Category: Antelme

Antelme marching with others, led by the SS, through the woods. A column of 4000 silent men marching through silent trees. Then: shots: first, a deluge, then more isolated. The men do not turn. One of their number has been shot. The column moves ahead. In the silence they hear ‘the sound of solitary fear and nocturnal, diabolical terror’. Terror: but the column march, they can only march. What will happen? Each fears another 50 will die – then another 50; perhaps they will all be killed. Meanwhile, they must march and march until there is no more column for the SS to lead.

An Italian is summoned by the SS: ‘Du, komm heir!’. The SS man is looking for a man to kill; anyone will do. The victim blushes. He knows he has been selected by chance. He does not ask: ‘why me? Why not another?’; there are no criteria. None of the marchers is worth more or less than anyone else.
The column is silent. Each tries to ready himself to be chosen at random to die. Each is afraid for himself, but Antelme notes ‘we probably have never felt such solidarity with each other, never felt so replaceable by absolutely anybody at all’. Think of the one who stood next to the Italian. Hearing: ‘Du, komm heir!’ and seeing another go forward in his place, Antelme writes, he ‘must have felt half his body stripped naked’.

Nakedness, nudity, exposure: someone will die in your place, just as you might die in the place of another. It is the possibility of this mortal substitution which allows each to feel solidarity with the other.

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?

Abjection borne in common. But abjection cannot be shared, for what do those without relation to themselves; deprived of self-identity, seized by a movement of detour bear in common. Can you dream of a celestial Master, the kingdom of God beyond this world? But your abjection is such that it is impossible to say ‘I’. If I address you, whom do I address?

You can belong neither to a common hope nor a common despair; your abjection isolates you, so long as one can write of an isolation without subject. A situation Antelme describes in the work camps where prisoners are brought, by starvation, by exposure, by brutality to the point of death.

Work in the camp is only a parody of work; it is like the labours of Sisyphus: absurdity. Carry a rock from one place to another and then back again. Mad labour; labour for its own sake, for the sake of labour, which is to say, for labour’s absurdity. Infinite rebeginning; one day resembles another and in the end time does not move forward. Every day is today; there is no longer a past and a future.

Antelme dreams of a communism among the prisoners, but resistance is limited to a friendly glance, an acknowledgement of another, a few words. There are no slaves but the shadows of slaves. Notice, though, that Antelme writes ‘we’ more often than ‘I’. We: and to this experience of the common, of commonality, he links an experience of communism – of the encounter with others in their dereliction, their simplicity. But what begins here? What can begin?

The SS meet the limit of their power in the faces of the magma. More and more prisoners will come, infinitely substitutable in their broken, famished bodies, but coming nonetheless. And in their multitude they address their captors in their own abjection, in a murmuring or barbarism which cannot harden itself into a word. A living, still-living accusation.

In the end, as Antelme argues, there is hope because the SS cannot transform the human race into workers, stock or standing-reserve. What resists is the multitude of the magma itself, the innumerable mass which is there even as its members are close to death. The bodies of the prisoners, substitutable for one another, were a living, still living refusal; there are always other prisoners to come, until the whole human race including the SS themselves would have to be brought to Gandersheim.

Refusal, resistance: it is true, Antelme allows himself to dream of a kind of communism. The camp is a microcosm of the world; the SS the image of the men and women of power, the proletariat those who are excluded from the human race and made to suffer whether because of their class or the colour of their skin.

Still, this is not a communism founded upon shared work; there is no collective labour here. And without labour, what can be accomplished? There is nothing that can be actualized, but this is significant: without work, a kind of resistance occurs – one which can be re-echoed in other protest movements.

It happened, but it happens again. It is true, for a while, prisoners of the concentration camps lost faith in the horizon. There was no talk of rights. But isn’t this the case in the regions of the world? And isn’t it the case at Guantanamo bay?

Resistance: you can do nothing; there’s nothing to be realized. Resistance: work itself becomes absurd, and you are the bedraggled Sisyphus who mocks work and the measure of work. Then it is clear: you mock those who put you to work, mock them without intending to because they encounter in you what they cannot bear in themselves.

Communism: an event, and not collective labour. An event which has already occurred. Which brings us together according to what we share when we cannot work. Common idleness.