The Witness and the Archive ( tr. Daniel Heler-Roazen, Zone Books2002.
pp: 155-157.
4.9 As we have seen, Foucault defines the difference between modern
biopower and the soverign power of the old territorial state through the
crossing of two symmetrical formulae: To make die and to let live( in
italics) summerizes the procedure of old soveriegn power which exerts
itself above all as the right to koll; 'to make live and to let die' is,
instead, the insignia of biopower, which has its primary objective to
transform the care of life and the biological as such into the concern
of State power.
In the light of the preceding reflections, a third formula can be said
to insinuate itself between the otehr two, a formula that defines the
most specific trait of twentieth -century biopolitics: no longer either
'to make die or to make live', but to 'make survive'. The decisive
activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life
or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival. In
every case, it is a matter of dividing animal life from organic life,
the human from the inhuman, the witness from the 'Muselmann', conscious
life from vegetative life maintained functional through resuscitation
techniques, until a threshold is reached: an essentially mobile
threshold that, like the borders of geopolitics, moves according to the
progress of scientific and political technologies. Biopower's supreme
articulation is to produce, in a human body, the absolute seperation of
the living being and the speaking being, 'zoe' and 'bios', the inhuman
and the human-- survival.
This is why in the camp, the 'Muselmann'-- like the body of the
overcomatose person and the neomart attached to life support systems
today--not only shows efficacy of biopower, but also reveals its secret
cipher, so to speak its 'arcanum'. In his 'De arcanis rerum publicarum'
(1605), Clapmar distinuished in the structure of power between a visible
face 'jus imperii') and a hidden face ('arcanum', which he claims
derives from 'arca', jewel casket or cofer). In contemporary
biopolitics, survival is the point in which the two faces coincide, in
which the 'arcanum imperii' comes to light as such. This is why it
remains, as it were invisible in its very exposure, all the more hidden
for showing itself as such. In the 'Muselmann' biopower sought to
produce its final secret: a survival seperated from every possibility of
testimony, a kind of absolute biopolitical substance that, in its
isolation, allows for the attribution of demographic, ethnic, antional,
and political identity. If, in the jargon of Nazi bureaucracy, whoever
participated in the "Final Solution" was called a 'Geheimnistrager', a
keeper of secrets, the 'Muselmann' is the absolute unwitnessable,
invisible ark of biopower. Invisible because empty, because the
'Muselmann' is nothing other than the 'volkloser Raum', the space empty
of people at the center of the camp that, in seperating all life from
itself, amrks the point in which the citizen passes into the
'Staatsanghorige' of non-Aryan descent, the non-Aryan into the Jew, the
Jew into the deportee and, finally, the deported Jew beyond himself into
the 'Muselmann', that is, into a bare, unassignable and unwitnessable life.
This is why those who assert the unsayability of auschwitz today should
be more cautious in their statements. If they mean to say that auschwitz
was a unique event in the face of which the witness must in some way
submit his every word to the etst of an impossibility of speaking, they
are right. But, if joining uniquiness to unsayability, they transform
Auschwitz into a reality absolutely seperated from language, if they
break the tie between an impossibility and a possibility of speaking
that, in the 'Muselmann', constitutes testimony, then they unconsciously
repeat the Nazis' gesture: they are in secret solidarity with the
'arcanum imperii'. Their silence threatens to repeats the SS's scronful
warning to the inhabitants of the camp, which Levi transcribes at the
very start of 'The Drowned and the Saved':
However the war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you
will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the
world will not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions,
discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties,
because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some
proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the
events you describe are too monstrous to be believed... We will be the
ones to dictate the history of the Lagers( Levi 1989: 11-12)
In this citation words in italics are placed within single inverted
comas. This is as the mail is in plain text format. Earlier in the
book, Agamben has engaged in detain manner with categories mentioned
here i.e. animal life and organic life, human and the inhuman, the
witness from the Muselmann' etc or teh concepts i.e. the 'Muselmann'
occupying empty center space of the camp.
I Hope this fragment will make some sense to readers.
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