Dead man walking: Law and ethics after Giorgio Agamben's Auschwitz

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 397-417

  Fraser, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845251961     PISSN: 09528059     EISSN: 15728722     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1008926224876     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Laurent Nkangali, a Rwandan lawyer, in Philip Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (London: Picador, 1999).
2. See Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Holocaust Theology (London: Lamp Press, 1989)
3. and Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1987) for the presentation of various theological perspectives.
4. Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical foundation of authority'", in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 3-68.
5. Jean-François Lyolard, Heidegger and "The Jews" (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
6. Jacques Hassoun, Mireille Nathan-Murat and Annie Radzynski, Non Lieu de la Mémoire: La cassure d'Auschwitz (Paris: Bibliophane, 1990).
7. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz (Paris: Rivages, 1999).
8. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz (Ibid., 13. "...if as a consequence, some of the terms which carry the vital lesson of this century are corrected, some words banned, and others understood differently". (All translations from the French are my own.)
9. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz (Id., 34-39. There is however no discussion of the theologically charged, but less common, Hebrew, churban.
10. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
11. L'Ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998), 52-62.
12. Homo Sacer, 166-180.
13. Robert Cover, "Forward: Nomos and Narrative", 97 Harvard Law Review 4 (1983).
14. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
15. This is of course my own reading of Agamben's rendering of Heidegger and Nazism. For Agamben, the primacy of facticity in Heidegger's philosophy lays the groundwork for the creation of the "bare life" of the biologized homo sacer of Nazism, the life unworthy of life. Homo sacer, 150-153.
16. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 59.
17. See also, Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience (London and New York: Verso, 1993).
18. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz, 23. "The very idea of responsibility is contaminated, without possible recourse, by the law."
19. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 83-84.
20. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz, 48.
21. Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 199.
22. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz, 64.
23. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz, Ibid., 157-158.
24. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz, Id., 176. "The paradox here is the following: if the person whose humanity was destroyed is the only one who can testify about the human, this means that the identity between the human and the non-human is never perfect, that it is not possibly to completely destroy the human, that something always remains. The witness is this remainder". 23 Id., 42. "Whoever takes on the task of testifying for them knows that s/he will have to testify about the impossibility of testifying. This is what alters definitively the value of testimony and requires us to look for its meaning in an unexpected place."
25. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 295-302.
26. Jacques Derrida, Demeure (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 31.
27. "If this possibility, which it appears to forbid, were effectively excluded, if testimony, from that point onwards, became proof, information, certainty, an archive, it would lose its function as testimony. To remain testimony, it must let itself be haunted." See Maurice Blanchot, L'instant de ma mort (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994).
28. Demeure, 54.
29. Demeure, Ibid., 48.
30. Jacques Derrida, "... and pomegranates", in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 326-344, at 341.
31. A fuller version can be found at, "Foi et savoir", in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, La religion (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 9-86.
32. Demeure, 86.
33. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz, 158-159.
34. Demeure, 54-61.
35. Demeure, Ibid, 123.
36. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz, 113-177.
37. Benny Lévy, Visage continu: La pensée du Retour chez Emmanuel Lévinas (Paris: Verdier, 1998).
38. Order of Terror, 202-203.
39. Tzetvan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Metropoliten Books, 1996).
40. See e.g., Emmanuel Lévinas, Dieu, La Mort et Le Temps (Paris: Grasset, 1993).
41. Emmanuel Lévinas, Dieu, La Mort et Le Temps (1993). Ibid.
42. esiècle", in Emmanuel Lévinas et l'histoire, eds. Nathalie Frogeux and Françoise Mies (Paris-Namur: Éditions du Cerf, Presses universitaires de Namur, 1998), 81-95, at 93.
43. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz, at 19-21.
44. Homo Sacer, at 65.
45. Homo Sacer, at Ibid., at 147.
46. See David Fraser, "Law before Auschwitz: Aryan and Jew in the Nazi Rechtsstaat", in Thinking Through the Body of the Law, eds. Pheng Cheah, David Fraser, Judith Grbich (Sydney and New York: Allen & Unwin, New York University Press, 1996) 63-79.
47. Sem Dresden, Persecution, Extermination, Literature (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1995), at 175.
48. See also Annette Wierviorka, L'Ère du Témoin, at 109.
49. An der Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod- Eine Studie die Erscheinung des "Muselmans" im Konzentrationslager (Weinheim and Basel, 1987).
50. But murder is also unacceptable to the law. See Dick de Mildt, In the Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide in the Reflection of their Post-War Prosecution in West Germany (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996).
51. The Coming Community, at 87.
52. See Vladimir Jankélévitch, L'imprescriptible (Paris: Seuil, 1986).
53. "Ethics and Spirit", in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 3-10, at 10.
54. Luke 19-31, at 29-31 (NRSV).