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While the historical circumstances (material, technical, bureaucratic, legal) surrounding the extermination of the Jews can now be considered sufficiently clarified, the situation is quite different when it comes to the ethical and political significance of the extermination—or even just a human understanding of what happened, that is, ultimately, its relevance today. Not only is there a lack of any attempt at comprehensive understanding, but the meaning and reasons behind the behaviour of the perpetrators and victims also remain unclear, and very often their own words continue to appear enigmatic to us. Between the desire to understand too much and too soon of those who have explanations for everything, and the refusal to understand of those who sacralise cheaply, this book chooses a third way: it tries to listen not so much to the voices of the witnesses as to the unwitnessable gap, the “faceless presence” that every testimony necessarily contains—that is, in the words of Primo Levi, those who have “hit rock bottom” (the “Muslims”). From this perspective, Auschwitz no longer appears merely as a death camp, but as the site of a still unimagined experiment in which the boundaries between the human and the inhuman are erased; and, put to the test of Auschwitz, the entire moral reflection of our time shows its inadequacy to allow the uncertain outline of a new ethical land to emerge from its ruins: that of testimony.

Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most hotly debated political philosophers today. His works on the political and legal paradigm of the West have caught the attention of philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and jurists alike, but his significance has been obscured by myths and misunderstandings. His works have been translated into more than 15 languages.