Georgio Agamben, Remnantsof Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002)

The testimony is crucial because it always points to its own unarchivability

''“escapes both memory and forgetting”''

'Georgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (2002)'

Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz consists of philosophical exploration of questions that come up when confronting the testimonies and growing records of Holocaust survivors.

“a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements—such is the aporia of Auschwitz”

The aporia of Auschwitzh is, indeed, the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension.”

Testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivor bore witness to something that is impossible to bear witness to.

Levi: No one has told the destiny of the common prisoner, since it was not materially possible for him to survive

Elie Wiesel—those who have not lived through the experience will never know; those who have will never tell; not really, not completely…the past belongs to the dead.”

Calls into question the very meaning of testimony—and the identity and reliability of the witnesses.

Levi—we the survivors are not the true witnesses

the “complete” witnesses

The witness usually testifies in the name of justice and truth and as such his/her speech draws consistency and fullness. Yet here the value of testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority.

The “true” or “complete” witnesses are those who did not bear and could not bear witness. “The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy—as pseudo witnesses; 'they bear witness to a missing testimony''. '''

And yet proxy makes no sense; the downed have nothing to say, nor do they have instructions or memories to be transmitted. No story, no face, no thought.

“Whoever assumes the charge of bearing witness in their knows that he or she must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness.”

Lyotard—paradox of gas chambers

'Summary of Felman/Laub:'

''The Shoah is an event without witness in the double sense that it is impossible to bear witness to it from the inside—since no one can bear witness from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice—and from the outside—since the “outside” is by definition excluded from the event.''

''Threshold of indistinction between inside and outside—Felman/Laub fail because to explain the paradox of testimony through song is aestheticizing testimony—something Lanzmann made clear to avoid. ''

Neither the poem nor the song can intervene to save impossible testimony; on the contrary, it is testimony, if anything that founds the possibility of the poem.

Levi on Celan—inarticulate babble of a dying man

“This darkness that grows from page to page until the last inarticulate babble fills one with consternation like the gasps of a dying man; indeed, it is just that. It enthralls us as whirlpools enthrall us, but at the same time it robs us of what was supposed to be said but was not said, thus frustrating and distancing us. I think that Celan the poet must be considered and mourned rather than imitated. If his is a message, it is lost in the ‘background noise.’ It is not communication; it is not a language, or at the most is a dark and mamiedm language, precisely that of someone who is about to die and is alone, as we will all be at the moment of death.” (Levi).

Levi—Child name Hurbinek who didn’t speak, made “nonsense” word no one can understand: “The need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency.”

“Now at a certain point Hurbinek begins to repeat a word over and over again, a word that no one in the camp can understand and that Levi doubtfully transcribes as mass-klo or matisklo.

“No it was certainly not a message, it was not a revelation; perhaps it was his name, if it had ever fallen to his lot to be given a name; …Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine.”

Perhaps this was the secret word that Levi discerned in the “background noise” of Celan’s poetry. And yet in Auschwitz, Levi nevertheless attempted to listen to that to which no one has borne witness, to gather the secret word, mass-klo, matisklo. Perhaps every word, every writing is born, in this sense, as testimony. This is why what is borne witness to cannot already be language or writing. It can only be something to which no one has borne witness. And this is the sound that arises from the lacuna, the non-language that one speaks when one is alone, the non-language to which language answers, in which language is born. It is necessary to reflect on the nature of that to which no one has borne witness, on this non-language.”

“Hurbinek cannot bear witness, since he does not have language …And yet he “bears witness through these words of mine.” But not even the survivor can bear witness cmpletely, can speak his own lacuna. This means that testimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness; ''it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness. The language of testimony is a language that no longer signifies and that, in not signifying, advances into what is without language, to the point of taking on a different insignificance—that of the complete witness, that of he who by definition cannot bear witness.'' To bear witness, it is therefore not enough to bring language to its own non-sense, to the pure undecidability of letters. It is necessary that this senseless sound be, in turn, the voice of something or someone that, for entirely other reasons, cannot bear witness. It is thus necessary that the impossibility of bearing witness, the “lacuna” that constitutes human language, collapses, giving way to a different impossibility of bearing witness—that which does not have language.

The trace of that to which no one has born witness, which language believes itself to transcribe, is not the speech of language. The speech of language is born where language is no longer in the beginning, where language falls away from it simply to bear sitness: “It was not light, but was sent to bear witness to the light.”