Literature and Theology Advance Access published November 10, 2010

Literature & Theology, 2010, pp. 113 doi:10.1093/litthe/frq044

THE REPRIEVE: WEAK MESSIANICISM AND THE EVENT IN PRIMO LEVIS MOMENTS OF REPRIEVE
Em McAvan
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Abstract In this article, I analyse Primo Levis work on Auschwitz, in particular his Moments of Reprieve. Against the overdetermined inhuman economy of the camp, I nd that the reprieve is what philosopher John D. Caputo has described as an Event, a stirring prompted by a call from alterity. Because it does not redeem or provide salvation, the reprieve is a weak form of messianicism, suspending but not cancelling the camp. Because every other Other remains ultimately incomprehensible, I argue that even in the most repressive of the circumstances there remains the possibility of the reprieve.

in the violent and degraded environment of Auschwitz, a man helping other men out of pure altruism was incomprehensible, alien, like a saviour whos come from heaven. (155) Primo Levis chronicles of life in Auschwitz have been increasing in critical importance over the last several decades. Notably, fellow Italian Giorgio Agambens theories have relied heavily on tropes taken from Levis writingthe musselman,1 the role of the witness, the impossibility of full testimony and the distinction between the drowned and the saved drawn in that work of the same name.2 As the subtitle of Agambens book on Auschwitz suggeststhe witness and the archive3Levis work has become a privileged touchstone in critical reections on the role of the witness in the concentration camps of the Nazi regime. Whilst a number of writers have reected upon Levis work in If This Is A Man and The Drowned and the Saved,4 his Moments of Reprieve5 has been comparatively critically under-appreciated. Its series of short, disconnected vignettes may be his nest work, and in the gure of the reprieve, offers a series of moments that post important questions about the way we conceptualise mercy,

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forgiveness, the ethical and the religious. In this, Levis work has an unexpected proximity to post-secular theology and philosophy; in particular, American deconstructionist John D. Caputos work on the Event, weak theology and forgiveness allows us to reect anew on Levis testimony on the camp.
I. THE CAMP

But rst, before we look at the reprieve, we must examine the status quo. The camp represents what Agamben rightly calls a limit situation6 and throws into relief the severity of what is at stake in politics, ethics and relationships. As a character in Art Spiegelmans acclaimed graphic novel Maus says, Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week. . . then you could see what it is, friends!7 As Levi describes it, the camp functions as a closed system, an apparatus regulating bodies, clothes, emotions, language. Each thing was measured exactly outfrom the 1600 calories in the soup8 given daily to the bales of hair the Nazis removed from prisoners. Unauthorised communication between prisoners and non-prisoners was a crime.9 The camp was almost totally closed, completely saturated in the calculated cruelty of the Germans biopolitics. Survival, as Levi describes it, was a survival of the ttestno one could take the risk or spare the energy for altruism, since the soup was intentionally not nutritious enough to sustain a person.10 The camp was a regular, controlled life which is identical for all and inadequate to all needs.11 For Agamben, the camp is both an indistinct zone of biopolitical power outside of the social and the apotheosis of the governmental power regulating everyday life.12 Although hierarchical and rational in certain senses, the camp suspends any rights or legitimating principles and instead is run by the pure principle of sovereignty. The camp was both immensely irrational and rational, though the two were mixed together in ways that one could not know in advance. Indeed, Levi suggests that the Nazis systematicallyand thus rationallyextracted every last ounce of suffering from their Jewish prisoners. The Lagers were not merely the result of more commonplace ruthless efciency and indifference towards the working conditions of prisoners; the apparatus featured a systematic drive towards producing misery, which as Levi puts it, was entirely useless since it had no other goal than itselfby and large the work camps did not produce any tangible results. Agamben rightly suggests then that the non-humanity of the prisoners in the camp may be best described as bare life.13 As the title of Levis rst book If This Is A Man makes clear, humanity is not possible in Auschwitz. The prisoners in the camp are not precisely human, he suggests, because they are not able to be. Humanity is dulled in Auschwitz, for in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced

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to silence. Jacques Derrida points out that, as much as the murder of millions of people, the Nazis attempted to erase singularity, rst of all the possibility of giving, inscribing, calling and recalling the name.15 The end result of this regime of misery is the musselman (literally: Muslim), one whose affect disappears, becoming something like a zone between life and death. The musselmans are starving, usually diseased and become unresponsive and apathetic to their fate, doomed to selection for the gas chambers. The divine spark is dead in the musselmans, Levi hesitates to call them living.16 The line between human and inhuman becomes increasingly blurry, for in the camp, the Jew is transformed into a musselman and the human into a non-human.17 Because they perished in Auschwitz, the musselmans cannot speak for themselves. However, for Levi, it is only the musselman who has endured the worst of the Nazi treatment (up to death), and therefore only the musselman who can be the true witness to the camp. Testimony thus is an aporia, an impossibility, but a necessary one for survivors like Levi, who became a writer so he [could] bear witness.18 This is a fraught and necessarily awed endeavour, for as Agamben puts it, testimony is the disjunction between two impossibilities of bearing witness; it means that language, in order to bear witness, must give way to a non-language in order to show the impossibility of bearing witness.19 As Agamben makes clear, the ethical task is to attend to the impossible necessity of witnessing, though even the survivor cannot give full and total testimony. In Auschwitz ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the complete witness, makes it forever impossible to distinguish between man and non-man.20
II. THE EVENT OF THE REPRIEVE

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Yet however total it may beand the camps are very much the denition of a totalising system as Agamben makes clearevery system must have its ambivalences, its reprieves. Levi describes the stories that make up Moments of Reprieve as bizarre marginal moments of reprieve, in which the compressed identity can reacquire for a moment its lineaments.21 These moments of reprieve are moments of re-humanisation in an inhuman situation. But how could a reprieveeven a temporary oneoccur in the camp? Arguably, the reprieve operates on the level of an Event, a stirring, a taking over. The idea of the event has a strong philosophical pedigree, with more recent versions being laid forth by Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou and American deconstructionist John D. Caputo. Drawing on Deleuze but more nely attuned to the religious, Caputos conceptualisation in his The Weakness of God is perhaps the most compelling. For Caputo, the Event is something uncontainable, untranslatable, excessive and true.22 It is a stirring, a response to the unconditional call of alterity. Something (we know not what) moves

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within a set of given elements and takes them over to produce the new, the unforeseeable. In a telling phrase often repeated by Caputo, Deleuze says that to the extent that events are actualized within us, they wait for us and invite us in. They signal us.23 Caputo attempts to exit the strong onto-theological metaphysics of presence and being, arguing that the event be understood instead as something coming.24 In a kind of Levinasian move, Caputo situates Events in something other than language, arguing that Events occur within names (of which God is one), but they must ultimately be distinguished from them.25 For while the name is a kind of provisional formulation of an event, a relatively stable if evolving structure, . . . the event is ever restless, on the move, seeking new forms to assume, seeking to get expressed in still unexpressed ways.26 Like the evolving set of terms Jacques Derrida used through rance, pharmakon, supplehis career to describe the un-deconstructible (diffe ment, kho ra and so on), the Event stirs within different names, different cultural constellations. It is less a determinate object like a name (however in ux that may be) than a movement. Indeed, Caputos gloss on the Event has a distinctly theological avour that is shared by other more explicitly atheist writers like Alain Badiou. Badious Event is a form of laicized grace, which gives people a chance of being a little bit more than living individuals, pursuing our ordinary interests.27 As Caputo points out, Badious Event can be seen as a fortuitous visitation by something that we did not invite, the arrival of something unexpected, unforeseeable, unprogrammable, uncontrollable, and even unwarranted . . . . For Badiou, grace is an exceptional moment, like the one that unhorsed Paul on the way to Damascus.28 For Caputo as much as Badiou, the Event is an exception, not a generalised rule. The reprieve in Levi, too, is an exception rather than a rule. Yet, Badiou emphasises that grace is based absolutely on chance,29 a position that is untenable in the camp. Levi demands that we face the truth of the camp, even when it be, improbably, one human German whispering that Christmas is coming.30 In contrast to the randomness of Badious grace, the reprieve marks a specic response to a specic call from the Other. It is unpredictable and unforeseeable, but not based absolutely on chance. The reprieves Levi describes are on the order of a stirring, but though it is something like a miracle, it does not redeem, it does not free. The reprieve is not a moment of what Caputo would call a strong messianicism: it does not promise let alone deliver salvation. If the reprieve has a messianic dimension it is necessarily a weak one.31 After all, as Caputo puts it, it is because God is but a weak force that Auschwitz was possible.32 A strong metaphysics of God is therefore untenable, perhaps even perverse in the face of Auschwitz. Though the categorical distinction between the drowned and the saved might in some ways suggest that the saved might have a divine or providential purpose behind it, Levi empathetically denies

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this. The pious talk of sacrice, martyrdom or divine Providence has no place los whole in Levis lexicon.33 The etymology of the word Holocaust (ho s burnt) implies a burnt offering to a pagan god, a philological and kausto implication that is a mistake for the atheist Levi34especially given that it could be read as casting the Nazis in the role of the priests sacricing the Jews.35 Indeed, he has nothing but scorn in If This Is A Man for the prayers of Kuhn, a fellow prisoner, who gives thanks for having been spared the gas chambers. Levi imagines that even God would be disgusted by the spectacle of one person saved against the backdrop of so many more murderedif I was God, I would spit at Kuhns prayer.36 Levi nds there to be no purpose to the Shoah, no adequate reason for subjecting the Jews to its horror. To imagine the deaths as a sacrice to God is abhorrent, as is a testing of his Chosen People. Such explanations do not explain, let alone mitigate, the horror of genocide. The best men drowned in Auschwitz in Levis eyes, so for survival to be given as a reward by a divine being is an abomination in itself. Indeed, any form of salvation would be insufcient without the musselman, those who most fully experienced the camp. Instead, the reprieve opens only the weak force of a (potentially messianic) longing in a zone in which such desires have been largely erased by the totalising system of the Lagers. Badious grace offers people the chance of being a little bit more than living individuals,37 a position which presumes they are already human. For both Levi and Agamben, this is untenable in the camp given that the prisoners are existing in a zone somewhere between life and death. In contrast, the reprieve offers merely the chance of an unforeseeable brief moment of re-humanisation for prisoners who cannot be fully human in the camp. And so it is religious in a certain (atheistic) sense, because although the reprieve operates on the edge of that Christian economy of grace and forgiveness, it does not require it.
III. FORGIVEN TIME

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What is Levis relationship to forgiveness, then? Is the reprieve simply an act of mercy? Not entirely. As Jacques Derrida has noted in an interesting deconstruction of Shakespeares Merchant of Venice (itself a kind of anti-Semitic ur-text), mercy is itself tied up in a Christian economy of grace and forgiveness. Paraphrasing Portias speech in the climactic act four, he says:
The quality of mercy is not forced, constrained, mercy is not commanded, it is free, gratuitous, grace is gratuitous. Mercy falls from heaven like a gentle shower. It cant be scheduled, calculated, it arrives or it doesnt, no-one decides on it, nor does any human law; like rain it happens or it doesnt, but its a good rain, a gentle rain, forgiveness isnt ordered up, it isnt calculated, it is foreign to calculation, to economics, to the transaction and the law.38

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Derrida builds here on his speculations in The Gift of Death about the foreignness of calculation to Abrahams own gift of death.39 Yet the equivalence drawn between mercy and Abrahams gift (that is, his attempted murder of Isaac at the prompting of the call of pure alterity) is somewhat troubling. Is mercy then like death? Perhaps, sometimes. What is more pertinent to Levis Moments of Reprieve, however, is the unstrained nature of mercyit must be freely given, not forced or for an exchange. Yet what usually passes by the name of mercy, as the hypocrisy of Portias speech makes clear,40 relies upon a hierarchy of the wrong and the wronged, the strong who dispense mercy and the weak who require it. Derrida points to the inequality between the person who is merciful, and the one who receives mercy, for if mercy falls like rain then it falls from above. How does mercy drop in what Levi calls the grey zone of the camp? Clearly in some senses there is a rigidly dened hierarchy in the camp starting with the SS, guards, civilian contractors, Allied POWs, experienced prisoners, new prisoners down right to the bottom with musselmans. Mercy may, as with the German woman whispering Christmas will be here soon,41 be from the powerful to the prisoner. The messianic promise of that reprieve is hard to miss, yet it is nevertheless more complex than a merely Christian messicianism. It is tempting to suggest that the kind of mercy from above (like that the German woman displays to Levi) may be no mercy at all, for it requires nothing of the powerful. But that is not precisely true, nor is it without value (particularly as with those acts of mercy which do allow survival). Levi suggests that these were obvious words, absurd actually when addressed to a Jewish prisoner yet they were intended to mean something else, something no German at that time would have dared to put into words.42 The event stirs within the name (of Christmas), an event that briey promises a future in which the Nazis will not be in power, in which the hierarchy of the camp will be levelled out. This is a weak messicianism to be sure, and as Levi points out, one human German does not whitewash the innumerable inhuman or indifferent ones.43 The reprieve is a moment of re-humanisation in a milieu in which inhumanity is the norm. So though both are supercially similar in their suspension of a rule, the reprieve should not be confused or equated with the Schmittian state of exception highlighted by Agambenafter all, the camp is already functioning in the state of exception. The rule of law has already been suspended; instead there is only the un-legitimated function of power. Those peopleevents things that the Event stirs within may or may not have certain forms of power in the camp, but in any case they are far from the gure of the sovereign whose actions positioned the camp prisoners as homo sacer outside the body of the social. Levis reprieves, as often as not, come from prisoners of similar stature. Even, as with Bandi, the new prisoner Levi teaches to steal, from

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below. The reprieve, therefore, is not without hierarchy, but it is a certain suspension of its efcacy. If we look to the aporia of forgiveness, we nd something of the economics of the reprieve. Derrida suggests too that like mercy, forgiveness is nothing if it is calculable. He says If I forgive because its forgivable, because its easy to forgive, Im not forgiving.45 Derrida argues that true forgiveness consists of forgiving the unforgivable, that forgiving, if it is possible, must only come to be as impossible.46 He asks, how I can be sure that I have the right to forgive or that Ive effectively forgiven rather than forgotten, or overlooked, or reduced the offense to something forgivable?47 Because of the impossibility of humanity in the camp, the reprieve is similarly impossible as Derridas forgiveness, similarly incalculable. But as Caputo makes clear, forgiveness cannot be premised on the erasure of the original offence,48 but rather in its remaining legible in its cancelling out. He points out that if the offense were by some mysterious act of divine power/goodness annihilated, so would the forgiveness be eradicated, for there would be nothing then to forgive. In the forgiveness, there is always something to be forgiven.49 It is here that Levi departs from the economy of forgiveness, for what offence has the camp inhabitant committed? Further, if a reprieve was a forgiveness, to not eradicate the punishment (that is, remove the prisoners from the camp) would be all more monstrous. As the stories of Moments of Reprieve show, the reprieve in the camp does not cancel out, does not denitively remove the prisoner from the camp or from hunger or from the threat of death. It temporarily suspends, but it does not free.

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IV. LORENZO

Rather than draw out a schema of the kinds of reprievesfor they are many and varied in Levis bookI want to underline that each reprieve is a singularity, a unique (if similar) set of co-ordinates and elements that coalesce around a single event. As such, it seems more pertinent to draw out the meanings from several of key reprieves through close reading. Lorenzo was an Italian civilian worker in the camp, not a prisoner. Every day for six months, he brought soup for Levi in a can. This of itself was an act of immense bravery, for if the Germans had discovered his actions he would have been imprisoned in the camp himself.50 Lorenzo risked his own life to give a tin of soup and sometimes a slice of bread a day to Levi, an act that was itself lifesaving. The Germans starved their prisoners, every extra calorie was itself potentially life-saving, and each tin of soup keeps Levi and Alberto from becoming musselman.51

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But despite their value to Levi and Alberto, Lorenzos actions do not make sense, not entirely. He had a difcult personality, and almost never spoke.52 He clearly does not help Levi because they are friends, though their shared Italianness may have helped. Similarly, he does not give the soup in exchange for some other service or good. Though Levi and his compadre Alberto strain to repair his shoes,53 the risk nevertheless outweighed the gain greatly. They are still operating in an economythe exchange of a service for the soupbut it is in essence symbolic. Lorenzo refuses more substantial recompense, as when Levi offers to send Lorenzos sister some money, or his mother after the war. In the camp, in which everything was traded and black market goods were traded to the prisoners largely for prot, the trade of soup for shoes may have appeared to be a transaction like any other, but in hindsight Levi nds Lorenzos actions to have been outside that economy. Indeed, Levi nds the unlikeliness of Lorenzos actions almost religious: in the violent and degraded environment of Auschwitz, a man helping other men out of pure altruism was incomprehensible, alien, like a saviour whos come from heaven.54 Like Derridas Abraham, Lorenzo works in silence. Later he tells Levi that he had also been giving food to other people in the camp, but he thought it right not to tell me about it: we are in this world to do good, not to boast about it.55 Lorenzos ethical response to the camp is a very denite here I am, followed by an Abrahamic silence around the task of keeping Levi and others alive. The situation of the camp is enough of an Event to provoke a stirring in Lorenzo, giving him a task to which he is extraordinarily faithful. Lorenzo goes beyond mere convenience, mere calculable altruism. Levi later discovered that Lorenzo had gotten up at three in the morning every day to make soup while his room mates were asleep (remember that he too is working, he too is living from limited, if not fatal, rationed amounts of food). Once, a bomb had fallen close to him and exploded in the soft ground; it had buried the mess tin and burst one of his eardrums, but he had the soup to deliver and had come to work anyway.56 In the end, without the ability to dispense the reprieve, Lorenzo found it difcult to live in civilian life,57 drifting from place to place and becoming an alcoholic. Eventually, he fell sick and left the hospital Levi found to treat him because they had no wine. Sadly, he, who was not a survivor, had died of a survivors disease.58
V. THE VIOLIN What kind of a reprieve, what kind of an event, is the story of the violin? Levi describes an unlikely series of events culminating in Wolf, a pharmacist from Berlin, playing a violin. Wolf secreted music as our stomachs secreted

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hunger, for which he was mocked soundly by Elias, the dwarf. Elias ridicules Wolf, mocking his nose and scabies, and giving him the nickname Scabies-Wolef60 that follows him for months. And yet, one day:
A timid spring at last arrived, and in one of the rst stretches of sunshine there was a work-free Sunday afternoon, fragile and precious as a peach blossom . . . . But from far away, carried by the whims of a tepid wind redolent of damp earth, we heard a new sound, a sound so improbable, so unexpected, that everyone lifted his head to listen. The sound was frail, like that of the sky and that sun.61

First, we have a more usual form of reprievea precious work-free day. Then, we have the strange appearance of the violin itself, for where he [Wolf] could have found a violin was a mystery.62 Though the veterans knew that in the Camp anything could happen . . . perhaps he had stolen it; perhaps he rented it in exchange for bread,63 this seems an unconvincing rationalisationthere is something miraculous about the violins appearance, on that day, for Wolf. Further, even though Wolf played for himself,64 it is his tormentor Elias who is most moved of his fellow prisoners. On his gladiators face hovered that veil of contented stupor one sometimes sees on the faces of the dead, that makes one think that they really had for an instant, on the threshold, a vision of a better world.65 Here the reference to the dead is quite apt, recall that for Levi the humanity of those in the camp is always under question. So though Deleuze refers to the actor (that is, a subject), it is clear that the Event coalesces around human and non-human elements equally, assemblages of people and objects. This becomes particularly apparent when we consider the story of the violin, where the appearance of the violin itself is something of an unlikely stirring, for where he [Wolf] could have found a violin was a mystery.66 The Event stirs for Wolf, the violin and Elias equally.

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VI. THE CANTOR AND THE BARRACKS CHIEF

In this story, Levi tells one of his more explicitly religious stories. He begins with a description of Otto, a political prisoner (a red triangle) who had been in the Camp an astonishing seven years, and before that at Dachau. Otto was respected, not so much for his past as his quick sts and still very quick reexes.67 Otto is confronted by Ezra, a Lithuanian cantor. It is the day before Yom Kippur, the day of atonement and forgiveness, but of course we worked anyway.68 The very fact that it is known to be Yom Kippur is itself suggested by Levi to be something of a mystery, since the Jewish

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calendar is not lunar. He suggests that it may either be news from new arrivals or pious Jews keeping a count, but has no nal explanation for how the prisoners were aware of the date. On Yom Kippur eve, Otto doles out the days food rations. When he reaches Ezra, Ezra refuses the days rations, saying, Mister Barracks Chief, for us today is a day of atonement and I cannot eat my soup. I respectfully ask you to save it for me until tomorrow evening.69 This is, as Levi tells it, an extraordinary request. Otto is dumbfounded, for in all his years he had never run into a prisoner who refused food.70 As Lorenzos story suggests, the struggle for more food in the camp was a ght for survival, hunger a constant. To refuse food even for a meal is an act of tremendous religious delity. Rather than administer the more usual violence, Otto takes Ezra aside and interviews him when he is nished ladling out the soup to the other prisoners. Otto asks Ezra if he is not hungry. Ezra replies that he is hungry, but he would abstain from food because he wasnt certain it would lead to his death (Jewish law of course allows for exceptions in life-threatening situations). Otto then asks what sins Ezra is atoning for, and Ezra replies that he has some of his own, but that he is also atoning for the sins of others, hoping to contribute to Gods forgiveness of the sins of others. And then Levi describes something that can only be seen as an Event:
Otto grew more and more perplexed, torn by amazement, the desire to laugh, and still another feeling to which he no longer could give a name and which he believed had died in him, killed by the years of ambiguous, savage life in the Camps and even before that by his political militancy, which had been rigorous.71

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In response to this Event, Otto saves the soup for Ezra, even keeping it cool so that it did not go sour. Even more unlikely, Otto rewards Ezra with a particularly generous serve of soup.72 The calculable, likely response for Otto to such an unlikely event as asking to save soup would have been self-interest (drinking the soup himself, trading the soup to another). At worst, violence or even denunciation to the Germans was a possibility. Instead, we see a stirring in Otto, a moment of the unexpected. He experiences an un-nameable feeling, a moment of alterity, a call whose origin he cannot place. Instead he argues with Ezra, eshing out his arguments, and nds something of himself in the exchange another long lost pleasure: the heated polemics at his party meetings.73 The Event causes in Otto, one of the oldest prisoners in Auschwitz, a brief moment of re-humanisation in which, as Levi puts it, the compressed identity can reacquire for a moment its lineaments.74

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VII. CONCLUSION: THE ETHICAL DEMAND

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Though it was an environment of utter inhumanity, the question of how to ethically respond to another, far from being suspended, was heightened in Auschwitz. In the wake of the Shoah, the Jewish philosopher and Talmudist Emmanuel Levinas repeatedly argued that the ethical responsibility to the Other is primary and unconditional to the formation of the individual. For Levinas, ethical responsibility consists of saying here I am [me voici]. To do something for the Other. To give.75 He describes responsibility as integral in forming the relation between the self and Other, a relation in which the ethical response to the Other must be a responsibility without concern for reciprocity.76 Every self has a responsibility to respond unconditionally, to give simply because it is asked for. This is a difcult, indeed impossible, bond that Levinas places us under, one that is partially formed as an attempt to make sense of the devastation of the Shoah.77 As we can see in Levis accounts of the Lager, there was a constant ethical demand from other prisoners that could not be fullled. As he puts it, the demand for solidarity, for a human word, advice, even only a listening ear, was permanent and universal but rarely satised.78 Levi keenly feels the weight of his responsibility to this demand, and the impossibility of its satisfaction. The other(s) of Auschwitz is innitely demanding, to use Simon Critchleys felicitous phrase.79 Given that the intent of the Nazi formulation of the camp was to exert as much suffering as possible, the reprieve seems formally impossible. At best it is a luxury, but one that could just as easily bring violence or death to oneself. Yet for all that, it is necessary. Indeed, it is the necessity of humanityand its impossibility in the campthat makes Levi react with shame to the selections, the shame that the just man experiences at another mans crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist.80 It is impossible to respond unconditionally to the ethical demand and still survive in the camp, and yet Levi nevertheless feels its presence keenly. So how does a reprieve occur, given its formal impossibility? How can it stir? How can an Event take place? Levi suggests in The Drowned and Saved that every person is a little bit incomprehensible. In other words, even with the saturation of power in Auschwitz, in which human behaviour is regulated to the nth degree, there remains a degree of unpredictability in peoples actions. As Derrida puts it in The Gift of Death, everyone else . . . is innitely other in its absolute singularity, inaccessibility, solitary, transcendent.81 It is that innite alterity of the Other that clears the space for the reprieve to take place. Levis writings suggest that, even in the limited situation of Auschwitz, because the other will always remain a little bit other, something may stir within

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to produce the unthinkable, the incalculable. An Event will take place, a weak and fragile Eventthe reprieve. Murdoch University, Australia E.McAvan@gmail.com
REFERENCES
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The word musselman has several variations in English translation. For the main, I follow the spelling used in the English translation of Moments of Reprieve, but leave quotes with alternate spellings such as those of Agamben unchanged. Primo Levi, If This is a Man; The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Everymans Library, 2000); Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989). Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999). See for instance Gillian Banner, Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of the Offence (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2000). Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve, trans. Ruth Feldman (London: Penguin, 2001). Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 48. Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History (New York: Pantheon, 1986), pp. 4. Levi, Moments of Reprieve, p. 153. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 154. Levi, If This is a Man, p. 102. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 123. Ibid. Levi, If This Is a Man, p. 103. Jacques Derrida, Force of Law in Gil Anidjar (ed.) and M. Quaintance (trans.) Acts of Religion (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 296. Ibid., 106.

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24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

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Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 52. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 47. Levi, Moments of Reprieve, p.10. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 27. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boudas (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 169. Caputo, The Weakness of God, p. 53. Ibid., 3-20. Ibid., 47. Badiou, Ethics, p. 123. John D. Caputo, Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event in After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, ed. Jeffrey Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) p. 4785; 183. Ibid., 123. Levi, Moments of Reprieve, p. 92. Caputo here takes the phrase weak messianicism from Walter Benjamin. Caputo, The Weakness of God, p. 94. See Agamben for more on this. Agamben quotes Levi as saying that he does not like the term Holocaust, that he uses it only to be understood (p. 2831). Quoted in Agamben, Remnants, p. 28. Zev Gardner and Bruce Zuckerman, Why Do We Call the Holocaust The Holocaust: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Labels, Modern Judaism 9.2 (1989) 197211 (p. 199).

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36 37 38

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40

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Levi, If This Is A Man, p. 155. Badiou, Ethics, p. 123. Jacques Derrida and Lawrence Venuti, What is a Relevant Translation? Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001) p. 174200 (p. 192). Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 96. Portias speech, of course, seeks to deploy the force of the law to control Shylocks actionsnow must the Jew be merciful (italics added). It is therefore extremely coercive, far from the free gift she speaks so glowingly about. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (New York: Bantam, 2005). Levi, Moments of Reprieve, p. 92. Ibid., 92. Ibid. Ibid., 54. Jacques Derrida, A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event, trans. Gila Walker, Critical Inquiry 33 (2007), p. 449. Ibid., 449. Ibid., 450. Caputo, The Weakness of God, p. 225. Ibid., 225. Levi, Moments of Reprieve, p. 153. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 160.

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

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78 79

80 81

Ibid. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 62. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 78. Ibid. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 10. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Innity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 97. Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford 1998), p. xv. Levinas dedicates his magnum opus Otherwise Than Being to the six million assassinated by the National Socialists. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. v. Levi, Moments of Reprieve, p. 59. Simon Critchley, Innitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007). Levi, If This Is A Man, p. 218 Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 78.

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