In this book the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben looks closely at the literature of the survivors of Auschwitz, probing the philosophical and ethical questions raised by their testimony.

"Agamben`s moving text on the Nazi death camps asks what happens to speech when the deracinated subject speaks. Although some say that Auschwitz makes witnessing impossible, Agamben shows how the one who speaks bears this impossibility within his own speech, bordering the human and the inhuman. Agamben probes for us the condition of speech at the limit of the human, evoking the horror and the near unspeakability of the inhuman as it witnesses in language its own undoing." (Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley)