Abjection borne in common. But abjection cannot be shared, for what do those without relation to themselves; deprived of self-identity, seized by a movement of detour bear in common. Can you dream of a celestial Master, the kingdom of God beyond this world? But your abjection is such that it is impossible to say ‘I’. If I address you, whom do I address?
You can belong neither to a common hope nor a common despair; your abjection isolates you, so long as one can write of an isolation without subject. A situation Antelme describes in the work camps where prisoners are brought, by starvation, by exposure, by brutality to the point of death.
Work in the camp is only a parody of work; it is like the labours of Sisyphus: absurdity. Carry a rock from one place to another and then back again. Mad labour; labour for its own sake, for the sake of labour, which is to say, for labour’s absurdity. Infinite rebeginning; one day resembles another and in the end time does not move forward. Every day is today; there is no longer a past and a future.
Antelme dreams of a communism among the prisoners, but resistance is limited to a friendly glance, an acknowledgement of another, a few words. There are no slaves but the shadows of slaves. Notice, though, that Antelme writes ‘we’ more often than ‘I’. We: and to this experience of the common, of commonality, he links an experience of communism – of the encounter with others in their dereliction, their simplicity. But what begins here? What can begin?
The SS meet the limit of their power in the faces of the magma. More and more prisoners will come, infinitely substitutable in their broken, famished bodies, but coming nonetheless. And in their multitude they address their captors in their own abjection, in a murmuring or barbarism which cannot harden itself into a word. A living, still-living accusation.
In the end, as Antelme argues, there is hope because the SS cannot transform the human race into workers, stock or standing-reserve. What resists is the multitude of the magma itself, the innumerable mass which is there even as its members are close to death. The bodies of the prisoners, substitutable for one another, were a living, still living refusal; there are always other prisoners to come, until the whole human race including the SS themselves would have to be brought to Gandersheim.
Refusal, resistance: it is true, Antelme allows himself to dream of a kind of communism. The camp is a microcosm of the world; the SS the image of the men and women of power, the proletariat those who are excluded from the human race and made to suffer whether because of their class or the colour of their skin.
Still, this is not a communism founded upon shared work; there is no collective labour here. And without labour, what can be accomplished? There is nothing that can be actualized, but this is significant: without work, a kind of resistance occurs – one which can be re-echoed in other protest movements.
It happened, but it happens again. It is true, for a while, prisoners of the concentration camps lost faith in the horizon. There was no talk of rights. But isn’t this the case in the regions of the world? And isn’t it the case at Guantanamo bay?
Resistance: you can do nothing; there’s nothing to be realized. Resistance: work itself becomes absurd, and you are the bedraggled Sisyphus who mocks work and the measure of work. Then it is clear: you mock those who put you to work, mock them without intending to because they encounter in you what they cannot bear in themselves.
Communism: an event, and not collective labour. An event which has already occurred. Which brings us together according to what we share when we cannot work. Common idleness.
Lars Iyer's Blog 