ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Auschwitz body politics that produced the Other of the human, the Musselmann. It argues that the matter of the Musselmann, by testing our ideas of what it means to be human, puts our concepts of justice, dignity and responsibility to the test. Taking up the challenge of this test disrupts the project of phenomenology, for insofar as the Musselmann cannot bear witness to themselves, the meaning of their unlivable lives can only be approached through a phenomenology of the alien (Waldenfels) and/or a phenomenology of the unsaid (Agamben). Pursuing the implications of these phenomenologies, I find that deciphering the shame that saved Primo Levi and Jean Améry from the fate of becoming a Musselmann, in bearing witness to the unbearable absence of their presence, directs us toward an ethics and politics that rejects the Nazi principle “Everything is permitted”.
