The ghost of Auschwitz

Abstract

The article deals with the “riddle” of testimony in the context of Auschwitz. Trying to move beyond the reliance on “experience” on the one hand and the danger of “trivializing” the Holocaust on the other, we focus on the intermediary space in between the two approaches to the Holocaust, and discuss the possibility of an ethics that takes point of departure in Muselmann’s naked body. In this context we read Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful together to render visible the (im)possibilities of representing the “unspeakable”. The Holocaust is that which resists archivation for it escapes both the appropriating memory and the willed forgetting. But then, how can we keep alive the aporia, the tension between speech and naked life, between the traumatized testimony and the appropriating forgetfulness, and thus “mediate” between the past and the present? How can one represent the impossibility of depicting horror? We argue that the Holocaust cannot be represented in its horror and all its essence for this essence precisely consists in making testimony impossible. The horror of the camp can be depicted only indirectly. “The spirit of Auschwitz” is thus neither incarnated in those who died of gassing nor in those who survived, but in the bond that exists between them. We are all descendants of Auschwitz, and we are all obliged to bear testimony.