The subject is forever fractured in its passivity, between its receptive role (Muselmann, desubjectification) and its active role (witness, re-subjectification as bearing witness to the desubjectification). After considering the sentiment of shame at length, Agamben argues that the subject shows itself to have no other content than its own desubjectification. For Agamben, bearing witness to desubjectification is what constitutes the ethical subject as such. "The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak solely in the name of an incapacity to speak - that is, in his or her being a subject". Knowing is barred speaking and speaking is barred knowing. Consciousness, the "I," only has a consistency qua language as the event of language; but this very event divides the "I" constitutively, for to enter into discourse is already to be fractured. "In testimony, the empty place of the subject becomes the decisive question" and "it is a matter of situating the subject in the disjunction between a possibility and an impossibility of speech" (pg 145). Or again, to bear witness is to "place oneself in one's own language in the position of those who have lost it".
Timothy Lavenz
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