ABSTRACT
Agamben (1999) refers to a poem by Primo Levi, which speaks of the uncertainty of the survivors of the concentration camps, and whether their actual lives are a dream or an awakening: “Now we have found our homes again; our bellies are full; we have finished telling our tales. It’s time. Soon we will once again hear the foreign order: Wstawac” (quoted by Agamben, 1999, p. 102). That foreign word, Wstawac (waking up), appears in place of the Name, that is, of that which has no name: the horror vis-à-vis the awakening, the last word that beckons from the real; the occurrence of the impossible. For the victims of the concentration camps, many are the processes that converge and which they experience, such as the loss of temporality, of spatiality, of humanity, but there is one that presents itself with more violence: the witnessing of their own desubjectivation—paradoxically, because, even though from a place of torture, of degradation and deprivation, it exposes that which produces subjectivity itself: subjectivity as that which is subtracted from the self-sustained processes of subjectivation and desubjectivation. In this regard, the extreme conditions suffered in the Lager, even 110though they portray the misery of humanity and the plunder of the human attributes of man, reveal nevertheless a structural condition: the non-human is not the flip side of the human but, on the contrary, that which inhabits it. The same thing occurs with the processes of desubjectivation-subjectivation in relation to being the subject of the subject and the same can be emphasised in relation to the not-said: it does not constitute the other of language but instead, from the ends of the symbolic, harasses the production of signifiers.
