THE “HOMO SACER” OR THE “HIDDEN CIPHERS” OF AUSCHWITZ: THE HOLOCAUST IN THE WORK OF GIORGIO AGAMBEN AND MOISHE POSTONE

Abstract

Interpretations of the Holocaust are diverse. Without a doubt, one of the most controversial readings regarding this phenomenon is the work “What Remains of Auschwitz”, by Giorgio Agamben. For the Italian philosopher, the use of the term “holocaust” to refer to the mass slaughter of six million Jews gives a theological and sacrificial meaning to a senseless massacre. Relying on the notions of thanatopolitics, genocide as the management of bare life and the political form of the concentration camp as a paradigm of modernity, the author seeks to contest the attribution of a sacrificial meaning to the Holocaust and defends, in turn, the meaning of the genocide of the Jews as a mass slaughter of the Homo Sacer. This brief essay aims to present Agamben's ideas and contrast them with the different interpretation of the historian Moishe Postone, for whom the meaning of the Holocaust can only be understood through a critical reading of political economy, offering an interpretation of the phenomenon of ideology and Nazi political regime as a finished form of commodity fetishism, presenting Nazism as a reactionary form of romantic anticapitalism, which operates a projection of the most abstract characteristics of capitalism onto the Jewish people as personifications of capitalist value and modernity and which aimed to purge the abstract side of capitalism through genocide of the Jewish people, of Jews as hidden ciphers, personifications of the abstract domination of capital. The article proposes an examination of the two interpretations, Agamben’s philosophical-political one, and Postone’s historical-critical one, in order to observe their convergences and ruptures.