According to Giorgio Agamben, the subject of testimony is the one who bears witness to a desubjectification, and testimony is tied to shame. In fact, the survivors of catastrophic disasters often feel a heavy responsibility to remember and to testify about what really happened, usually out of guilt and shame for others who died (on behalf of themselves), and their faithfulness in carrying out this responsibility can determine or re-define the meaning of their survival. What Agamben notes in the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors like Primo Levy is the existence of the Muselmann, a zero-level humanity, a figure that other Holocaust survivors described as the “living dead” reduced to an apathetic vegetative existence. While existing ethics could not conceptualize of the Muselmann as human, Agamben established the foundation for a new ethics related to “bearing witness to the Muselmann.” To bear witness to the Muselmann is to be willing to fight to reveal the truth silenced due to Muselmann’s inability to speak, “to break with the violence of ethical silence,” and thus to establish the true meaning and power of testimony by making “the inhuman in the human be spoken.” This paper attempts to extend the meaning of the Muselmann not only to the absolute impossibility of bearing witness, but also to the “inhuman” condition in which survivors are forced to remain silent after a traumatic disaster. Survivors, who have lived like the Muselmann, can overcome such deadlocks and renew their lives by bearing witness to the dead/the drowned/the silenced in their stead, and thus prove that some degree of “humanity” remains within their grasp. If, metaphorically speaking, “bearing witness to the Muselmann” can be also a role of literature, it is in this context that this paper will examine the survivors’ shame and testimony in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and explore the meaning of “literary testimony” as performed by the novel.
