Giorgio Agamben L’uso dei corpi pdf – Quel che resta di Auschwitz ; Agamben post

Giorgio Agambcn L’uso dei corpi – Scienze Umane

« L’usage des corps – Homo Sacer, IV, 2 » de Giorgio Agamben.

Agamben, Giorgio, Le Seuil

12 octobre 2015

Par Librairie Ptyx

les jambes et les cuisses inventent la promenade.

Si une lecture semble bien échapper à tout résumé, c’est bien celle de Giorgio Agamben. Work in progress par excellence, Homo Sacer, dont L’usage des corps se présente comme la conclusion, est de ses livres dont chaque recoin fait sens et résiste à toute effacement. Non seulement rien n’y parait superflu mais aucune de ses parties, aussi intimes soit-elle, ne se laisse réduire à un ensemble qui en assumerait la signification. Finalement, rien n’y semble partie.

Agamben revient dans cette livraison sur certains des concepts qui ont parsemé son oeuvre dès ses balbutiements. Moins pour en construire une forme d’éclairage de l’oeuvre qu’ils surplomberaient que pour creuser encore mieux les concepts eux-mêmes.

Revenant sur ce que signifiait être esclave pour Aristote, l’auteur montre en quoi l’esclavage doit se départir de ses liens avec le concept de propriété pour pouvoir être compris. Ce n’est pas par le prisme de la propriété que nous devrions l’envisager mais bien par celui de l’usage.

tout usage est d’abord usage de soi : pour entrer en relation d’usage avec quelque chose, je dois en être affecté, me constituer moi-même comme celui qui en fait usage.

Loin d’être une distinction ad minima, la disjonction des concepts d’esclavage et de propriété permet de repenser radicalement – et surtout d’éclairer mieux – ceux du corps ou de la technique. L’esclave n’appartient pas. Il est ce dont on use. Usant du corps de l’esclave, le maître use de son propre corps et l’esclave, usant du sien est utilisé par le maître. Il n’appartient pas, il est continuité du corps du maître, comme la main de ce dernier prolonge son bras.

les membres précèdent leur usage, et l’usage précède et crée la fonction.

Plutôt qu’un simple renversement paradigmatique, cette vision de l’esclave antique – plus proche de la réalité de cette époque que de celle que les temps d’après y ont apposé – permet de repenser en profondeur notre rapport à l’instrument, à l’outil ou à la technique. L’esclave est instrument. Et comme un instrument, s’il « est » indépendamment de l’usage que son maître en fait, il n’ « est complètement » que relativement à l’acte que pose son maître sur lui et à celui auquel ce dernier le destine. Instrument d’une cause finale (selon la classification héritée d’Aristote), il en est, intrinsèquement, sa cause instrumentale (selon la classification héritée de Thomas D’Aquin). L’esclave n’est pas à regarder par le lorgnon de la propriété, mais par celui de la techné.

si l’hypothèse d’un lien constitutif entre esclavage et technique est correcte, il n’est pas étonnant que l’hypertrophie des dispositifs technologiques ait fini par produire une forme d’esclavage nouvelle et sans exemples.

Au travers de cette refonte – par la précision de la philologie – de la question de l’esclavage, ce sont tous les dualismes hérités d’Aristote qui peuvent être articulés à nouveau. Essence/existence, essence première/essence seconde, zoé/bios, acte/puissance, étant/être, objet/sujet etc…, nos clivages sont des héritages. Forgés parfois sur des imprécisions linguistiques d’importance, ces clivages, qui ont défini l’ontologie occidentale, ne peuvent trouver à s’expliquer – à défaut de s’y résoudre – que dans une analyse toujours plus précise, plus fine, des mécanismes du langage. Alors que l’impossibilité d’une philosophie première est devenue l’ « a priori » historique de l’époque où nous vivons encore, Giorgio Agamben tente, en exhumant les fondements de cette scission de l’être dans lesquels s’origine notre tradition philosophique de lui ouvrir un ailleurs. Un ailleurs – c’est, in fine, son rôle – où se devine beaucoup de notre « ici »…

Aujourd’hui, le problème ontologico-politique fondamental n’est pas l’oeuvre, mais le désœuvrement, non pas la recherche fébrile et incessante d’une nouvelle opérativité, mais l’exhibition du vide permanent que la machine de la culture occidentale garde en son centre.

Giorgio Agamben, L’usage du corps – Homo Sacer, IV, 2, 2015, Le Seuil, trad. Joël Gayraud.

http://www.librairie-ptyx.be/lusage-des-corps-homo-sacer-iv-2-de-giorgio-agamben/

For a theory of destituent power

Public lecture in Athens, 16.11.2013

Invitation and organization by Nicos Poulantzas Institute and SYRIZA Youth

Giorgio Agamben

A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way disturbing, because it obliges to think the end of democracy in the very place where it was born. As a matter of fact, the hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the prevailing governamental paradigm in Europe today is not only non democratic, but that it cannot either be considered as political. I will try therefore to show that the European society today is no more a political society: it is something entirely new, for which we lack a proper terminology and we have therefore to invent a new strategy.

Let me begin with a concept which seems, starting from September 2001, to have replaced any other political notion: security. As you know, the formula “for security reasons” functions today in any domain, from everyday life to international conflicts,  as a password in order to impose measures that the people have no reason to accept. I will try to show that the real purpose of the security measures is not, as it is currently assumed, to prevent dangers, troubles or even catastrophes. I will be consequently obliged to make a short genealogy of the concept of “security”.

One possible way to sketch such a genealogy would be to inscribe its origin and history in the paradigm of the state of exception. In this perspective, we could trace it back to the Roman principle Salus publica suprema lex, public safety is the highest law, and connect it with Roman dictatorship, with the canonistic principle necessity does not acknowledge any law, with the comites de salut publique during French revolution and finally with article 48 of the Weimar republic, which was the juridical ground for the nazi regime. Such a genealogy is certainly correct, but I do not think that it could really explain the functioning of the security apparatuses and measures which are familiar to us. While the state of exception was originally conceived as a provisional measure, which was meant to cope with an immediate danger in order to restore the normal situation, the security reasons constitute today a pemanent technology of government. When in 2003 I published a book in which I tried to show precisely how  the state of exception was becoming in western democracies a normal system of  government, I could not imagine that my diagnosis would prove so accurate. The only clear precedent was the Nazi regime. When Hitler took the power in february 1933, he immediately proclaimed a decree suspending the articles of the Weimar constitution concerning personal liberties. The decree was never revoked, so that the entire Third Reich can be considered as a state of exception which lasted twelwe years.

What is happening today is still different. A formal state of exception is not declared and we see instead that vague non juridical notions –like the security reasons- are used to instaure a stable state of creeping and fictitious emergency without any clearly identifiable danger. An example of such non juridical notions which are used as emergency producing factors is the concept of crisis. Besides the juridical meaning of judgement in a trial, two semantic traditions converge in the history of this term which, as it is evident for you, comes from the greek verb crino: a medical and a theological one. In the medical tradition, crisis means the moment in which the doctor has to judge, to decide if the patient will die or survive. The day or the days in which this decision is taken are called crisimoi, the decisive days. In theology, crisis is the Last Judgment pronounced by Christ in the end of times. As you can see, what is essential in both traditions is the connection with a certain moment in time. In the present usage of the term, it is precisely this connection which is abolished. The crisis, the judgement is split from its temporal index and coincides now with the cronological course of time, so that, not only in economics and politics, but in every aspect of social life, the crisis coincides with normality and becomes, in this way, just a tool of government. Consequently, the capability to decide once for all disappears and  the continuous decision-making process decides nothing. To state it in paradoxixal terms, we could say that, having to face a continuous state of exception, the governement tends to take the form of a perpetual coup d’état. By the way, this paradox would be an accurate description of what happens here in Greece as well as in Italy, where to govern means to make a continuos series of small coups d’état. The present government of Italy is not legitimate.

This is why I think that, in order to understand the peculiar governamentality under which we live, the paradigm of the state of exception is not entirely adequate. I will therefore follow Michel Foucault’s suggestion and investigate the origin of the concept of security in the beginning of modern economy, by François Quesnais and the Physiocrates, whose influence on modern governamentality could not be overestimated. Starting with Westphalie treaty, the great absolutist european states begin to introduce in their political discourse the idea that the sovereign has to take care of his subjects security. But Quesnay is the first to establish security (sureté) as the central notion in the theory of government –and this in a very peculiar way.

One of the main problems governments had to cope with at the time, was the problem of famines. Before Quesnay, the usual methodology was trying to prevent famines by the creation of public granaries and forbidding the exportation of cereals. Both this measures had negatives effects on the production. Quesnay’s idea was to reverse the process: instead of trying to prevent famines, he decided to let them happen and to be able to govern them once they occurred, liberalizing both internal and foreign exchanges. “To govern” retains here its etymological cybernetical meaning: a good kybernes, a good pilot can’t avoid tempests, but, if a rempest occures, he must be able to govern his boat, using the force of  waves and winds for the navigation. This is the meaning of the famous motto “laisser faire, laissez passer”: it is not only the catchword of economic liberalism: it is a paradigm of government, which conceives of security (sureté, in Quesnay words) non as the prevention of troubles, but rather as the ability to govern and guide them in the good direction once they take place.

We should not neglect the philosophical implications of this reversal. It means an epoch-making transformation in the very idea of government, which overturns the traditional hyerachical relation between causes and effects. Since governing the causes is difficult and expensive, it is more safe and useful to try to govern the effects. I would suggest that this theorem by Quesnay is the axiom of modern governamentality. The ancien regime aimed to rule the causes, modernity pretends to control the effects. And this axiom applies to every domain: from economy to ecology, from foreign and military politics to the internal measures of police. We must realize that European governments today gave up any attempt to rule the causes, they only want to govern the effects. And Quesnay’s theorem makes also understandable a fact which seems otherwise inexplicable: I mean the paradoxical convergence today of an absolutely liberal paradigm in economy with an unprecedented and equally absolute paradigm of state and police control. If government aims to the effects and not to the causes, it will be obliged to extend and multiply controls. Causes demand to be known, while effects can only be checked and controlled.

One important sphere in which the axiom is operative is that of biometrical security apparatuses, which is increasingly pervading every aspect of social life. When biometrical technologies first appeared in 18th century in France with Alphonse Bertillon and in England with Francis Galton, the inventor of finger prints, they were obviously not meant to prevent crimes, but only to recognize recidivist delinquents. Only once a second crime has occurred, you can use the biometrical data to identify the offender.

Biometrical technologies, which had been invented for recividist criminals, remained for longtime their exclusive privilege. In 1943, the Congress of the USA still refused the Citizen identification act, which was meant to introduce for every citizen an Identity Card with finger prints. But according to a sort of fatality or unwritten law of modernity, the technologies which have been invented for animals, for criminals, strangers or Jews, will finally be extended to all human beings. Therefore in the course of 20th century, biometric technologies have been applied to all citizens and Bertillon identifying photograph and Galton’s fingerprints are currently used in every country for ID cards.

But the extreme step has been taken only in our days and it is still in the process of full realization. The development of new digital technologies, with optical scanners which can easily record not only finger prints but also the retina or the eye iris structure, biometrical apparatuses tend to move beyond the police stations and immigration offices and spread to everyday life. In many countries, the access to student’s restaurants or even to schools is controlled by a biometric apparatus on which the student just puts his hand. The European industries in this field, which are quickly growing, recommend that citizens get used to this kind of controls from their early youth. The phenomenon is really disturbing, because the European Commissions for the development of security (like the ESPR, European security research program) include among their permanent members the representatives of the big industries in the field, which are just armaments producers like Thales, Finmeccanica, EADS et BAE System, that have converted to the security business.

It is easy to imagine the dangers represented by a power that could have at its disposal the unlimited biometric and genetic information of all its citizens. With such a power at hand, the extermination of the jews, which was undertaken on the basis of incomparably less efficient documentation, would have been total and incredibly swift. But I will not dwell on this important aspect of the security problem. The reflections I would like to share with you concern rather the transformation of political identity and of political relationships that are involved in security technologies. This transformation is so extreme, that we can legitimately ask not only if the society in which we live is still a democratic one, but also if this society can be still considered as political.

Christian Meier has shown how in fifth century a transformation of the political conceptuality took place in Athens, which was grounded on what he calls a “politisation” (politisierung) of citizenship. While till that moment the fact of belonging to the polis was defined by a number of conditions and social status of different kind –for instance belonging to nobility or to a certain cultual community,  to be peasant or merchant, member of a certain family etc- from now on citizenship became the main criterion of social identity.

“The result was a specifically greek conception of citizenship, in which the fact that men had to behave as citizens found an institutional  form. The belonging to economical or religious communities was removed to a secondary rank. The citizens of a democracy considered themselves as members of the polis, only in so far as they devoted themselves to a political life. Polis and politeia, city and citizenship constituted and defined one another. Citizenship became in that way a form of life, by means of which the polis constituted itself in a domain clearly distinct from the oikos, the house. Politics became therefore a free public space as such opposed to the private space, which was the reign of necessity”. According to Meier, this specifically greek process of politisation was transmitted to western politics, where citizenship remained the decisive element.

The hypothesis I would like to propose to you  is that this fundamental political factor has entered an irrevocable process that we can only define as a process of increasing depolitisation. What was in the beginning a way of living , an essentially and irreducibly active condition, has now become a purely passive juridical status, in which action and inaction, the private and the public are progressively blurred and become indistinguishable. This process of depolitisation of citizenship is so evident, that I will not dwell on it.

I will rather try to show how the paradigm of security and the security apparatuses have played a decisive role in this process. The growing extension to citizens of technologies which were conceived for criminals has inevitably consequences on the political identity of the citizen. For the first time in the history of humanity, identity is no longer a function of the social personality and its recognition by others, but rather a funtion of biological data, which cannot bear any relation to it, like the arabesques of the fingerprints or the disposition of the genes in the double helix of  DNA. The most neutral and private thing becomes the decisive factor of social identity, which loose therefore its public character.

If my identity is now determined by biological facts, that in no way depends on my will and over which I have no control, then the construction of something like a political and ethical identity becomes problematic. What relationship can I establish with my fingerprints or my genetic code? The new identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of politics and ethics loses its sense and must be thought again from the ground up. While the greek citizen was defined through the opposition between the private and the public, the oikos , which is the place of reproductive life, and the polis, place of political action, the modern citizen seems rather to move in a zone of indifference beteween the private and the public, or , to quote Hobbes terms, the physical and the political body.

The materialization in space of this zone of indifference is the video surveillance of the streets and the squares of our cities. Here again an apparatus that had been conceived for the prisons  has been extended to public places. But it is evident that a video recorded place is no more an agora and becomes a hybrid of public and private, a zone of indifference between the prison and the forum. This transformation of the political space is certainly a complex phenomenon, that involves a multiplicity of causes, and among them the birth of biopower holds a special place. The primacy of the biological identity over the political identity is certainly linked to the politicization of bare life in modern states. But one should never forget that the leveling of social identity on body identity begun with the attempt to identify the recidivist criminals. We should not be astonished if today the normal relationship between the state and its citizens is defined by suspicion, police filing and control. The unspoken principle which rules our society can be stated like that: every citizen is a potential terrorist. But what is a State which is ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic State? Can we even consider it as being something political? In which kind of State do we live today?

You will probably know that Michel Foucault, in his book Surveiller et punir and in his courses at the Collège de France sketched a typological classification of modern States. He shows how the State of the Ancien regime, that he calls territorial or sovereign State and whose motto was faire mourir et laisser vivre, evolves progressively in a population State and in a disciplinary State, whose motto reverses now in faire vivre et laisser mourir, as it will take care of the citizens life in order to produce healthy, well ordered and manageable bodies.

The state in which we live now is no more a disciplinary State. Gilles Deleuze suggested to call it «Etat de contrôle»,  control State, because what it wants, is not to order and to impose discipline, but rather to manage and to control. Deleuze’s definition is correct, because management and control do not necessarily coincide with order and discipline. No one has told it so clearly as the Italian police officer, who, after the turmoils of Genoa in July 2001, declared that the government did not want that the police maintains order, but that it manages disorder.

American politologists, who have tried to analyze the constitutional transformation involved in the Patriot Act and in the other laws which followed September 2001, prefer to speak of a Security State.  But what does security here mean? It is during the French revolution that the notion of security –sureté, as they used to say- is linked to the definition of police. The laws of March 16, 1791 and August 11, 1792 introduce thus in the French legislation the notion of «police de sureté» (security police), which was doomed to have a long history in modernity. If you read the debates which preceded the votation of these laws, you will see that police and security define one another, but no one among the speakers (Brissot, Heraut de Séchelle, Gensonné) is able to define police or security by themselves.

The debates focused on the situation of the police with respect to justice and judicial power. Gensonné maintains that they are «two separate and distinct powers»; yet, while the function of the judicial power is clear, it is impossible to define the role of the police. An analysis of the debate shows that the place and function of the police is undecidable and must remain undecidable, because, if it were really absorbed in the judicial power, police could no more exist. This is the discretionary power which still today defines the action of the police officer, who, in a concrete situation of danger for the public security, acts so to speak as a sovereign. But, even when he exerts this discretionary power, he does not really take a decision, nor prepares, as is usually stated, the judge’s decision. Every decision concerns the causes, while the police acts on effects, which are by definition undecidable.

The name of this undecidable element is no more today, like it was in XVII century, «raison d’Etat», State reason: it is rather «security reasons». The Security State is a police State: but, again, in the juridical theory, the police is a kind of black hole. All we can say is that when the so called «Science of the police» first appears in XVIII century, the «police» is brought back to its etymology from the Greek «politeia» and opposed as such to «politics». But it is surprising to see that Police coincides now with the true political function, while the term politics is reserved to the foreign policy. Thus Von Justi, in his treatise on Policey Wissenschaft, calls Politik the relationship of a State with other States, while he calls Polizei the relationship of a State with itself. It is worthwhile to reflect upon this definition: (I quote): «Police is the relationship of a State with itself».

The hypothesis I would like to suggest here is that, placing itself under the sign of security, modern State has left the domain of politics to enter a no man’s land, whose geography and whose borders are still unknown. The Security State, whose name seems to refer to an absence of cares (securus from sine cura) should, on the contrary, make us worry about the dangers it involves for democracy, because in it political life has become impossible, while democracy means precisely the possibility of a political life.

But I would like to conclude –or better to simply stop my lecture (in philosophy like in art, no conclusion is possible, you can only abandon your work) with something which, as far as I can see now, is perhaps the most urgent political problem. If the State we have in front of us is the Security State I described, we have to think anew the traditional strategies of political conflicts. What shall we do, what strategy shall we follow?

The Security paradigm implies that each dissention, each more or less violent attempt to overhrow its order, become an opportunity to govern them in a profitable direction. This is evident in the dialectics which binds tightly together terrorism and State in an endless vicious spiral. Starting with French revolution, the political tradition of modernity has conceived of radical changes in the form of a revolutionary process that acts as the pouvoir constituant, the «constituent power» of a new institutional order. I think that we have to abandon this paradigm and try to think something as a puissance destituante, a «purely destituent power», that cannot be captured in the spiral of security.

It is a destituent power of this sort that Benjamin has in mind in his essay On the critique of violence when he tries to define a pure violence which could «break the false dialectics of lawmaking violence and law-preserving violence», an example of which is Sorel’s proletarian general strike. «On the breaking of this cycle» he writes in the end of the essay «maintained by mythic forms of law, on the destitution of law with all the forces on which it depends, finally therefore on the abolition of State power, a new historical epoch is founded». While a constituent power destroys law only to recreate it in a new form, destituent power, in so far as it deposes once for all the law, can open a really new historical epoch.

To think such a purely destituent power is not an easy task. Benjamin wrote once that nothing is so anarchical as the bourgeois order. In the same sense, Pasolini in his last movie has one of the four Salò masters saying to their slaves: «true anarchy is the anarchy of power». It is precisely because power constitutes itself through the inclusion and the capture of anarchy and anomy, that it is so difficult to have an immediate access to these dimensions, it is so hard to think today something as a true anarchy or a true anomy. I think that a praxis which would succeed in exposing clearly the anarchy and the anomy captured in the Security government technologies could act as a purely destituent power. A really new political dimension becomes possible only when we grasp and depose the anarchy and the anomy of power. But this is not only a theoretical task: it means first of all the rediscovery of a form-of-life, the access to a new figure of that political life whose memory the Security State tries at any price to cancel.

http://www.chronosmag.eu/index.php/g-agamben-for-a-theory-of-destituent-power.html

Quel che resta di Auschwitz. Una riflessione sul libro di Giorgio Agamben

di pubblicato lunedì, 27 gennaio 2014 ·

Pubblichiamo questa riflessione di Isabella Adinolfi sul libro di Giorgio Agamben Quel che resta di Auschwitz. Il pezzo in questione è uscito originariamente sulla  rivista di filosofia Diapsalmata pubblicata sul sito web di Orthotes Editrice, che vi invitiamo a visitare.

di Isabella Adinolfi

Il libro di Giorgio Agamben è una stimolante riflessione sulla Shoah, su ciò che essa ha significato per l’etica e, più in generale, per la comprensione dell’uomo, un libro che mette in moto i pensieri, con cui si può essere d’accordo oppure no, ma che, comunque, non si può non considerare una riflessione originale e intelligente su questo tragico fatto storico e sulle sue implicazioni politiche, giuridiche e soprattutto morali. Rispetto all’etica Auschwitz ha rappresentato infatti la più radicale messa in discussione dei suoi valori fondamentali, delle sue regole, d’oro e d’argento che siano. Con un’immagine suggestiva, nell’Avvertenza che apre il suo studio, Agamben si augura che alcuni problemi sollevati dall’analisi del fenomeno Auchwitz, possano aiutare ad orientare futuri “cartografi” di una “nuova terra etica” (pp. 9-10). E qualche riga sopra la crisi dell’etica tradizionale viene annunciata con queste parole: “Come si vedrà, quasi nessuno dei princìpi etici che il nostro tempo ha creduto di poter riconoscere come validi ha retto alla prova decisiva, quella di una Ethica more Auschwitz demonstrata” (p. 9).

Auschwitz – osserva ancora lo studioso – rappresenta il luogo di un esperimento ancora impensato: tutti i metalli dell’etica tradizionale raggiungono il loro punto di fusione in quella che Levi ha designato come “zona grigia”, un’incessante alchimia dove l’oppresso diventa l’oppressore e il carnefice appare a sua volta come vittima (p. 19).

“Al di qua del bene e del male” si svolge la vita del campo e non soltanto quella degli aguzzini e oppressori, nonostante la loro pretesa di porsi “al di là del bene e del male”, ma anche degli oppressi, delle vittime, di cui Primo, Levi nei due  libri che raccontano la sua prigionia ad Auschwitz-Monowitz, non esita a registrare la completa perdita di quella dimensione umana e spirituale, su cui le categorie etiche propriamente poggiano e si fondano. La dimensione dell’uomo che sta alla base dell’etica, che ne è, per così dire, la condizione e la rende possibile, è infatti quella di un essere  capace di trascendere la pura naturalità, la pura immediatezza. E’ quella di un soggetto libero. Solo in quanto eccede la dimensione propriamente naturale, fisiologica, l’uomo è soggetto morale. La legge morale è infatti in contrasto con la legge che regna sovrana in natura, con l’elementare legge del più forte. Ma è la legge naturale del dominio, della sopraffazione da una parte e dall’altra della conservazione di sé, la legge della sopravvivenza ad ogni costo, quella che regna nel campo.

In quella gigantesca “esperienza biologica e sociale” che il Lager rappresenta – scrive Levi – “esistono fra gli uomini  due categorie ben distinte: i salvati e i sommersi. Altre coppie di contrari (i buoni e i cattivi, i savi e gli stolti, i vili e i coraggiosi, i disgraziati e i fortunati) sono assai meno nette, sembrano meno congenite, e soprattutto ammettono gradazioni intermedie più numerose e complesse” (Se questo è un uomo, La Biblioteca di Repubblica, Torino 1958-2002, p. 94). Così muore lo spirito e, con esso l’etica, ad Auschwitz. Scrive Agamben “Chi è passato nel campo, tanto se è stato sommerso quanto se è sopravvissuto, ha sopportato tutto ciò che poteva sopportare – anche ciò che non avrebbe voluto o dovuto sopportare” (p. 71).

Ma è in particolare il sommerso ad attrarre l’attenzione dello studioso. Vediamo per quali motivi. Il libro si pone innanzitutto il problema della testimonianza. Chi è il testimone? Chi può testimoniare, fino in fondo, quanto è accaduto nei campi e nei centri di sterminio? La risposta di Agamben è che il vero testimone, il “testimone integrale”, come Levi lo chiama, non è il superstite, colui che, secondo le parole di Levi, “per prevaricazione, abilità o fortuna” non ha toccato il fondo, ma il “sommerso”, chi “ha visto la testa della  Gorgona”. Ovvero, come lo si chiama nel gergo del campo, il musulmano. Le testimonianze che possediamo, essendo testimonianze di superstiti, presentano dunque tutte una “lacuna”, in quanto il testimone vero, il testimone integrale non può deporre, perché o “non è tornato per raccontare” la sua esperienza o è tornato “muto”. La testimonianza del sopravvissuto è dunque “un discorso per conto di terzi”, un parlare in “loro vece”, “per delega”. Ma – osserva Agamben – parlare di delega non ha senso: i sommersi non hanno nulla da dire, non hanno storia, né volto, né pensiero. La Shoah è pertanto “un evento senza testimoni”.

Chi è il musulmano? Secondo la  rappresentazione e definizione che ne hanno dato   testimoni quali Levi, Wiesel, Amery, Carpi, Bettheleim, e storici del calibro di Sofsky, Kogon, i musulmani, erano morti viventi, cadaveri ambulanti. Affamati, degradati, appartenevano a un regno intermedio tra la vita e la morte, tra l’umano e il non umano: non erano – sintetizza Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo – né veramente vivi, né ancora morti, né ancora veramente uomini, né del tutto non uomini.

Le descrizioni del musulmano concordano tutte nell’indicare questo stadio cui, prima o poi, quasi tutti gli internati raggiungevano, come “perdita di coscienza, di consapevolezza”, come il venir meno “della volontà di vivere”, come “ripiegamento” e chiusura su se stessi. Nella “situazione estrema”, nell’”esperienza limite” del campo, il musulmano, secondo Bettelheim, è colui che “non resta un essere umano”, colui che non riesce a rimanere uomo.

C’è, secondo quest’autore, “un punto di non-ritorno”, una sorta di discrimine morale tra umano e non umano, una soglia che il prigioniero non deve mai varcare e oltrepassare, se vuole rimanere uomo. Quando perde ogni senso di dignità, di rispetto di sé, di decenza, quando abdica anche all’ultimo margine di libertà, quando rinuncia alla dimensione della coscienza, allora l’uomo cessa di essere veramente uomo, muore spiritualmente e moralmente e talora anche fisicamente.

La conclusione di Bettelheim ha come presupposto, che l’umano, il propriamente umano sia lo spirituale, l’etico, ma è proprio questo presupposto che Agamben vuole mettere in dubbio, in questione con la sua riflessione su Auschwitz. Il musulmano, secondo l’autore, rende relativa l’opposizione più consolidata del nostro pensiero, quella tra umano e non umano. Per lui, il musulmano non deve essere escluso dall’umano: ha perduto ogni dignità e rispetto di sé, ma rimane un uomo. La “nuova terra etica” è dunque proprio il musulmano, per cui occorre cercare un’etica nuova, che inizi dove finiscono rispetto e dignità, dove si estingue lo spirito, dove finisce, cioè,  l’etica tradizionale. Alla luce dell’esperienza estrema del campo, al cospetto del musulmano, di colui che, pur ridotto alla nuda vita biologica, rimane ancora un uomo, l’etica tradizionale, del resto, con le sue idee di rispetto di sé, dignità, decenza, contegno, buone maniere, educazione, appare solo un’ “inutile commedia”, una “finzione”, che ci fa sorridere, così come, in una famosa scena del Malte, i barboni di Parigi, ammiccando e sogghignando, se la ridono del tentativo del protagonista di darsi un contegno, di apparire, a motivo del colletto pulito o delle mani lavate e curate, diverso da loro.

Ciò che con studio di secoli la riflessione morale aveva cercato di escludere dall’umano, riappare nel ghigno dei barboni e nella figura estrema del musulmano, e, come il poeta, anche noi temiamo di essere riconosciuti dai reietti come uno di loro, temiamo di riconoscerci in loro, di scorgere in loro, ciò che alla fine resta dell’uomo, e quindi il propriamente umano.

Commenta Agamben: “Forse mai prima di Auschwitz, il naufragio della dignità davanti a una figura estrema dell’umano, e l’inutilità del rispetto di sé di fronte all’assoluta degradazione sono state descritte con tanta efficacia. Un filo sottile collega le “bucce d’uomini” temute da Malte agli “uomini guscio” di cui parla Levi. E la piccola vergogna del giovane poeta di fronte ai barboni di Parigi è come una sommessa staffetta che annuncia la grande, inaudita vergogna dei superstiti di fronte ai sommersi” (p. 56). Jean Amèry ha descritto molto bene lo scandalo dell’intellettuale, dell’uomo di spirito, avvezzo alla riflessione morale, posto a confronto con l’assurda esperienza del  Lager, che gli si presenta in “stridente contrasto con tutto ciò che sino allora egli aveva considerato possibile e accettabile dall’uomo” (J. Améry, Intellettuale a Auschwitz, Torino 1987, p. 40). Essa gli appare sconcertante, incomprensibile perché immorale e, viceversa, immorale e  inaccettabile perché assurda. “All’inizio – scrive – per lui valeva una sorta di folle saggezza ribellistica secondo la quale certamente non può esistere ciò che non è lecito che esista” (ivi, p. 41).

All’amaro stupore e sconcerto, agli scongiuri di rito, del tipo: “non può essere”, spesso, però,  poi seguiva nell’anima dell’intellettuale, una volta costretto a  riconoscere come “possa esistere ciò che non deve esistere”, con  il crollo della sua prima resistenza interiore, un mettere in questione e poi un rifiuto dei valori morali: “Sì, se le SS potevano agire come agivano: non esiste alcun diritto naturale e le categorie morali vanno e vengono come le mode” (ibidem).

“La vergogna è il sentimento dominante dei sopravvissuti” (p. 81) scrive Agamben e cerca di capire le ragioni di questo, di primo acchito, inspiegabile sentire. Scarta immediatamente la spiegazione che i superstiti, nella quasi totalità, danno di questo sentimento, di questa tonalità emotiva, riconducendola a un vago “senso di colpa” per esser vivi al posto di un altro.

Esclude anche che il senso di colpa del testimone  possa essere interpretato nei termini di un conflitto tragico. Secondo la celebre interpretazione hegeliana del tragico, l’eroe diviene colpevole non volontariamente, non intenzionalmente, ma fatalmente (p. 89). C’è dunque un conflitto tra innocenza soggettiva e colpa oggettiva, e tragico è l’atto mediante il quale l’eroe plasticamente assume incondizionatamente su di sé le colpe che è stato destinato a compiere.

Ora il Befeflnotstand, lo “stato di costrizione conseguente a un ordine”, invocato da Levi a proposito dei membri del Sonderkommando, il gruppo di prigionieri ebrei condannato a servire alle camere a gas e ai forni crematori, con l’invito a sospendere ogni giudizio riguardo alla loro condotta, e poi invocato dagli avvocati degli ufficiali nazisti (Eichmann e Stangl) per scagionare i loro i clienti, per giustificare le loro azioni, rende, secondo Agamben, “impossibile ad Auschwitz ogni conflitto tragico”.  Non c’è più qui infatti assunzione di una colpa oggettiva da parte di un eroe soggettivamente innocente. Il superstite “Con un’inversione che rasenta la parodia, si sente innocente esattamente per ciò di cui l’eroe tragico si sente colpevole e colpevole là dove questi si sente innocente” (p. 90). Che non ci si vergogni poi per essere sopravvissuto ad un altro, lo prova, secondo lo studioso, al di là di ogni dubbio, un episodio riportato da Antelme. Durante le folli marce a cui le SS, incalzate dagli alleati, sottoponevano i prigionieri per trasferirli da un campo all’altro, venivano fucilati lungo il tragitto tutti coloro che ritardavano il cammino. Talora, tuttavia, le vittime venivano scelte a caso, senz’altra logica che quella del terrore. Un giorno la scelta cade su un giovane studente italiano, che, per la vergogna, arrossisce violentemente. Ebbene, riflette Agamben, egli non arrossisce per la vergogna di  sopravvive ad un altro, ma per la vergogna di “dover morire” e il sentimento che egli prova in quel momento richiama alla memoria la vergogna da cui è assalito Josef K nell’ultima scena del Processo, quando viene brutalmente assassinato e sta per “morire come un cane”. Dunque cos’è la vergogna? Non è la consapevolezza di un difetto, di una manchevolezza, di un’imperfezione da cui prendiamo le distanze, come vorrebbero i moralisti, ma, piuttosto, secondo l’analisi di Emmanuel Levinas, un non poter prendere le distanze, un “essere consegnati a un inassumibile” (p. 97). Essa si fonda dunque sull’impossibilità di desolidarizzarsi da sé del nostro essere, sulla sua incapacità di rompere con se stesso e presuppone un doppio movimento di soggettivazione e di desoggettivazione.

“Essa – annota Agamben – è nulla di meno che il sentimento fondamentale dell’esser soggetto, nei due sensi – almeno in apparenza opposti – di questo termine: essere assoggettato e essere sovrano” (p. 99). In questa prospettiva viene interpretata la vergogna che Ettore prova dinnanzi al seno nudo della madre, in quanto essa è insieme un guardare ed essere guardato, è come l’esperienza di “assistere al proprio esser visto e di essere preso a testimone di ciò che si guarda”. Ma torniamo alla questione centrale. Levi, lo ricordo, scrive : “Non siamo noi, i superstiti, i testimoni veri […], sono loro, i “musulmani”  i testimoni integrali; ma chi ha visto la Gorgona, chi ha toccato il fondo, non è tornato per raccontare, o è tornato muto. Sono loro la regola, noi l’eccezione. Noi, toccati dalla sorte, abbiamo cercato […] di raccontare non solo il nostro destino, ma anche quello degli altri, dei sommersi, appunto; ma è stato un discorso per “conto terzi”, il racconto di cose viste da vicino, non sperimentate in proprio”. La testimonianza, commenta Agamben, tirando le conclusioni, costituisce  allora un processo assai complesso che coinvolge almeno due soggetti: il primo, il superstite, che può parlare ma che non ha niente d’interessante da dire, e il secondo, colui che ha toccato il fondo, e ha perciò molto da dire ma non può parlare. Pertanto conclude Agamben occorre intendere la testimonianza come un atto di autore (p. 140), che implica e comporta sempre una dualità essenziale,  e che consiste nel portare a compimento, integrare, perfezionare un’insufficienza, un’incapacità di testimoniare. Il soggetto etico è dunque – scrive lo studioso –  quel soggetto che testimonia di una desoggettivazione (p. 141).
Etico è testimoniare per colui che non può testimoniare, integrare e compiere ciò che altrimenti resterebbe incompiuto.

http://www.minimaetmoralia.it/wp/quel-che-resta-di-auschwitz-una-riflessione-sul-libro-di-giorgio-agamben/


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