Primo Levi, described the “Musulmen” as “an anonymous mass,

The “Muselmen,” they say in an article on Auschwitz, “became indifferent to everything happening around them. They excluded themselves from all relations to their environment.

A splendid day for me sleeping and rising in Neo-Liberal freedom. So much freedom I do not know what I do with the time. I permit time to be free, I rarely cage it, I follow what time permits me in my circumstances to do, which pecuniary matters not with standing is considerable. Long long ago I was 17 and enrolled in college completely at a loss for I had no interest in majoring for a job. The concept, the connection, the categorical imperative of voluntary narrowing, agreeing to put on blinders, wear a stirrup, be ridden to a destination, and pay for the privilege as well, did not make sense. Learning deeply, widely, encountering even if filtered the great traditions of knowledge, learning how to learn and love lifelong learning as a way of development of personhood.

So at 66 needing really a reorientation towards a very. uncertain future my time at times goes to philosophy. Agamben lately, in conjuction with Ellul and Marcel, Berdyaev and others like Illich I continue to circle back to in thought.

Covid-19 was the grand attempt of a few humans to accomplish the impossible. In political theory and theology, to immanentize the eschaton is a generally pejorative phrase referring to attempts to bring about utopian conditions in the world, and to effectively create heaven on earth.

Agamben scandalized orthodox thought during the Pandemic by discussing lock downs and Covid laws as creating the Open Air Concentration Camp. “What is a society that has no value other than survival?” Giorgio Agamben asks, https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2020/03/giorgio-agamben-on-coronavirus-the-enemy-is-not-outside-it-is-within-us/

Primo Levi, who described the “Musulmen” as “an anonymous mass, continuously renewed and always identical, of no-men who march[ed] and labor[ed] in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty really to suffer… the weak, the infirm, those who were doomed to be singled out [for the gas chambers],” added that the reasons for this usage were unknown to him.

Sofsky thought the association of apathetic concentration camp victims with Muslims came from their uncontrolled body movements; their “swaying motions” reminded onlookers of “Islamic rituals.” Two Polish scholars of the Holocaust, Zdzislaw Ryn and Stanislaw Kodzinski, second this explanation. The “Muselmen,” they say in an article on Auschwitz, “became indifferent to everything happening around them. They excluded themselves from all relations to their environment. If they could still move around, they did so in slow motion, without bending their knees. They shivered, since their body temperature usually fell below 98.7 degrees.

Giorgio Agamben has theorized that “the most likely explanation of the term can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God.” It was “Islam’s supposed fatalism,” Agamben writes, that led concentration camp inmates to turn it into a metaphor for the utter resignation that the “Musulman” exhibited.

Holocaust survivor and French philosopher Jean Amery, in his “At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” explained the word differently. It came, he thought, from the dismissive attitude of Europeans toward Muslims, since “the so-called Mussulman, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts of good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions.

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