"Chi Potrebbe Dire Che Cosa Sono?" Questioning Humanism in Concentration Camp Survivor Texts and the Category of the "Muselmann" (Essay‪)‬

In public and academic discourses on concentration and extermination camps, on the Shoah and Auschwitz, the "Muselmann" has become the emblematic figure of "unsayability." This sublimation is largely due to Giorgio Agamben's influential Quel che resta di Auschwitz. This essay starts off with a critique of the hidden Christological implications of Agamben's conceptualization of the "Muselmann," pointing out his misreading of Primo Levi's fundamental hypothesis of "complete witnessing." The fact that the "Muselmann," as I shall argue, operates both in Agamben's and in Levi's ecriture as a disturbing element that tends to subvert textual strategies leads to the question of whether this ominous term might refer less to a positive definable factuality than to a threatening subjective potentiality that must be exorcised, though in vain, by a striking image of "otherness." After proposing a new understanding of the very meaning of "Muselmann," I shall develop this conjecture by analyzing a large sample of concentration and extermination camp testimonies. Bringing back a philosophical and rather abstract discourse to the accounts of survivors who, like Primo Levi, suffered physical and psychological decline and, like him, wrote on the limits of humanity in the camps will help us conceive complete (non human) otherness--whether or not it is called "Muselmann"--as an integral part of the camp inmate experience of self-abandonment and self-assertion. By way of a conclusion, I will stress the importance of survivor texts in discussing the crisis of European humanism after "Auschwitz" in a more complex, experiencesaturated way. 1. The Camp's "Faceless Center": Agamben's "Muselmann"