Chapter 1.

Homo necros: the camp Muselmann

This chapter explores the particular form of human subject that was termed the
“Muselmann” in death camp and concentration camp slang. My interest is focused on the
Muselmann as a lifeform that prisoners’ diaries and memoirs have described variously as
“living corpses”, “half-dead beings”, “half-human”, “non-human” and as “useless waste”.
Guided by Giorgio Agamben’s question, ‘What is the “ultimate” sense of belonging to
the human species?’1, I will consider to what extent being alive determines species
belonging and whether this status also applies to dead human beings. If so, at which point
does such identification end and what indeed are the foundations of this status? In other
words, if we consider the dead human body to be human, at which point in its
decomposition do we stop having “species solidarity” with it and what forms of existence
of the dead body are deemed more and less human by the living?

The biopolitics of the human race

Historically, the term Muselmann refers to a category of prisoner of Nazi death camps
and concentration camps at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy. In literary and
philosophical writings, the Muselmann becomes a limit-figure defining the non-human
realm of the human. In both senses, the Musselman plays an important role in studies of
the human condition in relation to the technology of power, which Michel Foucault called
"a biopolitics of the human race" and whose goal is to create a normalized society
through regulating the biological life of humans as a species, including reproduction,
sexuality and mortality. 2 Following Foucault, Agamben argues that the Muselmann
manifests the horrifying "efficacy of biopower" insofar as he reveals its "secret cipher":
the transformation of the human being into mere biopolitical substance reduced to
biological life, which is divested of identity and to which one cannot bear witness.
However, studies of the Muselmann have shown that the efforts of biopower to separate
zoe (organic life) from bios (life in culture) and thus exercise the "right to kill and power
over life" have proven neither universal nor entirely successful. The significance of these
studies lies mainly in demonstrating that although the Muselmann was reduced to bare,
vegetative life, he was still able to remain human and that his biological belonging to the
human species (his desire to be human and his recognition as human by the other
prisoners) surpassed humanity in the cultural sense (dehumanization through abjection,
loss of dignity, degradation to the sub-human or half-human). In such cases, the
Muselmann becomes a figure of resistance to biopower.3

1
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Homo sacer III), trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 1999, p. 58.
2
See: Michel Foucault, "Lecture - 17 March 1976," in his, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003: 239-263 and his, „Right
of Death and Power of Life,” in his, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. by Robert
Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990: 133-159. See also: Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics:
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, trans. by Graham Burchell. Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
3
In a somewhat different sense, Agamben talks about the Muselmann attitude which could be perceived by
the camp guards as a “silent form of resistance.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and

1
Investigating the specific human lifeform of the Muselmann creates potential for future
identification as as human of such lifeforms that in traditional conceptions of humanity
are considered less-than-human/not-quite-human. This, in turn, would open the way for
them to be included in a community of beings where only some members would be
human. This book is guided by an idea of death as a form of life and the principle of
constructing inclusive forms of community. I would therefore suggest using these ideas
to construct a framework for conceiving of belonging to the human race or human
species, with species (race) understood here as a dynamic biological-cultural category.
Inclusion in the species would thus be determined by the similarity of processes of
necrotic transformation and the potential for adapting to the nature-culture environment
that would be enriched by the species, as well as by the potential for symbiotic co-
existence with various lifeforms, rather than by common traits of the individuals
representing it. I have no intention of promoting any kind of racism here; on the contrary
– I consider individuals who, in traditional discourse, have been framed as weak and
deviating from standard forms of humanity as being particular significant to
reconceptualizing the very idea of humanity. The Muselmann is for me then not a “non-
human” being but rather an example of a posthuman lifeform for whom being alive is not
a key marker of his species status. As Agamben has noted, the Muselmann marks the
limit of humanity and the death of the conception of the human being that dominates
traditional ideas in the humanities and philosophy. The particular form of existence of the
Muselmann as a half-dead lifeform can thus be understood as a negative example of the
degradation and reduction of human beings to the level of zoe. On the other hand,
however, he is a symbol of the potential to survive or indeed thrive if we work on the
assumption that there is “species elasticity” enabling adaptation to extreme conditions.

Considering the past and contemporary instances of genocide and the possibility
of genocide in the future, my aim is to produce knowledge that has "survival value" and
helps preserve the human species (and indeed not only humans). Such knowledge must
support humanity's desire to be/remain human and its sense of bonds within the species.
In addition, it must undermine the divisions that exist within the human species as well as
prevent the establishment of new ones. Such divisions demonstrate the appropriative
claims of biopower, which upholds the biological hierarchization of the human species
and supplants the traditional categories of "friend" vs. "enemy" with the biological
category of the other who poses a biological threat to the population or the species and is
as such threatened by cultural and biological annihilation. To conceive of the relationship
with others in biological terms strengthens biopower, justifies its existence, and creates
the potential for future holocausts, i.e., planned, mass murders that are organized and
made more efficient through technology. 4

Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 185. Following
Emmanuel Levinas, David Couzens Hoy discusses the "ethical resistance" resulting from the lack of
agency. He argues that "the resistance of the completely powerless Other is perhaps paradoxically the most
powerful form that resistance can take.” David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance. From Poststructuralism
to Post-Critique. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005, p. 16.
4
From this point of view, comparative studies of institutionalized cruelty inflicted not only on people
(comparing holocaust and slavery) but also on animals (the slaughterhouse as a prototype of the death
camp) are of vital importance. It is precisely the phenomenon of institutionalized cruelty that rnables the
drawing of analogies between the holocaust on the one hand and husman and animal slavery on the other.

2
 In this broader context, studies of Auschwitz (and the slaughterhouse) as a symbol
of extermination and mass murder and of the Muselmann (and, in a certain sense, the
slave) as a symbol of dehumanized, useless human waste become a paradigmatic
reference for rethinking the idea of the political and resisting the appropriation of its
discourse by the language of biopower. The latter has its limitations anyway: As Achille
Mbembe points out, the notion of biopower is not "sufficient to account for the
contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the
fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective....
Imagining politics as a form of war," Mbembe continues, "we must ask: What place is
given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? How
are they inscribed in the order of power?" 5 The next step is to undertake a meticulous
study of the status of the dead body, remains, and ashes as points of reference for the
investigation of necro- or thanato-politics, which surrenders life to the power of death.
Reading Agamben and the thinkers who draw upon his notions of the biopolitical and
Homo sacer, we may argue that the primary importance of his theories for the
contemporary humanities resides in the hypothesis that the so-called posthuman future is
founded upon the repressed forms of the human, often referred to as non-human (the
rebel, the outlaw, the refugee, the "barbarian," the Muselmann, the wolf-man, the zombie,
the neomort); in general, on that which is non-human and, in a sense, dead. However,
Agamben's ideas have their limitations: most strikingly, the absence of the "real human
being," who in Agamben becomes a figure of discourse and a heuristic model illustrating
his philosophical concept of the concentration camp as a biopolitical paradigm of the
West.
Further on in this chapter, I will highlight the differences between Agamben's
figure of the Muselmann (or, in his own phrase, the paradigm of the Muselmann) and the
more "embodied" representations of Muselmann described in survivor testimonies and
literary works. To this end, I will examine a variety of texts, ranging from philosophical
writings (Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz) to memoirs of a Muselmann (Adolf
Gawalewicz, Anteroom to the Gas) to medical studies (Antoni Kępiński, Auschwitz
Reflections) to fiction (Jorge Semprún, Le mort qu'il faut). My goal is to compare and
problematize various representations of the Muselmann in order to show how they either
confirm the efficacy of biopower (Agamben) or manifest its limitations (Gawalewicz,
Kępiński, Semprún). Juxtaposing those representations, which I have termed the active
Muselmann, the Muselmann as automaton, the Muselmann as a non-human, and the
Muselmann as the Gorgon, demonstrate how testimonies and figurations of the
Muselmann complement, question, and verify one another. On the basis of this analysis
we may posit two models of the human being: the essentialist vertical model (imagined as
depth with a bottom on which the non-human is located) and the fluid horizontal model
(a continuum in which the human becomes non-human by means of transhumanation).
The latter model emphasizes the flexibility of the human and suggests that it be seen in

See: Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka. Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. New York:
Lantern Books, 2002 and Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery. New
York: Mirror Books, 1997.
5
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, p. 12.
See also: Stuart J. Murray, “Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life.”
Polygraph. An International Journal of Politics and Culture, vol. 18, 2006.

3
terms of potentiality and becoming rather than in terms of an essentialist quest for human
nature.
My comparative investigations demonstrate that descriptions of the Muselmann written
by survivors of the Holocaust observe traditional Kantian ethics, emphasizing moral
responsibility, free will, and choice. By contrast, the philosophical writings of authors
who did not experience the camps remain within the realm of philosophical speculation,
where the Muselmann as a universal figure of the human being in an extreme situation is
used to legitimize the theoretical concept of the extermination camp as an element of
biopower. The methodological lesson that follows from these analyses is that our
research should proceed from the testimony to the figure (not the other way round), a
sequence that prevents an instrumental approach to "sources" as illustration or support of
a previously formulated theory. The two then mutually verify and supplement each other.

The Active Muselmann

Adolf Gawalewicz, former prisoner of concentration camps in Auschwitz, Buchenwald,

Dora, Ellrich and Bergen-Belsen, writes in his Anteroom to the Gas: Memories of a
Muselmann: "Being a Muselmann, especially in the physical sense, was a sort of
synthesis of my Auschwitz life." 6 As a member of "the Muselmann caste," he went
through several stages of a Muselmann's career, which for many other prisoners ended in
death (29, 54). Gawalewicz describes two types of Muselmänner: the active and the
passive. Those who wanted to survive had to "muster the strength and act within the real,
if narrow and hopeless, scope of opportunity to decide about one's behavior. One had to
be an active Muselmann" even though most Muselmänner were indifferent and apathetic
(85). The Muselmänner, Gawalewicz argues, hovered on the verge of death but retained
the spark of life that could develop into a life force (140).
Gawalewicz defines his Muselmann condition primarily in physiological and
pathological terms: a Muselmann is a prisoner who suffers from extreme malnutrition,
exhaustion, typhoid fever, diarrhea, scabies with lice-infested phlegmons.
Simultaneously, Gawalewicz stresses his activity, an expression of his will to life and
hope of survival. He refers to himself as a "hardened Muselmann" (86) who assumes a
stoic attitude in response to his deep sense of the unreality of life in the concentration
camp (97). Although his memoirs describe conditions and behaviors that are often
thought of as inhuman (exhaustion, cannibalism as a means of survival), Gawalewicz
always uses the word "inhuman" to affirm humanity, never to negate it. Thus, he speaks
of "inhuman fatigue" (111) or the “inhuman time” he spent in the camp (9, 90, 165, 176).
His description of camp life emphasizes the prisoners' human attributes as he talks about
the "complexity of human affairs" (14), "human feelings" (112), "human suffering" (110),
"the human community" (112), "human life" (139), "human death" (158), and "human
kindness" (158). Typical of his narrative are passages in which he is clearly identified as
human by other prisoners, who address him as "man": “hey man, come back to the

6
Adolf Gawalewicz, Refleksje z poczekalni do gazu. Ze wspomnień muzułmana [In the Waiting Room for
the Gas: Memories of a Muselmann]. Oświęcim: Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2000, p. 29.
Subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

4
carriage!” (130), “stand up, man, it’s not far” (130); “thank God they only brought you
here now, man!” (101).
However, describing his first days in Auschwitz, Gawalewicz declares that after a
day spent carrying corpses, "I ceased to be human but have not yet become a prisoner of
the camp, I am the vilest creature called the Zugang (a new arrival)" (49). "This creature
with a shaved head," as he calls himself, is shivering with cold and fear, and does not
resemble a hero in any respect (49). Elsewhere, Gawalewicz confesses that he was given
a "bitter and difficult knowledge of the boundary above which a living being can be
called a human being" (151). Although the prisoners of the camp were systematically
dehumanized, he stresses that some of them managed to resist dehumanization (124). On
the other hand, when the first woman he meets after the liberation of the camp refuses to
give him water, he wonders whether "she hadn't yet had time to transform into a human
being" (134).
Gawalewicz's memoirs attest to the well-known fact that the camp dehumanized
prisoners, stripping them of their human attributes through degradation and extreme
malnutrition which led to stupor. They also demonstrate that the process could be
reversed after liberation and the prisoner could become human again. Moreover,
Gawalewicz points out that the survivors knew the boundary that separated a living being
from a human being. Yet he doesn't identify the condition they were in from the moment
of dehumanization (crossing the boundary) to the moment of return to being human.
Although he describes himself in the state of extreme exhaustion as "a crawling or supine
human quadruped" (132) and refers to the other exhausted prisoners as "crawling or
supine monsters" (135), these phrases concern their appearance rather than denoting any
kind of "essential" transformation. When he describes the prisoners transported from
Ellrich to Bergen-Belsen as "wild beasts" (125, 132), Gawalewicz points out that they
lost their humanity as a result of starvation in the Ellrich camp (which led to incidents of
cannibalism) and the terrible traveling conditions (the crowded train car carrying a
hundred people, no food or water for eight days).
Although Gawalewicz describes cannibalism, theft, and brutal struggle for
survival without any hint of pathos or cases of heorism, his memoirs affirm the value of
the human (18). For the former Muselmann, human beings remain human despite their
temporary dehumanization in the camp. While he describes limit situations in which
human beings turned into beasts, he always sees them as "human beasts" whose actions,
because of starvation, were not governed by reason but by the instinct for survival. It is
this instinct, stripped of the cultural veil, that Gawalewicz regards as the dehumanizing
factor which reduces the human being to a living being governed by its biological
impulses. After liberation, human beings regain their humanity, but it is flawed by the
knowledge of "what man is capable of in the bad and the good [sense]" (9) and a practical
knowledge about dying (158, 160, 170), which the author hands down to the next
generations in the following words: "it is not the fact of death but the path leading to it
that is the most important problem. A difficult path toward death, a long, painful process
of dying are what we must fear, what we must spare people to the greatest possible
extent" (160).
The concentration camp in his memoirs is a severe trial which humans can
survive while preserving their human values. However, they had better not be subjected
to such trials because in extreme situations, humans soon cease to be human and begin to

5
follow their dehumanizing instinct for survival. Notwithstanding his "perennial
Muselmann condition" and the dehumanizing processes he experienced, Gawalewicz
recognizes his own humanity and knows that the non-human is part of the human
condition. He raises the question of the moral judgment of the behavior of prisoners in
the concentration camp but refrains from providing an answer. Instead, he describes his
experience and leaves the rest to the reader, who must decide whether to pass judgment
or not. This points to another aspect of being human, which is the ability to make
decisions and assume responsibility for them.

The Muselmann as Automaton

Antoni Kępiński, a psychiatrist who studied the concentration camp syndrome (also
called K-Z syndrome), also spent two and a half years as a prisoner of the concentration
camp in Miranda de Ebro. He treated the Muselmann as a particular medical condition. In
his Auschwitz Reflections7 Kępiński writes that the main law of the camp was

the first biological law: the struggle for survival.... To survive the camp, one had,
to a certain degree, to break free from the powerful law of self-preservation at all
costs. Those who wholly surrendered to this law lost their humanity, and at the
same time their chance of survival.... Intensified to the maximum, biological laws
turn the human being into an automaton.... Automatism was one of the
characteristics of the nightmare of the camp which contributed to the annihilation
of the individual in the camp.... The individual became a will-less organism
struggling to survive; he quickly lost his strength and became a "Muselmann."
(22-23)

Kępiński demonstrates that the prisoners could preserve their humanity if they did not
surrender to the biological instinct for survival and maintained their ability to make
decisions, which the automaton lacks (25). Trying to save one's life at all cost led to
becoming a Muselmann (153) and actually reduced one's chances of survival. As the
prisoners adopted the view of themselves imposed by the executioners, they became
passive and lost faith in their ability to make decisions (however small the range of
possibilities). No longer governing their own choices, they let themselves be governed by
hunger and pain. The next stage was stupor and giving up the struggle (110), which led to
death.
According to Kępiński, the prisoners were not the only automatons in the camp.
The executioners, too, were automatons, unable to say "I want" or "I don't want."
Kępiński concludes that "the true living people in the camp were those who were on the
brink of death, while those with skulls on their caps were not living people but
automatons" (32). Not all prisoners were automatons but only those who succumbed to
the instinct for survival at all cost and/or wholly surrendered to the automatism of the
camp system, losing faith in their ability to make any decisions about themselves.

7
Antoni Kępiński, Refleksje oświęcimskie [Auschwitz Reflections], selected and with an introduction by
Jan Ryn. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear
parenthetically in the text.

6
However, the executioners were all automatons. Like Gawalewicz, for Kępiński the
ability to make choices and decisions is one of the main manifestations of humanity (25).
In their discussions of life in the concentration camp, Gawalewicz and Kępiński
reach very similar conclusions. Both argue that the limit-situation (camp) is the supreme
test of the value of the individual, who has been deprived of the conventions of everyday
life and left to his/her biological instincts. In this way, he/she became "a naked human"
(Kępiński, 99). Both authors suspend moral judgment of the prisoners' actions in the
limit-situation. Both write that the prisoners learned "what man is" in his potential to
become either a beast or a kind, noble being. They both seem to believe that the human
being ceases to be human when other people cease to see him/her as human.
Unlike Gawalewicz, who focuses on the practical knowledge of dying he acquired
in the camp (160), Kępiński stresses the necessity of getting accustomed to the
monstrosity of death as experienced in daily contact with the abject corpses (121-122).
Alongside the power to make decisions, in Kępiński's view, respect for death constitutes
another basic aspect of humanity (24, 121-122), whereas Gawalewicz attaches greater
importance to the way of dying and the treatment of the remains. The prisoners of the
camp did not die a human death; they died degraded, tormented by hunger, thirst, and
fear, or were murdered by torture, injection, or gas. They did not have graves; their
bodies could be made into soap, and their hair could be used as filling for mattresses
(158, cf. Kępiński 126).
Kępiński observes that "the split between body and soul disappeared in the camp.
Relaxing the inner tension [associated] with the will to survive usually meant the end of
life. The Muselmann was a typical example of giving up the struggle" (110). This
observation is of particular significance to the present argument. As mentioned above,
Kępiński's research led him to the conclusion that following one's biological instinct did
not increase one's chances of survival; on the contrary, it led to becoming a Muselmann,
an automaton without free will or the ability to make decisions. Consequently, Kępiński
calls for a "revision of certain opinions that, until recently, prevailed in medicine, where
too much emphasis was placed on physiological and biochemical factors, while
psychological factors [the will to survive, hope that the camp will not last forever] were
neglected" (22).

The Muselmann as a Non-Human (non-uomo)

Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz produces a "reality effect," created in part by

numerous quotations from survivor testimonies and scholarly studies. 8 The author seems
to be primarily interested in formulating a philosophical theory and projecting its
assumptions onto the material under his scrutiny, using the material to illustrate his
previously formulated concepts. The real problem is whether this abstraction (Agamben’s
version of the figura of the Muselmann) is justified or not.

8
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
New York : Zone Books, 1999. Subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. The
quotations from the Italian original are from Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il
testimone. (Homo sacer III). Torino: Bollati Boringhieri 2005 [1998] and are marked in the text as Q
followed by page number.

7
 A number of scholars decried the abstractness of Agamben's argument. The
philosopher responds to this criticism in the essay "What Is a Paradigm?" where he
explains:

In the course of my research, I have written on certain figures such as Homo

sacer, the Muselmann, the state of exception, and the concentration camp. While
these are all actual historical phenomena, I nonetheless treated them as paradigms
whose role was to constitute and make intelligible a broader historical-
problematic context.9

He goes on to argue that the paradigm does not follow the logic of metaphorical
transference of meaning but rather the logic of analogy between examples. The
movement is from the particular to the particular, and the canon is defined through
subsequent examples of a given phenomenon.
Agamben utilizes what he calls paradigmatology to construct, convincingly and
with great success, a certain figuration of the extermination camp as a prototype of the
possible hecatomb and the Muselmann as a prefiguration of the future human being: a
will-less automaton and/or useless waste. 10 As in Erich Auerbach's figural realism, the
figure does not become a sign but remains an event, preserving its concreteness, reality,
and historicity, which distinguishes it from the symbol and the allegory. 11 It also acquires
a certain intensity, which in Agamben manifests itself, e.g., in his sharp delineation of the
difference between the human as a being who has language and the Muselmann who is
reduced to bare life and silent. Approaching Agamben's representation of Auschwitz and
the Muselmann through the figural method reveals a view of reality in which the human
and humanity are at stake. Agamben argues that "It is not the city but rather the camp that
is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West or of the Modern." 12 The modern
world is reduced to Auschwitz, where modernity finds its realization, while Auschwitz is
reduced to the Muselmann, realized in the figure of the "complete witness" who is non-
human. Consequently, the paradigmatic figure of modernity is the non-human (non-
uomo).
In discussions of genocide, the human being with its human and animal attributes
is not the point of departure but the point of arrival. The literature on the topic proposes
that we as humans are still in the process of becoming, and that this process cannot be
described either as progress, the improvement of the species aimed at creating an
improved human being (as transhumanism claims), or as degradation which leads to

9
Giorgio Agamben, „What Is a Paradigm,” in his, The Signature of All Things. On Method, trans. by Luca
D’Isanto with Kevin Attell. New York: Zone Books, 2009, p. 9.
10
The concept of the human being as useless waste ("human waste") is formulated by Zygmunt Bauman in
Wasted Lives. Modernity and its Outcasts. Oxford: Polity, 2003.
11
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. by Willard R.
Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 195. Agamben often uses the concept of the figure.
In Homo Sacer, he talks about "the figure of bare or sacred life" (133) and discusses Primo Levi's figure of
the Muselmann. I leave open the complex question of the relation between Agamben's concepts of the
paradigm and the figure. The above-quoted passage from "What Is a Paradigm?" shows that he treats
certain figures as paradigms, which would mean that not every figure can become a paradigm. But how do
we know which one can?
12
Agamben, Homo sacer, p. 181.

8
secondary barbarism. In this context, it is also difficult to sustain the essentialist
conception of human nature as unchanging, timeless, and universal. The human being,
Agamben writes after Greta Salus, is a potential entity (l’uomo è un essere di potenza, Q
137). However, Agamben wants to convince his readers that

The human being can survive the human being, the human being is what remains
after the destruction of the human being, not because somewhere there is a human
essence to be destroyed or saved, but because the place of the human is divided,
because the human being exists in the fracture between the living being and the
speaking being, the inhuman and the human (135) [the human and the non-human
– ED] (l’uomo ha luogo nella frattura fra il vivente e il parlante, fra il non-umano
e l’umano) (Q 137).

The above quote indicates the value of Zygmunt Bauman’s hard description of
survivors, a term that is particularly accurate in the context of Muselmänner.13 Remnants
of Auschwitz defines a certain paradigm of thinking about the Holocaust and the non-
human condition as embodied by the Muselmann, the homo necros. However, situating
Agamben's work in relation to discussions of biopower and the anthropological machine
that creates divisions within the human being and isolates the non-human within the
human, helps to see the limitations of his argument. These limitations result not so much
from the narrowness of his concepts as rather from his assumptions. Agamben is mainly
interested in the human being as the locus of those divisions and in the process of their
emergence. "It is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way - within man
- has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human (l’uomo è stato
separato dal non-uomo e l’animale dall’umano), than it is to take positions on the great
issues, on so called human rights and values." 14
Although it was Agamben who, in The Open, described and analyzed the
workings of the "anthropological machine" that produces and determines the divisions
between the human and the animal (a concept used by many scholars to dismantle the
anthropocentric paradigm), the project of Remnants of Auschwitz continues the tradition
of thinking that lies at the foundation of anthropocentrism. Matthew Calarco, who
formulates a utopian vision of a "coming community" and calls, in a posthumanist vein,
for a reform and radicalization of the political to include non-human life forms, points out
that while Agamben asks questions about the animal, his works nonetheless manifest a
"performative anthropocentrism" he is unable to transcend. Agamben focuses on the
limitations of the logic of sovereignty and the prevailing models of the political, which, in
Calarco's view, significantly weakens his reflection and renders it less persuasive. Unless

13
Bauman writes of “survivor’s syndrome”, addressing the further dimensions and potentials associated
with this condition.
Zygmunt Bauman pisze o „syndromie przeżytnika”, tłumacząc tak angielski termin survivor’s
syndrome, co nadaje kondycji ocalonego inny wymiar i możliwości interpretacji. Zygmunt
Bauman, Świat nawiedzony, w: Zagłada. Wspołczesne problemy rozumienia i przedstawiania,
red. Przemysław Czapliński, Ewa Domańska, Wydawnictwo „Poznańskich Studiow Polonistycznych”,
Poznań 2009, s. 16.
14
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004, p. 16. Giorgio Agamben, L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007, p.
24.

9
this kind of anthropocentrism is transcended, the “anthropological machine will reassert
itself in places where we least expect it.”15
Agamben discusses the divisions within the human being in terms of the human
and the non-human. The words he uses are indefinite, ambivalent, fluid, negative. The
Muselmänner are described as apparitions, larvae, non-living beings, living corpses,
mummies, half-dead beings, half-humans, useless waste. Agamben concludes that the
Muselmann is the "non-human who obstinately appears as human" and "the human that
cannot be told apart from the inhuman" (81-82) (Il musulmano è il non-uomo che si
presenta ostinatemente come uomo e l’umano che è impossibile sceverare dall’inumano,
Q 76).16 By adding the negative prefix "non" to the common name "human," the
philosopher divests the human being of its humanity and seems to suggest that the term
"human" contains the term "non-human," which denotes a being that is different from the
human but that remains within the realm of the human. This non-human – a debased,
will-less being stripped of dignity and reduced to vegetative life, becomes a "diminished
human" (human -). The Muselmann is for Agamben the "limit-figure" of humanity that
still remains within the species. 17
Agamben's thinking is not entirely consistent, since the negation of the phrase "to
be human" is "not to be human" rather than, as he claims, "to be non-human."
Consequently, although we can say that "the Muselmann is a non-human," we cannot say
that "the Muselmann is not human." Such linguistic acrobatics allow Agamben to propose
that the Muselmann is in fact a place (or rather a non-place) and “marks the moving
threshold between the human and the non-human.”18 Agamben's argument is at times so
convoluted that some critics think that his concept of the non-human plays "something
like the role of différance in Derrida: a necessary condition for the possibility of meaning
that is equally its impossibility.” 19 Agamben writes:

At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at times a political limit or an

anthropological concept, the Muselmann is an indefinite being in whom not only
humanity and non-humanity (l’umanità e la non-umanità), but also vegetative
existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and
death continuously pass through each other. This is why the Muselmlann’s "third
realm" is the perfect cipher of the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary
barriers are destroyed and all embankments flooded (48).

15
Matthew Calarco, „Jamming the Anthropological Machine”, in: Giorgio Agamben. Sovereignty & Life,
ed. by Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 175.
16
The hyphen (in such words as, e.g., non-human, non-living) plays an important role in Agamben's
thought, as he explains in his essay "Absolute Immanence," presenting his "philosophy of punctuation." He
describes the hyphen as “the dialectic of unity and separation” and "the most dialectical of punctuation
marks, since it unites only to the degree that it distinguishes and distinguishes only to the degree that it
unites.” Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immamence,” in his, Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy,
trans. by Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 222.
17
The Muselmann as a non-human (a diminished human, "human -") can be seen as the opposite of the
trashumanist idea of "improving" the human through psychopharmacology and technology, which projects
an "augmented human" (human +). See Nick Bostrom, “A History of Transhumanist Thought”. Journal of
Evolution and Technology, vol. 14, no. 1, 2005.
18
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 55 and 48.
19
J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.
388.

10
Such manipulation of nouns and other parts of speech enables Agamben to investigate the
mechanisms of biopolitics and approach the conflict between the animal and the human,
the human and the non-human, as a metaconflict which lies at the root of all other
conflicts.20
If we agree with Kępiński, who objects to those studies of survival in the camp
that pay too much attention to physiological and biochemical factors while neglecting
psychology, then we have to disagree with Agamben's argument that in the camp, which
constitutes a certain biopolitical machine, "human life transcends every assignable
biopolitical identity" (86). Even though, as Agamben asserts, “biopower’s supreme
ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living and the
speaking being, zoē and bios, the inhuman and the human" (156) (non-uomo e dell’uomo,
Q 145), Gawalewicz's and Kępiński's writings show that in fact this ambition was not
fulfilled and, on the whole, biopower was not as effective as it seemed. As we can see in
both Gawalewicz and Kępiński, not all prisoners surrendered to dehumanization. The
human being did not renounce its humanity but appeared in its nakedness. Being stripped
of the conventions of everyday life and placed in a limit situation reveals the human
being's potential to become a human beast. However, the naked human in Gawalewicz
and Kępiński is not the same as Agamben's bare life. On the contrary, according to the
Polish writers, the human being preserves its humanity when it does not let itself be
reduced to bare life (vegetative life, biological instincts). In the camp such reduction did
of course happen but was not complete. Moreover, as Robert Eaglestone has observed,
"Agamben’s bare life is simply too bare."21 There is a certain intentionality to the bare
life of the Muselmann; it is not limited to what exists. The question remains, How much
bareness is there in bare life? How saturated is bare life with zoe (since the above
considerations demonstrate that bare life and zoe are not the same)?
This question reveals a certain superficiality of Agamben's concepts of zoe and
bios, which are complicated and contested by Muselmänner memoirs. It also seems to
suggest that Agamben, like Foucault, has difficulty conceptualizing agency. The subjects
described in Remnants of Auschwitz are either deprived of the inability to “be able” (the
executioners cannot suffer) or the ability to “be unable” (the prisoners cannot resist
degradation). This determinism of Agamben's theory creates a one-dimensional image of
the victims, who are will-less, subjugated automatons in the service of the camp system.
Obviously, the biopolitical camp machine reduced the prisoners' sense of agency to an
absolute minimum. Suicide in the camps was very rare, although, as Foucault
demonstrates in his discussion of biopower, suicide constitutes the ultimate mode of
resistance to power and escape from its control; it is the exercise of power over one's own
death when power over one's life is denied (84). It can certainly be argued that in the state
of extreme exhaustion, suicide took the form of surrender and loss of the biological
instinct and hope for survival. In this context, Gawalewicz's stance as an "active
Muselmann" appears as resistance to the totalitarian camp machine, manifesting itself in
his “will to live” ("I want") rather than in the biological self-preservation instinct.
Accordingly, his attitude becomes a "model" of resistance to biopower.

20
Agamben, The Open, p. 80.
21
Robert Eaglestone, "On Giorgio Agamben’s Holocaust." Paragraph, vol. 25, no. 2, July 2002, p. 64.

11
 Gawalewicz, Kępiński, and Agamben come together when they talk about dying.
But while Agamben stresses the activity of twentieth-century biopower, which he
summarizes as "sentencing to survival," and discusses the radical separation of zoe and
bios with reference to the separation of the Muselmann from the witness and vegetative
life, sustained by life-support technology, from conscious life (156), Gawalewicz appeals
to future generations to preserve human beings from a difficult and painful death (160).
Both Gawalewicz and Agamben identify the locus where power controls the process of
dying, either in the name of preserving life at all cost (sentencing humans to survival) or
by condemning humans to death in pain and degradation. In both cases, the human being
become a will-less automaton subjugated to totalitarian power which prevents it from
deciding not only how to live, but also how to die. Thus, in both cases the human being is
divested of free will, often regarded as the essence of humanity.

The Muselmann as the Gorgon

The Spanish writer Jorge Semprún, who was a prisoner of Buchenwald for two years,
writes about the camp in his Le mort qu'il faut.22 His prose resembles Agamben's
reflections on the Muselmann, partly because both authors cite and draw inspiration from
Primo Levi. The Muselmänner described by Semprún attest to the Nazis' successful
dehumanization of human being, reduced to the status of subhumans. Semprún points out
that SS officers looked away from the Muselmänner, while the prisoners were disturbed
by the sight of them because “[i]ls contredisent, dénient même, le comportement [qui lui
semble] indispensable pour survivre” (35) [they contradicted, even negated, everything
that was necessary for survival]. The “foutus Musulmans” [damned Muselmanns] were
suspended between life and death and moved about only thanks to “l’inertie vitale de
l’instinct” (36) [the vital inertia of instinct]. The narrator, who is in relatively good
health, feels an affinity with a young Muselmann:

Lui - si tant est qu’il fût Iicite, ou approprie, d’employer un pronom personnel;
peut-être aurait-il été plus juste, plus ajusté, de dire «ça» - lui, en tout cas, ce
n’était que ça, un amoncellement de hardes innommables. Un tas informe, avachi
contre la paroi extérieure du bâtiment des latrines.... Soudain, il avait levé la tête.
Sans doute était-il encore assez vivant pour sentir mon regard sur lui. Mon
regard angoissé, dévasté, appesanti sur lui.
Il s’avérait que cet être n’avait pas seulement un numéro de matricule, il
avait aussi un visage. Sous le crâne rasé couvert de croûtes purulentes, ce visage
était réduit à une sorte de masque sans grand relief, presque plat. [...] Mais ce
masque quasiment transparent, translucide, était habité par un regard
étrangement juvénile. Insoutenable, ce regard vivant sur un masque mortuaire.

22
Jorge Semprun, Le mort qu'il faut. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Subsequent references to this edition appear
parenthetically in the text and are followed by a literal English translation in square brackets. On Semprun's
novels as autobiography, see Connie Anderson, “Artifice and Autobiographical Pact in Semprun’s
L’Écriture ou la vie.” Neophilologus, vol. 90, no. 4, October 2006; Ursula Tidd, “The Infinity of Testimony
and Dying in Jorge Semprun’s Holocaust Autothanatographies.” Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol.
41, 2005.

12
 Cet être d’au-delà de la mort devait avoir mon âge: vingt ans, plus ou
moins. [...] Jamais je n’aurai aussi fortement senti la proximité, la prochaineté,
de quelqu’un. […] Ce mort vivant était un jeune frère, mon double peutêtre, mon
Doppelgänger: un autre moi-même ou moi-même en tant qu’autre. C’était
l’altérité reconnue, 1’identité existentielle perçue comme possibilité d’être autre,
précisément, qui nous rendait si proches (41-43).

[He himself – although I don't know if it's appropriate to use a personal pronoun
here; perhaps it would be better and more exact to say "it" – was already no more
than "it," a shapeless heap of abominable rags lying on the floor by the wall of the
hut with latrines.... All of a sudden, he raised his head. Obviously he was still
alive enough to sense my gaze. My horrified, heavy gaze resting on him. It turned
out that this being not only had a number; he had a face as well. Under the
shaved, scab-covered skull, this face looked like a flat, expressionless mask.... But
this almost transparent, translucent mask held a pair of strangely youthful eyes.
The living gaze of a death mask was unbearable. That being on the other side of
death must have been as old as I, about twenty.... Never before had I felt so
strongly the closeness of another human being.... This living corpse was my
brother, my double, my Doppelgänger: another me or me in someone else's skin.
It was precisely this recognized interchangeability, this sense of sameness
perceived as the possibility of being someone else, that brought us so close to
each other.]

Later on in the book, the narrator says that he tried to wake up the Muselmann, get him to
take care of himself and become interested in the world, since “[l]e désintérét, le
désamour de soi, d’une certaine idée de soi-même, était le premier pas sur le chemin de
l’abandon” (145) [the lack of interest, the self-neglect were the first steps on the way to
giving up]. The narrator talked to him a lot, but the Muselmann was silent. Only after a
while did he reply, in a hoarse and wild voice, that "parler fatigue" (45) [it is tiring to
speak]. The narrator continued his monologue, and finally the Muselmann was awakened
from his stupor by a passage from a prose poem by Rimbaud. He started to recite it. At
that moment, Semprún writes, "la conversation devenait possible” (46) [conversation
became possible]. For both of them, the poem and the recitation constituted a space of
resistance, a breaking away from the automatism of the camp, a refuge and an escape
from the nightmare of their reality (174-175).
After a period of certain improvement, however, the Muselmann began to decline
again. He had an indifferent, absent look in his eyes, which implied that "comme si ça
n’avait plus de sens de s’obstiner a vivre; alors, on saisit dans l’absence à quoi se
résume le regard...., on comprend que l’homme.... est en train de succomber au vertige
du néant, à la fascination médusante de la Gorgone" (136) [it suddenly made no sense to
persist in living.... This absent gaze is a sign that man is being sucked into nothingness,
that he has succumbed to the fascination with the Gorgon]. Aware that the Muselmann
was dying, the narrator wanted to see his face as it registered the last signs of life (139-
140):

13
 Son âme l’avait déjà quitté, j’en étris certain. Son vrai visage avait déjà été déait,
détruit, il ne sourdrait plus jamais de ce masque terrifiant. [...] Je regardais le
visage de François L., sur lequel on ne verrait pas apparaître l’âme, une heure
après sa mort. [...] l’âme avait depuis longtemps quitté le corps de François,
déserté son visage, vidé son regard en s’ absentant (141, 143).

[I was certain that his soul had already left him. His true face had been destroyed,
shattered, it would never appear from behind this horrible mask.... I stared at
François L.'s face, on which the soul would not appear an hour after his death....
The soul had departed François' body a long time ago, leaving behind a desolate
face and empty eyes.]

The figure of the Muselmann, which reappears throughout Semprún’s book, is unusual in
the context of other descriptions of life in the camps in that his Muselmann has a name
(François L.). The narrator often talks to him and feels a close affinity with him ("This
living corpse was my brother, my double, my Doppelgänger: another me or me in
someone else's skin"); he has a sense of shared identity, a "brotherhood in degradation"
("it was this recognized interchangeability, this sense of sameness perceived as the
possibility of being someone else, that brought us so close to each other"). Like
Gawalewicz, Semprún never doubts that the Muselmann is a human being, albeit
dehumanized. But the Spanish writer does not offer a testimony. Rather, as in Agamben,
Semprún’s Muselmann is a figuration, although his function is radically different than in
Agamben. While in Le mort qu'il faut the figure of the Muselmann is an element of the
fictionalized representation of the author's experience of the camp, a representation which
helps him to deal with his own past and talk about it, in Remnants of Auschwitz the
Muselmann is an element of a universalized concept of Auschwitz – Agamben's own
ideology of Auschwitz – as the realization (and potential) of the ubiquitous, all-
encompassing biopower.
Interestingly enough, the Muselmann in Semprún’s book has a face, which has
been destroyed and resembles a "horrible mask." But despite the horror, when the
narrator lies next to the Muselmann on the plank bed and witnesses his death, he turns the
Muselmann over in order to see his face (140, 143). This description provides an
alternative to Agamben's argument, supported by a quote from Aldo Capri's diary, that
"no one wants to see the Muselmann" (Remnants 50). Both Semprún and Agamben agree
that the prisoners' aversion to the sight of Muselmänner was caused by fear. The
Muselmänner embodied the possible fate of the other prisoners as the first candidates to
the gas chamber. In addition, as Agamben argues, “according to the law that what man
despises is also what he fears resembles him, the Muselmann is universally avoided
because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face” (Remnants 52).
But while in Agamben this sight causes the prisoners to reject the Muselmann, Semprún’s
narrator, led by his recognition of shared experience, establishes close contact with
François L.
This difference is founded upon the secret of the Gorgon's face. Following Primo
Levi, Agamben sees it as a forbidden face which turns onlookers into stone (in the
context of the camp, the Gorgon's vision "transforms the human being into a non-human”
(54). In the metaphorical sense, the Gorgon's face is the absolute image of the

14
"impossibility of seeing" (54) which exposes the inadequacy of testimony. On the other
hand, Semprún’s remarks about the Muselmann's face/mask point to a different trope,
referring to a deeper interpretation of the topos of the Gorgon.
Some scholars of Greek mythology point out that the Gorgon was in fact a ritual
mask worn by priestesses of the triple goddess (the three Furies) to frighten away the
uninitiated. Others suggest that the Gorgon expressed the horror of decaying flesh and
represented the fear of death. Yet others stress that the Gorgon-Medusa was first and
foremost an apotropaic symbol, serving protective, sheltering and aversive functions. The
Gorgon mask (Gorgoneion) guarded liminal spaces and was often placed on or near
doors, in the tympana of Greek temples, on gates, ships, as well as on shields and coins. It
was treated as protection against evil (e.g., the evil eye).
It is worth noting another aspect of the Gorgon's history, omitted by Levi and
Agamben but obliquely revealed by Semprún. The Gorgon-Medusa was not always a
terrifying monster but was changed into a monster by the angry Athena, who punished
the beautiful daughter of Phorcys and Ceto for surrendering to Poseidon in Athena's
temple (or rather, according to Ovid in the Metamorphoses, “As the story goes,/ Neptune
had raped her in Minerva’s temple” 4.795). In this way, Athena also satisfied her envy of
Medusa's beautiful hair, which she changed into serpents. It can be said, after Jane Ellen
Harrison, that terror was not born of the Gorgon, but the Gorgon was born of terror. 23
The above tropes seem to suggest three different interpretations of the Muselmann
figure (all of them alternative to Agamben's interpretation): 1. The Muselmann in the
Gorgon's mask becomes a symbol of the other, who is a double and a brother, the
possibility of metamorphosis into the dead, a symbol of death. 2. The Muselmann's
face/mask is a particular Gorgoneion, an apotropaic symbol protecting against death
(Semprún’s narrator after the Muselmann's death pretends to have his identification
number and thus escapes death)24; 3. The Muselmann is an embodiment of the Gorgon-
Medusa and an innocent victim of terror.
Semprún’s narrator, who looks the Muselmann-Gorgon in the face, breaks the evil
spell cast on the Muselmann by biopower since he perceives him as a human being with a
face and a soul. Moreover, the narrator discovers that although the Muselmann's face is a
repulsive mask, looking at the Muselmann and being with him does not cause death, as in
Agamben's theory, but saves from death. What operates here is the protective function of
the Gorgon-Medusa and its healing and restorative powers (after Medusa was deceitfully
slain by Perseus, her blood had the power of reviving the dead). Notably, the real
monsters in the Medusa myth are Athena, who changed her into a monster, and Perseus,
who is responsible for the image of the Gorgon-Medusa as a severed head of the "other,"
which he holds up in his hand for the world to see. 25 Accordingly, it can be argued that
the responsibility for the existence of Muselmänner resides not only with the Nazis, who
changed people into monstrous beings (paradoxically, Athena, the goddess of wisdom

23
Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980 [1922], p. 187.
24
By contrast, in Agamben, through what Robert Buch terms the "gorgonization of the Muselmann," the
Muselmann becomes “the figure of redemption,” “the imprint of Christ’s face: the ‘vera icon.’” Robert
Buch, „Seeing the Impossibility of Seeing or the Visibility of the Undead: Giorgio Agamben’s Gorgon.”
The Germanic Review, vol. 82, no. 2, Spring 2007, pp. 185-186.
25
On this aspect of the myth, see Rainer Mack, "Facing Down Medusa. (An Aetiology of the Gaze).” Art
History, vol. 25, no. 5, November 2002, pp. 588-598.

15
and just war, becomes a prefiguration of Nazi biopower), but also the students of the
Muselmann phenomenon, who proudly present to the world the effects of epistemological
violence inflicted on the subjects of their study. In this context, the face/mask of the
Muselmann becomes a symbol of Auschwitz, which, as Agamben asserts, is "like a
Gorgon's head," not because it embodies inconceivable horror that we never want to see
(Remnants 81) but because it is an inhuman, "pornographic" display of evil. This display
is justified, however, since the blood dripping from the monster's severed head has the
power to revive the dead. In Holocaust studies, this function is served by testimonies,
which restore the memory of the nameless victims and thus arrest the action of biopower
and its production of beings without memory or sympathy.

Two Models of Humanity

The above analyses of works by Gawalewicz, Kępiński, Agamben, and Semprún suggests
two models of humanity, which can be referred to as the vertical and the horizontal.
In the essentialist vertical model, human subjectivity is imagined as a well. This
image provides it with depth, allowing for discussions of its bottom, thresholds, and
lower limits. However, if the vertical model makes it possible to talk about the
degradation of the human being, it doesn't provide the vocabulary for discussing its
elevation. The Muselmänner are presented as those who find themselves at the very
bottom, drowned and damned. They are divested of the cultural attributes of humanity;
they become will-less and thoughtless, they have no history and no face. They are non-
human beings existing within the human species.
In the more interesting horizontal model, humanity as a distinctive attribute of the
human species is conceived of as a continuum extending in space. There is no point in
trying to define its extremes because it consists of a variety of intermediate (transitional)
stages and neither ascends (humanization: from the human as a living being to the human
as a speaking being; from zoe to bios) nor descends (bestialization: from bios to zoe). In
this context we cannot talk about the limits or thresholds of humanity since the
intermediates are fluid and are experienced not as leaps but as processes. On this model
continuum, the stages do not necessarily follow one another according to the degree of
the human being's bestiality or humanity but can be skipped. This model also illustrates
the idea, presented above, that the human being is a potentiality, a becoming, and that
continual metamorphoses, passing through transitional stages, which, after Dante, can be
termed transhumanation (transumanar – Divine Comedy, Paradise I, 70), is an inalienable
feature of the human condition. 26 The pivotal points of the continuum are marked by the
concepts of the human and the non-human, which, in logical terms, are not contraries but
a negation. To stress it again, the human and the non-human do not constitute the

26
Elsewhere I discuss the figure of the cannibal woman who appears in the memoirs of gulag prisoners and
is to the Soviet gulags what the Muselmann is to the Nazi death camps. Arguably, just as "we will not
understand what Auschwitz is if we do not first understand who or what the Muselmann is" (Remnants 52),
we will not understand the horror of the Gulag if we do not first understand who the cannibal woman was
as an extreme manifestation of gulag reality. See Ewa Domanska, „Transhumanation: From Man to
Monster. An Exercise in the Hermeneutics of Passage,” trans. by Magdalena Zapedowska, in: Spoiling the
Cannibas’ Fun. Cannibalism and Cannibalisation in Culture and Elsewhere, ed. by Tadeusz Rachwał and
Wojciecha Kalaga. Frankfurt am Main (etc.): Peter Lang, 2005: 161-171.

16
extremes of the continuum but are only "circulating references," to use Bruno Latour's
phrase. While humanity cannot exist without the human being, animality - as an attribute
of the animal species to which the human being belongs - can. Accordingly, the human
being can be legitimately described as an animal, in the sense of a community of species
based on the continuation of zoe and without the negative connotations animality has
acquired in Judeo-Christian culture.
Notably, the horizontal model cannot be explained in terms of classic Aristotelian
logic, which claims that intermediates can only exist between contraries insofar as
changes can only occur between contraries because intermediates are components of
contraries. 27 In this philosophical tradition, the human being should be considered in
contrast to the thing or in relation to the contrast between the animate and the inanimate,
the living and the dead. Then, according to Aristotle, we could think about changes rather
than metamorphoses and fluctuations within the same species. In this context, it is
important that we notice the potential of thinking that takes as its starting point the figure
of the Muselmann and proceeds to establish an opposition between the human and the
thing (or, more broadly, between the animate and the inanimate). The non-human being
as an intermediate stage between the human being and the thing can be approached
traditionally, as the reification of the human being who is reduced to a will-less
automaton (Kępiński), but it can also be regarded as a figure of passage, which
transcends the anthropocentric, humanist idea of the human and attempts to integrate the
animate and the inanimate. A figure of this process, which constitutes radical change in
the Aristotelian sense rather than mere transformation within the species, is the cyborg.

Humanity as a choice

Addressing Primo Levi's question, “What is man?” Agamben points out that “it is
necessary to withdraw the meaning of the term ‘man’ to the point at which the very sense
of the question is transformed” (58). He quotes Robert Antelme's The Human Race,
arguing that the most important issue faced by the prisoner of the camp when his/her
humanity was questioned was the “almost biological claim of belonging to the human
race.”28 It was not a matter of humanity in the moral or political sense but of species
identity. “And precisely this is what must be ‘considered,’ and considered not as a
question of dignity, as Bettelheim seems to think,” Agamben contends (59). He suspends
the question of species solidarity considered in terms of being human and focuses instead
27
Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. by Hugh Lawson-Tancred, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 307
[1057b]. Aristotle did not value the method of binary division (dichotomy), which he termed "weak
syllogism,” arguing that it did not lead to knowledge of the essence.
28
Antelme writes: “To say that one felt oneself contested then as a man, as a member of the human race –
that may look like a feeling discovered in retrospect, an explanation arrived at afterwords. And yet it was
that we felt most constantly and most immediately, and that – exactly that – was what others wanted. The
calling into question of our quality as men provokes an almost biological claim of belonging to the human
race. After that it serves to make us think about the limitations of that race, about its distance from “nature”
and its relation to “nature”; that is, about a certain solitude that characterizes our race; and finally – above
all – it brings us to a clear vision of its indivisible oneness.” Robert Antelme, „Foreword”, in his, The
Human Race, trans. by Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler. Marlboro, Vermon: The Marlboro Press, 1992, p.
5-6. See also: Manuela Consonni, “Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the Muselmann.” Partial
Answers, vol. 7, no. 2, 2009.

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on the question of belonging to the species, suggesting that an investigation of the
Muselmann figure can help us answer the questions, “What is the ‘ultimate’ sense of
belonging to the human species? And does such a sense exist?” (59).
Remnants of Auschwitz does not provide a solution to this problem, but, as I hope
to have demonstrated, a crucial factor in remaining human was the will to be human –
what Antelme calls the “almost biological claim of belonging to the human race.” Its
importance is illustrated by the prisoners' desperate attempts to have their humanity
affirmed either by other prisoners (Gawalewicz mentions the “appelative” phrases
confirming his humanity; Semprún recognizes the Muselmann as a brother, an alter ego)
or by non-human others (in Emmanuel Levinas's essay, a dog named Bobby, who
wanders around the camp, greets the prisoners as humans 29). The will to belong to the
human species and the desire to jam the anthropological machine that creates divisions
within the human species both constitute important aspects of Holocaust studies.
In his discussion of such limit-figures of human subjectivity as the Muselmann,
the Sonderkommando member, and the beastly executioner, as well as the outlaw, the
wolf-man, and the neomort, Agamben demonstrates both the inalienable presence of the
non-human in the human and the unity of the human species. The goal of Agamben's
thinking, which is to demonstrate how what has been repressed from the old becomes the
foundation of the new (martial law becomes the foundation of a new political system;
bare life located on the margin of the system becomes a universal rule 30), is realized in
futuristic visions of a posthumanity which consists of non-human, degraded waste-
subjects – which we might today, following Zygmunt Bauman, define as waste (Mad
Max, Waterworld). This, however, is the starting point for another potential history
because the unity of the human race could soon prove to be problematic. Humanity (as
we know it) would then become a choice (or a privilege or an order). Not every
representative of homo sapiens must be a human being, while the fact that we are
currently the only representatives of of homo does not mean that this will be the case
forever. For non- or post-human homo lifeforms, being not-quite-alive or not-quite-dead
(homo necros) might become the norm. In light of this, the dehumanization that is leading
to intra-species diversity (humanity as a matter of degrees) is both a relict and something
that anticipates the biological diversification of the species, with homo necros – a
particular sub-species – as symptom of this.

Translated by Magdalena Zapedowska and Paul Vickers

29
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Animal Philosophy. Essential Readings
in Continental Thought, ed. by Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton. London: continuum, 2006: 47-61.
30
Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 9.

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