"La mort ne recèle pas tant de mystère": Robert Antelme's Defaced Humanism

"La mort ne recèle pas tant de mystère" Robert Antelme's Defaced Humanism Bruno Chaouat For Stanley, in memory of Charlie A. Kelley, Jr. The idea of extermination lies no farther from the heart of humanism than Buchenwald lies from the Goethehaus in Weimar. -Sven Lindqvist COLIN DAVIS, IN AN ARTICLE entitled "Duras, Antelme and the Ethics of Writing" (1997), violently if belatedly attacks Maurice Blanchot 's and Marguerite Duras's readings of Robert Antelme's L'Espèce humaine.' This book, first published in 1947, testifies to its author's imprisonment in the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald, Gandersheim, and Dachau. Blanchot published his reading in L'Entretien infini (1969). Duras, in the first section of La Douleur (1985), tells of waiting for Robert L., her husband at the time, and of his return from the camps. As Davis has justly noticed: "La Douleur and L'Espèce humaine contain, in fact, a number of significant echoes and cross-references, so that the two works may be regarded to some extent as complementary texts" (171). Yet, Davis accuses both Duras and Blanchot of betraying the spirit of Antelme's testimony by bending it to their own philosophical and/or literary purposes. Those purposes are identified by Davis as anti-humanistic, whereas Antelme's text, in his view, "attests and proclaims the unbreached wholeness of humanity and the survival of the self despite the threat of its annihilation" (175). According to Davis, "the hesitation in his [Blanchot's] prose ... betrays a degree of unease about the reading of L'Espèce humaine which he offers" (173). For Davis, reading Antelme does not constitute an uneasy task. Why should the reader hesitate, indeed, when the message is so clear and reassuring? The significance of Antelme's book is very easy to summarize, and Davis does it for us, lest we misunderstand: it is a book about the final triumph of good over evil, of good people (the Résistants) over bad (the S.S. men), defeated at the last minute by genuine human goodness. The humanistic argument is well known: If you are not a humanist, you must be inhumane, that is, a virtual barbarian, and, after Auschwitz, an accomplice of war criminals. As early as 1947, also the year of the publication of Antelme's book, Heidegger, in his "Letter on Humanism," persuasively dismissed such a specious argument, showing that it relied upon a sim88 Spring 2000 Chaouat plistic either/or logic: if non-humanist, then inhumane.2 Following Nietzsche 's genealogical method, Heidegger recalls the historical roots of Western humanism, whose origin he traces back to the romanocentric opposition between homo humanus and homo barbarus. This subjectivist distinction, Heidegger argues, was resurrected during the Italian Renaissance. Then, he recalls and questions the Greek definition of man as zoon logon ekhon (the living being who has the language, the speaking animal). Heidegger rejects the animality of man, i.e., his biological determination, and offers a very questionable , neo-romantic definition of the human Dasein as the "shepherd of Being": "Humanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough." That Heidegger, after Auschwitz, had not abandoned the rhetoric of human dignity probably constitutes one of the most serious signs of his lack of repentance and, certainly, explains at least in part his silence on the death camps. That the philosopher in völkisch outfit boldly persisted as late as 1947 in assigning to man a poetico-ontological mission proper to him, a work to accomplish in order to become authentic and worth living, indicates that he had still not given up the Nazi rhetoric of Führung. Giorgio Agamben recently wrote: "Auschwitz signe l'arrêt de mort de toute éthique de la dignité. . . ."3 To Heidegger's pretension to overcome Western humanism in order to found a "more human" humanism, a super-humanism whose sublime mission would consist in watching over Being, Lévinas responds with a "humanisme de l'autre homme." To Heidegger's whining about the oblivion of Being, Lévinas will reply by denouncing Western humanism's oblivion of the Other. What is nonetheless worth meditating in Heidegger's argument...