Agamben's 'bare life' and Grossman's ethics of senseless kindness
Christiaens,Tim
Christiaens,Tim
Abstract
In his early works, Giorgio Agamben argues that some Auschwitz inmates practised a 'silent form of resistance' by shutting themselves off from the world until nothing could harm them. I argue that this conception of 'bare life' is both too abstract and too individualistic. Agamben's idea of bare life's resistance first neglects the socio-historical context that has produced particular instances of it, effectively barring the investigation into how to avoid future occurrences of sovereign violence. Agamben, second, emphasizes the potential for resistance present in individual bodies shut off from the world without providing guidelines for how these bodies should form a substantive community. I consequently employ Vasily Grossman's writings on the Shoah to provide an alternative conception of bare life's resistance in the camps. According to Grossman, resistance lies not in closing oneself off from the world, but in cultivating ineradicable nodes of 'senseless kindness' in concrete human interactions.
Description
Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2022.
Date
2022-03
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Animal Studies, Ethics, Kindness, Resistance, Shoah
Citation
Christiaens, T 2022, 'Agamben's 'bare life' and Grossman's ethics of senseless kindness', Journal of European Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 00472441211072611, pp. 36-53. https://doi.org/10.1177/00472441211072611