' testimony, and placing himself in a position of having a truer knowledge of life in the camps than those who were actually there. Auschwitz is by no means simple to write about, and Agamben's book is not worthless, though something of a bad first step towards his proposed project.