Levinas and Agamben on testimony and its limits

Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben are brought together through a problem neither an ethics of responsibility nor a theory of testimony can resolve alone: how to bear witness to the Shoah when its most complete witness cannot speak, and no recipient can fully authenticate what is said. Agamben’s Muselmann becomes the point at which Levinas’s appeal to the vulnerable face reaches its limit—and perhaps its most traumatic test. The relation is therefore not a simple opposition between ethics and testimony, but an account of the gaps that make both necessary and incomplete.

Ethical Responsibility and Its Limit

Levinas describes the ethical subject as called into being by the vulnerable face of another: responsibility precedes a settled account of the self and answers an appeal that cannot be reduced to ordinary exchange. The chapter questions what happens when this model is placed beside the Shoah. Although Levinas is often regarded as a thinker who sought to articulate its experience, his emphasis on one’s right to exist and on unconditional, asymmetrical responsibility does not, the text argues, describe how a survivor of the Shoah thinks after directly encountering its ethical abyss. Such a framework, it suggests, may instead express the position of those who feel guilty for witnessing catastrophe from a minimal safe distance.

This distinction does not dismiss responsibility. It identifies a danger in making the survivor’s experience legible through an ethical call that presumes the other can appear as a vulnerable face and summon a response. The question becomes more severe when the person encountered has been reduced to a condition that no longer presents itself in this recognizable form. At that point, the ethical relation cannot simply be affirmed by repeating its familiar terms.

The Muselmann as Impossible Witness

For Agamben, the Muselmann is an absolute or impossible witness: the figure who fully witnessed the concentration-camp horror and, for that very reason, can no longer bear witness to it. The image of someone burned by the black sun of what was seen gives this impossibility its force. The Muselmann is not merely a witness whose report has gone missing. The figure marks the point at which an experience is most fully undergone and yet cannot be converted into a report by the one who underwent it.

The testimony that reaches others is consequently mediated by this silent figure. It is never only a relation between a survivor and the event witnessed; an invisible third—the one who saw fully but cannot speak—stands within the relation. The familiar gesture of identification with exemplary victims cannot bridge the distance. To proclaim that everyone shares the Muselmann’s position would erase the very difference that makes the figure a limit of testimony, and would turn the impossible witness into a readily assumed identity.

No Ideal Recipient

The analysis extends Agamben’s account beyond the witness to the person or symbolic authority receiving testimony. In an idealized model, a fully accepting recipient would authenticate the witness’s words and allow the witness to lay inner demons to rest. But no such recipient is available: testimony is received by finite others, who cannot provide complete authentication. The failure is therefore symmetrical. The ideal witness cannot report what was fully seen, and the ideal recipient who could guarantee the report’s truth is also absent.

The chapter renders this structure through Schema L, the diagram of communication associated with Jacques Lacan’s early-1950s work. Its direct diagonal, representing true communication between the subject and the big Other, is crossed by the diagonal of the imaginary relation. In this application, the Muselmann occupies the position of the ideal but impossible witness, while the ideal recipient occupies the equally impossible position of fully validating that witness. Survivors and those who receive their testimony remain on the imperfect, human side of the crossing. The result is not a claim that testimony is meaningless: it is a refusal of the fantasy that its truth can be deposited with an ultimate authority and thereby finally secured.

The Faceless Neighbor

The Muselmann also unsettles the ethical significance of the face. Primo Levi repeatedly describes the figure as faceless. Where Levinasian ethics finds in the face a trace of the other’s vulnerability and a call to responsibility, the Muselmann may present a blank wall, without the depth that ordinarily makes empathic relation possible. The figure is at once life reduced to its zero level and pure excess stripped of its normal basis. This conjunction makes it difficult to treat the Muselmann either as simply a recognizable victim or as an ordinary example of Levinas’s ethical encounter.

Yet the difficulty cuts both ways. The facelessness might be where the other’s call becomes most radical, because it confronts the observer with responsibility at its most traumatic, beyond the reassurance of reciprocal recognition. The chapter brings this possibility into contact with the Freudian and Lacanian neighbor: not an imaginary double or a neutral partner in communication, but an impenetrable Thing that unsettles and provokes the subject. The face, on this account, need not be a harmonious image of human wholeness; its force may emerge most sharply when the neighbor loses face, in distortion or grimace.

That move, however, does not simply repair Levinas’s ethical structure. It introduces the ambiguity of the Real, where the vulnerable nakedness of the other can overlap with pure Evil. The central question is whether the monstrous neighbor of the Judeo-Freudian account can be identified with the neighbor of Levinasian ethics without domesticating the former. Agamben’s impossible witness thus presses Levinas’s face beyond a reassuring image of vulnerability: it leaves responsibility indispensable, but denies that the other’s appearance, the witness’s testimony, or its reception can be made fully transparent or finally complete.