Abstract
In his Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben situates the so-called Muselmann of the Nazi death camps in two iconographic traditions, that of the Medusa and that of the Christian vera icon. The Muselmann is blind to himself and invisible to others; yet, this figure of blindness and suffering undergoes a transfiguration. As the "true image" of man, he affords us insight into the violence at the hidden center of Western (bio)politics. A similar dialectics of blindness and revelation is at work in Homo Sacer. I argue that the structural blind spot of Agamben's construal of bare life (of which the Muselmann is perhaps the most prominent instantiation) is revealed in the unresolved tension between claims about the putative continuity of Western biopolitics, from Antiquity to the present, and the crisis it it supposed to have entered in the twentieth century.
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