Georgio Agamben, Remnantsof Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002)

*The testimony is*
crucial because it always points to its own unarchivability

*“escapes both*
memory and forgetting”

'*Georgio Agamben,* Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the
Archive *(2002)'*

Agamben’s
*Remnants of Auschwitz* consists of
philosophical exploration of questions that come up when confronting the
testimonies and growing records of Holocaust survivors.

“a
reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements—such is the *aporia* of Auschwitz”

The
aporia of Auschwitzh is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a
non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and
comprehension.”

Testimony
contained at its core an essential *lacuna*;
in other words, the survivor bore witness to something that is impossible to
bear witness to.

Levi:
No one has told the destiny of the common prisoner, since it was not materially
possible for him to survive

Elie
Wiesel—those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those
who have will never tell; not really, not completely…the past belongs to the
dead.”

Calls
into question the very meaning of testimony—and the identity and reliability of
the witnesses.

Levi—we
the survivors are not the true witnesses

the
“complete” witnesses

The
witness usually testifies in the name of justice and truth and as such his/her
speech draws consistency and fullness. Yet here the value of testimony lies
essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot
be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority.

The
“true” or “complete” witnesses are those who did not bear and could not bear
witness. “The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy—as pseudo witnesses; ***they***
bear witness to a missing testimony*. '*

And
yet proxy makes no sense; the downed have nothing to say, nor do they have
instructions or memories to be transmitted. No story, no face, no thought.

“Whoever
assumes the charge of bearing witness in their knows that he or she must bear
witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness.”

Lyotard—paradox
of gas chambers

***Summary***
of Felman/Laub:

*The Shoah is an*
event without witness in the double sense that it is impossible to bear witness
to it 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 “outside” is by definition excluded from the event.

*Threshold of*
indistinction between inside and outside—Felman/Laub fail because to explain
the paradox of testimony through song is aestheticizing testimony—something
Lanzmann made clear to avoid.

Neither
the poem nor the song can intervene to save impossible testimony; on the
contrary, it is testimony, if anything that founds the possibility of the poem.

Levi
on Celan—inarticulate babble of a dying man

“This
darkness that grows from page to page until the last inarticulate babble fills
one with consternation like the gasps of a dying man; indeed, it is just that.
It enthralls us as whirlpools enthrall us, but at the same time it robs us of
what was supposed to be said but was not said, thus frustrating and distancing
us. I think that Celan the poet must be considered and mourned rather than
imitated. If his is a message, it is lost in the ‘background noise.’ It is not
communication; it is not a language, or at the most is a dark and mamiedm
language, precisely that of someone who is about to die and is alone, as we
will all be at the moment of death.” (Levi).

Levi—Child
name Hurbinek who didn’t speak, made “nonsense” word no one can understand:
“The need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency.”

“Now
at a certain point Hurbinek begins to repeat a word over and over again, a word
that no one in the camp can understand and that Levi doubtfully transcribes as *mass-klo* or *matisklo*.

“No
it was certainly not a message, it was not a revelation; perhaps it was his
name, if it had ever fallen to his lot to be given a name; …Hurbinek died in
the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he
bears witness through these words of mine.”

Perhaps
this was the secret word that Levi discerned in the “background noise” of
Celan’s poetry. And yet in Auschwitz, Levi nevertheless attempted to listen to
that to which no one has borne witness, to gather the secret word, *mass-klo, matisklo.* Perhaps every word,
every writing is born, in this sense, as testimony. This is why what is borne
witness to cannot already be language or writing. It can only be something to
which no one has borne witness. And this is the sound that arises from the
lacuna, the non-language that one speaks when one is alone, the non-language to
which language answers, in which language is born. It is necessary to reflect
on the nature of that to which no one has borne witness, on this non-language.”

“Hurbinek
cannot bear witness, since he does not have language …And yet he “bears witness
through these words of mine.” But not even the survivor can bear witness
cmpletely, can speak his own lacuna. This means that testimony is the
disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness; *it means that language, in order to bear*
witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of
bearing witness. The language of testimony is a language that no longer
signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language,
to the point of taking on a different insignificance—that of the complete
witness, that of he who by definition cannot bear witness. *To bear witness,*
it is therefore not enough to bring language to its own non-sense, to the pure
undecidability of letters. It is necessary that this senseless sound be, in
turn, the voice of something or someone that, for entirely other reasons,
cannot bear witness. It is thus necessary that the impossibility of bearing
witness, the “lacuna” that constitutes human language, collapses, giving way to
a different impossibility of bearing witness—that which does not have language.

The
trace of that to which no one has born witness, which language believes itself
to transcribe, is not the speech of language. The speech of language is born
where language is no longer in the beginning, where language falls away from it
simply to bear sitness: “It was not light, but was sent to bear witness to the
light.”