Armenian Translation of Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive by Giorgio AgambenProject

The first book of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Series “Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone (Homo sacer III)” (Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive) by Giorgio Agamben has been published.

The book can be found at the Western Armenian Corner at the Artbridge bookstore café and at other bookstores in Yerevan.

Translator – Marc Nichanian

Editor – Minas Lourian

Publisher – Actual Art

Read below biographies of the translator and the editor, as well as short information about the author and the book. 

Marc Nichanian

Marc Nichanian, a philosopher, literary critic and translator. Nichanian was born in France, and specialized in Armenian Studies and Philosophy. Nichanian has taught at a number of outstanding Universities in France, Italy, the USA, Turkey and Armenia. He has a long bibliography of published books, both translations and his own works on literature, philosophy, and the humanities. In 1980, he founded KAM (ԿԱՄ), an analytical journal, which has been published with interruptions between 1980 and 1986, then in 2000’s, and is currently being published again since 2020. Nichanian now resides in Lisbon, Portugal. You can read the introduction to the translation by Marc Nichanian here.

Minas Lourian

Minas Lourian, Director of the Center for Armenian Culture Studies and Documentation. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he did part of his musical studies there, then moved to Venice in 1980 to continue his studies. Since 1987, he began to work with Veneto Musica and several other music societies, institutions, and international festivals of early and contemporary, classical and jazz music, as a founder, coordinator, or director. The recording studio founded by Lourian in 1991, created a complete sound archive of the orally transmitted Armenian medieval sacred chant repertoire, conserved since the beginning of the 18th century in San Lazzaro, by the Armenian Mekhitarist Congregation. Between 2016-2019, he was the president of the Italian-Armenian community representative board (Unione degli Armeni d’Italia).

Giorgio Agamben

Giorgio Agamben (1942) is one of the leading figures in philosophy and political theory. His unique readings of literature, literary theory, continental philosophy, political thought, religious studies, and art have made him one of the most innovative thinkers of our time.

Agamben was educated in law and philosophy at the University of Rome. As a post-doctoral scholar in Freiburg (1966–1968), he participated in Martin Heidegger’s seminars on Hegel and Heraclitus, and was later a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, from 1974 to 1975. Agamben then began teaching and–over the course of the next four decades–taught at a number of acclaimed European and American universities.

In addition to his important philosophical heritage, Agamben has critically engaged with religious and legal texts, as well as with some of the most important literary figures and poets in Western culture.

Source https://egs.edu/biography/giorgio-agamben/ (The European Graduate School)

About the Book

In the book Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, the Italian philosopher looks closely at the literature of the survivors of Auschwitz, probing the philosophical and ethical questions raised by their testimony.

“In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors’ testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics.”―Giorgio Agamben