Antelme, Renoir, Levinas and the shock of the Other

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French Cultural Studies, 14/1, 041–051 Copyright © SAGE Publications 0142-7237 [200302] 14:1; 041-051; 034317
Antelme, Renoir, Levinas and the shock
of the Other
COLIN DAVIS*
Over the mountain/ Down in the valley/ Lives a former talk-show host/
Everybody knows his name/ He says there’s no doubt about it/ It was the
myth of fingerprints/ I’ve seen them all and man/ They’re all the same
– Paul Simon, ‘All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints’,
from the album Graceland
Ihisn one
recent years there has been renewed interest in Robert Antelme and in
book, L’Espèce humaine, a powerful account of his time as a prisoner
of the German concentration camp system written in the immediate
aftermath of the war.1 Important articles by Blanchot and Perec, first published
in the 1960s, were followed by a period of relative neglect. Interest was
revived when Marguerite Duras, Antelme’s wife at the time of his deportation,
published a fictionalized version of his return from Germany in La Douleur
(1985), which prompted a number of comparative studies of Duras and
Antelme. At the same time, Antelme was again becoming a focus of study in
his own right, most significantly in Sarah Kofman’s Paroles suffoquées
*
Address for correspondence: Department of French Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry
CV4 7AL. e-mail: [email protected]
1
Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957; first published 1947). Page
references are given in the text. Other references in this paragraph are to: Maurice Blanchot,
‘L’Espèce humaine’, in L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 191–200; Georges Perec, ‘Robert
Antelme ou la vérité de la littérature’ (1963), in L. G. Une aventure des années soixante (Paris:
Seuil, 1992); Marguerite Duras, La Douleur (Paris: P.O.L., 1985); Sarah Kofman, Paroles suffoquées
(Paris: Galilée, 1987); Robert Antelme, Textes inédits, Sur ‘L’Espèce humaine’, Essais et
témoignages (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). An earlier version of this paper was written for a session on
Antelme organized by Bruno Chaouat at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in 2001. My
interest in Antelme has been intensified by Bruno Chaouat’s passionate enthusiasm for L’Espèce
humaine, and I am grateful to him for the invitation to speak at the conference. I am also grateful to
Martin Crowley, who spoke in the same session, for enlightening discussions of Antelme.
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(1985). In 1996, six years after Antelme’s death, some of his post-war
articles were republished together with substantial discussions of his life
and work in Textes inédits, Sur ‘L’Espèce humaine’, Essais et témoignages.
Now that primary material is readily available and academic interest is
established, Antelme’s status as one of the earliest and most important
concentration camp authors seems secure.
A consequence of the critical attention which L’Espèce humaine is now
receiving is that fundamental disagreements about the book are being made
explicit. In particular, attention has focussed on Antelme’s insistence that,
despite the attempts of the SS to strip them of their humanity, the prisoners
remain human throughout their ordeal. In the key passage which gives
L’Espèce humaine its title, Antelme asserts that the human species is single
and indivisible, despite racial and social diversity: ‘il n’y a pas des espèces
humaines, il y a une espèce humaine’ (229); anything which masks the unity
of the species and puts some beings in an exploited or inferior position is
‘faux et fou’ (230). Readers have attempted to come to terms with what
Antelme means by this insistence on the indivisibility of the human species.
In Blanchot’s account, heavily inflected by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas,
the core of humanity which survives the experience of the camps is not to be
understood in terms of identity, but rather as a revelation of the otherness
which inhabits the human subject: ‘déchu de moi, étranger moi-même, ce qui
s’affirme à ma place, c’est l’étrangeté d’autrui – l’homme comme absolument
autre, étranger et inconnu, le dépossédé et l’errant’.3 The influence of this
account can be traced through Kofman’s study to the recent work of Bruno
Chaouat, who argues that the brutality of the SS opens up ‘une brèche
d’altérité qui fissure notre identité et constitue le noyau insécable de l’espèce
humaine’. The deliberate paradox here, whereby what is indivisible (‘noyau
insécable’) is precisely a breach (‘une brèche d’altérité), is echoed by Bethi
Benslama, for whom ‘le propre de l’homme’ in L’Espèce humaine consists in
the human capacity to be disappropriated.5 By contrast, Martin Crowley has
2
For discussion of Antelme, see Bruno Chaouat, ‘“La Mort ne recèle pas tant de mystère”:
Robert Antelme’s Defaced Humanism’, in L’Esprit créateur 40, no 1 (2000), 88–99, and ‘Ce que chier
veut dire (Les ultima excreta de Robert Antelme)’, in Revue des sciences humaines, 261 (2001),
147–62; Martin Crowley, ‘“Il n’y a qu’une espèce humaine”: Between Duras and Antelme’, in The
Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable, edited by Andrew Leak and George Paizis
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 174–92, and ‘Remaining Human: Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce
humaine’, in French Studies, 56 (2002), 471–82; Colin Davis, ‘Duras, Antelme and the Ethics of
Writing’, in Comparative Literature Studies, 34, no. 2 (1997), 170–83 (expanded version in Davis,
Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction: Killing the Other (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
2000), 131–51), and ‘Robert Antelme’, in Holocaust Literature, edited by S. Lillian Kremer (Routledge,
forthcoming); Claire Gorrara, ‘Bearing Witness in Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine and
Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur’, in Women in French Studies, 5 (1997), 243–51.
3
Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 195.
4
Chaouat, ‘Ce que chier veut dire’, 158.
5
See Fethi Benslama, ‘Le Propre de l’homme’, in Antelme, Textes inédits, Sur ‘L’Espèce
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argued that there is in Antelme’s writing a ‘residual humanity’, which
survives intact despite the attempts to destroy it: ‘For Antelme, then, it is not
the internal, non-human void within the human which remains – rather,
essentially and repeatedly, it is the human which remains, on the edges of
and resisting this void.’6 In this version, humanity does not consist in pure
internal difference, but rather in something irreducible which cannot be
expunged, and which resists dissolution in what Blanchot calls the ‘magma
d’autrui’.7
What is at stake in this disagreement is in part the extent to which
Antelme can be associated with a Levinasian ethics of alterity. Blanchot,
Kofman and others have identified the key drama of Antelme’s writing as the
relationship with the Other. Alterity rather than identity is at the core of
what Kofman calls Antelme’s ‘nouvel “humanisme”’;8 the old figures of Man
have been irrevocably shattered, the self is torn open and exposed to
otherness, tormented by a debt to the Other which can never be fully
discharged. If Kofman is right, as she insists, to retain the old name of
humanism, it now has little in common with its earlier confident identification of Man as the proud, self-assured centre and creator of his own
values.9 The crucial reference point here, explicit in Blanchot and implicit in
Kofman, is what Levinas calls the ‘humanisme de l’autre homme’.10
Levinas’s objection to the old humanism is that, by focussing on the self, it
operates a potentially murderous exclusion of the Other. It bases its
insistence on Man’s worth on his self-containment and self-possession,
whereas Levinas believes that what constitutes us as human and as ethical
subjects is a fracturing of self occasioned by the encounter with the Other.
Through this lens, the experience of the camps recounted in L’Espèce
humaine has been read as showing the confrontation of the murderous self –
the SS – with the vulnerable, victimized, but ineradicable Other – the
prisoners. It thus illustrates, as Kofman puts it, ‘l’indestructibilité de
l’altérité, son caractère absolu’, and it thereby also gestures towards ‘un
“nous” d’un nouveau genre [. . .] car ce “nous” est toujours déjà défait,
déstabilisé’.11
Most critics have agreed with Kofman that Antelme’s ‘humanism’ is at a
far remove from any celebration of the powers and achievements of Man.
The characterization of Antelme’s stance in L’Espèce humaine as a ‘robust,
humaine’, Essais et témoignages, 95: ‘Dans la clôture du cercle de l’humanité, dans ce cercle même,
résiderait un reste, quelque chose qui serait impropre, un hors-humanité proprement humain.’
6
7
8
9
10
11
See Crowley, ‘Remaining Human’, 477.
Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, 198.
Kofman, Paroles suffoquées, 82.
See Kofman, Paroles suffoquées, 93–4.
See Emmanuel Levinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972).
Kofman, Paroles suffoquées, 82.
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defiant humanism’ has been criticized by Chaouat for neglecting the extent
to which Antelme breaks from conventional humanism, and by Crowley for
over-emphasizing the defiance and confidence of Antelme’s affirmation of
the human species.13 Both these criticisms are persuasive. However, this
article follows Crowley’s scepticism over the assimilation of Antelme to
Levinasian ethics by highlighting some of the differences between the
respective ethical demands of Antelme and Levinas. Jean Renoir’s great
prisoner-of-war film La Grande Illusion (1937) is introduced as a third point
of comparison because it stages the drama of sameness and difference in a
manner which both parallels and elucidates L’Espèce humaine. The epigraph
to this article, taken from Paul Simon’s song ‘All Around the World or The
Myth of Fingerprints’, suggests that human difference is a myth. Antelme
and Renoir edge towards suggesting that it is moreover a dangerous myth
which should be combated because of its political consequences; for Levinas,
on the other hand, otherness is the difficult foundation on which any ethics
or politics must be built.
In the preface to L’Espèce humaine Antelme makes an intriguing comment
about the solidarity of prisoners in Gandersheim, the camp in which much
of the book is set. Unlike Buchenwald, Gandersheim did not have the welldeveloped political organization which served to some extent to protect the
political prisoners. So, in Gandersheim the sole objective of the prisoners
was to survive; collective struggle was impossible to the point that, according to
Antelme, ‘La solidarité même était devenue affaire individuelle’ (11). How
can solidarity be an individual matter? Surely solidarity is by definition a
mode of relation with others, only achievable in conjunction with other
people. But Antelme insists here that solidarity may be attained by a solitary
subject, without – and perhaps even to the exclusion of – the support of
others.
The comment is all the more significant because of the strategic importance
of the first-person plural pronoun, nous, in L’Espèce humaine. This pronoun
first appears in the opening sentence of the preface, as Antelme describes the
response of the prisoners from the concentration camps on their return
home: ‘nous avons été, tous je pense, en proie à un véritable délire’ (9). In
this sentence nous precedes je, as if to imply that community has precedence
over individual identity and perhaps even that it is the subject’s condition of
possibility. The terrible spectre which haunts the narrator of L’Espèce humaine,
as of many of the testimonial and fictional texts from the concentration
camps, is the loss of the first person, of the ability to be the subject of one’s
12
Davis, ‘Duras, Antelme and the Ethics of Writing’, 172.
See Chaouat, ‘“La mort ne recèle pas tant de mystère”: Robert Antelme’s Defaced Humanism’,
88–91; Crowley, ‘Remaining Human’, 475.
13
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own experience and to say ‘I’. Thus, the first sentence of the text proper, ‘Je
suis allé pisser’ (15), is an act of resistance as well as a verbal and existential
self-affirmation: Antelme insists that he is still the subject of his own bodily
functions despite the attempts of the SS to reduce him to brute anonymity,
and he is still the subject of his own narrative. Crucially, the rescuing of the
first person from anonymity also entails the restoration of the first person
plural. L’Espèce humaine ends as it had begun with a nous which is reaffirmed after the liberation of Dachau when, in the final lines of the book,
the narrator shares a cigarette with a Russian prisoner: ‘Wir sind frei. (Nous
sommes libres)’ (306). The possibility of some sort of community has
survived, even if it is now indelibly marked by the trauma through which it
has passed. Sitting in the dark, the two men cannot see one another, as
Antelme observes in a resonant comment: ‘Rien n’existe plus que l’homme
que je ne vois pas’ (306). Only the man exists, and perhaps here l’homme
also stands for Man in general. His form cannot be seen, his contours have
been obscured by the terrible experience of the camps, but his existence is
affirmed in the emergence of a community of free men: nous sommes libres.
What is the nature of this community? Is it based on a shared humanity
which remains inviolable whatever happens to us, or is it a community
founded in difference and the traumatic encounter with alterity? The reading
of Antelme through Levinas suggests the latter, whereas Crowley’s account of
‘residual humanity’ in L’Espèce humaine entails a tempered insistence that
something distinctively human survives the experience of the camps. In one
version, the human is radically and totally permeated by its Other; in the
alternative version a kernel of the human resists the exposure to alterity. At
this point, Renoir’s film La Grande Illusion can be helpfully introduced to
the discussion.14 The connection between La Grande Illusion and L’Espèce
humaine is not entirely arbitrary, since Renoir’s film is perhaps the most
important French depiction of incarcerated men in wartime prior to
Antelme’s book (though of course the film is about the First World War
rather than the Second), and it is arguable that it helps form both the
experience and the representation of imprisonment for subsequent writers.
Perhaps a more direct allusion can be seen in L’Espèce humaine when
Antelme refers to the Marseillaise after Dachau is liberated: ‘Maintenant, ça
gueule. Une espèce de Marseillaise de voix folles gonfle dans le block’
(299).15 To anyone who has seen La Grande Illusion, this will inevitably
recall the extraordinary, nationalistic, sentimental yet still moving scene
when a show being put on by the prisoners is interrupted by news of a
14
References are to La Grande Illusion (1937), directed by Jean Renoir, written by Jean Renoir
and Charles Spaak.
15
For another scene of communal singing reminiscent of La Grande Illusion, see L’Espèce
humaine, 204–5; see also 117 for a further reference to singing the Marseillaise.
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significant German defeat. The prisoners are joined together in the
triumphant singing of the Marseillaise. The scene is made more bizarre by
the presence of prisoners dressed for the purposes of the show as women.
Moreover, it is an English prisoner in female dress who initially calls on the
band to play the Marseillaise. As the band begins he removes his wig as a
mark of respect. So, in a scene which borders on the surreal, the wig-less
English cross-dresser is joined together with virile French men-of-the-people.
The point is that this is a moment of improbable unity when differences (at
least differences within the group of prisoners) can coexist in temporary
harmony. It is important here that differences are not annihilated; they are
still there, they simply matter less.
La Grande Illusion is first and foremost a film about difference. Its
dynamics and tensions revolve around distinctions of class, race, nationality
and to a lesser extent gender. Differences between German and French,
aristocrat and proletarian, officers and men, Jew and gentile, man and
woman, and even (as will be explained in a moment) man and beast cross
over, complement one another, intersect, combine and merge, so that the
prison and the film become a space where difference reigns in all its forms.
Does a French aristocrat have more in common with a German aristocrat or a
working-class Frenchman? Is a cosmopolitan Jew more French than a French
peasant because he owns more of France? Such questions drive the film on
as it explores a context in which difference is rife. The character Maréchal
(played by Jean Gabin) tells de Boeldieu, the aristocratic officer, ‘Tout nous
sépare’. They have nothing in common. In the prison there is only difference,
though such difference does not exclude the possibility of community. De
Boeldieu will give up his own life to help Maréchal escape. Even love may
be possible, as Maréchal discovers later in the film when he is sheltered by a
German woman with whom he can barely communicate.
The establishment of the prison as a space of difference is echoed in
Antelme’s account of Buchenwald and Gandersheim. Distinctions and
conflicts abound, between SS and prisoners, political prisoners and common
criminals, French and Poles, and so on. The camps are organized according
to a highly differentiated class system, with its aristocracy and its plebeians,
and numerous gradations in between. In a crucial passage, Antelme insists
that the attempts of the SS to annihilate distinctions between the prisoners
have the opposite effect; the community is on the contrary made up of strict,
insurmountable differences: ‘L’homme des camps n’est pas l’abolition de ces
différences. Il est au contraire leur réalisation effective’ (93). This can evidently
be read as implying that the community of the camps is founded in
difference not identity, and such a reading readily justifies assimilation of
L’Espèce humaine to a Levinasian perspective. In Totalité et infini Levinas’s
discussion of fraternity seeks to describe a form of solidarity-in-difference. In
what is for Levinas the privileged relationship between father and son, the
selves of both are entwined with one another without ever fully coinciding.
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In this special, unrepeatable relationship, the son is always unique; the
conjunction of self and other which makes him who he is therefore becomes
a site of absolute singularity. But the son is not the only son, he has any
number of equally unique brothers. So he is not, as it were, unique in being
unique. Moreover, this fraternity is essential to the ethical and social relation
with the Other: ‘Le moi humain se pose dans la fraternité’, as Levinas puts
it.16 Fraternity, in this account, is not based on family ties or resemblance,
but on the absolute difference which ensures the uniqueness of everyone.
My brother is my brother precisely because he is incommensurable with
myself. Levinas knows full well that brothers may kill each other; the
shadow of Cain and Abel haunts his writing as an emblem of the human
capacity for violence. But Levinas is anxious to suggest that Cain’s act is
based on a misunderstanding of our ethical responsibility for the fraternal
Other. Levinas uses the word solidaire to describe the bond between brothers,
though this solidarity is at a far remove from the sense given to it by Camus
in L’Homme révolté.17 Camus’s solidarity represents a rigid bond between all
human beings, to the exclusion of any trace of otherness. In contrast,
Levinas’s fraternity is precisely the community in difference which seems to
be adumbrated in La Grande Illusion and L’Espèce humaine.
So, the prisons of La Grande Illusion and the camps of L’Espèce humaine
are the domain of difference, and identity is constantly fractured through the
proliferation of multiple forms of otherness. However, this is not the final, or
at least not the only, position adopted in either work. The scene in La
Grande Illusion in which Maréchal tells de Boeldieu that ‘Tout nous sépare’
is counterpointed later in the film when, after his escape, Maréchal talks to a
cow. Despite the differences between them, Maréchal reassures the cow that
‘ça ne nous empêche pas d’être copains’. What they have in common may be
as important as what separates them: ‘Tu es une pauvre vache, et puis moi
un pauvre soldat, chacun fait de son mieux, pas vrai?’ In this scene,
Maréchal suggests that difference is only part of the story, an effect of
perspective which does not obliterate the links between them. Indeed, what
they have in common may be more important than what separates them, and
difference may after all be contained within the framework of sameness.
Which is more fundamental: unity or diversity, sameness or difference?
Which is the illusion and which the reality?
The film’s title poses precisely this question by suggesting that, of the
many possible illusions, there is one which overrides all others. Yet it does
not tell us unambiguously which illusion this is. Different possibilities
16
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961;
Livre de Poche edition), 312–13.
17
See Levinas, Totalité et infini, 313: ‘dans la fraternité [. . .] autrui apparaît à son tour comme
solidaire de tous les autres.’ On the exclusion of otherness in Camus’s L’Homme révolté, see Davis,
Ethical Issues in Twentieth-Century French Fiction, 72–4.
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might be proposed. Class solidarity is one: the German aristocrat von
Rauffenstein is surprised that his French counterpart shows more loyalty to
his nation than to his class. At the end of the film, one of the escaping
prisoners expresses the hope that the First World War will be the war to end
all wars, only to be told ‘Tu te fais des illusions’, suggesting perhaps that the
illusion of the film’s title is the belief that war could ever be consigned to
humankind’s past. When reviewing the possible senses of the film’s title, the
critic André Bazin suggests that it may refer to the illusions of sexuality, of
love, of freedom. However, given that the film revolves around so many
different kinds of difference, it may be too narrow to confine its title to one
amongst others, such as class or nationality. Rather, the great illusion here
may be difference itself, in which case, as Bazin argues, the title refers to ‘la
grande illusion de la haine qui divise arbitrairement des hommes que rien
réellement ne sépare, les frontières et la guerre qui en découle, les races, les
classes sociales’.18 According to Bazin, then, the film shows the falsity of
barriers and the underlying fraternity of subjects. The distinctions between
German and Frenchman, aristocrat and proletarian, gentile and Jew,
prisoners and guards, may serve as sources of conflict, but they do not for
that reason inevitably correspond to any underlying reality. Difference is an
effect of shifting circumstances, and a difference which at one moment is
fundamental may rapidly become unimportant. At the beginning of the film,
the German aristocrat shoots down the plane of the French aristocrat; then
they take lunch together, then the Frenchman is taken away under armed
guard to be imprisoned. In a sequence lasting only a few minutes, national
conflict is superseded by class solidarity, only to be replaced by the power
relations between prisoner and jailer. Or again, later in the film Maréchal
escapes with the Jew Rosenthal because he is his preferred companion, only
then to insist ‘Je n’ai jamais pu flairer les juifs’. A moment afterwards,
though, they are seen again as companions as Maréchal helps Rosenthal to
walk. The racial difference is at one moment irrelevant to the relationship,
and at the next of defining importance.
In this film, then, difference reigns, but it has no ontological significance.
On the one hand ‘Tout nous sépare’, but on the other ‘ça ne nous empêche
pas d’être copains’. In this light, the great illusion of difference is the pretext
and epiphenomenon of conflict rather than its source, it is a surface effect
mistaken for an underlying cause. The end of the film, as Maréchal swears to
return to his German lover, gestures towards a utopian space not of difference
but of in-difference, represented by the white snows of Switzerland which
dominate the final shots. As the film closes, Rosenthal and Maréchal are seen
in long shot against the white snow, and the rich cosmopolitan Jew and the
18
André Bazin, Jean Renoir (Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1989), 59.
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gentile Parisian engineer are finally indistinguishable from one another. Here
at last is a space in which differences of race, class and nation may be finally
recognized as illusions. Though of course this moment of indistinction is
itself just another effect of perspective, and neither sameness nor difference
is the final truth of the film.
In this reading of La Grande Illusion difference never constitutes a stable
position or relation; rather it is produced in a context and a space in which
conflict is rife, and which generate difference as a necessary pretext for that
conflict. This is also the case in L’Espèce humaine. In the camps, as we have
seen, difference reigns; at the same time, difference can do nothing to alter
the indivisible unity of the human species. This is in the end the prisoners’
triumph over the SS: despite everything, their humanity cannot be taken
away from them, the SS and the prisoners remain of the same species. The
conviction that runs through L’Espèce humaine is that Man is essentially
inalterable as Man. The unity of the species is primary, difference – however
inevitable it may be – is secondary. The camps stage the proliferation of
difference, but they can do nothing to fracture the essential, or as Crowley
prefers ‘residual’, humanity of man. This view is reflected in the fragments
of a Marxist analysis of the camps that surface in the text from time to time.
The camp hierarchy is conceived as an aristocratic system which distils and
reveals the state of relations in society outside the camps. The camps thus
bring to light social and economic inequalities which impede the realization
of a more just society that would be founded on the indivisible unity of the
human species. Antelme insists that, by clinging on to their embattled humanity,
the prisoners are part of a struggle for ‘la libération de l’humanité’ (101).
The central point here is that this is an ethics and a politics based on the
integrity of the self and the species, rather than a Levinasian ethics of alterity
which focuses on the shock of the encounter with the Other who is totally,
insurmountably Other. The camps certainly do function as a space of
otherness, where the self is stranded and threatened by destitution in the
face of something which cannot be assimilated and which makes no sense;
but in L’Espèce humaine otherness appears as a threat to be resisted rather
than the opportunity for radical ethical renewal. Antelme’s aim is to preserve
the self in the face of everything which might reduce it to nothingness. The
very narration and writing of the text, the je which is used sparingly but
insistently, recount at a metadiscursive level that the self has survived the
encounter with alterity if not entirely intact, then at least not annihilated.
There are certainly moments when L’Espèce humaine looks very like a
Levinasian text, in its constant confrontation of the fragile self with
experiences which expose it to the possibility of its utter destitution. What is
un-Levinasian about it, though, is its resistance to that exposure and that
destitution, in its avid, perhaps hopeless, perhaps heroic endeavour to preserve
the self in something like a recognizable form in the face of the trauma of the
camps.
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The significance of this can be illustrated from an incident following the
evacuation of Gandersheim, whilst the prisoners are on a trek during which
many of them will be killed. They pause for a moment in a village. To the
local inhabitants, the strange and disturbing sight of the prisoners gives them
a glimpse of something utterly alien: ‘Ils nous regardent et semblent
complètement déroutés: jamais plus, sans doute, ils ne rencontreront d’aussi
parfait mystère. On leur fait franchir les limites humaines dont ils n’ont pas
l’air de pouvoir revenir’ (254). At this moment, it looks as if something like
an encounter with the shock of the Other in a Levinasian sense might be
about to occur. The prisoners are a ‘parfait mystère’, threatening to take the
villagers beyond the limits of the familiar on a journey from which they can
never return. But the distance that separates Antelme from Levinas becomes
explicit a moment later, as the narrator asks a woman for water and she
retreats in horror: ‘Un instant, devant cette femme, je me suis conduit
comme un homme normal. Je ne me voyais pas. Mais je comprends bien que
c’est l’humain en moi qui l’a fait reculer. S’il vous plaît, dit par l’un de nous,
devait résonner diaboliquement’ (255). What is diabolic – Other – about the
prisoners, it turns out, is not their utter strangeness, their ‘parfait mystère’,
but on the contrary their underlying shared humanity, even if it appears in
an initially unrecognizable guise. What horrifies the villagers is the
discovery that the prisoners are not of an alien species. These are human
beings, like themselves, despite the squalor to which they have been
reduced. Antelme describes not the shock of the Other, but the shock of
sameness.
The unity of the human species which, according to Antelme, survives the
camps, is at a far remove from fraternity in Levinas’s sense. In one case there
is an ineradicable core of humanity; in the other there is pure difference. In
this context, Antelme’s observation that ‘La solidarité même était devenue
affaire individuelle’ (11) begins to make some sense. Solidarity is a matter
for the individual subject, for the subject as undivided (in-dividuum),
because it involves resisting the invasive Other, keeping the Other out of the
fortress of the self, maintaining humanity as a relation with the species
rather than as a relation with specific others. This is not a Levinasian
humanism of the other man, it is a humanism resting on the joint foundations
of the self and the inviolability of the human species. In Antelme’s text,
staying alive at all costs, eating one’s own bread (and even stealing the bread
of others) is an act of defiance against forces that aim to fracture the self and
the species. In an ethics of alterity on the other hand, there is no moral
urgency to the survival of the self. One of the very few examples Levinas
offers of ethical action is giving to the Other one’s own bread; the responsibility to the Other far outweighs and overrides any adherence to the self. It
might be objected that any ethics which demands of a starving man that he
give up his bread to another is both harsh and utopian. But Levinasian ethics
does not offer an easy or a comfortable ride. For Levinas, the ethical demand
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is always unconditional, exorbitant, too extreme to be fully met. Antelme’s
astonishing achievement is that he manages to tell a story which he knows to
be on the edge of transmissibility, the story of the survival of the self as
subject of its own history. In Levinas’s ethics, that story could never have
been told. The destitution of the self, its total exposure to the Other, allows
of no reconstitution and no narrative of its improbable survival.