Do not watch the liberation of Auschwitz on television, read. Read Levi, or, perhaps, Antelme’s The Human Race, a testimony of the author’s experiences in the work camps.
The narrator learns that K. is going to die; he’d been in the infirmary for a week. He looks for K. at the infirmary, but cannot find him, although he recognises a few of the patients as he passes a row of beds. Where is K.? he asks a nurse. ‘But you passed him. He’s over there’. Antelme must have passed right by K.’s bed. The nurse points out K.; Antelme goes across: here is a man with hollows instead of cheeks and expressionless eyes. Formerly, he had been lying down, now he had raised up his head on his elbows. Perhaps he is smiling. Now Antelme goes towards him, thinking this patient was looking at him. But where is K.?
‘I went over to the next bed and asked the guy lying on it, “where’s K?”’ He turned his head and with it motioned towards the person propped on his elbows’. Then the patient with the long nose and the smile was K. But this frightens Antelme: ‘I looked at the person who was K. I became afraid – afraid of myself – and I looked at the other faces, seeking reassurance. I recognised them clearly enough. I wasn’t wrong; I still knew who they were. The other person was still leaning on his elbows, head down, mouth halfway open’.
Where is K.? Antelme looks into the blue, unmoving eyes of this patient. Then he looks at the other patients, whom he recognises. Then Antelme addresses the unknown patient (the one who has taken the place of K.): ‘Hello, old man’. ‘There was no way I could make myself more visible. He kept that appearance of a smile on his face. I didn’t recognise anything’. Antelme moves away. ‘Still nothing but the drooping head and the half-opened mouth of nobody in particular. I left the infirmary’. In one K. had become unrecognisable. A double had substituted itself for him. True, the other patients knew who K. was – he hadn’t become nobody for everybody. But Antelme hadn’t been able to say: ‘This is K’.
K. was dying; he would die that night. Dying, K. was no longer the man Antelme knew. And he – Antelme – did he exist? ‘Because I no longer found the man I’d known, and because he didn’t recognise me, I’d had doubts about myself for a minute. It was to reassure myself that I was still me that I’d looked at the other guys as though to recover my breath’. The ‘stable faces’ of the others grant him a surety in his own existence. But K.? K. is no longer stable; even his death will not reassure Antelme. ‘[I]t would remain true that between the man I’d known and the dead K., whom we all know, this nothingness had existed’.
Nothingness. How should one understand this? From the last text Blanchot published, a tribute to Antelme:
Not recognising, in the infirmary, a companion he had come to see, who was still alive, he understood that even in life there is nothingness, an unfathomable emptiness against which we must defend ourselves even while being aware of its approach; we have to learn to live with this emptiness. We shall maintain our fullness, even in nothingness.
One day, you may no longer recognise the one who is close to you. One day, it will be someone like a dead man who stares back at you. Death, half-smiling, holding your stare. Horror: it is death in life that regards you and, looking, you know that you, too, will be claimed by the same oblivion and death will shine from your face, too. But perhaps the dying, the dead reveal only a kind of nudity, a simple ‘presence’ which may burn darkly in your place at any time, at any moment. Is this what Giacometti revealed in his sculptures which, for their differences, are also all exactly alike?
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