“The exception is more interesting than the regular case. The latter proves nothing, the exception proves everything.”

– Carl Schmitt

he political and legal institutions of modernity have produced a figure defined by abandonment: the Muselmann. This is happening at a time when liberalism has achieved political and economic ascendancy at a planetary level. The German spelling retains its original phonetic characteristic. However, Muselmann, in this essay, does not refer to religion per se, but to its modern genesis and deployment in contemporary political philosophy to explain a particular state of humans in the modern nation-state. Though the word originally referred to the followers of Islam, it evolved into a concept denoting a particular human condition in a world dominated by rationalised institutions of modernity. Shorn of its religious roots, the meaning of Muselmann expanded to explicate a profane situation in modernity.

This essay employs the term Muselmann with reference to the conceptual categories developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his books, especially Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive.

The word Muselmann was forged in the fire of the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It was used by prisoners and guards in German concentration camps during World War II to refer to prisoners who had been stripped of their humanity through starvation, exhaustion and hopelessness. Among the survivors of Auschwitz were the writers Viktor Frankl and Primo Levi. They employed the term Muselmann to explain a situation where, in the words of Levi, men turned into “non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand …”

In a nutshell, Muselmann is a figure in which human identity, hope and certainty are pushed to the brink of extinction by the dominant political order and its power. It is a zone in which human beings are stripped of their humanity and the protection of the law.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has appropriated the term Muselmann to describe humanity’s condition and to expose the bleak side of modernity. Although he uses Muslims instead of the original German spelling Muselmann, I am sticking to the original German form. Agamben refers to it as the unconsciousness of modernity. However, most proponents of modernity remain oblivious to the hidden politico-juridical structure of modern power.

When morality and law disappear, something horrific takes place. Agamben lays bare the horrors that occur in the “non-men zone” of modernity. This zone comes into being when the law is suspended. Furthermore, Agamben identifies the conceptual absence of a category in modern political vocabulary. This absence is necessitated by the discourse of the modern nation state, which reduces the status of existent entities into non-entities.

Agamben’s analysis of modern politics and law is informed by the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose concept of the political introduced the categories of friend and enemy. Schmitt argues that the modern state suspends the law in order to confront the enemy and thus exempts itself from the law. It is this exemption from the law that makes the state viable and sovereign. Schmitt defines the “sovereign” as “he who can decide on the state of exception [Ausnahmezustand]”, in which the rule of law is suspended, and it is this suspension that gives the concept its force.

Giorgio Agamben has also reintroduced an ancient Roman legal concept, homo sacer, bare life. It refers to life “reduced to its purely biological existence, stripped of legal rights, political status and quality, existing in a state where it can be killed with impunity.” Imagine what happens to an individual on death row for a notion or entity with which he is associated, but when that very entity fails to save him from the horrors of imminent death unfolding before his eyes. It is a state in which no idea, soul or language exists. It is a cosmic silence, deafness and blindness. This point can be termed the threshold of death. In such an existential state, what kinds of thoughts come to mind cannot be envisaged, because death takes the witness along with the memory of painful experiences.

Death takes the witness along with the memory of painful experiences.

Agamben argues that the Muselmann is the true core of Auschwitz, but this core has been stripped of voice, soul and humanity. Hence, we can say that modernity, at its core, harbours horror while wearing the veneer of rationality, normalcy, laws and rights. That is why the person inhabiting the non-men space of modernity is bound to face the torments of hell in silence. However, the experience of torture and pain does leave traces of horror. A famous trace of such an experience was found in a gas chamber at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, where an anonymous prisoner carved this sentence on the wall: “If there is a god, he will have to beg for my forgiveness.” Imagine the existential anguish as the prisoner carved his scream of utter hopelessness into the wall.

Nazi Germany was able to murder people on an industrial scale because it made the inhuman treatment of Jews an exception to the law of a nation otherwise known for producing geniuses in every field of life and discipline of knowledge. For Germans, prisoners in Auschwitz were “the walking dead.” In other words, they were considered to have no soul; hence, they were not regarded as human. Homo sacer is therefore liable to be killed before the sacred altar of the nation-state.

The state of exception is still employed to enable the lethal machinery of the state to operate more through exception than through law. With globalisation, this exception has spread across the globe. Thus, in the words of Agamben, it leads “the West to a planetary civil war.” This is not to suggest that the state of exception is a recent phenomenon. Modern instances of rule by exception include France in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the summary arrests authorised by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, and the forcible removal by the United States of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent under Executive Order 9066 during World War II.

Similarly, Great Britain, Belgium and France governed their colonies more through rule by exception than by the rule of law. India employed comparable regimes of exception in East Punjab, Kashmir and Mizoram.

In his critique of modernity, Max Weber presciently warned that rationalisation would trap humans in dehumanising systems and laws, turning modern states into an “iron cage.” In our blind faith in modernity, we assume that the triumph of liberalism has taken us into a state of liberal eudaimonia, in which barbaric remnants of history, such as concentration camps and the killing fields of the world wars, will disappear. On the contrary, the reality is that the Twenty-first Century has witnessed the emergence of prisons in Guantánamo, the Negev desert, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, not to mention clandestine sites and the proliferation of liberal wars. All these establishments and wars are begotten by the discourse of terrorism peddled by the sole superpower of the world and accepted by states that seek to twist the definition of terrorism in order to suspend laws to “safeguard” their sovereignty.

Although modern concentration camps are hermetically sealed from international law, media scrutiny and academia, fragments of memory and experience from this hell of inhumanity nevertheless crack through the thick crust of invincible power. This can be seen in the memoir of the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Zareef. His book, My Life with the Taliban, provides a firsthand account of his personal experiences during his arrest and later detention at Guantánamo Bay.

In the wake of the defeat of the Taliban regime in 2001, the world has witnessed a boom in a Taliban-related scholarship industry, producing experts and books. The dominant representation of the Taliban in modern media and scholarship is that of brutal people with anachronistic minds, devoid of any sense of humanity or aesthetics in their lives. Yet this very humanity and aesthetic sensibility emerge in the life-world of their relatives and fighters, who sing of suffering and struggle against a dehumanising empire. This human facet is suppressed in order to present foreign occupation and “humanitarian” intervention in Afghanistan as a foil to the supposedly inhuman and brutal force of the Taliban.

Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn collected fragments of Taliban aesthetics from the rubble of death and destruction in their book Poetry of the Taliban. The volume is a compilation and translation of poems by anonymous and known poets, addressing themes of faith, martyrdom, love, emotion and resistance. In the absence of such testimonies from lived experience, the suffering of the vanquished risks vanishing from the consciousness of modern phono sapiens.

The writer, the author of Nomadic Meditations: Wandering in the History of Ideas, may be reached at [email protected]