Piotr Rawicz’sLe Sang du ciel, Heidegger, and the Holocaust as Ontological Experience

Abstract

AbstractWhen Piotr Rawicz’s (1919–82) semi-autobiographical novel Le Sang du ciel (Blood from the Sky) was published in 1961, Rawicz expressly rejected documentary status for his novel and eschewed moral indignation in his self-consciously philosophical and literary treatment of the Nazi genocide. Rawicz rejects moral and historical frameworks because they do not engage the Holocaust on the level he finds most salient: as a terrifying experience of ontological truths about the nature of God, subjectivity, and Being writ large. I situate Rawicz’s novel alongside his pronouncements and theorizations about the Holocaust as an extreme yet paradigmatic experience of ontological truth. Following allusions in the novel to concepts and tropes in the thought of Martin Heidegger, I unearth a provocative dialogue with Heidegger’s postwar anti-humanism and infamous refusal to confront the significance of the Holocaust, arguing that Rawicz brings Heidegger’s anti-humanist ontology and the Nazi genocide into an irreducible intimacy that Heidegger seemed determined to avoid or deny.