Remnants of Muslims: Reading Agamben’s Silence

European dystopias/utopias in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Submission: Part I (2004) and Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015)

“…Relying on Primo Levi’s analysis of The Drowned and the Saved , Giorgio Agamben, in Remnants of Auschwitz , discusses the Muselmann, the cypher of the Muslim figure as a dejected prisoner of the concentration camps. 7 As Jill Jarvis (2014: 174) has argued, this subdued presence marks a historical metamorphosis of the Holocaust victim into alternative contemporaneous subjects – colonial subjects – a metamorphosis driven by contextual rhetoric rather than by Agamben’s own conscious analysis. Under this metamorphosis, Muslims and Jews become cyphers for contemporary postcolonial transformations in relation to colonial tensions.…”

Digital witnessing and the erasure of the racialized subject

“…Additionally, something uncomfortable remains in the use of the term Muselmänner/Muselmann. I am not the first to critique Agamben’s use of the term Muselmann (Muslim) for those who have been completely dehumanized (Jarvis, 2014; Mesnard, 2004; Weheliye, 2014). In a careful and detailed account, Jill Jarvis exposes the discrepancy between the meticulous way in which Agamben analyses juridical categories such as homo sacer, testis, superstes and the taken as read of the odd naming of those at the edge of life as Muselmann, remarking only on its ironic nature.…”

“…In a careful and detailed account, Jill Jarvis exposes the discrepancy between the meticulous way in which Agamben analyses juridical categories such as homo sacer, testis, superstes and the taken as read of the odd naming of those at the edge of life as Muselmann, remarking only on its ironic nature. This lacuna also has an historical and colonial context as Jarvis (2014: 709) points out:Agamben nowhere acknowledges that the use of the epithet ‘muselman’ at Auschwitz coincided with its simultaneous function as a juridical category of exception experimented with by the French in Algeria since at least its 1848 departmentalization – when the constitution of the French Second Republic annexed Algeria to France, carved it into three departments, and drew a juridical distinction between ‘les citoyens français’ (bearers of full citizenship rights) and ‘les sujets français’ (subject to military conscription, forced labour, and a disciplinary system that included concentration camps).…”

Livestreaming the ‘wretched of the Earth’: The Christchurch massacre and the ‘death-bound subject’

“…Joseph Pugliese contends that Agamben, in failing to ‘name the racism that inscribes this term, specifically the Islamophobia and Arabophobia that constitute its very condition of enunciation and signification’ (Pugliese, 2013: 117) in Europe and the West means that ‘whoever is designated as a Muselmann/Musulman/Muslim is compelled to wear the burden of absolute alterity’ (Macura-Nnamdi, 2018: 118). Auschwitz as a site of unprecedented bio-political experimentation where ‘the most absolute conditio inhumana ever to appear on earth was realized’ needed the Muselmann as the spectral image as a limit figure of a radically new kind inhabiting the ‘threshold between the human and the inhuman’ (Jarvis, 2014: 708). Though Auschwitz marked the ‘exceptional’ it was a visitation upon European soil of the spirit and practice of slaughter and subjugation that Europe had long visited upon colonial ‘others’ (Césaire, 1955).…”