'An explicit political meaning has also been attributed to the extreme threshold between life and death, the human and the inhuman, that the (Muselmann [italics]) inhabits....At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at times a political limit or an anthropological concept, the Muselmann is an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death, continuously pass through each other.'
(Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive [1999], pp. 47-8)
'Freud directs our reading of the Abrahamic toward a shape of forgetting occurring, a movement of vanishing where that which "turns Turk" also continues to "turn ghost." When it appears or reappears -- though the term "appearance" has already proven inadequate -- in the texts of survivors of Nazi extermination camps, it remains as unreadable as Kafka's Abrahams, open only to the repeated and uninterpreted inscription of its being-forgotten, the movement of its disappearance.
Doing so, the spectral shape of the Abrahamic maintains the complex movement of memory's successes and failures describe by Freud...."Those people are like vanishing ghosts and, much further from Venice, they still bring together -- but this togetherness is more than ever suspended -- disparate theatrical genres (comedy and tragedy, Shylock and Othello, the Merchant and the Moor of Venice). They are named, as Helen Cixous recently recalled, "Muslims."
They are named, then, even if they do not quite figure, although Cixous subtly remarks that the did play a "sort of role." Everyone there has a sort of role, everyone is dressed up, travestied." (Cixous, "We Who Are Free, Are We Free?" Critical Inquiry 19 No. 2 (winter 1993): 208)
Cixous thus reiterates and gives to read the (trait d'union [it.]) whose haunting shape provides the "strange contrast" of a non-gathering in Freud, reminding us that "one never dares think of Hell as a comedy." "After" the theological and political, hell and comedy take the haunting shape of a strange contrast, that of "Jews" and "Muslims," Jews and Muslims, Arabs and Jews. The Abrahamic, if that is what this is, remains. It remains a haunting shape that is "made to remind the reader of something that cannot be altogether forgotten, something that spooks or haunts the text about to be opened, and in ways from which no one knows how best he may escape." '
(Jacques Derrida, Introduction, Acts of Religion)
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