Last Monday in class we talked a bit about the idea that there are no "complete" witnesses to Auschwitz. We talked about Primo Levi's suggestion that only the "drowned" can fully bear witness to the atrocities of the camps. In "The Archive and Testimony," Agamben writes "so the remnants of Auschwitz--the witnesses--are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them" (164).
What is Agamben saying here? Is he contradicting Levi? What does he mean by "remnants"? How might we better understand Anne Michaels' novel Fugitive Pieces through what Agamben is saying here?
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Here, Agamben represents this gap between living and dead, what is said and unsaid--the testimony. The witnesses are not the dead or the survivors, but both are needed in order for testimony and the gap it represents to be present. There are no complete witnesses to Auschwitz, but both the living and the dead are "partial" witnesses. Because only the "drowned" can fully bear witness, for Levi, there are never any true witnesses because the "drowned" could never share their testimony. They did fully bear witness, but they never actually CAN because they are no longer living. The living, while are also partial witnesses, did not witness the ultimate trauma in Auschwitz (death) and thus, are not full witnesses either. These "living" can provide some testimony though, unlike the "drowned." Each offer something in terms of testimony; each is needed to create the gap that is testimony. Because Levi's statement is a paradox, Levi and Agamben are not in fact contradicting.
ReplyDeleteThe "remnants" of Auschwitz are the testimony, the gap between everything that is said and unsaid regarding the Holocaust. The "remnants" are anything left over from Auschwitz which really captures the tragedies. However, no matter how many witnesses reveal pieces of the events, there can only ever be remnants because the true story died with those who died in the Holocaust.
From the very parallels between the titles Remnants of Auschwitz and Fugitive Pieces, it is clear that both acknowledge the gap between the remnants, the pieces, and the tragedy as a whole. The entire plot of Fugitive Pieces is not in fact the point of the story. Plot is not what matters. What matters is what the plot accentuates. The plot accentuates this gap in the story between the trauma of Jakob's past and the present. This gap is what Agamben reflects upon, the testimony, which Anne Michaels attempts to illustrate with gaps, where something is always missing, yet simultaneously glaringly present throughout.
Sarah Wissel