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

Bruno Chaouat

L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2000, pp. 88-99 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/esp.2010.0132

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"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 fromthe Goethehaus in Weimar.

-Sven Lindqvist

COLIN DAVIS, IN AN ARTICLE entitled "Duras, Antelme and theEthics of Writing" (1997), violently if belatedly attacks Maurice Blan-chot's and Marguerite Duras's readings of Robert Antelme's L'Espèce

humaine.' This book, first published in 1947, testifies to its author's imprison-ment in the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald, Gandersheim, andDachau. Blanchot published his reading in L'Entretien infini (1969). Duras, inthe first section of La Douleur (1985), tells of waiting for Robert L., her hus-band 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 significantechoes and cross-references, so that the two works may be regarded to someextent as complementary texts" (171). Yet, Davis accuses both Duras and Blan-chot of betraying the spirit of Antelme's testimony by bending it to their ownphilosophical and/or literary purposes. Those purposes are identified by Davisas anti-humanistic, whereas Antelme's text, in his view, "attests and proclaimsthe unbreached wholeness of humanity and the survival of the self despite thethreat of its annihilation" (175). According to Davis, "the hesitation in his[Blanchot's] prose ... betrays a degree of unease about the reading of L'Espècehumaine which he offers" (173). For Davis, reading Antelme does not consti-tute an uneasy task. Why should the reader hesitate, indeed, when the messageis so clear and reassuring? The significance of Antelme's book is very easy tosummarize, and Davis does it for us, lest we misunderstand: it is a book aboutthe 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, youmust be inhumane, that is, a virtual barbarian, and, after Auschwitz, anaccomplice of war criminals. As early as 1947, also the year of the publica-tion of Antelme's book, Heidegger, in his "Letter on Humanism," persua-sively dismissed such a specious argument, showing that it relied upon a sim-

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plistic either/or logic: if non-humanist, then inhumane.2 Following Niet-zsche's genealogical method, Heidegger recalls the historical roots of Westernhumanism, whose origin he traces back to the romanocentric oppositionbetween homo humanus and homo barbarus. This subjectivist distinction,Heidegger argues, was resurrected during the Italian Renaissance. Then, herecalls and questions the Greek definition of man as zoon logon ekhon (theliving being who has the language, the speaking animal). Heidegger rejectsthe animality of man, i.e., his biological determination, and offers a very ques-tionable, neo-romantic definition of the human Dasein as the "shepherd ofBeing": "Humanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas of manhigh enough." That Heidegger, after Auschwitz, had not abandoned the rhet-oric of human dignity probably constitutes one of the most serious signs of hislack of repentance and, certainly, explains at least in part his silence on thedeath camps. That the philosopher in völkisch outfit boldly persisted as late as1947 in assigning to man a poetico-ontological mission proper to him, a workto accomplish in order to become authentic and worth living, indicates that hehad still not given up the Nazi rhetoric of Führung. Giorgio Agamben recentlywrote: "Auschwitz signe l'arrêt de mort de toute éthique de la dignité. . . ."3To Heidegger's pretension to overcome Western humanism in order to founda "more human" humanism, a super-humanism whose sublime mission wouldconsist in watching over Being, Lévinas responds with a "humanisme del'autre homme." To Heidegger's whining about the oblivion of Being, Lév-inas will reply by denouncing Western humanism's oblivion of the Other.

What is nonetheless worth meditating in Heidegger's argument is that,since the origin of metaphysics, man (anthropos) has always been differenti-ated from other species as owning language. The experience of the camps hasirreversibly undermined this anthropological reduction of man to animalrationale, this problematic articulation between zoon and logos, between"naked life" and "speaking life." This is why it is no longer possible blindlyto embrace traditional humanism.

After the uncanny revelation of Heidegger's membership in the Naziparty, it has become all too easy for a humanistic good conscience to claimthat Heidegger's enemies were right to accuse him of complicity with theworst executioners in the history of humankind. See, we were right, question-ing humanism leads to totalitarianism and support of Hitler, etc. If Heideggeris equated with a Nazi, then the deconstruction of metaphysics, which, as itsinitiator himself reminds us, is the same thing as the deconstruction of West-em humanism, is virtually an inhumane, irresponsible, at least questionable,practice, and all post-Heideggerian writers and thinkers are somehow stained

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by the same suspicion. Hence, Blanchot and even Lévinas, for acknowledg-ing too loudly their debt toward Heidegger, can be labelled as "dangerous"and blacklisted by the good humanists. Alas, as Lévinas puts it, today—i.e.,after Auschwitz, in the aftermath of the totalitarianisms of the right and of theleft—not only is good conscience out of season, but bad conscience is not badenough. Indeed, Davis's insinuations show a complete misreading of Lévinas'sattempt to think again and otherwise Western humanism and metaphysicsrather than simply abandoning them. Such a misreading is all the more sur-prising inasmuch as the same Colin Davis has also written a fairly good intro-duction to Lévinas's philosophy.4 As for Duras, that wild and disturbingwoman, somewhat hysterical, Davis has no problem with associating her withthe aforementioned post-Heideggerians, namely Blanchot and Lévinas (withwhom, after all, she is in rather good company). This kind of witch-hunt—theterm is particularly suitable since Duras first published a section of LaDouleur in the journal Sorcières—is interminable. No need to resort to RenéGirard to figure out that in order to exorcise physical and even metaphysicalviolence one needs scapegoats. Witches or "hysterical" women have alwaysbeen perfect in that role. Any thinker or writer who dares, after Nietzsche andHeidegger, put into question what Davis refers to as "human and moralvalues," could become the target of such a witch-hunt. Ethics is naivelyreduced to vague "human and moral values" whose ideological and historical,i.e., metaphysical, determinations are never questioned. That Dionys Mas-cólo, Antelme's friend, commenting in 1987 on a personal letter receivedimmediately after Antelme's return from the camps, wrote: "Il n'y aura pas deretour à l'ancien humanisme, à 'l'humanité'.. .,"5 does not seem to make anydifference; that Antelme himself, in the aforementioned letter to Mascólo,wrote: "Il m'est arrivé l'aventure extraordinaire de pouvoir me préférer autre"(17) does not matter. Davis's premise is that L'Espèce humaine belongs to thehumanistic tradition; any empirical fact must comply with this theoreticalpremise or simply be overlooked.

My question is thus the following: does L'Espèce humaine belong to whatDavis calls a "conventional, mid-century Marxist humanism" (174)—not avery flattering way of characterizing one of the most unheard-of witnessingvoices of the century—or does it open a breach in that tradition, a wound fromwhich a humanism grounded upon good conscience and preached by thebelles âmes can never fully recover? This conflict of interpretations is crucial,for the reading of L'Espèce humaine constitutes in itself a testimony concern-ing the concentration camps and, ultimately, a statement about the signifi-cance of an event like Auschwitz for Western consciousness.

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Examining closely one passage from Antelme's L'Espèce humaine, and,in parallel, one from Duras 's first section of La Douleur, I will suggest thatonly a shallow, rapid, and all too impressionistic reading of Antelme's text,coupled with a refusal to let oneself be alienated by it, can reduce his testi-mony to a conventionally humanistic account.

From the two books, I have selected two scenes of failure to recognize theother (fellow prisoner or husband), due to the experience of extreme physicalsuffering. Those two scenes stage what we might call experiences of estrange-ment. I will start with Antelme's testimony. Starting with the phrase "K. vamourir" (Antelme 178) and scanned by the persistent and disturbing refrain,"Où est K?," that scene constitutes a nearly autonomous text summarized andcommented on by Maurice Blanchot as follows:

ne reconnaissant pas dans le Revier un compagnon qu'il était venu voir (K.) et qui vivait encore,il comprit que dans la vie même il y a du néant, un vide insondable dont il faut se défendre touten en admettant l'approche.6

On the threshold of death, self-alienation becomes manifest: "J'ai regardécelui qui était K.," Antelme writes (179), as though the experience of dyingpointed to the impossibility of fully adhering to oneself. Beyond the gram-matical sequence of tenses, this lack of adherence is temporal and is related tothe process of dying: this one, at some point, was K., and is no longer him.That failure to recognize the other generates a fear in the face of one's ownvirtual lack of integrity and self-resemblance:

J'ai eu peur, peur de moi. (179)Parce que je ne retrouvais plus celui que je connaissais, parce qu'il ne me reconnaissait pas,j'avais douté de moi un instant. (180)

If my fellow human beings resemble me—and this indeed constitutes the main,irrevocable claim of Antelme's testimony—then, in the defacing mirror heldout by K., it is now myself whom I can no longer recognize and piece together,rassembler: "c'était pour m'assurer que j'étais bien encore moi que j'avaisregardé les autres, comme pour reprendre respiration" (180). In a moment ofsuffocation self-recognition is suspended and the question "Who am I?"uttered, as it were, out of breath. The process of dying threatens the Cogito, thepossibility of any self-consciousness and certainty: "Je ne reconnaissais rien...Toujours rien que la tête pendante et la bouche entrouverte de personne" (179).

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A cryptonym for the mystery concealed at the core of human life, K. hasbecome a figure and a name of no one, a figure of the unknown, which inhab-its the familiar. If Antelme seems to consider the nose as the signature of theface and as its privileged reference, a physiognomic invariant which wouldprovide the face with a stable identity, here the nose does not sign, ratherresigns, or nullifies: "J'ai fixé alors le nez, on devait pouvoir reconnaître unnez. Je me suis accroché à ce nez, mais il n'indiquait rien" (179). It is lessdeath itself which furthers such a discovery than its approach. Death indeed,Antelme clearly suggests, makes the self recognizable in restoring it to itsoriginal aspect. As Mallarmé puts it in his "Tombeau d'Edgar Poe": "Telqu'en lui-même enfin l'éternité le change...." It is rather the very process ofdying which alters the self and makes it unrecognizable. During the suspen-sion between life and death, during the endless interval of undecidabilitybetween being still alive and being already dead, the face is defaced or eveneffaced and becomes no one's face, pointing to the hidden, unknowable sideof human life: "La mort ne recèle pas tant de mystère" (180). Death appears,in comparison, as a familiar experience, a phenomenon that can be identifiedand acknowledged. Indeed, Antelme insists, such an estrangement affects liferather than death. Blanchot had noticed this important detail, in perfect sym-pathy with and faithfulness to Antelme's testimony ("dans la vie même il y adu néant..."): "Cela était arrivé pendant la vie de K. C'était en K. vivant queje n'avais trouvé personne" (180).

On the other hand, death pieces the self together, relocates it in its formerplace. The work of death once accomplished, the human figure is expected tobe reunited, like the stable, reassuring faces of the other convalescents recog-nized by Robert at the camp infirmary: "Comme les figures stables des autresm'avaient rassuré, la mort, le mort K. allait rassurer, refaire l'unité de cethomme" (180). But what is the "unité" of the human face, its self-resem-blance, worth, if it can be undone and defeated (défaite)! How are we to readthis dissolution of K.'s oneness? Does this not indicate precisely that the one-ness of the human face is fragile, split and, as it were, hollow? Physical suf-fering would thus reveal a crack in the unity of the human face, whose disin-tegration seems to be taking place between life and death, in the distendedmoment of agony, when human life is reduced to a vegetable life.

The question "Où est K.?" thus must be heard as an ontological one.Dépaysement is constitutive of human life. As Dionys Mascólo has noticedabout the return of Robert: "A l'imitation de ce qu'il avait lui-même vécu,...nous n'avons fait que subir un dépaysement, déplacement ou transport del'imagination et des sens" (62). K. has withdrawn himself from any familiar

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location. What takes place in the impossibility to locate K. would be a struc-tural dis-location, an ontological displacement or dépaysement, a retreat intono place at all. K. can be found in no place, because his face, as a referencepoint and only means of identification, his face as what provides its ownerwith a name, has simply resigned.

What Antelme is confronted with is thus the enigma of the non-face, theterrifying vis-à-vis with an inverted or hollow face which has started eatingitself or melting and, as it were, liquefying. As Antelme writes about Jo, acompanion whose description precedes and anticipates the failed recognitionof K.: "Les os apparaissent sur sa figure. . . . Son corps commence à semanger" (91). And, about another one agonizing in the camp infirmary: "Safigure fond, ses yeux noirs sont comme noyés" (97). Antelme calls that emp-tying process of the human face for which there is no name available a"néant," as if the being which appears in the face and illuminates it had with-drawn: "Cependant ceci resterait, qu'entre celui que j'avais connu et le mortK. que nous connaîtrions tous, il y avait eu ce néant" (180). This "néant," thisexhaustion of the face which could be described as a counter-epiphany, cannotbe suppressed. This is a remainder and a reminder (a reste) which can neitherbe sublated nor forgotten ("ceci resterait"). In that remainder, Antelme sug-gests, lies the opaque mystery of human life.

Rilke, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, described a very similarphenomenon—but is it still a phenomenon, or does it not rather indicate, as weshall see, the limit of phenomenology?—the hollowing out of the face whichuncannily announces certain themes which will recur in Holocaust literature:

But the woman, the woman: she totally fell into herself, forward into her hands... The woman wastaken aback and lifted herself too quickly, too furiously, so that the face remained in the twohands. I could see it, its hollow form. I had to make an indescribable effort to remain by thosehands and not to look at what had been ripped off: I dreaded seeing a face from the inside, buteven more was I afraid of the bare sore head without a face.7

Gerhard Richter, commenting on Rilke's often quoted passage, suggests thatthe evocation of the "non-face" (das Nicht-Gesicht) displays the

anxiety that comes with seeing the inside of a face—the unthinkable inside of something that isthe very definition of the outside—and the frightening prospect of thus disturbing the logic of theface altogether. (Richter 432)

If in Greek prosopon (face) means etymologically that which stands beforeone's eyes, which presents itself to one's sight, the vision of Rilke's character

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appears as the petrifying vision of what cannot be seen, the nightmarish limitof human visibility. Interestingly enough, Primo Levi, in his own testimony,referred to the "Muselmann" as "celui qui a vu la Gorgone" (Giorgio Agam-ben 64). According to concordant testimonies of survivors, der Muselmann, incamp slang, was the name given to inmates who had reached a stage of com-plete passivity and who, in a state of absolute resignation, awaited their death.Giorgio Agamben proposes a useful interpretation of Levi's périphrase, sug-gesting that seeing Gorgon's head, which for the Greeks embodied the anti-prosopon or anti-face, means seeing the "inhumaine impossibilité de voir"(66).8 Agamben reads this impossibility as an allegory for the limit of humantestimony, a limit reached, to be sure, in Auschwitz. Clearly, K. presents allthe features of the Muselmann as described by eyewitnesses, althoughAntelme does not call him such and although his experience is not the expe-rience of a death camp:

S'il continuait à maigrir, même son visage changeait d'aspect. Le regard devenait opaque et lestraits formaient une expression indifférente, machinale et triste. Les yeux se voilaient, les orbitesse creusaient profondément.9Ils peuplent ma mémoire de leur présence sans visage, et si je pouvais résumer tout le mal denotre temps en une seule image, je choisirais cette vision qui m'est familière: un hommedécharné, le front courbé et les épaules voûtées, dont le visage et les yeux ne reflètent nulle tracede pensée.10

K. would have seen Gorgon's head and transmitted this counter-vision to hiscompanion as a dreadful legacy. Antelme thus bears witness for the one whobears witness for the "inhumaine impossibilité de voir," i.e., ultimately, for theimpossibility of bearing witness.

I would argue that in "disturbing the logic of the face," in disfiguring thehuman face or in de-humanizing it, the experience of extreme suffering as wit-nessed by Robert Antelme has altogether shattered the certainties of a human-ism grounded upon human likeness and the stability of the human face. Thus,Antelme's testimony and "inhumane" readings of it (Blanchot's and Duras's,for instance) echo Benjamin's apparatus of resistance against the fascistnotion of a stable face. After having described the technique of constructionof a self-identical German face by the Nazis, Richter comments on Ben-jamin's philosophico-political resistance to this national narcissism in the fol-lowing terms:

That Benjamin resists the notion of a face that is in some essential way linked to the figure ofwhat is human means that he wishes to think the face as also belonging to what can no longer bedelimited by the discourses of the human and its referentiality. (Richter 427)

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Another scene in Duras 's La Douleur clearly responds to RobertAntelme's failure to recognize K. The parallel between the two scenes is madeeven more evident by Antelme's mention of K.'s wife: "Celui que sa femmeavait vu partir était devenu l'un de nous, un inconnu pour elle" (179). RobertL., back from Dachau, first appears to his wife as a non-human body, a humanbeing who apologizes for having trespassed the borders of the human species,as is suggested by the narrative voice:

Je ne le reconnais pas... Il s'excuse d'en être là, réduit à ce déchet. Et puis le sourire s'évanouit.Et il redevient un inconnu. Mais la connaissance est là, que cet inconnu c'est lui, Robert L., danssa totalité."

The border between the familiar and the strange is blurred. Yet the strange,rather than precluding the familiar, has become part of it; the unknown fullybelongs to Robert L.'s identity although it cannot be reduced to it. Deprivedof his unknowable alterity, Robert L. would simply lack something, he wouldnot be Robert L. "dans sa totalité." But, since when does totality not subsumeeverything? Since when can the circle of totality leave anything outside itself?What kind of integrity is an integrity opened by a breach of the unknowable,split, as it were, by an internal outside? If we follow the logic of Duras 's text,we must acknowledge that totality and integrity are no longer what they usedto be, they can no longer pretend to comprehend everything.

In the portion of the diary published anonymously in 1976, Duras's descrip-tion concentrates without complacency on the aspect of Robert's excreta:

Pendant dix-sept jours, l'aspect de cette merde resta le même. Elle était inhumaine. Elle leséparait de nous plus que la fièvre, plus que la maigreur, les doigts désonglés, les traces de coupsdes S.S. (73)

It is through the inhuman aspect of his shit, as well as through the thickstrangeness of its smell, that Robert L. no longer belongs to the human com-munity and has been relegated by the experience of the concentration camp toan outside of the human species:

Dès qu'elle sortait, la chambre s'emplissait d'une odeur qui n'était pas celle de la putréfaction,du cadavre—y avait-il d'ailleurs encore dans son corps matière à cadavre—mais plutôt celle d'unhumus végétal, l'odeur des feuilles mortes, celle des sous-bois trop épais. (74)

Whereas the stench of the rotting cadaver would indeed be human, all too

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human—a smell that one could identify as unambiguously belonging to thespecies—the smell of Robert L.'s excreta is reinscribed in the vegetable king-dom and compared to the moist smell of "humus," a mixture of dead leavesand thick bushes. Interestingly enough, the word "humus" shares a root withthe word "human." The human species would thus be enveloped in a foreignsmell of vegetable "humus," a smell that cannot be identified as human by thehuman organs and nonetheless belongs to what we persist in calling thehuman, but as its unknown and unknowable outside. As Fethi Benslamaargues in his discussion of L'Espèce humaine: "Dans la clôture du cercle del'humanité, dans ce cercle même, résiderait un reste, quelque chose qui seraitimpropre, un hors-humanité proprement humain."12 This internal outside("hors-humanité proprement humain") has been uncovered by the conditionof absolute humiliation inflicted by the vain metaphysical wish of the S.S. torum the human being into something else. This wish is summed up byAntelme in the following statement: "Le S.S peut tuer un homme, mais il nepeut le changer en autre chose."13 What would characterize the human being,the propre of the human being, as Fethi Benslama suggests, would thus be atendency toward expropriation and dehumanizing, a virtuality of trespassingthe biological borders of the species. The human participates in the vegetablekingdom insofar as the borders of the human kingdom are characterized bytheir porosity. What the association of the inhuman smell of excreta with thevegetable humus suggests, far from any anchoring of the human being in thesoil that would participate in the fascist myth of belonging and of the com-munity, the Nazi Blut und Boden, is precisely the practical and ethical impos-sibility of any rooting and of any stable biological or anthropological deter-mination of the human species. The "totalité" of the human self is defined bya virtuality of disintegration legible in the effacement of the face as well as inthe inhumanity of the human feces. The reduction of the human self to a merewaste ("déchet") by the S.S. logic has opened the breach of otherness whichshatters our identity and constitutes the ineradicable and indestractible seed ofthe human species. If the S.S logic can be defined as the wish to tum thehuman into something else, to expropriate specific groups of humankind andtransfer them outside the borders of the human species, that wish was doomedto failure, since that something else always already blurs the lines between thehuman and the inhuman.

I will conclude by sketching a commentary of an opaque sentence ofEmmanuel Lévinas's preface to Humanisme de l'autre homme.'* In that book,

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Lévinas attempts to work out the remains of Western humanism, to indicate itsfailures and its horizon of hope. Curiously, one sentence resonates like anuncanny echo of Robert Antelme's failure to recognize his companion K., orrather, Robert Antelme's account of his failed recognition appears before the factas a very concrete and vivid illustration of this enigmatic and abstract sentence:

L'altérité du prochain, c'est ce creux du non-lieu où, visage, il s'absente déjà sans promesse deretour et de résurrection.

Lévinas suggests that what constitutes the genuine alterity of the other, whatmakes the other truly other, is the "creux du non-lieu," which seems to be, inthe nearly Mallarméan syntax of Lévinas's sentence, a metonymy of the face.Far from being convex, the human face would be, as it were, concave, hol-lowed out, defined by a cavity, a hole. No longer a sur-face to contemplate, nolonger a visible and seen outside, the face appears as a bottomless inside.Instead of appearing as full, it disappears in its emptiness, it literally effacesitself. Peculiar epiphany of the neighbor, whose face, instead of appearing tothe light, recedes into a dark hole. The presentation of the face of the other thusappears without appearing as a negative presentation, the presentation of whatcannot be presented). The face constitutes a clear case of Lévinas's counter-phenomenology and of his critique of Husserl. In the face, indeed, the phe-nomenologist faces a phenomenon which phenomenology cannot grasp'5: ashollow, the face of the other does not appear to me and cannot be reached bymy understanding. All my attempts to reach it, to comprehend it, are doomedto fail before the retreat of the phenomenon. In withdrawing into nothingness,in the very movement of its self-effacement, though, we have seen that the faceleaves a remainder. Antelme writes, about K.'s face: "Ceci [ce néant] resterait.. . ." But then again, how can a "néant" remain? If there is nothing, how canthere remain anything? Nothing is nothing ultimately and according to themovement of dialectics the nothingness will be sublated and turned into being.Is it not the reason why Antelme writes "La mort ne recèle pas tant de mys-tère," insofar as death, this ontological nothingness, far from disrupting themovement of dialectics, will ultimately restore the same and suppress theabsolute alterity read in the exhaustion of the face? The work of death is all toofamiliar compared to the radical strangeness of the extinction of K.'s face,compared to the désœuvrement of the human face. Hence, the economy of theremainder (the reste) disturbs and even transcends the dialectics of being andnothingness which determines ontology. The economy of the remainder carriesus beyond being and nothingness, beyond or before ontology, toward what

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Lévinas has called an "autrement qu'être." The reste or restance thus functionsas a political resistance against annihilation. In other words, Antelme's politi-cal resistance rests upon the reste inscribed in the human face.

Something, thus, seems to resist the coming to light of the face and its totalannihilation, a reste resists the alternative between being and nothingness,something in my neighbor's face stubbornly resists any attempt to reach it. The"visage" of my neighbor can no longer be the object of my "visée," of my aimor of my intentions, good or evil. Hence, murder, as Jill Robbins has argued,"misses the genuine alterity of the other, namely that which in him goesbeyond the sensible and that which in him is beyond being."16 In arguing that,Jill Robbins reinforces Maurice Blanchot's paradoxical but rigorously juststatement about L'Espèce humaine: "L'homme est l'indestructible qui peut êtredétruit" (Entretien infini 192), a paradox confirmed by Antelme himself:

Le SS ne peut pas poursuivre le copain dans la mort. Encore une fois, le SS est obligé de fairetrêve. Il touche une limite... Le mort n'offre plus prise. S'ils s'acharnaient sur sa figure, s'ilscoupaient son corps en morceaux, l'impassibilité même du mort, son inertie parfaite leur renver-raient tous les coups qu'ils lui donnent. (99)

Resisting the world of phenomena, the face does not take place: it is a "non-lieu." The face of the other never took place, never manifested itself in anygiven place as a phenomenon, but only as a hollow trace. From this "non-lieu," which indicates more an immemorial past than an absence of place, theface addresses me (the prosopon, for Lévinas, is always invested with thevocative power). What the face imparts to me, in its silent withdrawal, is theirrevocability of human finitude: I am going to die, I am already dying "sanspromesse de retour et de résurrection." Such a confession of irreversiblehuman mortality obliges me to respond, i.e., to bear witness, now, urgently.The other is mortal and, eventually, he will be defeated and undone. What willremain of him is the convulsive retreat of a face, pointing to the inhumanityof our human condition.

Berea College

Notes

Comparative Literature Studies, 34, 2 (1997): 170-83. L'Espèce humaine (Paris: Gallimard,1957). I will use the 1993 revised edition of this book.Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," in David Farrell Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger:Basic Writings, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, with J. Glenn Gray and David Farrell Krell (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1977), 193-242.

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3. Ce qui reste d'Auschwitz, L'archive et le témoin, Homo Sacer ¡II, traduit de l'italien parPierre Alferi (Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages, 1999), 87.

4. Lévinas: An Introduction (Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P, 1997).5. Dionys Mascólo, Autour d'un effort de mémoire (Paris: Maurice Nadeau, 1987), 37.6. Maurice Blanchot, "Dans la nuit surveillée," in Robert Antelme, Textes inédits sur L'Espèce

humaine. Essais et témoignages (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 72.7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge in Sämtliche Werke, vol.

6 (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1966), 71 If. Quoted by Gerhard Richter, "Face-Off," in Monat-shefte, XC, 4 (1998): 411-44.1 am grateful to Jeanne Hoch for the original English transla-tion of Rilke's piece.

8. Agamben here refers to chapter 5 of Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux's Du Masque au visage.Aspects de l'identité en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1995).

9. Z. Ryn and S. Klodzinski, An der Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod-Eine Studie über dieErscheinung des "Muselmanns" im Konzentrationslager, Auschwitz-Hefte, b. 1 (Weinheimet Bale, 1987). Quoted by Agamben 50.

10. Primo Levi, Si c'est un homme, traduit de l'italien par Martine Schruoffeneger (Paris: JuI-liard, 1987), 96-97. Quoted by Agamben 52.

11. Marguerite Duras, La Douleur (Paris: P.O.L. éditeur, 1985), 69.12. "Le propre de l'homme," in Robert Antelme, Textes inédits sur L'Espèce humaine. Essais et

témoignages 95.13. This sentence constitutes the starting point and the core of Maurice Blanchot's discussion

of L'Espèce humaine in L'Entretien infini.14. (Ed. Fata Morgana, 1972), 12.15. I am grateful to James Mensch for an inspiring conversation I had the pleasure of having

with him on this subject in Berlin in the summer of 1999.16. See "Visage, Figure: Reading Lévinas's Totality and Infinity," in Yale French Studies 79,

"Literature and the Ethical Question": 143.

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