The concentration-camp Muselmann embodies a juridical state beyond law and life

Evidence

The Muse/manner or Muslims are-if they are-those beings “of whom it is recounted that they have no other longing than to die, or rather they do not even have that longing, but death has a longing for them, and they abandon themselves to it.” They are exposed and abandoned to an abandonment-their own powerless enemy-that they always carry within themselves. Abandoned, yet paradoxically situated within companionship, the Muslim belongs without legality: “he was not only, like his companions, excluded from the political and social context to which he once belonged,” he “no longer belongs to the world of men in any way, he does not even belong to the threatened and precarious world of camp inhabitants who have forgotten him from the beginning.” The Muslim thus “moves in an absolute in distinction of fact and law, oflife and juridical rule, and of nature and politics.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 768

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets out Agamben’s use of the figure of the Muslim as the concrete instance where the exception becomes rule and law becomes indistinguishable from life.
• XREF: This is the primary theoretical statement of the Muselmann/Muslim figure that other Islamophobia-cluster sources cite back to; connects to Primo Levi and Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz.