L’Orient des revues (XIXe et XXe siècles) éd. par Daniel Lançon (review)

Reviews 239 Lamy-Rested’s essay can be seen as an attempt at bringing the debate to a close. Her purpose is to“signer l’échec du projet théorique de Littell, qui n’est pas pour autant un échec littéraire”(101). The central issue to be considered is to know what exactly does the“je”of the narrator stand for. In this regard, Littell’s fictional account suffers from an unsolvable contradiction: on the one hand, the SS officer is an individual psyche that is an integral, organic part of a specific State apparatus; on the other, according to a second thesis implicit in the novel:“les génocides ont la même cause et les ‘bourreaux ’ parlent d’une seule voix”(105). Consequently, Lamy-Rested seeks to develop a new conceptual model, a third thesis that would reconcile the “anthropo-psychological ” explanatory model with the socio-political and historically contextualized approach. Her study proceeds on the basis of several well-known precedents that include Stanley Milgram’s experiments as well as three studies of genocide: Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (2007), Harald Welzer’s Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (2005), and Jean Hatzfeld’s Une saison de machettes (2003), an account of the genocide in Rwanda.The testimony of the Hutu killers as well as that of the participants in World War II massacres all reveal what Lamy-Rested identifies as a process of depersonalization , which, in turn, produces a denial of reality allowing the perpetrators to act with a full, conscious awareness of their deeds and then to return to an ordinary life in an ordinary world—free from any remorse or misgivings. What the process amounts to, in effect, is a splitting of the self due to a lengthy experience of indoctrination whereby each killer has unconsciously developed and internalized a representation of the world providing the individual the capacity for following what Lamy-Rested terms an impulsion injonctive, a driving force to which the killer acquiesces freely since“il ne fait que s’accorder aux lois qui sont au principe même de sa construction psychique inconsciente et auxquelles il s’est finalement identifié”(155). Quoting Primo Levi—who was told by an SS guard“Hier ist kein warum”in response to his “why?”—Lamy-Rested recognizes that a satisfactory answer to Levi’s question may always elude us. Nevertheless, in an age when genocide is still invoked and even carried out in different parts of the globe, Lamy-Rested’s thoughtful and elaborate analyses provide a valuable source of reflection and shed some further light on the incomprehensible. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis Lançon, Daniel, éd. L’Orient des revues (XIXe et XXe siècles). Grenoble: ELLUG, 2014. ISBN 978-2-84310-286-8. Pp. 198. 24 a. This volume traces the evolution of representations of the Orient in French periodicals from the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 to the end of decolonization in the 1960s. In the book, the Orient includes territories lying east and south of Western Europe, from Slavic countries (“l’Europe orientale”) to the Arab World (especially the French Maghreb and Egypt) and, further East, India and China. Successfully balancing periodicals from the nineteenth and twentieth century, the volume showcases an impressive range of expertise. It also productively reads prominent journals (Mercure de France, Revue des deux mondes, Cahiers du Sud, Europe, Esprit, Nouvelle revue française) alongside lesser-known periodicals (Revue indépendante , Magasin pittoresque, Tour du monde, Egypt-based Un effort). The book presents heterogeneous engagements with the Orient—some overtly political, either for or against contemporaneous colonizing efforts, some mired in essentialist depictions of an immutable Orient. This welcome plurality of voices complicates monolithic visions of Europe’s writings on the Orient and foregrounds the contrasts and tensions inherent in the corpus. Also fruitful is the inclusion of native voices dialogically engaging European opinions on topics as varied as the suitability of Islamic reform and Islam’s compatibility with Western modernity (Egyptians Taha Hussein and Tewfiq el-Hakim in Cahiers du Sud),or on the usefulness of Communist paradigms...