Beyond Agamben’s bare life: Understanding acts of resistance in the camp with Levi and the late Foucault

Abstract

Recent scholarship has repeatedly highlighted a significant flaw in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: its inability to account for acts of resistance in the Lager, or its aprioristic closure to the very possibility of such acts. As a result, instead of clarifying ‘the sense and reasons’ behind the behaviour of both executioners and victims of the Shoah, as his work initially sets out to do, Agamben’s analysis ends up rendering their conduct even more enigmatic and unintelligible. To address this lacuna in Agamben’s work, I draw on Foucault’s later studies on antiquity – precisely the so-called ‘ethical’ Foucault whom Agamben dismissed in favour of the ‘biopolitical’ Foucault. In doing so, I aim to bring to light a particular form of resistance described by Primo Levi in If This Is a Man: what he calls ‘moral survival’. Through this framework, I seek to partially reconstruct the rationality behind the conduct of those Häftlinge who, like Levi himself, attempted to resist the immanentizing pressure of the lex of the camp (i.e., the process of Muselmannization) by constituting themselves as the ethical subjects of their own moral acts.