Matteo Johannes Stettler

Recent scholarship has repeatedly highlighted a significant flaw in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz : its inability to account for acts of resistance in the Lager, or its aprioristic closure to the very possibility of such acts. As a result, instead of clarifying ‘the sense and reasons’ behind the behaviour of both executioners and victims of the Shoah, as his work initially sets out to do, Agamben’s analysis ends up rendering their conduct even more enigmatic and unintelligible. To address this lacuna in Agamben’s work, I draw on Foucault’s later studies on antiquity – precisely the so-called ‘ethical’ Foucault whom Agamben dismissed in favour of the ‘biopolitical’ Foucault. In doing so, I aim to bring to light a particular form of resistance described by Primo Levi in If This Is a Man : what he calls ‘moral survival’. Through this framework, I seek to partially reconstruct the rationality behind the conduct of those Häftlinge who, like Levi himself, attempted to resist the immanentizing pressure of the lex of the camp (i.e., the process of Muselmannization ) by constituting themselves as the ethical subjects of their own moral acts.

The reception of Hadot’s work on the tradition of spiritual exercises among historians of medieval philosophy has rarely produced the results one might reasonably have expected. In this revisitation of the historiography on the notion of “intellectual felicity,” I thus hope to be able first to provide a corrective to the faulty understanding that some medievalists still seem to have of Hadot’s contribution to the study of philosophy as a way of life in the Middle Ages, and second, to show how ongoing debates in medievalist circles might point us toward the possible limitations with Hadot’s own understanding of philosophy as a way of life and its history in and beyond the Middle Ages.