Notes on Butler’s Abject & Agamben’s Muselmann

Judith Butler introduces her thoughts on the notion of abjection firstly by debating on notion of construction. According to Butler, construction is a concept which may be misunderstood at several levels of interpretation especially when being asked the question “who constructs?” If subjects are constructed within particular networks, then who/what does the construction? Butler implies that, to think of series of acts as necessarily having an origin in subject formation should be considered not as single act but a whole network of regulatory practices where the subject doesn’t have to contain its origin in particular agent. In this respect Butler suggests that sexualities and identities are constructed not by previous deciding subjects but performativity of things themselves. She also notes that this performance is citational and reiterative. In this respect Butler uses the concept materialization of bodies instead of construction of bodies, in order to better point at the notion of abjection in relation to constitutive outside. In order for us to produce certain types of bodies as existing, we have to exclude unknowable, meaningless, unrecognizable bodies. Thus there occur bodies which may be identified as constitutive outside.
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I think that Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of The Muselmann is related with Butler’s concept of constitutive outside. First of all, Agamben implicitly underlines that Muselmann cannot be analyzed as a clinical case study. For him, Muselmann “marked the moving threshold in which man passed into non-man and in which clinical diagnosis passed into anthropological analysis” Within this anthropological respect, the Muselmann stands in the third realm between humanity and non-humanity, life and death. Additionally Agamben presents a striking example about the cameraman capturing the camp in which lay full of dead bodies and Muselmanner. The cameraman cannot bear to see the half-livings and immediately turns back his camera to cadavers. At this point, the Muselmann is an unknown, unrecognizable body which includes whole mass of unintelligibility. The Muselmann which Agamben describes stands outside of any particular, social materialization of bodies. Furthermore Agamben explains the reason of which cameraman withdraws his camera from Muselmanner immediately by pointing at the constitutive outsideness of their bodies: “…the Muselmann is universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face” At this point, even prisoners in the camps turn their backs on the Muselmanner because it is the constitutive other and moreover, it is as if things will get better if they were to not exist, thrown out. At this point, Butler’s ideas reveal that abjection is the very inadmissibility of certain bodies to codes of intelligibility.
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In addition to the visibility of the Muselmann fifty years after the Holocaust, Agamben implies that the experiences of the Muselmann caused to redefine the meaning and the function of bodies on the basis of ethics of life. He emphasizes dignity and its meanings in different contexts. According to him, dignity is a constant component which accompanies one’s body in order to fulfill his/her “humanness”. Actually it is a socially regulated, defined phenomenon; and its uses may as well differentiate in different social contexts. Nonetheless dignity was an autonomous entity which defines human beings’ bodies as humanly. Agamben suggests that the Muselmann is a crucial example of how this kind of understanding of dignity versus humanness becomes obsolete. He states that “…it is possible to lose dignity and decency beyond imagination, that there is still life in the most extreme degradation.” I think Agamben’s emphasis on this issue once again brings us back to the basic discussion of culture vs. nature in cultural studies. Agamben’s understanding of the Muselmann reveals that in fact, apart from “body plus dignity equal to humanness” kind of understanding; it is only the biological entity of the body which makes it very “humane”. Agamben announces that “The Muselmann, who is its most extreme expression, is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where dignity ends” On the other hand, with respect to culture vs. nature discussion, Butler opposed to distinction between sex and gender that is put forth by feminist theory in general and thus questioned the distinction between culture and nature. For Butler, whatever is naturalized as human in particular social context is the real body – materialized body- . They are real but their materiality isn’t naturally given. They are realized through our defining their existence. In this respect I think Muselmann is an example of materialized body in the way which Agamben and many others define its existence.
Agamben simply tells that Muselmann stands between life and death, human and inhuman. Furthermore his analysis grew broader, while he begins discussion of becoming Muselmann or not, remaining human or not. Bettelheim implies that Nazi commander Höss turned into a kind of Muselmann; “an improbable and monstrous biological machine.” He was lacking emotions, moral conscious and sensibility.
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I think remaining human and not becoming a Muselmann surely requires resistance. This resistance may be handled by counter-performances that Butler suggests (such like queer movement). However the sole fact is that Muselmanner only existed in concentration camps, so we can’t talk about a Muselmann today resisting? Obviously this may not be the case. If Muselmann is a notion which defined particular people, who experienced something between life and death in a certain period of time, as constitutive outsiders, now we should find out ways of resistance for contemporary Muselmanner, together with handling the discussion of what it means to be human today, in relation to the popular debate of nature vs. culture.
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