아우슈비츠의 수치

The Shame of Auschwitz: On Primo Levi’s Testimony

This paper aims to explore the ethical and political possibility of the feeling of shame of putting human beings on trial and reconstructing them. Emotions or feelings have been excluded and denied for a long time as the proper objects of the study for humanities on the ground that they are obscure, elusive, and unreliable. However, emotions are not just immediate physical reactions of human beings to objects, but their complex cognitive and sensational responses toward and about objects, and thus should gain justifiable attention from the humanities. For only when emotions are embraced in our research on human beings, can we reach a balanced and authentic understanding of them. Shame is one among many emotions, yet it has gained a special meaning after Auschwitz. Auschwitz was the extreme historical event in which human beings were faced with their total annihilation. Shame, commonly felt when the subject sees its weakness exposed by the other, has changed its affective quality in Auschwitz. The shame Primo Levi felt when he saw Muslims in concentration camps cannot be reduced to the common gap between one’s ego and ego-ideal in the psychoanalytic sense. Muslim is a borderline figure between the human and the non-human, a homo sacre in Agamben’s sense, who is exempt from legal responsibility for murder and at the same time from religious sacrifice. Muslim is not only denied his life but also his death itself. Shame is felt when human being is faced with the non-human within himself, when his subjectification is consigned to his desubjectification from which he cannot in any way distance himself. Through this ontological shame can he bring out the resisting force against the sovereign power that promotes the separation of his action from his being.