Robert Antelme Research Articles

La Littérature inouïe: témoigner des camps dans l’après-guerre. Par Ariane Santerre

Analysing linguistic techniques and literary resources in testimonies by survivors of Nazi concentration camps in the immediate post-war period (1945–47), Ariane Santerre nuances the claim that the Holocaust is ‘indicible’, arguing that testimony’s ‘impossibilité’ to communicate derives from being ‘inouï’: marginalized, ruptured, and ‘inentendu’ (pp. 275, 23). In the first years following the war, survivor accounts were met with incomprehension or a categorical refusal to listen. Of the hundred or so published in France and Italy during this time, only a few are known today. Focusing on the testimonies written in French or Italian of six men and four women — Robert Antelme, Suzanne Birnbaum, Aldo Bizzarri, Marcel Conversy, Denise Dufournier, Guy Kohen, Primo Levi, Liana Millu, David Rousset, and Giuliana Tedeschi — Santerre sets out to recuperate those forgotten and marginalized, yet also includes the canonical. In Part One, ‘Aspects linguistiques des témoignages’, Santerre argues that the fractured language the authors use to express the traumatic double experience of living through and writing, so soon after liberation, about the concentration camps forced them to rethink their relationship to language in a way that challenged the very foundations of literature. She examines three features of the authors’ language: their reflections on ‘les non-coïncidences du dire’ (p. 53), the unmooring of language, and the gulf between survivors and the public; their metalinguistic reflections, which reveal how, faced with the loss of their linguistic reference points, they reinvested words with new meanings; and a Bakhtinian reading of the dialogism of Lagerszpracha — a mixture of German jargon, prisoner slang, and camp lingua franca, which the testimonies commonly include. Part Two, ‘Ressources littéraires’, first argues that survivors tried to understand and represent their experience through intertextuality, thereby activating the reader’s imagination and understanding through shared cultural foundations, particularly of Dante. In this way, testimony ‘se révèle véridique tout en s’inscrivant […] dans un imaginaire littéraire’ (p. 229) — although not without limitations. Sitting somewhat tangentially in the volume, the final chapter examines ‘L’Intermédialité des témoignages’ — the connections and reciprocal influences between different media and the space where such connections occur. Santerre posits the view of some authors that a single medium is insufficient for communication, and analyses rare testimonies that include photographs to self-authenticate or contextualize the author, or which constitute testimonial theatre. She argues that both media problematize authenticity and objectivity, artifice, and illusion. Her conclusion highlights the way in which the reader is central to how survivor testimony is written, and determines that twenty-first-century readers are well placed to receive and respect testimonies from both the Holocaust and subsequent genocides and state-led atrocities. Particular strengths of this accessible, convincing, and engaging volume are its detailed linguistic analyses via many select extracts, new insights into familiar testimonies, introductions to unfamiliar ones, and useful paratexts including brief author biographies — although its bibliography in six categories complicates navigation. Complementing Annette Wieviorka’s analysis of French post-war testimonies (Déportation et génocide: entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992)), this volume is extremely valuable for scholars and students of Holocaust testimony and of marginalized testimonial writers.

Thus spoke the student from Bologna: On behalf of the blush and confusion

To the extent that philosophy deals with the blush, it is almost always as the pink blush of shame. Such is philosophy’s seeming obsession with the latter, there remains the risk of something important being lost in translation when it comes to those examples in the literature that mention the blush. I intend to focus on one such example, a scene from Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, the story of the student from Bologna, in which Antelme describes the student’s blushing response to being randomly selected by an SS soldier from a bedraggled line of prisoners for a roadside execution. I will turn to Lisa Guenther and Giorgio Agamben for their reading of Antelme’s account, not, I should stress, to evaluate their respective analyses of shame, but that which may have been overlooked as a result, namely confusion. I will turn also to Jean-Paul Sartre, again, not in relation to shame, rather for his brief, but no less important, phenomenological account of blushing. I will refer to recent social psychology research suggesting that confusion is a knowledge emotion – something like embarrassment (as aporia). All this in support of the argument, that when Antelme writes of the student – ‘ Il a l’air confus’ (‘He seems confused’), we are bound to take them both, the student and Antelme, the blusher and the beholder, at their word – to maintain our distance so that the scene might speak for itself and in so doing reveal signs of life.

« Ici rien n’est vert. Ici rien n’est végétal. Ici rien n’est vivant » : l’hiver dans les témoignages des camps de concentration

For the prisoners of the concentration camps winter with its seasonal attributes as the icy cold or snow is more than a meteorogical phenomenon. The arrival of winter not only announces the annihilation of the prisonners, but also and perhaps above all their dashing and the unspeakable suffering to come out. In this paper we wish to study in the light of such authors as Robert Antelme, Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, David Rousset and Jorge Semprún how the hard weather conditions are able to redraw the space and the prisoners’Horizon of despair.

From the Collapse of Signifiers to the Reconstruction of Language: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Robert Antelme’s The Human Race

From the Collapse of Signifiers to the Reconstruction of Language: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Robert Antelme’s The Human Race Dana Amir (bio) Robert Antelme, a member of a French Resistance group headed by Francois Mitterrand, was arrested by the Gestapo in June 1944, sent to Buchenwald, then to a work camp in Germany where he almost died. His moving memoir The Human Race (1957), his only book, is dedicated to the task of tracing the outline of the “human” from the perspective of both victim and witness. Its close observation of language’s most subtle nuances, in an uncompromising effort to represent the event in terms of the experience of the event rather than in the terms of the retrospective observer, makes its reading uncommonly demanding. This demand constitutes itself the gravest and most exposed self-testimony, one in which Antelme constantly warns against slipping into “comfortable” categories and against a possible escape into the saturated state of the “gratified” consciousness and conscience. Whether they concern the executioners or their victims, his descriptions are marked by the same gentle restlessness which turns its penetrating gaze upon the observer no less than upon the object of observation. Survivors’ experience can sometimes be condensed in a single word. Primo Levi (1979), describing a recurrent dream he has about Auschwitz, narrows it thus: “[A] single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘Wstawach’” (p. 380). Antelme’s nightmare also points at a word that became etched in his memory: “Fertig!”—”that’s it!” (Antelme, 1992/1957, p. 18) It is not just a word that holds the difference between the before and the after, the human and the inhuman, the pre-traumatic and the traumatic. Somehow this word is so powerful exactly because it is quoted (uttered as a direct speech) rather than told about: it is directed straight at the reader, a call one [End Page 685] cannot ignore, a rupture in the continuous language. Unlike the other words, it is uttered in its original language, with its original sound, thus becoming signifier and signified at one and the same time, something that by pointing at the rupture reconstitutes the very rupture itself. Antelme notices that in the seemingly random exchanges between the prisoners while they do their forced labor, they often mention things they owned in the past, especially the food they so badly lack now: Each of us will already be with somebody else in a little while. He’ll explain how his mother makes custard, because he needs to talk about custard and milk and bread [...] We’ll invite each other over to dinner, because by inviting each other we can picture still more meat, more bread. And then, if tonight there are seconds of soup, this guy who’s invited his buddy to come to dinner along with his wife may elbow him out of the way. (p. 44) Not only does speech turn from a mode of communication into a mode of survival—placing the other, the random listener, as a means through which speech can go on rather than as the subject of this speech—but it also turns words that are signifiers into signifieds: talk about bread takes the place of the bread; the invitation to a meal stretches the limits of the concrete stomach by increasing the number of imaginary guests. In the traumatized domain of language, the symbolic gradually collapses into the excess of real suffering. One of the major aspects of this suffering concerns the break in the continuity of identity: That particular Sunday I looked at length at my face in the mirror. It was neither beautiful nor ugly; it was dazzling. It had accompanied me here, here it was on the loose. It was without employment now, but it was still itself, the machine for expression. Next to it an SS mug was nothing. And the face of the guy who when his turn came was going to look at himself in it remained reduced to the state determined by the SS. Only the one in the mirror was distinct. It alone signified something...

Homossexualidade, testemunho e cárcere: pensar o eu, pensar o outro

O artigo abordará a relação do homossexual com o cárcere, partindo do modo pelo qual o heteronormativo se posicionou diante desse homossexual encarcerado. Tendo por base dois livros canônicos da literatura de testemunho dos sobreviventes da Segunda Guerra, que focalizam o preso político e o preso por motivos religiosos, É isto um homem?, do italiano Primo Levi e A espécie humana, do francês Robert Antelme, se analisará o posicionamento desses autores frente a homossexualidade observada por eles de longe, no campo de concentração-extermínio. Por sua vez, vêm à tona os testemunhos Antes que anoiteça, do escritor cubano e homossexual Reinaldo Arenas, e do francês homossexual Pierre Seel, Eu, Pierre Seel, deportado homossexual, ambos enviados a presídio e campo de concentração-extermínio. Se objetiva, portanto, analisar as diferentes abordagens do outro e do eu.

The Infinite Task: Being-In-Common in Robert Antelme's L'Espece humaine

L'Espèce humaine, Robert Antelme's 1947 memoir chronicling his year in a German labour camp, was read, in its initial reception, as a reflection on alterity: the human subject, stripped of the capacity to speak and reduced to eating scraps of food, is revealed as the Other. Against these readings, contemporary critics have argued that alterity is not quite so central to Antelme's work, and that the text should instead be read as a triumph of the subject that survives the experiences of the camps. Pushing this debate further, this essay argues that the significance of Antelme's text lies in its configuring of relations beyond the logic of subjectivity and prior to an ethical demand. The essay thus offers a reading that recognizes the ‘unity of the species’ as an ontological given rather than a project realized or affirmed on the basis of transcendent notions such as fraternity or a shared humanity. To this end, the reading draws heavily on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and in particular on his efforts to rethink the fact of our shared existence in the wake of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Finally the essay argues that such a reading has important consequences for our status as readers and the possibility of testimony.

Silêncio e literatura: as aporias da testemunha

Partindo do debate sobre os limites da linguagem diante da tragédia do extermínio nazista, pudemos constatar que a falta de respostas aos interrogativos sobre a Shoah é preenchida pelas tentativas da literatura de representar o evento gerando um discurso que inclua as lacunas, as impossibilidades, os paradoxos. As testemunhas deparam-se com dificuldades e aporias (entre as quais "o paradoxo de Levi" proposto por Agamben), vivenciam a "síndrome" do Velho Marinheiro, mas não são ouvidos ou atravessam as diversas décadas e fases históricas em silêncio até começar a contar sua experiência. Escritores como Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, Elie Wiesel, Jorge Semprún, Imre Kertész procuram o caminho da literatura onde o recurso da fabulação tenta superar as falhas da linguagem.

De l’écrivain qui s’engage à l’écrivain qui se souvient. Ou la littérature française face à l’Histoire au tournant des années 1960

This paper describes the transformations which, in the course of the 1960s, affect the relationships between French literature and History. It first analyzes the main types of commitment caused by the historic crises of the Algerian War and May 68, as well as the weakening of the prestige of the « man of letters » and of the powers of the fiction they reveal. The author distinguishes four main literary possibles that are then available to the writer for recording in writing his relationship to the world: the committed literature of Sartre, the aesthetic purism of the Nouveau Roman, the avant-gardism of Tel Quel and, finally, the « romanesque lazaréen », theorized by Jean Cayrol and embodied by Robert Antelme’s exemplary work. This last literary possible, although discreet, would have a major influence on the new literature that emerged in the 1960s and in particular that of Georges Perec: trying to get rid of the models of the committed literature as well as of the avant-garde, without returning to the aesthetic purism, the novel of Perec builds its relationship to reality on the work of memory and so defines for the writer a new form of implication in the world and of responsibility before History.

Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma by Barbara Will

procédures juridiques et des discours abscons ou abstraits, qu’il ne cite dans l’ouvrage que pour les rejeter, pour revenir aux racines humaines du mal et à la responsabilité individuelle de ceux qui l’ont perpétré. En questionnant Duch, il ne cherche ni à comprendre le bourreau ni à le diaboliser, mais à révéler ses gestes et ses motivations, en tentant de lui faire admettre et décrire, souvent en vain, les exactions qu’il a commises. Œuvre de mémoire, où l’évocation des victimes et l’hommage à ses parents sont appuyés, son récit s’inscrit dans la lignée des grands textes et témoignages sur la Shoah et le système concentrationnaire (ceux de Robert Antelme, Primo Levi et Charlotte Delbo notamment). Il est également une réflexion sur l’avenir du Cambodge et sur le chemin qu’il reste à faire pour reconstruire, sans oublier. Western Washington University Cécile Hanania WILL, BARBARA. Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-231-15620-4. Pp. xvi + 320. $35. With her innovative in-depth analysis of the “unlikely collaboration” between Stein—an “unlikely propagandist” for the Vichy regime—and Faÿ—an “unofficial Ambassador from France to the New World” (xiv)—Will offers a fascinating view of Franco-American politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Thanks to this densely written, exacting study, we come to understand that, for Stein and Faÿ as well as for many of their contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, “the 1930s was a decade of disillusionment and reaction as well as radical politicization. It was a moment when complaint and criticism seemed more virulent and pointed than in previous epochs, more apt to lead to revolutionary action and, eventually, to violence” (77). In this relatively slim volume, Will encapsulates a complex chapter of French history. Part I, “Stein, Faÿ, and the Making of a Friendship,” includes profiles of the two protagonists that serve as a foundation for the analysis to follow. The chapters that make up Part II, “The Vichy Dilemma,” present an analysis of the political climate in France and the influences that shaped Stein and Faÿ’s conservatism. From the Introduction to the Epilogue, Will’s mastery of her subject is evident in the historical and cultural context she provides. Given what we know today about the Vichy government’s complicity with Nazi Germany, it is difficult to imagine why Stein, herself a Jew, would admire Pétain, let alone undertake a translation of his speeches into English. Basing her argument on her seemingly exhaustive reading of the writer’s correspondence and essays, Will suggests that Stein saw Pétain’s Révolution nationale as a viable alternative to the Third Republic’s secular and liberal policies. The regime, Stein believed, heralded a “‘new era’ in both France and America that would arrest the soul-sucking march of modern life and return its citizens to a lost, vital, eighteenthcentury pioneering spirit” (14). Above all, Stein’s unexpected admiration of Pétain points up the insularity of the Parisian intelligentsia during the Occupation. Before his ignominious association with the Vichy regime, Faÿ was a bright star in intellectual circles in the United States as well as in France. Inaugural chair in American civilization at the Collège de France, prominent scholar of FrancoAmerican relations, and director of the Bibliothèque Nationale during the années noires, he was, as Will puts it, a “pragmatic collaborator” (63) and “one of the few Reviews 591 establishment French intellectuals to work openly in collaboration with the Nazis” (160). As director of the BN, Faÿ “did whatever he could to achieve his personal and political aims without alienating the Nazi authorities” (162), up to and including allowing the removal of a number of pieces that are still in Germany. Will explains in meticulous detail that the members of the French right, including Faÿ, believed that the “decadence” of the Third Republic originated in “a transposable constellation of global adversaries: Freemasons, Jews, communists, liberals, Anglo-Saxons and foreigners in general (with the possible exception of Germans)” (84). In order to deflect criticism from Stein...

Resisting Agamben: The biopolitics of shame and humiliation

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot – I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity, and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare; even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting point for resistance.

Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, and the Body of the Muselmann

Part of the project of reweaving the threads of the history of the Third Reich, the essay discusses the complex relation between the testimony of the victims and their body as an epistemic source of the witnessing. On a theoretical bases constructed with the help of Shoah memoirs – by Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Jorge Sempun, Robert Antelme, and others, the paper challenges the notion of the witness as a speaker, a narrator; instead, it treats the kind of victim that since Auschwitz has been known as “a Muselmann” as an integral witness. It is the body of the survivor that constitutes integral testimony; it fills a testimonial lacuna. The presence of the Muselmann is testifiable, and it can replace the memoir by the body as the repository of the event. When the body translates into the corpus of writing, survivor testimony is perceived as incomplete so long as the Muselmann is perceived as the other. The lacuna in survivor narratives is testimony from inside the experience of the Muselmann.

Langages du désastre: Robert Antelme, Anna Langfus, André Schwarz-Bart, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel by Joë Friedemann

578 Reviews graphy to 'musealiser (p. 256) and that of novels both to reflect ambient attitudes and to refer intertextually to previous writings are sharply juxtaposed and shown to interactwith each other, though again in a largely one-way process from the former to the latter.This is a significant contribution to reflections on the nature and development of Te roman colonial'. Trinity College Dublin Roger Little Langages du desastre: Robert Antelme, Anna Langfus, Andre Schwarz-Bart, Jorge Semprun, Elie Wiesel. By Joe Friedemann. Saint-Genouph: Nizet. 2007. 174 pp. 18. ISBN 978-2-7078-1296-4. In the context of the disappearance of historical witnesses which has resulted in a prevalent focus on the concept of postmemory> in representations of the Second World War and theHolocaust by second or third generations, Joe Friedemann's careful study of literarytestimony by fivesurvivors of concentration and extermina tion camps and political prisons returns the critical spotlight to the first-generation ecrivains-temoins'. The aim outlined in thework's brief introduction is to cerner [...] les contours d'un langage, d'une expressivite constituant chez leurs auteurs une tentative [. . .]de depasser les frontieres de rincommunicable' (p. 10). Adopting a thematic rather than a chronological approach, Friedemann offersan exploration of the senses understood ina broad sense, 'une recherche de la comprehension des etats de conscience du rescape' (p. 11), analysing questions of language and representa tions of the gaze, laughter, silence, and hatred in order to 'sonder [...] lamosaique complexe des comportements du survivant' (p. 11) in thepost-camp world. The firstchapter examines the state entre le desastre et Tecriture' (p. 13) and points to salient issues of language, fiction,and truth in relation toHolocaust litera ture. Friedemann considers debates on why and how survivors should bear witness, both in the immediate post-war period (Robert Antelme) and in the laterworks of authors such as JorgeSemprun who continually strugglewith the questions of testimony and writing. The second chapter offers an effective analysis of the lin guistic codes of both victims and perpetrators and representations of the camps inAntelme's VEspece humaine. Friedemann has previously published a study of Le Rire dans Vunivers tragique d'Elie Wiesel (Paris: Nizet, 1981), and this extensive knowledge ofWiesel's oeuvre is evident in his edifying observations on the Jewish specificity ofWiesel's portrayal of the gaze, which is analysed in relation to ex istentialism in the third chapter. The fourth chapter is particularly incisive in its investigation of the use of laughter inAndre Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des justes, reaching theunexpected conclusion that reactions to theHolocaust take place at the level of Te rire* (p. 85). The fifthand longest chapter isdevoted to an insightful and original analysis of constructions of silence (rather than the unsayable) in the three novels published by Polish-born author Anna Langfus. The final chapter returns to an analysis of representations of hatred in Wiesel's works, contending thathatred is an absent phenomenon inhis Holocaust writings. Friedemann's detailed and sensitive textual readings, conveyed in a vivid and MLR, 104.2, 2009 579 poetical style,work well as individual studies. However, wider questions have been eschewed by the author. For example, what are the implications of the authors' thematic focus on the gaze or laughter for the representation of the Holocaust? Naturally, the choice of authors for such a study can always be debated, but Friede mann's rather canonical selection is not problematized at all, nor does he engage with the choice by three of the authors towrite about the univers concentrationnaire using the (non-native) French language. In spite of theoverlapping themes of several of the authors (for example, there are also references to the gaze and laughter in the discussion ofAntelme's VEspece humaine), comparisons between them remain solely implicit. The absence of a concluding chapter leads to the thematic strands of the individual chapters remaining untied, and the lack of an overarching argument means that thework would be best appreciated as a collection of instructive but separate articles. However, Langages du desastre offers an insightful approach to survivor literature, and will certainly appeal to readers with a particular interest in Antelme, Langfus, Schwarz-Bart, Semprun, andWiesel. Swansea University Kathryn N. Jones...

The Rhetoric of Anachronism

This essay organizes its readings around a figure of speech, anachronism, that embodies a defining tension in much new formalist thought, one best expressed as a chiasmus: the historicity of form and the formal quality of history. I aim to trouble the lingering binary distinctions between text and context by analyzing the capacity of anachronistic discourse to collapse the boundaries between a literary work's internal means of reference and its external referential compass. Because the aesthetically productive temporal fissures that anachronism produces are not limited to any single literary genre, I examine the rhetoric of anachronism in two historical novels—Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) and Giorgio Bassani's Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis)—two texts dealing with the Holocaust—Primo Levi's “Il tramonto di Fòssoli” (“Sunset at Fossoli”) and Robert Antelme's L'espèce humaine (The Human Race)—and poems by Francis Ponge. My argument centers on the ability of certain modes of temporal disjunction to subvert any a priori and potentially reductive belief in the objective historicity of an aesthetic form, especially when this same creative representation emerges as a challenge to a visceral historical crisis. Throughout the essay, I make claims on behalf of the “necessity” and “ethics” of the rhetoric of anachronism, primarily because it provides a corrective against any attempt to reduce the formal matter of literary discourse to the status of mere reflector or mirror of its contextual referents and, correspondingly, resists the isolation or separation of this same formal component from the historical discourses in which it not only participates but also, in some cases, actively shapes.

After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy by Leslie Hill, Brian Nelson, Dimitris Vardoulakis

550 Reviews collected byTouret, of reviews contemporary withMoravagine's publication, includ ing those of Barbusse, Larbaud and t'Serstevens. All in all, this is an indispensable collection of consistently thought-provoking and penetrating essays on thenovel that Paul Husson called amodern version ofDante's Inferno (p. 255). UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA CLIVE SCOTT After Blanchot: Literature, Criticism, Philosophy. Ed. by LESLIE HILL, BRIAN NEL SON, and DIMITRIS VARDOULAKIS. Newark: University ofDelaware Press. 2005. Viii+277pp. $30. ISBN 978-o-874I3-946-4. Maurice Blanchot enjoyed celebrating his birthday. Or at least, in a gesture towhich Christophe Bident, Leslie Hill, and Michael Holland have in particular drawn our attention, he seems to have enjoyed encoding references to its date, or near-misses, in and around his works, sometimes even in the date of their dept lgal. It is then perhaps especially fitting,for all the complexity of his rigorous reflections on the question ofmemory, that the centenary ofBlanchot's birth, celebrated inSeptember 2007, should have produced some notable acts of commemoration, including a Cerisy colloque (held in July2007) and thepublication byGallimard of a volume of his early, and previously uncollected, literarycriticism. If the current volume pre-dates these festivities, it comes nevertheless as a welcome indication of the depth, range, and quality of the critical work towhich Blanchot's writings are now consistently giving rise.The collection has itsorigins in the conference 'Blanchot, theObscure' held in Melbourne inAugust 2004, where a number of itsessays were firstgiven. Featuring many of themost significant established Blanchot critics, it also includes thework of younger researchers; and both constituencies do much to indicate the ability of Blanchot's work to engage a diverse range of referencepoints. A good number of the essays here, taken collectively, demonstrate the detail and force of the intersections between Blanchot and such interlocutors, familiar and more unexpected, as Paul de Man, Baudelaire, Holderlin, Jean Paul, Melville, Kierkegaard, or Giorgio Caproni. In a characteristically incisive account of Blanchot's (non-)concept of the 'neuter', Christophe Bident traces the filiations-acknowledged and otherwise-from Blan chot to Barthes, and sets these compellingly in the context ofwhat he presents as Blanchot's ethical search: for a just way of being in theworld. Robert Antelme is of course, as Bident shows, a decisive figurehere; this essential connection is deve loped further, with the crucial addition of Blanchot's reflections on 'Etre juif', by Christopher Fynsk, in a typically sensitive and tenacious discussion of Blanchot's 'L'Indestructible'. Elsewhere, Leslie Hill unfolds with contagious urgency the ex treme demands made by Blanchot's approach to that strange thing called literature on contemporary literarycriticism (demands which emerge as, to say the least, perti nent to the crisis inwhich thisdiscipline plainly finds itself,but which it isdesperate to ignore); Kevin Hart pursues what isemerging as a truly indispensable enquiry into Blanchot's relation toparticular elements of Judaeo-Christian thought and practice (here, with specific and extremely rich reference to iconoclasm); Michael Holland provides an exemplary reading of the significance of Blanchot's manceuvrings in re lation to dates, bringing out with supreme rigour the intimate connections between tiny textual details and themost imposing historical contexts. The collection closes with theextraordinary reflectionsprovoked in sculptor Elizabeth Presa-whose work features on its cover-by Blanchot, here alongside Rilke and Rodin. Overall, this volume is a rich resource, and strangely heartening. If our time, afterBlanchot, is MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 55 I once more a time of need, the kind of thinking this collection brings within reach nevertheless turns thenecessity toendure it into a kind of good fortune. QUEENS' COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE MARTIN CROWLEY Provisionality and thePoem: Transition in the Work ofDu Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noell. By EMMAWAGSTAFF. (Faux Titre, 278) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2006. 244 pp. E48. ISBN 978-90-420-I939-3. In his recently republished Eclisse, Jacques Dupin recalls the solitariness of the emergent post-war poetic voices of his own generation, who, unlike Char, Artaud, Michaux, or Ponge, had littleprospect of being published, doggedly pursuing their artwithout public recognition, in the shadow of the already verymuch moribund formsofResistance and Surrealist writing. Far removed from the limelight, forming no identifiable group, these poets developed highly individual practices...

Before The Human Race: Robert Antelme's Anthropomorphic Poetry

In the Spring of 1944, one month before the Gestapo arrested him, sending him first to the prison at Fresnes and then deporting him to Buchenwald and Dachau, Robert Antelme published four poems in Litterature, a newly inaugurated and ultimately short-lived literary journal. The journal, which appeared only in that year, aimed to present the work of young French writers.1 As the editor, Rene Julliard explains in a preface to the first issue, Litterature did not represent a particular 'school', and authors were not bound by restrictions of page numbers or genre. In each issue which included poems, stories, plays, and essays the contributions were organized alphabetically, according to the author's name.2 Antelme intended the poems that appeared in Litterature to be part of a collection, which he tentatively called Les mains aux grilles [Hands on the Bars]. Had he not been deported, it is possible that Antelme would have become a poet. Yet the collection that he imagined never appeared. In place of the book of poems, Antelme came to write L 'espece humaine [The Human Race], an account of his experience as a prisoner in Buchenwald, Gandersheim (one of Buchenwald's subcamps) and Dachau. In France, L 'espece humaine stands as the exemplary account of the experience of the camps. Maurice Nadeau has called it 'one of the great books written about the camps', comparable only with Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz and David Rousset's Les Jours de notre mort ? Edgar Morin singles out Antelme's testimony as 'the first 1 would even say the only book that stands firmly at the level of humanity, at the level of naked experience lived and expressed in the simplest, most adequate words there are.'4 Morin goes on to acknowledge that although Antelme's testimony is a work of 'antiliterature (since, very rightly the author didn't want to make literature out of the camps)', it is also 'a book of pure literature ...

The case of Robert Antelme

An analysis of the mnemonic mechanisms at work in the narrative of the concentration camp experience, based on the case of Robert Antelme. This survivor of the Buchenwald camp gave a first spoken version of what was to become his major work, l’Espèce humaine (The Human Species), to his friend Dionys Mascolo. Mascolo’s testimony concerning the narrative that was told to him and his reception, some time later, of the written narrative (with the transition between the two versions marked by forgetting), question the notion of loss — in particular, the loss of a “0” text which is the text of death. This postulate allows us to explore the notion of the ineffable and to reveal its cultural implications; in other words, to approach the concept of survival as a narrative category.

Comment le témoignage devient une œuvre littéraire : Le cas de Robert Antelme et de Primo Levi

Teklik Joanna, Comment le temoignage devient une asuvre litteraire : Le cas de Robert Antelme et de Primo Levi (How testimony becomes a Iiterary work: the case of Robert Antelme and Primo Levi). Studia Romanica Posnaniensia, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, Poznan, vol. XXXIII: 2006, pp. 49-63. ISBN 83-232-1643-6, ISSN 0137-2475. Can a testimony, a text similar to a document, be a Iiterary work? The answer to this ąuestion is definitely positive in the case of R. Antelme (Z, 'espece humaine) and P. Levi {Se guesto e un uomo) who relate their experience from a concentration camp. These authors, remaining faithful to the truth, do not neglect aesthetic reąuirements, using known narrative techniąues and skillfuUy maintaining the tension characteristic of Iiterary texts. They use an innovative form of narration. It is fragmentary and broken, which fuUy reflects the character of the prisoners' fate. Finally, a new conception of humanity and a deep reflection on human nature (the titles are meaningful themseWes) prove the Iiterary character of both texts.

Robert Antelme and Innovation

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. I refer to the Häftling narrator (who is never named in the text) as Robert. 2. This clause does not imply that Antelme claims this coinage to be original, as indeed it was not; Holocaust survivors’ memoirs often refer to the collaborating “aristocracy.” See for example Primo Levi, If This is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz and David Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire. 3. As regards no-man's-lands, Checkpoint Charlie might be considered a shared space of complementary biopoliticizations. On both sides of the border, in both kinds of political structure, the body itself is the ultimate political expression. Additional informationNotes on contributorsMarina DaviesWith an Introduction by Ora Avni

Horror and the Everyday in Post-Holocaust France

The recent proliferation of studies of French representations of the Holocaust, dominated by trauma studies and postmodern theory, has tended to privilege the survivor testimony of Robert Antelme (author of L'Espèce humaine), the critical work of Maurice Blanchot on the unnameable and a Levinassian ethics of the other. In this article I would like to focus on a different strand in post-Holocaust art and theory in France in which the significant imaginative thinker aiming to shape a new aesthetic vision is not Blanchot but Alain Resnais's collaborator on Nuit et brouillard, Jean Cayrol. Through an analysis of Resnais's film (1955), I will consider ways in which the interplay between everyday life and horror, and especially the role of objects in this process, are central to the emergence of a reshaped artistic vision in post-Holocaust France: in the words of Cayrol, an ‘art concentrationnaire … où l'invraisemblable et le naturel se confondraient’. I will then discuss the importance of an antifascist politics of representation at the heart of this artistic vision which subsequent treatments of the Holocaust have often effaced.

Robert Antelme: Humanity, Community, Testimony by Martin Crowley (review)

220 Reviews tribution to the study of narrative. The diverse meanings of the expression 'telling performances'?the telling of performance, the performance of telling, the fact that some performances are particularly 'telling'?are investigated in various ways by the differentcontributors. The firstfive essays are the most strictly narratological, and move from a useful theoretical overview, where Gerald Prince takes stock of recent thinking on narrativity,to consideration ofthe vicissitudes ofplot in a number ofspeci? ficworks. In the works featured there is a diversity ofboth time (although the twentieth century predominates, there is a discussion of Emile Gaboriau's early detective novel Le Crime d'Orcival) and genre (while most of the narratives are textual, Naomi Segal 's exploration of how adulterous triangles are inflected by gender culminates in the analysis ofthe filmsFatal Attraction and The Piano). The next section focuses on how performances of various kinds, notably erotic, are narrated. The contributions here are perhaps the most uneven. In particular, Peter Cryle's survey of erotic narrative is marred by his repeated association of body with truthand especially by his suggestion that there can be an 'unmediated utterance of bodily truth' (p. 128), a suggestion that seems furthermore at odds with the relationship between telling and performance propounded by so many of the other contributors. On the other hand, Nathaniel Wing's discussion of Gautier'sMademoisellede Maupin, Julie Solomon's piece on La Vagabonde, which merits inclusion in any bibliography on this much-studied text, and Anne Freadman's 'Hair?And How to Do It', a compelling example of cultural com? mentary, are truly excellent articles which deserve a greater readership than this kind ofcollection tends to attract. Maclean's work is a constant reference formost, ifnot all, ofthe contributors. But perhaps the book's own most telling performance is the intro? duction, unsigned but presumably written by the three editors. This self-effacement, along with a number of other elements, such as the apposite use of the exclamation mark or the final analysis of Quintilian's poignant tribute to his son, is one of the rea? sons why,notwithstandingits declared desire to eulogize the work rather than to purge the pain of the person's passing, the introduction succeeds in conveying?at least to this reviewer?a stark sense of griefat Maclean's loss. Perhaps the very factthat itjolts the reader into realizing how rare it is fora book presenting itselfin memoriam actually to touch its reader is proof that this tribute performsas well as tellsan act of mourning. University College Dublin Mairead Hanrahan Robert Antelme: Humanity, Community, Testimony. By Martin Crowley. (Re? search Monographs in French Studies, 15) Oxford: Legenda. 2003. xii+111 pp. ?19.50. ISBN 1-900755-80-7. Martin Crowley's study offers a sensitive and timely account of Robert Antelme's important but surprisingly often neglected 1947 'memoir', L'Espece humaine, which emerged out of his experiences as a prisoner in various Nazi concentration camps. This monograph comprises three chapters, each addressing one of the themes in the title?humanity, community, and testimony?through close readings of Antelme's writings. Bridging these chapters are sections entitled 'Readings', which explore pos? sible connections between Antelme and later European thinkers, (re)locating Antelme as an important figure within a tradition of post-war European philosophy. L'Espece humaine is thus shown to anticipate and also, crucially, to resist contemporary notions of humanity, community, solidarity, and testimony, key concerns of post-war Euro? pean thought. Crowley's readings are careful and perceptive, drawing out the complexities of Antelme's thought and highlighting its political implications. He warns against reading Antelme's theorization of humanity as indestructible and indivisible in positive terms: for Antelme, humanity is shown to be indestructible only when MLRy ioo.i, 2005 221 it is threatened with destruction, figured as an irreducible residue which emerges at the point where it is most contested. If this notion of a fragile yet indestructible humanity that survives the death of the human being finds resonances in the images of spectrality and of ash scattered through the work of thinkers such as Blanchot, Derrida, and Agemben, Crowley also, crucially, unpicks the irreducible differences between their ideas and those...