Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance 9780823265503

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Memory and Complicity

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Memory and Complicity Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance

Debarati Sanyal

Fordham University Press New York 2015

Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 First edition

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Contents

Acknowledg ments Introduction: Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections 1.

vii 1

A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies

23

2.

Concentrationary Migrations in and around Albert Camus

56

3.

Auschwitz as Allegory: From Night and Fog to Guantánamo Bay

99

4.

Crabwalk History: Torture, Allegory, and Memory in Sartre

149

5.

Reading Nazi Memory in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

182

6.

Holocaust and Colonial Memory in the Age of Terror: Assia Djebar and Boualem Sansal

213

Afterword

265

Notes

269

Index

333

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have found its way to completion without the support and complicité of colleagues, friends, and family. I am continually inspired and engaged by the intellectual community at Berkeley. Special thanks go to Karl Britto, Rob Kaufman, and Ann Smock for their feedback on earlier versions of these pages, and to Tim Hampton and Michael Lucey for their sound professional advice. I’ve richly benefited from conversations with Vanessa Brutsche, Églantine Colon, Mary Ann Doane, David Hult, Mia Fuller, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Dan O’Neill, Miryam Sas, Jiwon Shin, Alan Tansman, Soraya Tlatli, Estelle Tarica, Maria Vendetti, and Damon Young. A wider circle of friends and colleagues have sustained me through the writing of this book: Lynne Huffer read an early draft of the manuscript during a retreat in Big Sur and wisely urged me to articulate the bigger picture. Vilashini Cooppan commented on each chapter of the fi nal version with extraordinary care and insight. Michael Rothberg has been an invaluable interlocutor, collaborator, and reader over the past years; Ross Chambers was a treasured intellectual presence throughout. Many colleagues generously engaged with this project at workshops, conferences, and invited lectures. I’m especially grateful to Marianne Hirsch, Thomas Trezise, Maurie Samuels, Max Silverman, Nina Fischer, Noah Guynn, Jack Halberstam, Joe Golsan, Dan Edelstein, Judah Pollack, Christophe WallRomana, and Brett Ashley Kaplan. I’m also fortunate to have the daily company and encouragement of a virtual community of writers. A recurring Mellon Research Grant allowed me to conduct initial research in Paris, and a Townsend Fellowship in Spring 2013 helped me finish the vii

viii

Acknowledgments

book. My thanks to Sharron Wood and Teresa Jesionowski for their skilled copy editing. I’m grateful to the late Helen Tartar at Fordham University Press for taking on this book, and to Thomas Lay and Eric Newman for seeing it to completion with such care during a difficult transition. Sections of this book have appeared in different form elsewhere. An early version of Chapter 1 was published as “A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism,” Representations Vol. 79, No. 1 (Summer 2002). Chapter 3 draws from “Auschwitz as Allegory,” published in Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog,’ ed. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (New York: Berghahn, 2011). An initial draft of Chapter 4 appeared in “Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture,” ed. Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal, and Max Silverman, Yale French Studies, No. 118/199 (2010). An early version of Chapter  5 was published in “Vichy 2010,” ed. Richard J. Golsan, L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 50:4 (Winter 2010). Like Baudelaire’s poet, whose recollection of past itineraries conjures up this or that person and finally trails off (“I think / Of captives, of the vanquished, and many others still!”), my list of intellectual, affective, and imaginative debts could be endless. . . . My final thanks are to my parents and brother, who in their own ways have forged an art of memory in migration, and to Michael Iarocci, my untiring reader and accomplice in all things.

Memory and Complicity

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I n t roduc t ion

Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

This book is about how literature and film can bear witness to violence and atrocity by bringing together ostensibly different histories through a reflection on complicity. Complicity is a word typically used to mean participation in wrongdoing, or collaboration with evil, and yet it is also an engagement with the complexity of the world we inhabit. The Latin root of complicity, complicare, “to fold together,” conveys the gathering of subject positions, histories, and memories that are the subject of this investigation. In a time of unprecedented connection with other peoples and histories, complicity and solidarity may be two sides of the same coin. The recognition of complicity— of our place in a historical fold, but also of the folds that bring diverse histories into contact—is a challenging task. It requires us to consider our sometimes contradictory position within the political fabric of a given moment, as victims, perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders, witnesses, or spectators. It demands an awareness of the past’s reverberations in the present, an attunement to the unpredictable affinities between disparate 1

2

Introduction

legacies of violence and loss. Such recognitions can spark affiliations between various identity groups in the collective pursuit of recognition and justice. Memory’s entanglement of distinctive and asymmetrical sites of trauma (slavery, the Holocaust, colonialism, or terror) can shake up established traditions of remembrance and belonging, allowing new ones to emerge. Yet it can also drive us to dangerous intersections, where difference is eclipsed into sameness, where identification leads to appropriation, or where political uses of memory collide with the ethical obligations of testimony. The recognition of proximity and connection between different histories can function as both a structure of engagement and an alibi for abdication; the awareness of complicity can awaken responsibility but also foster resignation or disavowal. The works that form this book’s corpus are so many case studies of this more complex understanding of complicity. They illustrate the unpredictable power and peril of “this terrible desire to establish contact”1 across traumatic pasts and ethnocultural difference. Memory and Complicity focuses on the uses of Holocaust memory in French and francophone culture, from the postwar years to contemporary times, taking up a distinctive intellectual tradition that foregrounds complicity rather than trauma in conceptualizing and representing readers’ relationships to the Shoah. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, literature and film from the French-speaking world repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma, but rather to connect its memory with other memories of atrocity, often through a focus on the complicities between distinctive regimes of violence. This tradition has also highlighted complicity as a mode of reception and engagement with multiple histories. Works by Alain Resnais, Jean Cayrol, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus that appeared to be “about” the wartime experience of occupation, deportation, and extermination simultaneously invoked the racial violence of late-colonial France. Such comparative or metaphoric uses of Holocaust memory were largely forgotten or suppressed from the 1960s to the 1990s, when the Shoah was reconceptualized as a singular, incomparable event. Since the 1990s, however, a number of French and francophone writers have begun to pursue the transnational reverberations of Holocaust memory to illuminate France’s entanglement with other sites of violence, displacement, and loss. Contemporary fiction by Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, and Boualem Sansal complicates the boundaries of national memory by

Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

3

entwining distinctive histories and offering complex models for thinking about the ethics and politics of cultural remembrance. In a different vein, philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben have turned to Auschwitz as the paradigm for a state of exception at work in different sites and times. In the chapters that follow I engage this corpus, guided by a series of fundamental questions: What are the political stakes of bringing together seemingly disparate memories of violence within an artwork? What are the risks and benefits of invoking the memory of one historical atrocity in relation to another? When does the cross-pollination of memorial legacies spur productive dialogue? When are other histories or dialogues foreclosed or suppressed? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of memory work? The Holocaust is now a paradigm for memory in historiography, juridicopolitical discourse, philosophy, theory, and cultural production. Its status has shifted from “exception to exemplum.”2 Susan Suleiman notes “the increasingly global presence of the Holocaust as a site of memory,” which has “become a template for collective memory in areas of the world that had nothing to do with those events but that have known other collective traumas.”3 The emergence of the Holocaust as a paradigm for genocide, human rights violations, historical trauma, and collective remembrance lead some cultural critics to envision it as “a universal ‘container’ for memories of myriad victims” that promises “unprecedented opportunities for ethnic, racial, and religious justice, for mutual recognition, and for global confl icts becoming regulated in a more civil way.” 4 The Holocaust’s unmooring from its historical occurrence, its movement across space and time, is the condition of its relevance for other histories of violation and victimization. In other words, its transformation into a figure is what ensures this mobility and pertinence. Andreas Huyssen observes, “In the transnational movement of memory discourses, the Holocaust lost its quality as index of the specific historical event and begins to function as a metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories. The Holocaust as a universal trope is a prerequisite for its decentering and its use as a powerful prism through which we look at other instances of genocide.” Yet if the Holocaust is currently a transposable site of memory that can serve a range of political causes and ethical investments, Huyssen warns that this movement should be approached with caution: “While the comparison with the Holocaust may rhetorically energize some discourses

4

Introduction

of traumatic memory, it may also serve as a screen memory or simply block insight into specific local histories.”5 To what extent does the universalization of the Holocaust illuminate or block engagements with other histories, memories, and identities? Is there a distinction to be made between the current transformation of the Holocaust into exemplum or paradigm and more supple uses of its memory through aesthetic devices? And what do we mean by memory’s movement in the first place? Huyssen’s allusion to the “transnational movement of memory discourses” reflects a profound shift in the conceptualization of cultural memory, from spatial models to figures of process and motion that capture the fluidity of remembrance in a postcolonial age of globalization and mass migration. Memory is on the move, and literary scholars, sociologists, political philosophers, and historians are seeking to conceptualize its proliferating itineraries and representations. Richard Crownshaw describes this shift from centripetal models of memory, where group or national identity coalesces around collective memories of events, to a centrifugal movement scattering memories beyond national borders.6 In Maurice Halbwachs’s foundational analysis, collective memory was contained within social frames of memory (les cadres sociaux de la mémoire) that include family, class, and religion.7 The containment of collective remembrance within social, ethnic, or national frames characterizes Pierre Nora’s groundbreaking Les Lieux de mémoire as well, for if its kaleidoscopic array of sites, from the Eiffel Tower to the “Marseillaise,” does not necessarily add up to a unified sense of France’s past, its commemorative significance remains fi rmly contained within the nation’s hexagonal borders. Alternate sites and chronologies such as the longue durée of colonialism are significantly absent (“What are the lieux de mémoire that fail to include Dien Bien Phu?” exclaims Perry Anderson).8 Nora’s project can thus be situated within a centripetal model of collective memory insofar as it remains embedded within the container-culture of the French nationstate and “the assumption of isomorphy between territory, social formation, mentalities and memories.”9 By contrast, the centrifugal impetus of current memory studies portrays the nation-state as a container cracked open by globalization, releasing memory from ethnic, territorial, and national particularism into transnational flows and cosmopolitan contents. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider observe that if “the conventional concept of ‘collective memory’ is firmly embedded

Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

5

within what we call the “container of the nation-state . . . this container is in the process of slowly being cracked.”10 The shift we witnessed in the past decade, from memory contained to memory unbound, from national frames to worldwide itineraries, has led to memory’s reconceptualization as a “process and movement, rather than as a phenomenon that is fi xed in time and space,” as a “multidimensional” motion and a “global memoryscape” that reflects transnational circuits of technology, migration, and globalization.11 Of course, the notion of a homogeneous national “container culture” is always heuristic. Memories have always been in motion and traveled beyond the nation-state in itineraries of trade, war, slavery, colonialism, and migration. The concept of “memoires croisées,” or intersectional memory, developed by Françoise Vergès and others maps such forgotten or minoritized transnational itineraries of remembrance and collective action.12 But transformations in media technologies from the nineteenth century onward have accelerated such global pathways, ushering in what Andrew Hoskins calls a “connective turn” in the age of digital technologies and information networks.13 Technology and mass media diffuse memories across cultures and identities, producing psychic, imaginative, and social formations that can be unmoored from actual experience and travel across generations and memory groups.14 Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory is now indispensable for conceptualizing memory’s movement across generations, subjectivities, and sites of trauma. Initially formulated to convey the belated, fluid, and mediated forms of traumatic memory inherited by children of Holocaust survivors, Hirsch’s account of postmemory travels beyond the familial structure to encompass cultural forms of “retrospective witnessing by adoption.”15 Hirsch has further expanded postmemory’s reach to illuminate how its motion can reconstitute the self across generational, cultural, subjective, and geopolitical lines. “Connective histories” is the term she proposes for such memorial crossings and affiliative structures of transmission. The concept of connective histories places pasts into contact with one another in a conceptual touching that is reparative rather than comparative. Hirsch is invested in “thinking different historical experiences in relation to one another to see what vantage points they might share or offer each other for confronting the past” through a practice of “feminist, connective reading that moves between global and intimate concerns by attending precisely to the intimate details, the

6

Introduction

connective tissues and membranes, that animate each case even while enabling the discovering of shared motivations and shared tropes.”16 The allusion to folds, tissues, and membranes in Hirsch’s methodology returns us to the image of complicity as a folding or pleating of histories and identities that brings them into contact without merging them altogether. Her readings of the overlay of memory traces in photographic montages of the Holocaust suggest that the palimpsest is a central figure for considering the complex layering of transcultural memory. The figure of the palimpsest is also at the heart of Max Silverman’s capacious study of the relations between colonialism and Holocaust memory in postwar French cultural production. In Palimpsestic Memory (2013), Silverman adapts concepts such as the Freudian writing pad and memory-trace, David Rousset’s and Jean Cayrol’s view of the concentrationary (the concentration camp as a recurrent space of terror and domination), Derridean écriture, and Walter Benjamin’s constellation to argue for a poetics of memory in which “the relationship between present and past . . . takes the form of a superimposition and interaction of different temporal traces to constitute a sort of composite structure, like a palimpsest, so that one layer of traces can be seen through, and is transformed by, another.” These traces retain a temporal overlay of “a number of different moments, hence producing a chain of signification which draws together disparate spaces and times.”17 Silverman illuminates how these palimpsests, with their condensation and displacement of sites, histories, and communities, produce a cosmopolitical memory, that is to say, a cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust and colonialism that contribute to a Derridean, post-Enlightenment democracy to come. Silverman’s focus on the politics of memory’s poetics is very much in the spirit of this book, and our corpus of French and francophone works is complementary. However, I foreground the ethical complications that arise in political figurations and poetic compressions of cultural memory. My interest is in highlighting the kind of memory work aesthetic discourse activates when it brings disparate histories together, but at the same time also pointing to what is potentially precarious or dangerous about the gesture. Cultural memory’s migration across sites of trauma has received one of its most lucid accounts by Michael Rothberg, whose Multidirectional Memory investigates the relations between Holocaust memory and decoloni-

Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

7

zation, illuminating the “multidirectional” orientation of collective memory since World War II. Rothberg excavates a “differentiated collective memory capable of holding together similarity and difference and of mobilizing remembrance in the ser vice of political responsibility without relativizing or negating historical specificity.”18 For Rothberg, these dialogues between Holocaust memory and other histories of trauma existed before and during the consolidation of the Holocaust as a unique historical event and continue today. This focus on the ties that bind different cultural formations and subject positions opens an important alternative to the ethno-cultural grounding of collective memory and resists the collapse of memory into identity.19 Indeed, multidirectional memory assumes that “the borders of memory and identity are jagged; what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be a borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant.”20 Multidirectional memory considers collective memory as a productive rather than privative process and offers an alternative to the zero-sum logic of competitive memory, that is to say, the notion of memory as a closed economy in which the recognition of one history will necessarily diminish or displace that of another. Rothberg is thus a point of reference in theorizing the “multidirectional traffic of memory” as it circulates between sites, temporalities, and communities.21 This book is informed by and in dialogue with these vibrant developments in transcultural memory studies. I share a commitment to bringing into relief the connections between legacies of remembrance, with a focus on how aesthetic figures such as allegory, palimpsest, and irony function as “vectors of memory.”22 Yet even as this book traces the “multidirectional traffic of memory,” it also foregrounds the collisions and conflations that can occur when pathways of remembrance converge. If memories travel around our global cultural landscape, I see their confluence as a dangerous intersection as well as a productive multidirectional site. Of particular concern to this project are the tensions between the ethics of testimony and its demand for specificity—in this case, the specificity of the Nazi genocide and its victims—and a more pragmatic politics of memory in which this genocide is deployed toward other times, subjects, and bodies. This is a fundamental tension from which each chapter in this book springs, and as readers will see, my objective is not to resolve the tension but to highlight its operation within the reading process.

8

Introduction

This book also departs from a critical tradition that has primarily conceived of cultural memory in terms of trauma. Although I do not question the validity of trauma as an experience, or diminish its claims, I argue against the current tendency to blur the distinction between surviving a trauma and receiving its memory. Traumas such as the Holocaust, slavery, colonialism, and 9/11 have shaped collective imaginaries and group identities, yet they are also mediated representations that can be unmoored from lived experience, an unmooring that is the condition of cultural memory, prosthetic memory, and traumatic memory alike. The overwhelming focus on victimhood in the reception of such memory can lead to appropriations of stories not our own and can even become alibis for the perpetration of violence. The dominance of trauma and identification in the reception of Holocaust memory positions us largely as victims of history rather than as potential actors who participate in history’s making in myriad ways. Historically, our collective tendency to identify with the victims’ trauma is linked to the emergence of the Holocaust’s specificity. As Annette Wieviorka has argued, the broadcasting of Adolf Eichmann’s trial through television and radio airwaves inaugurated an “era of the witness,” endowing the survivor with unprecedented authority as “a human voice that has traversed history and harbours not the truth of facts, but the more subtle indispensable truth of an era and of an experience.”23 For Wieviorka and others, the rising authority of testimony and subjective experience has turned trauma and affect into privileged modes of our access to the historical past. “Witnessing witnessing” is Thomas Trezise’s evocative expression for our position as receivers of survivor testimony. In Trezise’s account, the sacralization of the Holocaust as an unspeakable history whose transmission demands various forms of traumatic identification has the effect of silencing survivors and suppressing more attentive modes of reception.24 Gary Weissman describes the contemporary tendency to appropriate the experience of survivors as an attempt to “feel the horror” in a “fantasy of witnessing” that conflates survival and spectatorship. As a corrective to these identificatory modes of reception, he puts forward the category of the “nonwitness” as a necessary reminder that “we who were not there did not witness the Holocaust, and that the experience of listening to, reading, or viewing witness testimony is substantially unlike the experience of victimization.”25 In a warning against the perils of our current emphasis on vicarious experience when we are

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“witnessing witnessing,” Richard Crownshaw advocates that we “hold onto a more nuanced and gradated sense of trauma and historical affect, particularly in the face of a confluence of histories not necessarily our own, being aware of our possible implications in transferential relations but also knowing the limits of our affective and experiential participation in memory after the Holocaust.”26 Along with these critics, I am wary of the theoretical tendency to collapse events and their representation. If affect and identification are inevitable features of our engagement with memory’s movement toward otherness, I foreground the violence of this engagement and the complex responses that the work of art demands.27 Adapting Richard Crownshaw’s term “critical memory studies” for approaches skeptical of trauma’s universalization, I position my work within a field of “critical multidirectional memory studies,” and I focus on the complicitous identifications invited by representations that gather together disparate histories of violence.28 Memory and Complicity highlights the uncomfortable place of perpetration and complicity within the constitution of a memorial field. The hypostasis of the victim as sole witness can give us only a partial view of historical violence, and it runs the risk of foreclosing further investigation into the complexity of a historical juncture and our own position within its ethicopolitical fabric.29 Instead, I give an account of the many instances in which “we” (readers, spectators, witnesses) are positioned in often contradictory ways within configurations of power and violence, as victims, perpetrators, accomplices, or bystanders. This focus on complicity responds to Susannah Radstone’s invitation to embark on “the path not taken” into “testimonial witnessing’s darker side.” It investigates memory’s gray zones to probe the ethical value of postmemorial art in terms of “its capacity to move its spectator through fantasy identifications with perpetration as well as with victimhood.”30 Literature demands the practice of what, in an inflection of Rothberg’s formulation, we might call a multidirectional ethics whose solidarities emerge from within a sustained reflection on complicity. This reflection allows new questions to come into view: How does complicity, rather than affect-based discourses of trauma, shame, and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? How is collective memory, whether “transcultural,” “multidirectional,” or “cosmopolitan,” inflected in distinctive ways when the memories in question are those of a

10

Introduction

perpetrator or an accomplice to a violent regime or event? What are the politics and ethics of complicity, collusion, collaboration, and repentance when Holocaust memory is employed for other ends and vice versa? How might memory-in-complicity function as a form of commitment? Complicity is a capacious and elusive term, which may explain the relative paucity of its theorization. It may be worth unpacking the range of its uses in this book. If complicity designates the state of being an accomplice, or partnership in wrongdoing, its secondary and now archaic usage is “the state of being complex or involved” (OED). Further, if it means collusion or collaboration, in French complicité can also mean understanding or intimacy. As I noted earlier, complicity’s Latin root, complicare, “to fold together,” captures the interweaving of histories and memories examined in this book. The recognition of complicity can have contradictory effects: It might illuminate convergences between self and other, past and present, here and elsewhere. But it can also convert difference into sameness or conflate the extreme and the everyday. Each of the works that the book discusses is, in effect, a case study of this more complex understanding of complicity. As a nation formerly occupied and yet guilty of deportation, internment, and torture in ser vice of colonial occupations, postwar France is a significant locus for the exploration of complicitous memory. The salience of complicity as a mode of historical engagement is undoubtedly linked to the French experience of Nazi occupation and the Vichy government’s collaboration with the deportation of 75,000 Jews (of whom only 2,500 returned). Sartre’s essay “Paris sous l’Occupation” (1945), for example, conveys the ubiquity of complicity during that period. The quotidian, tentacular, and faceless presence of Nazism contaminated each and every action with its plague so that the bravest acts of resistance could mutate into collaboration, enmeshing civilians into a “shameful and indefinable solidarity . . . created . . . out of a biological accommodation” with the enemy.31 In Henry Rousso’s classic The Vichy Syndrome (1987), this complicity is diagnosed in light of its pathological impact on collective memory, from the postwar repression of collaborationism to the current obsession with “a past that refuses to pass.” The memory of the war in France remains a memory of— and in— complicity. Beyond the French and francophone context, complicity, guilt, shame, and other uneasy feelings of implication have been cast as the ethical “feel” of postmodernity. The information era has placed us in the virtual front row

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of the global news. The mass media’s spectacularization of violence and trauma implicates us as witnesses, but also as spectators, bystanders, accomplices, and even consumers.32 In the words of the contemporary philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, complicity is an inescapable existential predicament, for we are all caught at the scene of the crime: To be modern, one must be touched by the awareness that, besides the inevitable fact of being a witness, one has been drawn into a sort of complicity with the newer form of the monstrous. If one asks a modern person, “Where were you at the time of the crime?” the answer is: “I was at the scene of the crime”—that is to say, within that totality of the monstrous which, as a complex of modern criminal circumstances, encompasses its accomplices and accessories, those who are accomplices by action and accomplices by knowledge. Modernity means dispensing with the possibility of having an alibi.33

In such a view we are complicit and entangled in global patterns of violence by virtue of our knowledge as well as our actions, by simply being there. This structural implication in atrocities of all kinds is the dark side of the “connective turn” in a modern age of mass media and digital technology. It is also the moral tenor of a world after Auschwitz envisioned as the exemplary scene of historical crime, a world forever tainted by the complicity between those guilty of the crime and those who stood by or looked away, those complicit by action and by knowledge, the accomplices and accessories, and the generations raised in its shadow. Although this existential view of complicity emerges from a valuable sense of our fates being inseparable from those of subjects and histories remote from us, I caution against such universalization. Primo Levi’s gray zone has been crucial to universalizing complicity in the aftermath of Auschwitz. The survivor reminds us that “in the camps the perpetrators and victims could not be divided into a ‘we’ inside and the enemy outside, separated by a sharply defined geographic frontier.”34 Levi diagnoses the intricate chain of complicities that bound victims, perpetrators, accomplices, and bystanders under the concentration camps’ conditions of extreme deprivation. The gray zone is at the center of recent thought on the Holocaust, and more generally on the ethics of witnessing in the postmodern age. The traumatized complicity it conveys—between victims, executioners, and witnesses, but also between banality and horror—makes it emblematic of the demands that Holocaust

12

Introduction

memory places on successive generations: our duty to remember and our collective responsibility for the past and present, but also our vigilance toward new Holocausts dormant in everyday practices. Yet if the moral ambiguity of the gray zone is a useful category for considering our ongoing implication in past and present historical violence, such ambiguity has also given rise to politically questionable interpretations of the Holocaust (such as Giorgio Agamben’s) that will be the subject of chapter 1. The tendency within contemporary philosophy, theory, and cultural politics to foreground what I call “traumatic complicity” as the primary lens through which we receive the Shoah’s memory, for example, positions us largely (and paradoxically) as victims and recipients of history. If complicity, as an entanglement of subject positions and histories, leads to a convergence of subject positions and memorial pathways, these convergences remain dangerous intersections in which histories can become blurred, conflated, universalized. By putting us at the scene of every crime, the hyperbolic gray zone we find in cultural discourses of trauma and shame can foster melancholy abdications toward the violence of history. Paradoxically, the narratives that position reading subjects as traumatized victims of history (i.e., “we are all victims”) and those that conceive of subjects as universally complicitous with historical violence (i.e., “we are all accomplices”) both run the risk of muting any sense of the subject’s political agency and responsibility. In this regard, although this book takes issue with the universalization of trauma, it also challenges the gray zone’s universalization as the structural complicity of our age. I approach complicity not as a generalized sign of the times but as a form of commitment. How might the memory of complicity, and memory-in-complicity, open an engagement with the violence of history, and offer alternatives to discourses that route us back to “the scene of the crime”? How might complicity rather than shame or trauma, both honor remembrance and enable us to contest ongoing injustice? Complicity might in fact be at the foundation of responsibility since it is the refusal of complicity that is the traditional hallmark of commitment. In the foundational text of intellectual engagement, Emile Zola came forward during the Dreyfus Affair as a citizen who refuses complicity with the state: “My duty is to speak out; I do not wish to be an accomplice.”35 Several decades later, as the French army tortured in Algeria, Simone de Beauvoir similarly expressed her commitment as a refusal of complicity: “I wanted to stop being an ac-

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13

complice in this war.” The recognition of complicity with structural violence, of the effects that our actions or inactions have on the fate of others, can serve as a catalyst for ethical and political action. “Opposition takes its first steps from a footing of complicity,” Mark Sanders declares in his study on the subject; a “motivated acknowledgment of one’s complicity in injustice” is the prerequisite for responsibility and engagement.37 Sanders theorizes complicity in the context of apartheid and invokes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s pedagogy of “responsibility in complicity.”38 For the TRC, a recognition of Arendt’s banality of evil and our universal potential for perpetration (or the “little perpetrator within”) were the foundations of postapartheid collective life. Similarly, Tzvetan Todorov argues for a robust engagement with the memory of perpetration and complicity in order to counter the overwhelming dominance of identifications with victims and heroes.39 A reorientation of collective identification toward complicity and perpetration need not lead to the permissive fatalism of propositions such as “only circumstances prevent us from killing.” Instead, it would foster a nuanced understanding of how power folds us into its mechanisms, of the institutional forces that mediate our agency, of the past’s reverberations in the present. In its must rudimentary sense, then, complicity alerts us to what Sanders calls “the basic folded-together-ness of being,” that is to say, to modes of responsibility attuned to the effects of our actions elsewhere.40 The legal scholar Christopher Kutz’s theory of complicity elucidates the mediated nature of our impact on others in a technological, globalized era. Kutz delineates the domain of complicity as “the cultural and legal practices, surrounding relations of an agent to a harm that are mediated by other agents.” 41 His “complicity principle” addresses an individual’s moral position within a collectivity’s wrong and suggests that we are accountable for a harm regardless of whether our actual actions made a difference in that harm. This considerably expands our responsibility’s domain, for not only am I “accountable for what others do when I intentionally participate in the wrong they do or the harm they cause,” but I am also “accountable for the harm we do together, independently of the actual difference I make.” A simple illustration of this expansion of accountability is global climate change. Although drivers may not be committed to producing this effect or even intend to produce it, and even if their specific emissions are not causing it, they nevertheless participate in

14

Introduction

a broader social process that causes environmental damage. Kutz’s theory thus proposes that “individuals must come to think of themselves as inclusively accountable for what they do together, to see themselves as participants in a group.”42 Yet what does it mean to invoke such forms of complicity in the realm of memory, where harm has occurred in the past and can no longer be repaired? How does complicity function within cultural memory, as a mode of encountering, or witnessing, an aesthetic representation of past injury and suffering? And how might complicity enable a passage from the represented past to an unfolding present, and to our current potential for what Kutz calls our “mediated relations to harms”?43 Does memory-in-complicity return us to “the scene of the crime” as a witness, and if so, what kind of a witness? In an argument against the rhetoric of the unspeakable in Holocaust studies, Naomi Mandel proposes that complicity constructs a “self affiliated with the horrors of history.” An attunement to complicity affords the recognition that “all of us, literary authors and critics alike, are the producers and the products of our cultures and hence always already complicit in the ugliest aspects of our histories.”44 For Mandel, complicity entangles us into cultural forms that bear witness to the horrors of history through modes of affiliation rather than identification, that is to say, modes that neither beckon a fi xed identification with victims nor sentence us to an always already guilty helplessness. Her view of culture as a force that we shape as much it shapes us conveys the vitality of aesthetic representation as a conduit for moral reflexivity and historical responsibility. This book examines how aesthetic discourses of literature and cinema can generate such forms of “responsibility in complicity.” A final model, this time derived from the field of ethnography, might help to further clarify how the aesthetic experience of complicity can spur a self-reflexive movement of memory across disparate histories of violence. For George Marcus, complicity offers a way of thinking about the anthropologist’s rapport with his or her informant in a postcolonial and increasingly transcultural context. Whereas the traditional “regulatory ideal” of rapport or collaboration between anthropologist and informant was based on an asymmetrical relationship in which the anthropologist sought access to local knowledge through false reciprocities that could mask colonial or neocolonial agendas, Marcus argues that complicity captures the new mise-en-scène of anthropological fieldwork

Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

15

in a decentered, global, and multi-sited research context. Complicity emerges from an awareness of how other sites influence the anthropological encounter. Defined as a sense of doubleness, mediation, curiosity, and anxiety shared by anthropologists and their subjects/informants, complicity involves “having a sense of being here where major transformations are under way that are tied to things happening simultaneously elsewhere, but not having a certainty or authoritative representation of what those connections are. . . . The individual subject is left to account for the connections—the behind-thescene structure— and to read into his or her own narrative the locally felt agency and effects of great and little events happening elsewhere.”45 Marcus stresses that the ethnographic encounter—indeed, its very terrain—is in flux, co-created by both parties, and with an awareness of their connection to external changes that may be difficult to grasp. This account highlights complicity’s secondary meaning as “a state of being complex or involved,” for it signals how each subject is engaged in a creative relationship that mediates between inside and outside, a local “here” and several “elsewheres.” 46 In an ethnographic context, then, complicity is less an ethical stance than a cognitive model that involves “reflexive positioning at the inside/outside boundary” of the terrain for both researcher and informant.47 Yet even as a cognitive structure, complicity remains embedded in narrative, situational, and ethical reflections on the conditions of the ethnographic encounter and its relationship to other sites and trajectories. This account of complicity is suggestive for an ethics of multidirectional memory in cultural production. Setting aside the evident differences between a live encounter in fieldwork and the mediations of literature and film, we might imagine artworks as sites of self-reflexive positioning and multisited, multi-temporal investigation. The aesthetic encounter does not simply open up our identification with various forms of alterity, in a conversion of difference into familiarity. The concept of complicity prompts a turn away from such intimate modes of identification and invites a supple, dynamic approach to the multiple meanings that are harbored in the artwork. Figures, by definition, are always pointing beyond or outside themselves; like memory, they are perpetually on the move. Metaphor, the figure of resemblance where one thing is likened to another, is a form of travel, from the Greek metaphorein, to move or carry over, to transfer, to put across. Similarly, allegory, or the trope of tropes—from allos, or other— dislocates meaning

16

Introduction

toward what lies elsewhere. To engage with a work of figuration, in all of its elusiveness, is to be aware of the displacements of meaning across multiple spaces and times. A complicitous approach positions the reader-viewer not as the passive recipient, but as an uneasy co-creator who is aware that figures, like memory, are on the move, taking us toward several “elsewheres.” It demands that the reader-viewer consider the elusive connections between sites, memories, and places while remaining aware that there may be no “authoritative representation of what those connections are,” as Marcus puts it. Allegories, for instance, are constellations of potential meanings that are actualized differently by readers at different times. If aesthetic figures, by virtue of signifying beyond themselves, carry us to crossroads of memory, these are further complicated by the frames of reference that we currently inhabit or project into the future. The ethnographic terrain’s diffraction toward other sites is in this regard not unlike the dislocations of allegory, which take readers to other sites and temporalities, leading them to read within the “narrative the locally felt agency and effects of great and little events happening elsewhere.” Art can be the site of an ethical encounter with other(s’) memories, provided we remain attuned to our complicity, to our “reflexive positioning at the inside/outside boundary” of an artifact, its context of production, and the variable meanings that accrue over time. Complicity characterizes a reading practice that is attuned to the unpredictable interactions of figure and context and to the movement of memory itself. If figures are what bring together seemingly disparate memories, the ethnographic model helps posit reading as the site of its multidirectional ethics. Of course, as much as we wish to ascribe a fi xed value to figures and devices, there is nothing necessarily ethical about recognizing complicity. Such recognition can ossify into fascinated contemplation, or abdication into relativism, quietism, or nihilism. Similarly, the comparative and transcultural turn in recent memory studies is not a guarantee of pluralism. In French Writers and the Politics of Complicity (2006) Richard Golsan warns against comparative approaches to violence for their erasure of crucial differences between distinctive historical formations. His study of French writers’ complicity with authoritarian, racist, and antidemocratic politics and regimes during collaboration and the 1990s reveals “the coercive power of memory,” which he attributes to a refraction of the present by the past. For collaborationist intellectuals, as for contemporary ones, “political complicity derives from a

Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

17

combination of passions and ideals . . . as well as a desire to make the present conform to a particular and generally skewed vision of the past.” Of particular concern is “the coercive influence of the memory of Vichy and Nazism as a hermeneutic device and moral compass in the intellectual discourse of 1990s France.”48 In Vichy’s Afterlife (2000), Golsan similarly cautions against the tendency to consider France’s Vichy past through the lens of the Algerian War (especially after Maurice Papon’s trial in 1998–99). Such transhistorical gestures forge a “dangerous parallel between the implementation of the Final Solution in France and the excesses of la guerre sans nom,” enabling “a distortion and conflation of two distinct historical moments in question— each thus acted as a kind of counterhistory to the other.” 49 He thus alerts us to the dangerous intersection of such memorial pathways, to their propensity to conflate past and present without nuance and to enmesh us in complicity with renewed violence. I am mindful of the dangers of using the past as a template for the present, especially in discourses that assume history to repeat itself in identical configurations. Yet I also believe that such uses of the past are inherent in memory’s migrations across time and space. Memory by definition entangles past with the present and fi lls the contemporary horizon with prior echoes. In Richard Terdiman’s formulation, “The complex of practices and means by which the past invests the present is memory: memory is the present past.”50 If the memory of prior violence can fuel regressive, antidemocratic politics, it can also energize discourses of recognition, solidarity, liberation, and justice. For example, chapters 2 through 4 will suggest that the parallels between World War II and Algeria existed decades before the Papon trial and animated a range of anticolonial positions, even as they were claimed by proponents of French Algeria.51 Although I share Golsan’s caution about using Vichy or the Final Solution as templates for other legacies and regimes, the works examined in this book are dialectical and selfreflexive in their invocation of these legacies, primarily because they are literary and cinematic works that connect different histories through the back-and-forth movement of aesthetic figure rather than the rigid equivalence of models or paradigms. Complicity, in the sense that I have been evoking, is not a fixed stance but a structure of engagement that produces ethical and political reflection across proliferating frames of reference. Its pathways can lead to the recognition of

18

Introduction

proximity between self and other, past and present, here and elsewhere. But these migrations of remembrance are inherently dangerous insofar as they can also convert difference into sameness or conflate the extreme and the everyday. By the same token, transcultural memory is not inherently progressive or inclusive (even though many of the examples I pursue in this book can be labeled as such). Just as it can produce solidarities and affiliations across historical and ethnocultural lines, it can also deepen divisions and occlude certain histories while bringing others into relief.52 If the container of the nation-state is cracked, memory nevertheless moves within the political constraints of an often identitarian field of representation whose channels are limited by competing ideological interests. None of these structures, tropes, and movements has fixed political or ethical valences, but they are mobilized at particular junctures in which certain connections are made visible and others eclipsed. To return to the figure of memory on the move, these itineraries can lead to felicitous convergences but also to conflations or collisions. They can also leave certain routes off the map altogether. Thus, although I take issue with attempts to universalize both traumatic victimization and complicity, I do not ascribe a stable value to strategies of complicity within aesthetic discourse. Instead I trace how Holocaust memory has energized solidarity and struggle in certain contexts while freezing into a paradigm in others. As Huyssen reminds us, “The global and local aspects of Holocaust memory have entered into new constellations that beg to be analyzed case by case.”53 The aesthetic space is a laboratory for examining the dynamism and complexity of these constellations and the memorial processes they disclose. Johanna Drucker’s reflection on complicit aesthetics in contemporary visual art conveys the volatile energy of this book’s corpus: “Complicity is neither salvific nor nihilistic; its transformations do not prescribe the consequences that might follow from the aesthetic experience works of art provide, even as it suggests the many routes of entangled and embedded provocation to which their artfulness gives rise.”54 The works I address beckon us into pathways of complicity with historical violence and its representations, yet the significance of the encounters they stage between sites, times, and subject positions is never prescribed but left up to us. The book begins by engaging contemporary approaches to the Holocaust. It then moves chronologically from postwar French film and literature to the work of contemporary francophone writers. Chapter 1, “A Soccer Match

Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

19

in Auschwitz: Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies,” lays out the conceptual scaffold of the book and defines its central terms (allegory, complicity, shame, repentance, responsibility). It examines the work of Giorgio Agamben and other theorists who have turned the Holocaust into a transhistorical paradigm for political life. I map the convergence of trauma and complicity in Agamben’s thought, as we see it in his influential reading of Primo Levi’s gray zone, to argue that such paradigm-based accounts of violence lead to a melancholy view of history as repetition that blocks more robust engagements with the way things are. The chapter distinguishes between “traumatic complicity” and the more animating form of “ironic complicity”; it also distinguishes between the fi xity of paradigms in theory and philosophy and the boundary-crossing force of allegory and other literary figures in a broader argument for the power of figural language to energize ethical and political commitments. The second chapter, “Concentrationary Migrations in and around Albert Camus,” engages the central allegorist of postwar France. In contrast to Agamben’s use of the gray zone as a universal paradigm of trauma and complicity, Camus’s allegories, specifically that of the concentration camp world as a plague, functioned as a key site of political mobilization in its postwar circulation on both sides of the Mediterranean. The chapter tracks the plague as a figure for overlapping histories of occupation and terror in Camus’s oeuvre, from La peste to Le premier homme. Throughout, I seek to dislodge conventional approaches to this classic author, who is either condemned as an apologist of colonialism or sacralized as a witness to fascism and the Holocaust. I argue instead that we do not have to choose between colonialism and the Holocaust as the “ground” for Camus’s allegories. The fact that the plague (of fascism/Nazism) is reworked as a figure for colonial pauperization in Algeria (in Mohammed Dib’s Le métier à tisser) illustrates the multidirectional force of Camus’s allegories and challenges readers to hold more than one history in mind when engaging these works. My account also repositions Camus in current French debates on the relationship between Holocaust memory and colonial memory while challenging recent attempts to mobilize him as an ally in the war on terror. Chapter 3, “Auschwitz as Allegory: From Night and Fog to Guantánamo Bay,” takes my analysis of allegory as entanglement into film and visual culture. In his 1955 documentary on deportation, Resnais brought to the screen the recent trauma of the Nazi genocide and mobilized its emblematic images

20

Introduction

toward ends that were both testimonial in relation to Auschwitz and admonitory with regard to colonial Algeria. Whereas the chapter on Camus focuses on the contemporary circulation of the concentration camp world as a plague, here I attend to the visual legacy of Resnais’s images (including those informed by Camus) in their anti-imperial deployment across historical time. The chapter tracks the aesthetic uses of Auschwitz’s iconography in Night and Fog through Sembène Ousmane’s 1988 fi lm, Camp de Thiaroye (set in a Dakar transit camp for returning colonial soldiers), and in recent images of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp that visually “bring home” the actuality of what Camus called le fait concentrationnaire, or the concentration camp world. By pursuing the visual traces in Algerian, Senegalese, and contemporary American contexts of Night and Fog and its testimony to the Nazi camps, I demonstrate the ongoing political (and transnational) force of the documentary’s imagery, even as I point out the ethical quandaries of its migration across asymmetrical histories. In the fourth chapter, “Crabwalk History: Torture, Allegory, and Memory in Sartre,” I turn to French postwar responses to the torture of Algerian insurgents as sites of intersection between World War II’s memory and the unfolding Algerian War. I put Sartre’s writings on torture into dialogue with testimonies of dehumanization by Robert Antelme, Henri Alleg, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, the painter Roberto Matta, and others to recover the cultural tropes that connected Nazism to French colonialism after the war. In his neglected play Les séquestrés d’Altona (1958), Sartre uses crabs as figures of petrified humanity in order to link distinct sites of racialized violence. Drawing on Günter Grass’s image of the crabwalk (from Im Krebsgang, 2002), I develop the notion of “crabwalk history” as an alternative to reading allegory and history in univocal, chronological, or hierarchical terms. As a figure (rather than a paradigm) for how history can be approached, crabwalk history invites us to read Nazism and French imperialism, but also occupation, genocide, and colonialism, side by side, in relations of mutual illumination. Chapters 5 and 6 examine contemporary francophone fiction that addresses Holocaust memory in relation to other histories of violence today. What is the place of complicity and perpetration in cultural memory, particularly during our “era of the witness”? (Annette Wieviorka). Chapter 5, “Reading Nazi Memory in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones,” addresses this

Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

21

question through the Franco-American writer’s monumental Les bienveillantes (2006), a historical novel that revisits the archive of Holocaust testimony through the memory of a fictional perpetrator. I frame this novel within the current anxiety that we have now entered the “era of perpetrators” and position the work within recent French debates on fiction’s displacement of history. My reading also takes up Littell’s treatment of the Holocaust within the emerging field of comparative genocide studies in a broader argument for the historical and cultural value of his ethically risky treatment of complicity. Chapter 6, “Holocaust and Colonial Memory in the Age of Terror: Assia Djebar and Boualem Sansal,” addresses the entangled itineraries of Holocaust and colonial memory, as well as multiple occupations, in a postcolonial context of global terror. The chapter focuses on Assia Djebar’s Les nuits de Strasbourg (1997) and Boualem Sansal’s Le village de l’Allemand (2008), situating them within French debates on national identity and memorial recognition but also within a transnational reflection on terror. Both novels view the city as a palimpsest whose layering speaks to France’s entangled histories. Djebar evokes these histories through the entwined bodies and memories of Strasbourg, a city that becomes the figure for a transnational Eu rope. Yet even this idealized creolization, or métissage, of memory and identity remains haunted by the remnants of unprocessed colonial violence. Sansal’s novel— about a Nazi officer who participates in the Algerian liberation struggle and is murdered by the Armed Islamic Group—weaves together the Holocaust, the Algerian Civil War, and global circuits of terrorism, leading to polemical analogies between the concentration camps and the French banlieue, or between Nazism and fundamentalist Islam. I argue that Sansal’s tapestry and its exclusions teach us about the strategic choices available for engaging with a politics of Holocaust memory in an ideological climate that polarizes Islam and the West. By situating Sansal’s novel within current debates on colonial repentance, Islamophobia, and antiSemitism, I probe the political constraints of memory’s movement across histories. If the legacy of the Holocaust is increasingly bound to other cultural memories, it is our responsibility as readers to recognize how these migrations animate ongoing political engagements, while remaining attuned to the histories that might be missing from the picture. Aesthetic representations

22

Introduction

can serve as laboratories for experimenting with practices of remembrance, yet the responsibility to animate their virtual memories lies in their reception. Reading is an ethical engagement, an activity attuned to the mobility of figures and their variable meanings. Rather than offering a new theory of memory, then, this book suggests that reading is where an ethics of memory in motion can develop. The chapters that follow seek to trace the energy and perils of these movements.

On e

A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies

In The Drowned and the Saved, his final meditation on the Nazi camps, Primo Levi describes a scene reported by Miklós Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish physician who worked as pathologist for Josef Mengele and survived the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. Nyiszli describes a soccer game played in the courtyard of the crematorium between the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sonderkommando (SK), a squad composed primarily of Jewish prisoners in charge of duties at the crematoria: “So, Nyiszli tells how during a ‘work’ pause, he attended a soccer game between the SS and the SK, that is to say, between a group representing the SS on guard at the crematorium and a group representing the Special Squad. Other men of the SS and the rest of the squad are present at the game; they take sides, bet, applaud, urge the players on as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game were taking place on the village green.”1 This scene is a powerful illustration of what Primo Levi termed “the gray zone” in the moral topography of the Nazi camps, a zone of violence and ambiguity in which victim, perpetrator, accomplice, 23

24

A Soccer Match in Auschwitz

and witness were “bound together by the foul link of imposed complicity.”2 The soccer match and its fleeting erasure of the concrete facts of extermination capture a logic central to the concentrationary ideology: the creation of an all-encompassing web of culpability that put into circulation the distinct positions of victim, perpetrator, accomplice, and witness, thus displacing the burden of guilt from oppressor to oppressed. Testimonies of life in the camps abound with illustrations of forced collusion between prisoners, guards, and executioners, from the Jewish councils of the ghettos to “Canada,” the labor Kommando that helped unload the convoys of people destined for the gas chambers; from Elie Wiesel’s paralysis as he watches a kapo (prisoner functionary) beat his father to Levi’s disquieting sensation of living in the place of another.3 The Sonderkommando was arguably the most chilling manifestation of the Nazi strategy to exculpate itself by stamping out the very concept of innocence. The Special Squad enabled the illusion of a mimetic relation between persecuted and persecutor, where the dehumanization of the SK, forced to participate in the extermination of their fellow prisoners, mirrored the inhumanity of the SS. This mirroring of victim and executioner is conveyed in haunting terms by Levi: With them, with the “crematorium ravens,” the SS could enter the field on an equal footing, or almost. Behind this armistice one hears satanic laughter: It is consummated, we have succeeded, you no longer are the other race, the anti-race, the prime enemy of the millennial Reich; you are no longer the people who reject idols. We have embraced you, corrupted you, dragged you to the bottom with us. You are like us, you proud people: dirtied with your own blood, as we are. You too, like us and like Cain, have killed the brother. Come, we can play together.4

The soccer match played in the courtyard of the crematorium encapsulates this coerced mimesis between executioner and victim. A distorted simulacrum of the camp’s structure and purpose, it staged an illusory convergence between victims and executioners by presenting them as two opposed but equal teams respecting a common set of conditions and playing by the rules of the game.5 The apparent reciprocity between the SS and the SK was, of course, belied by the reality of imminent extermination: The Special Squad was reg-

Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies

25

ularly shot and reconstituted, so that the prisoners playing on the field generally only purchased a few months’ grace.6 Primo Levi subtly underscores the representational falseness of this scene when he specifies that the soccer match does not merely pit one team composed of SS officers against the SK, but rather that players represent the SS and the SK. In this space of referential play, the figures on the field retain their designations as representatives of each squad and yet are seemingly detachable from their real tasks. In fact, we do not fi nd out if actual Sonderkommandos played on the team representing the SS, or if some actual SS found themselves representing the SK. Nyiszli’s own account suggests that the teams were composed of members from their respective squads. It is Levi’s retelling of the scene that opens up this ambiguity. The possibility that one may be unable to distinguish between the SS and the SK on the field illustrates Levi’s central point: that the camps’ most insidious form of dehumanization was this coerced complicity in which the moral degradation of perpetrators found a mirror in the collusion of victims.7 The soccer game, then, as a simulation of the camp’s structure and a symbol of its investment in universal guilt, literally makes sport of the distinction between executioners and victims. It illustrates the gray zone’s function as an aporetic space where extreme and norm converge, and where victims, perpetrators, and witnesses seem to exchange positions with the fluidity of a soccer ball’s course on the village green. Nyiszli’s testimony of the soccer game attests to Nazism’s ability to conjure up a world of eerie banality, and even of referential play, at the threshold of unspeakable violence: the fiction of the village green at the gates of hell. It exemplifies what, in Survival in Auschwitz, Levi calls the “geometric madness” of the concentration camp, the mockery it made of human life through its regulated production of normality in the midst of annihilation. The German marches accompanying the prisoners at the camp’s reveille are “the voice of the Lager [camps], the perceptible expression of its geometric madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.”8 Tadeusz Borowski’s short story “The People Who Walked On” also notes how a simple game of soccer creates a beautiful fiction within the deadly realities of the camp. The story is set in a playing field framed by lawns and blooming flowers (Nyiszli, too, comments on the careful grooming of the crematorium’s courtyard) situated

26

A Soccer Match in Auschwitz

between the crematorium and the women’s camp. The narrator, a goalkeeper, glances up and notes the arrival of a train full of people destined for the crematorium, returns to his game, looks up again, and is astonished to find that in the interval of a few moments everyone has vanished: “Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.” 9 In both accounts the soccer match becomes emblematic of a maddening coexistence of incommensurate realities, in which the temporality of soccer (a “work break” for Nyiszli and Levi, “two throw-ins” for Borowski’s narrator) somehow unfolds alongside the temporality of extermination. I have discussed the anecdote of the soccer game in Auschwitz at length because it illustrates a logic fundamental to the functioning of the Nazi camps. The logic we see at work in the soccer match, and in the gray zone more generally, erases the distinction between victim, executioner, and witness (or spectator). It also merges incommensurate contexts and temporalities, thus erasing the actual conditions of the camps and creating a fiction of normalcy from within the horror of extermination. In what follows, I argue that the circulation of innocence and guilt staged by the soccer match is now reproduced in current theorizations of the Holocaust, and particularly in approaches indebted to the conceptual apparatus of trauma. I examine how the apparently fluid exchange of guilt and innocence in the gray zone (and we should remember that this symmetry was a deadly fiction) is currently deployed as the paradigm for an ongoing contamination that implicates secondary witnesses—that is to say, the readers, listeners, and viewers who issued forth in the aftermath of the Holocaust—within a general web of traumatic culpability. In a dominant strain of critical discourses on the Shoah, the circulation characterizing Levi’s gray zone is fi xed into the rigid plot of trauma and a universal affect of shame. My broader argument is that contemporary invocations of complicity in the context of Holocaust memory paralyze rather than invigorate ethico-political engagement. This paralysis is in part caused by the petrification of figures for the concentrationary experience into paradigms, leading to a homogenous concept of historical existence as trauma. This occludes more nuanced accounts of the past’s reverberations in the present, and of the complicities that may exist between different regimes and legacies of violence. The aim of this chapter, then, is to restore the dynamism and critical edge of Levi’s figuration of complicity

Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies

27

in what will ultimately be a defense of aesthetic figures (rather than philosophical paradigms) in the face of historical violence and its cultural memory. It has become increasingly common to invoke a vocabulary of contamination when addressing Holocaust testimonies, one that implicates not only the victims and executioners within the camps but also survivors, witnesses, and bystanders, both literal and figurative. Affects such as trauma and shame have come to dominate our thinking about memory, history, and violence. For generations that did not live through the Holocaust but encountered it as secondary witnesses, as readers and viewers of fi lms and documentaries, a peculiar sense of metaphorical survival and secondhand guilt has emerged. Primo Levi’s gray zone has furnished a compelling point of reference for a shared need to situate oneself vis-à-vis a trauma of such catastrophic magnitude. The apparently fluid circulation of guilt and innocence in the concentration camp’s gray zone metaphorical ly conveys a general sense of contamination that reaches into what Marianne Hirsch terms our “postmemory,” the cultural imagination of successive generations of readers of Holocaust testimonies. This sense of secondhand culpability, or implication, has given rise to a strand of critical discourses that hypostatize the gray zone into an overarching framework for thinking about history, subjectivity, and ethics. Levi’s gray zone is recast as a trauma that “we” continue to inhabit and perpetuate at all times and in all places. What are the underlying assumptions, ideological investments, and ethical consequences of theorizing the Holocaust through a hyperbolic vision of complicity? If the moral ambiguity of Levi’s gray zone has been a useful category for considering our ongoing implication in past and present historical traumas, its transformation into a universal paradigm for just about any subject’s relationship to history raises several problems. Among other things, it positions the Holocaust as both a catastrophic originary event and a recurrent condition that continues to unfold and to uniformly affect the generations that emerge in its wake. It thus risks both erasing the specificity of the Holocaust and conflating the distinct subject positions of victim, executioner, accomplice, witness, and secondary witness. In doing so it produces a rhetorical and conceptual “gray zone” that mirrors the dislocations of historical conditions and subject positions found in the concentration camp

28

A Soccer Match in Auschwitz

itself. It also risks dehistoricizing the Holocaust by turning one of its effects (moral contamination in the camps) into a metaphor for any subject’s relationship to history, thereby universalizing the experience of trauma and victimhood. Questions of agency and responsibility are foreclosed in favor of a transhistorical approach that posits the Shoah as both an original, unrecoverable event and the template through which other genocidal regimes are viewed. The universalization of trauma conflates distinctive histories and homogenizes collective memory. This particular critique of trauma theory is hardly new. Important work by Amy Hungerford, Dominick LaCapra, Ruth Leys, and more recently, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw, Susannah Radstone, Thomas Trezise, and Gary Weissman, among others, has demonstrated that such dislocations are common, if not constitutive, features of theorizing the Holocaust through the lens of trauma.10 Yet critiques of trauma theory have primarily targeted its excessive identification or transference with the victims of historical traumas rather than the circulation of innocence and guilt that defines the gray zone. LaCapra’s work in this field, for instance, focuses on the problems that arise when testimonies and theories enact an identification with the trauma of the Holocaust itself. He rightly criticizes approaches that transform the Holocaust into a site for perpetual retraumatization, giving rise to a discourse of the negative sublime. LaCapra also cautions against the conflation of structural traumas and specific historical traumas; the related conflation of absence with loss; the valorization of “acting out” over “working through”; and the temptation to identify with the experience of the victim (surrogate victimhood). My interest lies specifically in identifying how certain approaches to understanding the Holocaust rely on complicity or the gray zone—both literal and metaphorical, both within the camps and in the reading of the camps—rather than on the stance of surrogate victimhood. The two categories are related, of course, insofar as the assumption of metaphorical culpability for the Holocaust can become another way of claiming the status of a surrogate victim. Yet the transference enacted by approaches indebted to trauma theory does not occur as much with the victims of the Holocaust as it does with the circulation of victim and perpetrator, of innocence and guilt. In other words, the identification occurs with the gray zone itself and the state of “traumatic complicity” that it unveils. Further, this identifica-

Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies

29

tion with a dislocated subjectivity and history—indeed, with “traumatic complicity”—is itself, disturbingly, invested with ethical value. For if the unspeakable nature of a trauma such as the Holocaust is an epistemological proposition (we can’t fathom it), it has also become an ethical injunction (we wouldn’t want to try for fear of betraying it with what Claude Lanzmann has called “the obscenity of understanding”). An ethical relationship to this unspeakable past seems to demand that we honor its illegibility and acknowledge our ongoing implication in its unmasterable legacy. Of course, we cannot deny that the representation of a traumatic past can be a violent act. But consigning this past to unknowability by claiming that silence, trauma, and shame are the underlying structural reality of psychic and historical constitution can also be violent. The unknowable, unspeakable, and unrepresentable may also function as alibis for identification and appropriation.11 The following pages examine the pervasive redeployment of a discursive “gray zone” and its logic in the work of Giorgio Agamben. I consider the ethical consequences of claiming that “in truth it [Auschwitz] has never ceased to take place; it is always already repeating itself.” 12 In the course of my reading, the soccer match serves as a synecdoche for the gray zone both as a historically bound phenomenon and as a critical category that emerged in the 1990s and has risen to dominance in the aftermath of 9/11. I am, of course, mindful of the dangers of invoking a soccer game witnessed in Auschwitz as a figure, particularly in a critique that is directed against the abuses of hyperbolic figurations of history as a “gray zone.” However, Agamben’s work is symptomatic of a broader tendency (in philosophy and literary theory, but also in post-9/11 public culture) to freeze the energy of figures into fi xed paradigms. A metaphor like the gray zone loses its power of illumination when it is fi xed into a paradigm for our relationship to history. My broader claim is that aesthetic figures differ from paradigms insofar as they circulate and refuse to settle into a model. In contrast to the fi xity of paradigms in theoretical and critical discourses, aesthetic figures are the site of mobile and renewable interpretive energies that animate— rather than paralyze— ethico-political engagements. My rereading of Levi’s gray zone argues that its status as an allegory rather than a paradigm reactivates Holocaust memory to reopen a more robust engagement with the way things are.

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A Soccer Match in Auschwitz

From Primo Levi’s Gray Zone to Giorgio Agamben’s Shame Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz remains one of the most influential philosophical reflections on the gray zone and its implications for a postShoah conception of ethics. It also lays out the historical and conceptual scaffolding for the claim that the gray zone’s legacy defines our contemporary ethical terrain. Agamben’s earlier work, Homo sacer (1995), argued that the concentration camp is the hidden paradigm for modern political life. Starting with the figure of the homo sacer— sacred man—in archaic Roman law, Agamben describes the “bare life” as a life that is accursed and therefore may be killed without being executed or sacrificed. Generally speaking, “bare life” denotes the biological existence of all subjects prior to their mediation by and investment with political and juridical value, their status as living organisms that are unconditionally vulnerable to elimination. The concentration camp is emblematic of the political subject’s vulnerability—in that it may be killed or kept alive—to the sovereign power of the state. Crucibles for the production— or, rather, the isolation— of “bare life,” the camps were a place where the category of the human emerged, paradoxically, through the process of dehumanization. The extreme conditions of the extermination camp reveal the hidden norm of Western configurations of sovereign power. Agamben’s objective is to illuminate how sovereign power intervenes in the management of the political subject’s bodily life. In a dense historical argument that moves through Plato, Hobbes, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the current status of refugees, Agamben presents the concentration camp as the exemplary site for twelve centuries of Western legal and political structures that have defined sovereignty as the state’s power to decide on the preservation or destruction of a body. If politics and biopolitics are irreversibly intertwined in modern configurations of power, it is because sovereign power in any political structure bears a constant—if contradictory— relationship to the citizens’ bodies. “Bare life” is always in a relation of “excluded inclusion” with regard to the sovereign power of the state, for while “bare life” lies outside juridical representation, sovereign power has the authority to repeal the order that it instituted (and thereby repeal its exclusion). Indeed, sovereign power exercises its authority thus. Because sovereign power is able to lift the ban on “bare life” by declaring a state of exception

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that would include it within its juridical order, “bare life” occupies a position of invisible belonging to the state. Stripped of juridical status, subjected to im mense deprivation, existing only in their capacity for suffering and death, the bodies inhabiting the concentration camp are the most visible recent incarnations of the homo sacer. For Agamben, the detainees who are on the brink of extinction, designated by Levi and others as Muselmänner because of their collapsed posture, reveal the full force of the state in its biopolitical management of bodies. The subject’s reduction to pure sentient matter, to biological facticity, becomes an emblem and a structural analytic that enables an inquiry into the status of all bodies before the violence of the state (Agamben cites refugees, the comatose, and, later, Guantánamo detainees). Although this concept of “bare life” has been tremendously productive in describing biopolitical violence in a variety of sites, here I wish to point out merely the logic of derealization at work in Agamben’s thought. We see a shift from facticity to figure: The most material embodiment of vulnerability becomes a heuristic principle; the most extreme of conditions reveals the underlying norm of all regimes. Just as Homo sacer presents the extermination camp as the invisible but constant armature for political life in its myriad forms, Remnants of Auschwitz proposes that the gray zone unveiled by Primo Levi in Auschwitz is the hidden yet constant paradigm for modern civilian life. According to Agamben, the gray zone discloses a heretofore uncharted and volatile ethical space “in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims.” It is a “gray and incessant alchemy in which good and evil and, along with them, all the metals of traditional ethics, reach their point of fusion.”13 Primo Levi’s account of the soccer match is seen as a pivotal illustration, not only of the gray zone in the camps (the fiction of normalcy maintained under inhuman conditions, the apparent convertibility of oppressor and oppressed), but also of the moral ambiguity we encounter in our daily lives and its many instances of regulated and unregulated violence. Nyiszli’s soccer match is woven into Agamben’s argument as an exemplary metaphor for an ongoing trauma that is cut adrift from the historical conditions of its occurrence: This match might strike someone as a brief pause of humanity in the middle of an infi nite horror. I, like the witnesses, instead view this match, this moment of normalcy, as the true horror of the camp. For we can perhaps think that the

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A Soccer Match in Auschwitz massacres are over— even if here and there they are repeated, not so far away from us. But that match is never over; it continues as if uninterrupted. It is the perfect and eternal cipher of the “gray zone,” which knows no time and is in every place. Hence the anguish and shame of the survivors, “the anguish inscribed in everyone of the ‘tohu-bohu,’ of a deserted and empty universe crushed under the spirit of God but from which the spirit of man is absent: not yet born or already extinguished.” But also hence our shame, the shame of those who did not know the camps, and yet, without knowing how, are spectators of that match, which repeats itself in every match in our stadiums, in every television broadcast, in the normalcy of everyday life. If we do not succeed in understanding that match, in stopping it, there will be no hope.14

Agamben’s claim for the continuing relevance of Levi’s gray zone transforms the aberrant event of a soccer match played in Auschwitz— and the complex web of complicity between victims and executioners that such a game reveals—into an emblem for a recurrent, unlocatable, and transhistorical violence, one contaminating the civilian world of even a liberal democracy and its daily rituals and spectacles. The analogy drawn between the soccer match in Auschwitz and its ongoing rehearsal in stadiums and television broadcasts is at once compelling and perplexing, for it conflates several incommensurate and undefined forms of violence, turning the instance of a game played in Auschwitz into the figure for a historical violence that is completely unleashed from its spatiotemporal moorings. It echoes Jan Kott’s pronouncement that “at the limit of that experience, Auschwitz is no exception but the rule. History is a sequence of Auschwitzes, one following the other.”15 Perhaps the spectacles of everyday life distracting us from the surrounding massacres can be seen to echo the production of normalcy at the gates of the crematoria. Yet such a view suggests that the genocide masked by a game in Auschwitz is fundamentally the same as the violences masked by contemporary mass culture.16 Agamben obscurely suggests that “the true horror of the camps” is woven into the very normalcy of daily life, a nameless violence circulating between spectator and spectacle, consumer and product, like the shifting dynamic between victim and executioner staged in the soccer match. Those in the collective “we” he interpellates are cast as baffled and complicit witnesses to, if not consumers of, a sanctioned violence that remains a “perfect and eternal cipher,” losing all context and definition. Also troubling is Agamben’s conflation of literal and metaphorical survival.

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“We” secondary witnesses and spectators of athletic events and television broadcasts are identified with the camps’ survivors (or primary witnesses) and made to share their anguish and shame (“hence the anguish and shame of the survivors . . . but hence also our shame”). Leland de la Durantaye has glossed this commentary on the soccer match in the following terms: “For Agamben, the game serves as a parable or emblem of the false sense of distance and security in which we live. Agamben’s indirectly expressed message seems to be: You think that the evil is over and the time is now for play, relaxation, forgetting, but you are wrong; the game you play now is no different than the one played then. It is a brief respite, and at any moment the suffering and cruelty can come screaming back.”17 Yet surely this simplifies the reach of Agamben’s indictment, for the philosopher suggests that “we” are not mere spectators of this game but that we are analogous to the SS and the SK, who, presumably, were the only ones relaxing in the crematorium’s courtyard. It is possible that Agamben forgets that Miklós Nyiszli, and not Primo Levi, is the witness of this scene. As an assistant to Mengele, Nyiszli was structurally implicated in the gray zone to an extent that Primo Levi was not, and hence he could hardly be seen as an “innocent-but-implicated” bystander the way that Primo Levi might be, let alone “us.” In any case, within Agamben’s catastrophic vision of history as a perpetual circulation of victims and perpetrators, “we” contemporary readers are coerced into complicity with and shame for the violence around us.18 As we shall see in the following chapters, to imagine that our actions and beliefs may inadvertently participate— even by distraction—in the violences around us was a powerful gesture of critique in the aftermath of World War II. None has articulated this with more power than Albert Camus, in his postwar novel La peste. Tarrou, one of the characters participating in the resistance to the plague that overtakes the city, claims that we are all pestiférés, plague-ridden, and that each one of our daily acts and choices may end up colluding in unforeseen ways with the workings of violence. Similarly, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog ends with a call for its postwar viewers to reckon with their implication in ongoing forms of genocide. Yet, unlike Agamben, figures such as Camus, Resnais, and the other authors discussed in this book appealed to historically concrete instances of complicity between victims, perpetrators, and witnesses during the occupation

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and collaboration, thereby injecting a distinctive political charge into the notion of a “gray zone” within a particular historical juncture. By contrast, Agamben’s plea that we recognize our continued implication within the indeterminate zone of ethics produced in the camps gives an unexpectedly normative reading of the Shoah. Erasing the specific circumstances of an event such as Nyiszli’s soccer match, and the nexus of conditions that it reveals about moral life in the concentration camp, he transforms a key moment in Levi’s testimony into a “perfect and eternal cipher” in which detainees and spectators are interpellated into both complicity and victimization. The infernal conditions of the gray zone’s emergence undergo a sort of spatiotemporal erasure. What the death camps reveal, it would seem, is no less than the human condition, “which knows no time and is in every place.” Agamben’s extension of the gray zone to civilian life today is analogous to his general claim that “Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception coincides perfectly with the rule and the extreme situation becomes the very paradigm of daily life.”19 Yet Primo Levi’s exposition of the gray zone makes quite the opposite claim. In the chapter detailing the soccer match—a chapter that is titled, significantly, “Shame”—Levi stresses the utterly singular nature of the prisoners’ affective and somatic experience in the camps: “The mental mechanisms of the Häftlinge [prisoners] were different from ours; curiously, and in parallel, different also were their physiology and pathology.” Warning his readers against the temptation to apply categories drawn from the space of civilian normalcy to their anguish, Levi proposes that “knowledge that has been built up and tested ‘outside’ in the world that, for the sake of simplicity, we call civilian” is irrelevant to the physiological and psychological conditions within the lager.20 Agamben’s appropriation of Levi’s voice when discussing a different order of violence altogether is a ventriloquism that disregards the survivor’s explicit warning against conflating the camp and civilian life. The shame and anguish to which Levi refers in his allusion to the “tohu-bohu” of a deserted universe are not abstract experiences of moral chaos accessed by camp survivors and television viewers alike. Levi evokes the elusive mixture of guilt, shame, anguish, and ethical responsibility that drove survivors to testify on behalf of those who never returned. The shame that arises from having survived or witnessed extreme cruelty may well be a new “ethical material,” as Agamben suggests in his discussion of the gray zone’s redefinition of morality. But to suggest

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that primary and secondary witnesses have a comparable experience of the traumatic inner dislocation Agamben describes is an untenable conflation of literal and metaphorical victimization, complicity, and survival. For how can the “we” interpellated by Agamben, as secondary witnesses, fully grasp the shame Levi describes as, in silent defeat, he watches a member of the Sonderkommando defiantly shout out, “Comrades, I am the last one!” before being executed for participating in the revolt that blew up a Birkenau crematorium on October 7, 1944?21 How can we claim to belong to the gray zone’s world of “choiceless choices” in which a Sonderkommando might find members of his own family dead in the gas truck and be forced to bury them himself?22 What we must question, then, is the impulse toward identification enabling Agamben to posit himself as survivor-witness (“I, like the witnesses, instead view this match, this moment of normalcy, as the true horror of the camp” [emphasis mine]), thereby assimilating the positions of primary and secondary witnessing. To conflate his own stance with that of the “witness” in this particular instance is particularly problematic, for it is Nyiszli, and not Primo Levi, who reports the soccer game—a fact that, as was noted earlier, Agamben might have forgotten. The ambiguities of Nyiszli’s own position as pathologist to Dr. Mengele’s experiments while being the chief doctor of the Sonderkommando makes it difficult to transparently assume his place, to be “like the witnesses.” In fact, Primo Levi sharply says of Nyiszli, “It does not appear he strenuously objected” to his task of studying twin corpses killed at the same moment in Birkenau.23 In that sense his position is emblematic of the gray zone, and yet it is all the more irreducible to these sorts of identifications. Agamben’s extension of shame, guilt, and trauma of responses to the affective and bodily experiences occurring in the extreme conditions of the camps to “us” and “now” disregards the particularity of the gray zone. It also erodes the very real differences between those who inhabited that zone (the distinction, for example, between Miklós Nyiszli and Primo Levi) as well as the multiple gaps separating us, as readers of testimonies, spectators of a continuous figurative soccer match, and the survivor-witnesses.24 Beyond the problems inherent in a transhistorical treatment of shame and complicity, Agamben’s radicalization of Levi’s gray zone has even more disturbing consequences for understanding the relations of power within the

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camps. The unstable boundary between oppressor and oppressed in the gray zone is radicalized in Agamben’s account such that the two positions appear to be reciprocal and convertible: “It seems, in fact, that the only thing that interests him [Levi] is what makes judgement impossible: the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims.”25 Agamben incorrectly paraphrases Levi when describing the soccer match as one “played between the SS and representatives of the Sonderkommando” (instead of “that is to say, between a group representing the SS on guard at the crematorium and a group representing the Special Squad”). This is a minor but telling detail, for it fails to take into account Levi’s own emphasis on the false interchangeability of executioner and victim in the fictional realm of the game. Although Agamben does not declare that perpetrators and victims truly did exchange positions, his emphasis on the camps as sites for a potentially endless circulation of guilt nevertheless takes the convertibility of victims and executioners as a structural given. Primo Levi, however, took pains to emphasize that this convertibility was a politically expedient fiction designed to erase the difference between victim and executioner by forcing Jews to participate in the murder and cremation of their own. He also stressed the unimaginable strain this must have placed on the SK. To transform such a charged, embodied reality into a formal conception of convertibility has disturbing ethical consequences. It suggests that the perpetrators, too, by virtue of occupying this zone of radical inversion and participating in the traumatic conditions of camp life, could be perceived as victims. The fallacy of this structural reciprocity, however, is refuted by Levi in a cautionary preface to his discussion of the Sonderkommando: This mimesis, this identification or imitation or exchange of roles between oppressor and victim, has provoked much discussion. . . . I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious ser vice rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.26

The conceptualization of the gray zone as a transhistorical and transsubjective site of culpability “in which victims become executioners and execu-

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tioners become victims” thus conflates the positions of Muselmänner, kapos, and other “prominents,” as well as SS in a gesture that reaches beyond the concentration camp experience to include “us” in a general condition of traumatic culpability. This blurring of subject positions leads to a vision of inescapable guilt in which we are always already collectively steeped in the logic that led to the concentration camp, and we continue to unknowingly perpetuate its violence. But just as this vision posits an ever-encroaching web of complicity, it also, paradoxically, proposes an infinitely elastic notion of victimhood. If we are obscurely complicit with the logic of the soccer match, we are also comparably violated by the trauma of the camps. The generalization of complicity and victimization not only dismantles the historical specificity of the camps and the survivors’ testimonies. It also co-opts the figure of the victim as an “other” who is but an avatar of ourselves.

Traumatic Complicity That the Holocaust has led to a “crisis of representation” has become doxa in recent criticism. To read, understand, and transmit a limit-experience such as the concentration camp is to confront the boundaries of the thinkable and the sayable. It entails giving up the clarity of traditional explanatory and representational frames. Agamben’s project of deciphering the traumatic reverberations contained in testimonies such as Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved responds to this challenge by attempting to think at the limits of political and linguistic representation in order to disclose the invisible norms of the modern subject’s psychic constitution and political status. This view of the Shoah as a unique historical phenomenon that, because of its extreme nature, opens up unlocatable and unrepresentable forms of knowledge belongs to an ongoing reflection on trauma, representation, and history. Indeed, Agamben’s project to listen “to something that is absent, to interrogate testimonies which contain an essential lacuna at their core” because “the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to,” converges with a theoretical current that posits trauma as essential to an understanding of history.27 Trauma theorists have suggested that history is not an emplotment of events yielding the reassuring plenitude of a continuous and available collective narrative, but rather that it occurs as trauma,

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that is to say, as something that resists immediate knowing and representation. Their approach brought into visibility a hitherto “unclaimed experience,” in Cathy Caruth’s classic formulation, or events that were not experienced in their occurrence but that take place belatedly, as repetitions in the traumatized subject’s psyche. Following a Lacanian understanding of the past as repetition, trauma is addressed as an experience that— often because of its shattering or unthinkable nature—is not available to immediate and conscious understanding. Instead, the event (or history) is belatedly and repetitively recorded by the psyche in complex and indirect forms that entangle knowing with unknowing. Trauma theory emerged in part as a response to the question so powerfully posed by the Holocaust: How do we understand, represent, and transmit events that, because of their unthinkable atrocity, were not fully assimilated and understood even by those who experienced them? For Caruth, traumatic history is a vehicle for the recovery and transmission of that experience, one attentive to the ways in which trauma resists the claims of reference: “For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it cannot be perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence.”28 Further, Caruth redefines history as a structure that implicates the self with the other, in a recognition of collective wounding, or intertwined (although not necessarily shared) trauma: “History, like trauma, is never simply one’s own. . . . History is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas.”29 At the intersection of these two claims—that history is a structure of displacement and repetition, and that history is a structure of entanglement— lies an ethical investment in the unrepresentability of both history and subjectivity. For it is the gap both within the event and the experiencing subject that opens up selfhood to otherness. What the experience of trauma reveals, then, is a lack, a difference, a departure from oneself that is the condition of all subjects positing themselves as “I.” A history of trauma is thus not a diachronic record of events aligned along a readable narrative axis. Instead, it is a structure of entanglement between self and other, past and present, constituting a web of interwoven traumas resisting representation: “We could say that the traumatic nature of history means that events are only historical to the extent that they implicate others.”30

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It is precisely the unmooring, or dis-location, of the traumatic event that leads to its repetition and its implication of self with other, since those who experienced trauma in some sense were never there. This is where potential problems arise in the theorization of history as trauma. First, it situates “history” within a representational crisis produced by trauma, as both a rupture from the past and as a repetition. In doing so it erases the spatiotemporal location of the past event and robs this past of its particularity. Since to approach history as trauma is to posit a missed encounter with the reality of an experience, or history, what is valorized and invested with specificity is not the initial occurrence of the event, but rather its displaced and symptomatic replay in the traumatized psyche. This valorization of displacement, repetition, and unrepresentability is neatly captured in Agamben’s conception of an infinitely recurring yet unfathomable gray zone, “a perfect and eternal cipher . . . which knows no time and is in every place.” More important, Caruth’s conception of history as an implication with others produces a potential conflation of subject positions. Such conflations are inevitable if we view history as something that is not experienced in its unfolding but belatedly, and that this belated experience is “precisely the way we are implicated in each others’ traumas.” There is, of course, ample evidence that such transference frequently occurs, and that listeners and witnesses, even therapists, are in turn traumatized by the testimony of a traumatized subject. However, to posit “implication” as a defining feature of trauma and thus constitutive of history (“events are only historical to the extent that they implicate others”) is to conflate the positions of victim, witness, and proxy-witness through a logic of contamination whereby one wound responds to another in a potentially infi nite relay of analogies. It is precisely this logic that allows Agamben—the reader of another’s testimony—to assume the position of the other, as in his identification with Nyiszli/Levi (“I, like the witnesses”). This logic of contamination also accounts for the complicit yet victimized “we” posited by Agamben, the “we” who silently watch the infinite recurrence of a soccer match in Auschwitz. The objective of my critique thus far has been to point out how some of the assumptions underlying a theorization of history as trauma—that is to say, history as a dislocation of both the event and an experiencing subject— replicates the violence of the traumatic event itself. I have addressed the violence of these slippages as the “logic of the soccer match” because this

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metaphorical recycling of culpability and victimization replicates the circulation of innocence and guilt that we see in the soccer match played between the SS and SK at the gates of the Auschwitz crematorium, yet in irreducibly distinct contexts. A case study illustrating the ethical consequences of this approach to testimony is found in Shoshana Felman’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Like Agamben, Felman reflects on the ruptures and silences that hover over autobiographical, literary, and critical representations of the Holocaust. In the process, she weaves a series of structural analogies between the concentration camp and civilian life, between “them” and “us,” between “then” and “now,” and between literal and metaphorical forms of complicity, victimization, and survival. She does so by viewing history through the lens of trauma, that is to say, by viewing history as repetition (in this case, the infinitely renewed wound of the Holocaust) and as contamination (in which the self and other are circulating positions). The trauma of the concentration camps is thus presented as a historical wound whose trace is to be found in the gaps and silences of testimonies by survivors, primary witnesses, and secondary witnesses. Enacting Caruth’s vision of history as implication, Felman weaves a series of analogies between Albert Camus, Primo Levi, and Paul de Man vis-à-vis the Holocaust. The tormented confession of a Parisian lawyer turned “judge-penitent” who has exiled himself in Amsterdam after failing to save a woman from drowning herself, Albert Camus’s The Fall, Felman argues, allegorizes a missed encounter with the fact of the concentration camps and records the betrayal of testimony. At stake in this view of the impossible or betrayed testimony is an implicit claim for a post-Shoah literary ethics founded on the impossibility of representing historical trauma. As Agamben puts it, “The language of testimony is a language that no longer signifies.”31 For Felman, The Fall and its allegory of a betrayal of witnessing attests to this new ethical imperative by laying bare how “the cryptic forms of modern narrative and modern art always—whether consciously or not—partake of that historical impossibility of writing a historical narration of the Holocaust, by bearing testimony, through their very cryptic form, to the radical historical crisis in witnessing that the Holocaust has opened up.”32 History, paradoxically, becomes the knowledge transmitted by the “cryptic forms” of a representation that continually attests to the crisis inaugurated by the Holocaust.

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The consequences of this bid for an ethics of interpretive instability are revealed in Felman’s discussion of Paul de Man’s anti-Semitic writings for the Belgian journal Le Soir. Felman proposes The Fall’s allegory of the betrayal of witnessing (Clamence’s inability to turn back and save the woman) as de Man’s unspoken autobiographical story, his belated confession of the trauma caused by the Holocaust’s legacy. Felman argues that de Man’s silence about his wartime writings (like the silence of Camus’s protagonist in the aftermath of the drowning) cannot be judged by us because “[in] reality, we are all implicated— and in more than one way—in de Man’s forgetting, and in his silence.”33 Primo Levi’s gray zone is instrumental in the formulation of these claims. Felman suggests that de Man’s predicament as a journalist writing collaborationist prose in occupied Belgium was comparable to that of the Sonderkommando. If, as Levi warns us, we cannot put ourselves in the place of the Sonderkommando in the concentration camps, and therefore cannot pass judgment on their actions, then, Felman suggests, a similar perspective must be cast on de Man’s position as a journalist in occupied Belgium: “The crucial ethical dimensions of a historical experience like de Man’s need to be probed by the incommensurability of the experience.”34 Here Felman argues for the singularity of de Man’s experience, paradoxically, by making it analogous to the equally singular experience of the Sonderkommando. In a gesture similar to Agamben’s treatment of the soccer match, Felman makes that incommensurability commensurate by assimilating conditions peculiar to the camps’ moral life to life outside the camps. Indeed, when Felman invokes “our” implication in an ethical terrain that forbids reductive representations of people as “us” and “them,” and hence comparable to Primo Levi’s gray zone, she is turning a product of the concentration camp’s moral and physical apparatus into a transsubjective and transhistorical model for her readers’ moral landscape. The extension of the concentration camp from fact to concept, its transformation into a paradigm, leads to the erasure of the very real differences between victims, executioners, and witnesses. This blurring of subject positions (in which de Man, the Sonderkommando, Primo Levi, and “we as readers” circulate on the metaphorical playing fields of the gray zone) occurs by privileging silence as the only adequate mode of apprehending a historical reality that confounds representation. If, as Felman claims, “de Man could borrow Primo Levi’s words,” it is only

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because both de Man and Levi “fall silent” before the trauma of the Holocaust. Silence, then, is essentialized into a trope that functions identically across contexts and genres. De Man’s silence about his wartime writings is analogous to the silences found in the writings of survivors such as Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. De Man’s later writings, like the muffled historical references of Camus’s novels, attest to the impossibility of bearing witness to an unspeakable history. Just as the soccer game played in Auschwitz staged a convergence between victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, Felman’s reading suggests a parallel convergence between collaborator, survivor, witness, and proxy-witness. The abstract specter of universal implication (“we are all implicated,” “our silence”) shades into shared victimhood. The inexpressible trauma of the Holocaust binds us all and equally into a general legacy of traumatized complicity. This fetishism of trauma and complicity, and the attendant affective registers of shame and implication have been reinvigorated by 9/11 and the “war on terror.” The fascination with “traumatic complicity” permeates not only contemporary theoretical discourses but also recent art. For example, after September 11 the Jewish Museum of New York hosted a polemical exhibit of contemporary art titled Mirroring Evil. The exhibit showcased artists who used “imagery from the Nazi era to explore the nature of evil.”35 In its focus on ambiguity and compromise—in relation not only to the survivors but also to the spectators—the exhibit sought to break down the boundaries between norm and extreme, blurring subject positions such as perpetrator, victim, survivor, witness, and spectator and gesturing toward the links between Nazism and contemporary consumerism in our current society of spectacle. In keeping with the title of the exhibit, several pieces “mimicked and deconstructed the aesthetic language of Nazi displays” in an attempt to challenge a purely victim-oriented orthodoxy of representation, exploring instead Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, the proximity of horror and the everyday, the compromises faced by survivors and spectators alike, and the difficulty of political action in the face of such intractable moral ambiguity. Some works achieved this by mirroring the Holocaust through fashion. Tom Sachs’s Duchampian “Giftgas Giftset,” for example, displayed three Zyklon B canisters packaged by designer labels. Another piece by the same artist titled “Prada Death Camp” featured a pop-up model of an extermination camp made using the designer’s packaging. The fashion victims of contem-

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porary consumer culture were thus analogized to the victims of the Nazi death machine.36 The exhibit illustrated the ethical consequences of appropriating Levi’s gray zone as a model for any subject’s relationship to history or commodity culture in the aftermath of the Shoah. In its fetishism of complicity and universalization of genocide, Mirroring Evil fostered a monolithic and politically disabling view of history as a perpetual “gray zone.” Such deployments risk transforming a historically embedded category into a universal figure that eclipses questions of situatedness, agency, and responsibility. Transformed from event to universal condition, the Holocaust becomes the matrix for interchangeable traumas. Rather than a historical experience remembered by survivors, it becomes an ongoing metaphorical, psychic, and cultural condition that migrates from one subject and history to another. It is important to note that the concept of trauma itself hinges on such conflations between different subject positions insofar as it is a category that can be applied to victims, executioners, and witnesses alike. As Didier Fassin observes from a sociological perspective, “The broad application of the concept of trauma makes it possible today to both recognize and go beyond the status of victim— something that was impossible within the Holocaust model. By applying the same psychological classification to the person who suffers violence, the person who commits it, and the person who witnesses it, the concept of trauma profoundly transforms the moral framework of what constitutes humanity.”37 As we see in the case of Agamben, Caruth, and Felman, however, such slippages occur even within the Holocaust model that Fassin identifies as the matrix for subsequent theorizations of trauma. In a genealogy of trauma theory and its relations to the psychoanalytic definition of survivor guilt, From Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys addresses Agamben’s hypostasis of the gray zone as symptomatic of our contemporary “vogue of shame.”38 Leys demonstrates that classic theories of survivor guilt focused on the victim’s immersion in the scene of trauma and the victim’s identification with the oppressor, hence Leys’s designation of this account of trauma as “immersive” (the subject has no distance from the experience) and “mimetic” (the subject mimes/identifies with the perpetrator). Leys contrasts this definition of survivor guilt with current theorizations of shame, in which no identification takes place between the traumatized victim and the perpetrator. Rather, shame is a specular experience that is constitutive of the

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subject; it is a shame of exposure or of “being seen” that lies beyond intention or agency. Along with other critics, notably Claudine Kahan and Philippe Mesnard, Leys notes that Giorgio Agamben views shame as constitutive of the subject itself, thus following what he sees as Primo Levi’s lesson, which is that “ ‘there is today a shame in being human,’ which was and still is.”39 In positing this affect as constitutive of the subject itself and not of a situation, Leys suggests that Agamben ultimately gives an ontological conception of shame. I concur with Leys’s critique of Agamben’s ontological treatment of shame and its problematic evacuation of agency. Yet I am not convinced that the philosopher can be fully assimilated into the new nonimmersive, antimimetic theory of shame.40 Rather, Agamben too works within an identificatory model. His claim for our collective responsibility by way of the shame of Levi’s soccer match falls squarely within an intentionalist account of violence, agency, and responsibility (“If we do not succeed in understanding that match, in stopping it, there will never be hope”), even though this passage’s cyclical vision of history as catastrophe seems to disable any engagement. Further, if identification with the aggressor is the linchpin of traditional accounts of survivor guilt (as opposed to the new shame theory), Agamben and Felman’s fetishism of complicity suggests a model issuing from survivor guilt rather than a theory of shame, even as they turn shame into an ontological predicament.41 These thinkers are bound by both models. But what ultimately binds them is the circulation of innocence and guilt embodied by the gray zone. The secondary witness/reader/viewer’s identification with this circulation, which partakes of the paradigms of both guilt and shame, defines Caruth’s implication, Felman’s response-ability, and Agamben’s shame. The distinction that I wish to foreground here is between the “actual” experience of trauma and its representation and reception by those who have not lived it firsthand, or, as Richard Crownshaw puts it, the “political and ethical significance of collapsing together text and traumas.”42 How do nonsurvivors such as Agamben or any other reader of testimony receive another’s trauma? For even if someone can be traumatized by representations, he or she is nevertheless in quite a different position than the survivor, accomplice, or witness, quite clearly not “like the witnesses.” Do the poles of guilt and shame capture the critical-affective operations of a traumatic event’s representation?

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Our contemporary cultural postmemory has accorded an overwhelming privilege to one’s identification with an affect that I will characterize as “traumatic complicity” rather than shame. Three principles organize what is now a culturally dominant account of the subject in/of history as a subject of traumatic complicity: the postmemorial secondary witness’s identification with the traumatized survivor/witness, the confusion of survivor memory and cultural postmemory (in which we assimilate “floating” mediatized memories), and the conflation of experience and representation. This traumatized complicity partakes of both guilt and shame, of both the “mimeticimmersive” and the “anti-intentional-specular” poles at work in classic guilt theory and the more recent paradigm of shame. The turn to traumatic complicity is mimetic insofar as identification occurs with both the victim and the perpetrator, that is to say, with the circulating subject positions characterizing the gray zone itself. It is also immersive insofar as its subjects are positioned as proxy-witnesses and survivors of a scene of trauma (even though they did not experience it firsthand), and it is anti-intentional insofar as the traumatizing conditions are portrayed as universal and constitutive of psychic experience (as Agamben does in his universalization of shame). This is why I find it more useful to designate the implicit paradigm of implication shared by thinkers such as Agamben, Caruth, and Felman as “traumatic complicity” rather than either guilt or shame.43 The pervasion of the “gray zone” and its traumatic complicity as an approach not only to the Holocaust but also to a range of historical traumas and their cultural representation raises familiar ethical and political concerns in memory studies. Can the memory of an event such as the Shoah be used for ends other than itself? What are the conflicting obligations of memory to the past and to the present? How does one establish points of contact and overlap between aspects of the Nazi genocide and other forms of historical violence without establishing invidious analogies? How can one adjudicate between what Tzvetan Todorov termed “good and bad uses” of memory and resist the poles of sacralization and banalization?44 Can the deployment of Holocaust memory in contemporary life retain the singularity and texture of past historical events while tracking their reverberations or resurgences in current formations? How can we negotiate between the demands of testimony and a politics of memory that pulls the past into the present without flattening events into an undifferentiated continuum of violence?

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The uses and misuses of Holocaust memory for other situations were concerns raised by Primo Levi himself when he situated his investigation of concentrationary phenomena within other atrocities such as the “horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the shame of the Gulags, the useless and bloody Vietnam War, the Cambodian self-genocide, the desaparecidos of Argentina, and the many atrocious and stupid wars we have seen since.” 45 Despite his investment in the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Levi neither fetishizes nor sacralizes its memory, but rather seeks to articulate a futurebound ethics and politics attentive to the potential resurgences of concentrationary violence in other times and geopolitical sites. As he states in The Drowned and the Saved, “This book . . . sets itself a more ambitious goal, to try to answer the most urgent question, the question which torments all those who have happened to read our accounts: How much of the concentration camp world is dead and will not return, like slavery and the dueling code? How much is back or is coming back? What can each of us do so that in this world pregnant with threats that at least this threat will be nullified?” 46 Levi’s preoccupation with the potential return of a “concentration camp world” invites the use of specific historical phenomena such as the gray zone to analyze other sites and structures of detainment and extermination. But as we have seen, the extension of limit-experiences such as the camp into the realm of everyday life, or that of survivor guilt into a universal affect such as shame, diffuses the heuristic force of such categories. Specific— and extreme—historical formations are plucked out of their sites and immobilized as universals; a “limit-situation” becomes the paradigm for a limitless spectrum of events.47 We witness this dilation in the current deployment of Levi’s gray zone. What began as a figure that illuminated the ongoing relevance of a specific testimony has ossified into a transhistorical condition that is simultaneously phenomenological and metaphysical.

From Paradigm to Figure: Rereading the Gray Zone as Allegory In essence, positing degrees (of exception) and differentiation (of function) . . . means resisting the pathos that the perennial existence of the camps understandably generates. It means quite simply reminding ourselves

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of the complexity and ambiguity of reality: paraphrasing Stéphane Mallarmé, one could say that a paradigm will never abolish the real. Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason

For thinkers such as Agamben, the concentration camp world functions not as a figure so much as a paradigm. Historically specific spaces, subjects, and relations—the camps, the Muselmann, the gray zone— are treated both in their singularity and as a revealing nomos or law that remains immutable across time. We can discern this strategy in Agamben’s defense and illustration of his methodology in The Signatures of All Things: On Method (2009). In response to those who reproach him for overstretching the reach of the formations he investigates, Agamben argues that his use of paradigm makes intelligible different phenomena whose kinship would not otherwise be seen. The concentration camp is both an empirical phenomenon and a paradigmatic figure “whose role was to constitute and make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context.”48 Agamben traces his use of paradigm back to Thomas Kuhn and, more importantly, to Michel Foucault, whose treatment of historical phenomena such as Bentham’s panopticon as both a specific architectural plan and an epistemological figure illuminated broader disciplinary logics of confi nement and surveillance. The paradigm does not universalize or reduce difference into sameness, Agamben argues, because it proceeds from singularity to singularity, or example to example, and produces an analogical and bipolar form of knowledge that can gather a diversity of practices into an intelligible structure: “More akin to allegory than to metaphor, the paradigm is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it constitutes. That is to say, to give an example is a complex act which supposes that the term functioning as paradigm is deactivated from its normal use, not in order to be moved into another context but, on the contrary, to present the canon—the rule— of that use, which can not be shown in any other way.”49 Here Agamben suggests that a site-event such as Auschwitz can be “deactivated from its normal use” in order to illustrate the rule of history and its continuous states of exception. It is this logic of deactivation that allows him to postulate, in Remnants of Auschwitz, that “Auschwitz is precisely the place in which the state of exception coincides

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perfectly with the rule, and the extreme situation becomes the paradigm of daily life.”50 Admirers of Agamben’s method have stressed that the philosopher does not follow the logic of synecdoche, or “part to whole,” but rather that of analogy, or “part to part,” where one historical singularity is analogized with another singularity in a different context so that their commonalities can be examined.51 Yet as the citation above suggests, the paradigm is a term displaced from its initial context not in order to be moved to another context in an analogical transposition of part to part, but in order to illustrate the canon, a new ensemble of which it is an integral part. This slippage from analogy-allegory to synecdoche accounts for the idealist tenor of Agamben’s thought, which immobilizes images into transhistorical essences. It is not surprising, then, that Agamben would conclude his chapter on methodology by stating that paradigms are not only heuristic but also ontological: “The intelligibility in question in the paradigm has an ontological character. It refers not to the cognitive relation between subject and object, but to being. There is, then, a paradigmatic ontology.”52 It would seem that for Agamben, thought retains a specific structure across time, and this despite contingent, material forces and the messy unpredictability of history. In summary, there are two main problems I see with Agamben’s methodology, both in his work on Auschwitz and in his more recent writings on the state of exception. The first is the transformation of a historical phenomenon into a paradigm which then becomes (through synecdoche) an ontological given that remains constant throughout time. This strikes me as a clear instance of philosophical idealism. The second is the quasi-structural assumption that the exception reveals the norm, such that limit-situations (the camps, the gray zone, the Muselmann) are turned into a totalizing rule that governs all sorts of incommensurate situations. Let me clarify that I do not reproach Agamben for using Auschwitz to illuminate underlying structural similarities between the Nazi camps and other states of exception. Categories such as the “state of exception” and “bare life” have been immensely productive in a range of inquiries into state violence, and I will allude to them in my own analysis of postwar French concentrationary iconography. What I find problematic, however, is the determinism of his deployment of concentrationary imagery as a paradigm that illustrates a universal rule, with all the historical and ethical distortions that ensue.

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If Levi’s gray zone continues to illuminate coercive social and historical formations ranging from Abu Ghraib to the Rwandan genocide, it is thanks to its deployment as a figure rather than a paradigm for the forms of complicity it conveys.53 When a figure is petrified into a paradigm, however, it risks losing its critical edge. Figure, of course, has a fraught history since Adorno’s pronouncement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This response to Paul Celan’s Todesfuge has been seized by some as evidence of a Bilderverbot (a prohibition on images) when it comes to the Holocaust and remains a central (if tired) node in discourses against the consolatory/ redemptive effect of figuration. The emergence of figure from the ashes of extermination offends because figuration is perceived to soften the horror of atrocity, to beautify and stylize it, offering a specious redemption that risks replicating the aesthetic ruses of the Nazi gaze. Yet Adorno’s subsequent qualification is well known: “It is virtually in art alone that suffering can find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it” (of which more will be said in chapter 3 in the context of Resnais and Cayrol’s documentary Night and Fog).54 Figures need not immobilize or dematerialize—they need not freeze into paradigm or convert suffering into beauty. Instead, figures and the aesthetic realm more generally produce mobile and asymmetrical proximities between events, subjects, and histories. Not only do such proximities enable comparative analysis of violence and the political work of memory, but they can also foster nonredemptive forms of connection, solidarity, and consolation. As Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi reminds us, the consolation of figure is embedded in the Jewish poetics of catastrophe. In the book of Lamentations, the speaker-poet turns to the ruins of Jerusalem and asks, “To what shall I compare thee that I may comfort thee?,” invoking the power of figure to bring distinctive entities into contact and even community. Ezrahi offers an eloquent commentary on this ethical gesture: “Here the poetic dimension of the prophetic voice is neither in its function as magical vessel of revelation, nor in its utopian promise of redemption, but in its power to offer comfort through commensuration. Analogue, precedent, simile, metaphor assure the sufferer (in this case, “Jerusalem”—figured first as an abandoned, aggrieved woman and then as a defiant man—) that s/he is not alone. That, notwithstanding the evidence of all our senses, the shattered world can be made, if not whole, then once again, familiar.”55

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If figures can track familiar features linking disparate faces of historical experience, this does not mean that an identical skeleton— or paradigm— lies underneath them all. Unlike philosophy, poetry does not make truth claims about its representations. In fact, poems can interrogate the very procedures by which truth claims—whether philosophical, historical, or juridical—are made (as we shall see in the final chapter of this book on memory, politics, and recognition in contemporary France). Unlike paradigms, figures in aesthetic discourse do not repeat themselves to infinity, but rather they are transformed according to their investment with varying meanings across horizons of reception. Figures are iterable and signify differently to different interpretive communities; they are sites of infinitely renewed and renewable interpretive energies. As such, they wield a performative force; they interpellate readers and spectators into forms of complicity and resistance in ways that theoretical discourses typically do not. As with any comparative heuristic, of course, figuration remains ambiguous. If it can offer consolation, assault beliefs, or mobilize interpretive communities, it can also turn difference into sameness and congeal into paradigm. The petrification of trope into essence is a risk in any act of figuration, whether its context is political, cultural, or aesthetic. Ezrahi once again offers a pertinent illustration of this ethico-political oscillation, specifically in the figure of allegory. In an essay on Jerusalem as ground zero of the Hebrew imagination, Ezrahi traces the holy site’s literary saturation by feminizing figures that facilitate its incorporation into the Jewish imaginary. By endowing Jerusalem with these feminine qualities, poetic activity “can give birth . . . to an ecstatic and deadly form of erotic possession,” for when “metaphors . . . congeal into allegories,” they petrify what would otherwise remain a hybrid site open to imaginative re-creation. In what is ultimately an argument for the material consequences of aesthetic figuration, Ezrahi contrasts the mutability of metaphor and the fixed conversions of allegory, arguing for the difference between “a Jerusalem whose metaphoric shapes are free, tentative, and self-conscious and an allegorized or literalized Jerusalem reduced finally and fatally to an essential self.”56 Ezrahi’s politics of figuration suggests that the mobility of metaphor is antithetical to the fi xity of allegory. In my approach, however, allegory, as the trope of tropes or a synecdoche for rhetoric itself, shares the supple and self-conscious mobility of figuration and its capacity to create proximities

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(instead of identifications) between disparate bodies, subjects, and histories. Allegory’s self-conscious figurality distinguishes it from approaches to the Holocaust as a paradigm for modernity, the state of exception, bare life, traumatic complicity, and so forth. For Paul de Man and Walter Benjamin, whose reflections on aesthetics and politics inform what follows, allegory is a selfreflexive operation that disrupts any stable equivalence between first- and second-order reference, tenor and vehicle, ground and figure, sign and meaning. Unlike paradigms that repeat uniformly over time, or the utopian organic instantaneity of the symbol, allegory is discontinuous and fragmentary. If, for de Man, allegory “designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin,” for Benjamin, “the allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways.”57. The sign and its origin or “true meaning” is caught in a relationship of perpetual anteriority (de Man), and the figure acquires an improvisational quality as it unfolds and is actualized by readerships over time (Benjamin). Since Coleridge’s definition of the symbol as the manifestation of a “translucence of the Eternal through and in the temporal,” which de Man argues characterizes all figural language, including allegory, the layers of meaning hosted by figure have been conveyed through the register of luminosity.58 At their most effective, the works examined in the following chapters create a chiaroscuro effect in cultural memory, an interplay of meanings and stances that yield neither the automatic conversions of a gray zone nor the fi xity of a paradigm. Their figural operations seek to bring the Holocaust into proximity with other forms of violence in a variable flickering and dimming of distinctive meanings, histories, and subjects. As R. Clifton Spargo observes, the Holocaust is usually the ultimate referent or “meaning” of an allegory: “Much of our language about the meaning of the Holocaust follows a surprisingly allegorical trajectory, insofar as the Holocaust, as an event of paradigmatic injustice, occupies the position of a second-order reference supplanting the contemporary, first-order context in which it is invoked.”59 Yet in my corpus, the Shoah functions neither as a second-order reference nor as a first-order reference through which another history is signified (although the ethical peril of using the Shoah for another site-event haunts each work I investigate). The evocation of disparate histories resists the hierarchies and transpositions of classical allegory, and in so doing it demonstrates figuration to be a key vector of what

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Michael Rothberg terms “multidirectional memory.” For in this corpus, the literal terrain of figuration is not fully colonized and sublated by the metaphoric one. Rather, the Shoah fl ickers in and out as it pulls other histories into our field of vision in a relationship of reciprocal illumination. In its most ethical, self-reflexive deployment, then, as Spargo argues, allegory can resist the “symbolic occupation” of literal territory: “Figurative allegory . . . is akin to an improvisation, derived as if from within the larger rhetorical procedure of allegory so as to effect a détente between the two levels of reference, promoting their comparative interplay rather than the primacy of one over another.” 60 The aesthetic operations considered in the following chapters—primarily allegory, but also irony, analogy, palimpsest, intertextuality, and so forth—retain an improvisational quality in their movement across sites, histories, memories, and communities. If paradigm in Agamben’s usage is an exemplum that is essentially connected to the structure it “exemplifies,” allegory (from allos, or other) is a figure that “speaks otherwise.” Tenor and vehicle are assumed not to be ontologically bound, but rather linked by relations of resemblance and analogy within a historical and epistemic formation. Unlike paradigms, figures evoke unpredictable associations as well as embodied, affective responses that can shake up established patterns of thought and spur memory’s movement. The following chapters thus seek to articulate alternate models for comparing distinct formations of violence, for placing one history next to the other in nonessentialist relations of mutual illumination. The works studied here do not seek to find the underlying structure linking different historical iterations of genocide, torture, or the concentrationary phenomenon. Rather, they proceed figurally, suggesting partial analogies, proximities, and intersections between distinctive legacies and configurations of violence. Their images activate traces of the past within the present and wield a critical force within specific political projects. Of course, allegory— and figure more generally—remains a risky mode of engaging history. Its transpositions cycle through distinctive histories and can transform a singular event such as the Nazi genocide into a hollowedout structure of eternal recurrence. As Ezrahi and Spargo suggest, allegory can also freeze into a deadly “ground zero” that, in its symbolic occupation of literal territory, fi xes essence and identity. Further, if allegory’s indeterminacy makes it an effective strategy of representation in situations of con-

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straint (such as regimes of censorship), this same indeterminacy can appear to close allegory off into textuality and irrelevance to the realm of praxis.61 I will argue, however, that allegory, and in particular allegory that draws attention to itself as such, has much to teach us about the political value and the ethical limits of drawing comparisons between distinctive histories of violence. This self-reflexivity makes allegory an ambiguous yet potent vector of intervention and critique. Allegory’s structure is self-dismantling; it simultaneously invites and disrupts the links drawn between different phenomena, alerting us to the complex negotiations that aesthetic figures demand of us as we read and reactualize them across different temporalities and sites. In the uses examined by this book, allegory is a figure that opens proximities and intermittent points of contact rather than total identification between one’s unfolding present and another’s unmasterable past. Historically, the use of Auschwitz as allegory has played a crucial role in mobilizing—rather than immobilizing—the Holocaust and enlisting its memory in ongoing political struggles in the public sphere. In the French postwar moment, allusions to the Nazi legacy produced a set of temporal ricochets or relays, opening a dialogue between the Holocaust and other histories and regimes of power. Allegory, and allegories of complicity specifically, were forceful vehicles not only for testimonial reflection but also for political intervention in the aftermath of World War II. The next three chapters trace how par tic u lar deployments of allegory sought to mobilize the memory of the Holocaust in relation to alternate legacies and regimes of violence. I examine a series of works that exploit the oppositional edge of complicity at a particularly dense historical juncture (1956–59), when committed French intellectuals explored the legacy of Nazi occupation and the Holocaust while invoking the war of Algerian independence. Camus, Resnais, Cayrol, and Sartre exploit allegory as a mode of working through and bearing witness to the wartime experience of occupation and deportation, while alerting their audiences to the continuation of terror in the French repression, internment, and torture of Algerians. My investigation focuses on the dangerous intersection that figuration, and primarily allegory, produces between these distinct histories, but also on the dangerous intersection of trauma and complicity as modes of engagement. By attending to literary/cinematic meditations on allegory and complicity (but also allegories of complicity) in postwar France, Algeria, and the postcolony, I

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hope to recover critical and disruptive energies that have vanished from recent discourses on trauma and memory. Methodologically, this account steers away from the traumatic complicity we witness in recent articulations of Primo Levi’s gray zone. Instead, I propose the concept of ironic complicity, a strategy that simultaneously beckons and suspends our identification (whether textual, visual, or cinematic) with the violence that we, as readers, viewers, and secondary witnesses, are called to witness. To further elucidate the distinction I seek to make between the traumatic complicity conveyed by the gray zone and the more robust, politically vibrant recognitions of complicity pursued in the following chapters, it may be helpful to consider Robert Jay Lifton’s distinction between static and animating forms of guilt. Based on his work with Vietnam veterans, Lifton departs from Freud’s focus on a neurotic, “hypertrophied and pathological susceptibility to guilt,” to formulate an alternative “animating guilt” that harbors “energizing and transforming aspects.”62 As Lifton elucidates, “An animating relationship to guilt exists when one can derive from imagery of self-condemnation energy toward renewal and change. . . . This kind of guilt is the anxiety of responsibility, as it is characterized by a continuous transformation of self-condemnation into the feeling that one must, should, and can act against the wrong and towards an alternative.”63 Lifton notes the fragility of guilt’s animation, for it is always susceptible to congealing into affective states such as shame, traumatic complicity, and condemnation: “The capacity for an animating relationship to guilt means, in effect, a well-functioning conscience. But this dialectical view suggests that there is a precarious quality to the most humane conscience, and that the capacity to be sensitive to wrong contains within it potential vulnerability to immobilizing condemnation of oneself or others.” By contrast, Lifton alerts us to the “dialectical nature of guilt—the simultaneous presence and continuous interaction of the vulnerable-destructive and illuminatingconstructive possibilities of that emotion.”64 The dialectical operations of guilt within the psyche resemble those of allegory in literature, insofar as guilt’s oscillation between animation and stasis also characterizes allegory’s operations in the aesthetic realm. If allegory can be envisioned as a mode of historicization that puts into contact the past and the present, complicity also opens an ethical circuit in which selves and others (victim, perpetrator, and witness) circulate and make con-

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tact. In these aesthetic and ethical systems, the gesture of connection is fraught with peril, for allegory can sublate different events into a paradigm, and experiments with complicity can ossify into shame or melancholy abdication. It is up to us, as readers, to animate these structures and invest them with contestatory possibilities, to remain attuned to the partial nature of their transpositions and the waywardness of their movement. Allegory is a form of travel, since it involves the movement of a figure across temporal horizons and geopolitical sites. The authors I examine produce and resignify allegorical figures that circulate both within and beyond the boundaries of the postwar moment and the borders of metropolitan France. Their allegories of the concentration camp world and its migration across borders spark connections between different histories, spurring recognitions, connections, and even, in some cases, commitments. Their figural allusions to the concentrationary experience are invested with a degree of irony and distance: They invite suspended forms of identification, wherein one formation is likened to but not conflated with another. Similarly, the subject positions established by these representations complicate, resist, or circumvent the identificatory thrust of trauma and its various impasses. They forge a memory in complicity that binds victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. An animating memory in complicity has the potential to uproot our accepted ways of inhabiting the past and present, to disrupt established patterns of memory, and to light up alternate pathways of collective remembrance.

T wo

Concentrationary Migrations in and around Albert Camus Terror has many faces, which justifies that I named none of them in order to strike at them all. Perhaps this is why The Plague is criticized, for serving all resistances to all tyrannies. —Albert Camus, in a letter to Roland Barthes The concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality. — Imre Kertész, Galeerentagebuch

Perhaps the most important allegorist to emerge from World War II, Albert Camus gave lasting expression to the postwar imagination of historical terror. If David Rousset’s L’univers concentrationnaire (1946) and Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947) diagnosed the structure and phenomenology of concentrationary experience in testimonial and philosophical form, Camus’s literary works charted its reverberations for other times and places. Although neither a survivor nor a firsthand witness, Camus was haunted by the fact of the concentration camps (which he termed le fait concentrationnaire) and the possibility of its resurgence, just as Primo Levi had wondered if the world of the camps was already returning (“How much is back or is coming back?”).1 From Caligula to Le premier homme, Camus forged some of the most influential imagery for the concentrationary universe and its rule of terror, tracing proximities, complicities, even intersections between different regimes and histories of violence. Figures of circulation and contamination— such as plague, vermin, bacillus, fall, cry—opened a passage between different 56

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sites and temporalities within his work and the work of his contemporaries. The preceding chapter suggested that Camus’s inquiry into the ethics and politics of complicity has recently been immobilized into a paradigm of the gray zone and anchored within the history of the Holocaust. Yet in the 1950s, these tropes of complicity and contagion drew on different memories of violence to animate a range of political struggles. One of my aims in this chapter is to unfasten Camus’s figures from a singular historical paradigm, in order to restore the dynamism and the danger of their intersections, both in the author’s corpus and beyond. I suggest instead that these allegories teach us how to read multiple histories at the same time, to glimpse familiar features across the many faces of terror without petrifying them into a timeless mask of catastrophe. An overview of Camus’s critical reception demonstrates the difficulty of recovering the multiple historicizations that his figural practice demands. Both his works and his legacy remain a battleground for competing ideological investments. As the French press recently put it, “A chacun son combat, et son Camus” (“to each her own cause, and her own Camus”). 2 His allegorical corpus has provoked wildly divergent interpretations supported by a quasi-juridical approach to the biographical author that either indicts or defends him for representing one history or another. Was he a secular saint? An apologist of colonialism? A “moral man in an immoral situation” who was “simply wrong historically” when it came to the Algerian situation?3 In the immediate aftermath of the war, Camus was consecrated as a figure of the Resistance whose diagnosis of the absurd and rebellion was embraced as a universal ground for resistance to terror in all of its forms. Shortly afterward, the secular saint was knocked off his pedestal by Francis Jeanson and Jean-Paul Sartre in the pages of Les Temps Modernes over L’homme révolté. A genealogy of how Western forms of rebellion congeal into institutionalized terror, L’homme révolté indicted revolutionary messianism and Stalin’s gulag archipelago, provoking a heated polemic on the fate of the left and of political Marxism in the postwar era. The scathing exchange of letters in Sartre’s journal (the latter mocked Camus’s “portable pedestal”) drew a lasting portrait of the pied- noir as an ahistorical “cartesian of the absurd.” Since then, Camus’s corpus has been read according to competing ideological investments: He is either celebrated as an exemplary witness to the European atrocities of the century or denounced as the accomplice of an

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imperialist imaginary. If Camus is regularly taught in classrooms as a figure of Resistance and a critic of totalitarianism, he also stands accused of symbolic collaboration with colonialism. As early as 1970, Irish intellectual Conor Cruise O’Brien denounced the erasure of the indigenous population in The Plague as an “artistic final solution of the problem of the Arabs of Oran.” A decade later, Rachid Boudjedra reiterated this accusation: Indigenous Algerians were “annihilated by the writer’s colonial consciousness, exterminated by the magic of words and fiction.”4 Camus’s retreat into silence during the Algerian War of Independence continues to trouble his posthumous reception in Algeria. “I believe in justice, but I would defend my mother before justice,” he declared in an often misunderstood exchange with an Algerian student after receiving the Nobel Prize.5 Yet if Camus’s legacy remains fraught in the former colony, as we shall see in chapter 6, contemporary francophone writers have recently turned to his work in order to imagine an Algeria to come. Assia Djebar places the pied- noir at the head of her procession of the dead in Le blanc de l’Algérie, a meditation on the civil war of the 1990s; Boualem Sansal frequently invokes Camus when imagining a future postcolonial multicultural subject; and Aziz Chouaki observes his clairvoyance regarding the dangerous tides of political Islam.6 Most striking, however, is Camus’s American fate in the aftermath of 9/11 and his posthumous mobilization as an ally in the “war on terror.” In Terror and Liberalism (2003), a critique of American liberal naïveté, Paul Berman applied The Rebel’s analysis of Western revolutionary violence and its totalitarian structures to Islamic fundamentalist terror (although he makes no mention of the essay’s critique of expansionist empires represented by the Soviet Union in the 1950s and resonant of the Bush administration’s unilateralism). In any case, Camus’s position on Algeria has been evoked with some frequency in reflections on terror from across the French and American political spectrums. After decades of derision for defending his mother before justice, Camus’s refusal of colonial violence and counterviolence alike is speaking to readers with renewed relevance. David Carroll’s Albert Camus the Algerian (2008), for instance, returns to his failed advocacy of a civil truce in an Algeria that he hoped to see federated with France. Carroll portrays Camus’s idealizations of Franco-Algerian hybrid identities and cohabitation as forms of postcolonial multiculturalism, and as a tragically unheard mod-

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erate alternative to the bloodbath of Algeria before and after independence. Camus’s search for a third way out of the double binds of occupation and terrorism, which has acquired more credibility in recent years, challenges the dominance of Sartre and Fanon’s theorizations of nationalist revolutionary violence. Still, discussions of Sartre and Camus continue to pivot upon tiresome arguments about whether history has “given reason” to one or to the other: If Bernard-Henri Lévy proposes that, in the end, we are right to be wrong with Sartre rather than right with Camus, James Le Sueur wonders with regard to Camus’s refusal to support the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), “Was he right, and was he wrong to be right”? A special issue of the Nouvel Observateur titled Le triomphe de Camus has no such qualms, proclaiming instead that “his only wrong was to be right before anyone else.”7 As this brief itinerary of his reception indicates, Camus’s work continues to be embedded in disparate histories and to be actualized by competing ideological investments. His life and works are sites of a memory war, with different groups claiming both for their political interests (“A chacun son combat, et son Camus”). Secular saint, colonialist apologist or collaborator, witness to the Holocaust, critic of terrorism, postnational multiculturalist, prophet, or critic of Islamic fundamentalism: Despite this remarkable heterogeneity, what these portraits have in common are tendencies to privilege one historicization over another and to ignore the interplay of memories in Camus’s dense and difficult allegories. These tendencies may be described as the “Camus effect,” a fracturing of memory into compartments such as the Holocaust or colonialism, and the production of readings that either indict or defend. Are we wrong to be right with Camus? Right to be wrong with him? Is he innocent or guilty of colonial investments? Was he sacrificed on the altar of a now-defunct Marxism? Are his figures of culpability our universal truth? The Camus effect produces mutually exclusive readings of his allegorical practice: Readers convert his ambiguous figures into a singular frame of reference and turn to the historical record in support of this or that accusation or defense. Yet if Camus is so readily enlisted into contradictory ideological agendas, and used as a pawn in the contemporary memory wars (discussed in chapter  6), it is because of the plasticity of his allegories, their allusion to multiple—if not contradictory—legacies of violence. The plurality of histories invoked by Camus’s figures suggest that these are not isolated from

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each other, that connections between regimes and legacies of violence are made and remade in their migration within a global memorial network. I will suggest that Camus’s allegories weave intersections and interferences between memories of violence, and that his fiction serves not so much as a “lieu de mémoire,” or site of memory, but as a “noeud de mémoire,” or knot of memory. Pierre Nora’s monumental Les Lieux de mémoire has deeply marked our understanding of the relations between space and collective memory. Yet as my introduction suggested, Nora examines the crystallization of memory around sites that remain anchored within the boundaries of the nation-state, with little discussion of spaces and chronologies beyond the hexagon (for example, those of imperialism or decolonization) or of heterogeneous elements that would trouble the divide between memory and history, tradition and modernity, France and its colonial/postcolonial others. Unlike Nora’s lieu de mémoire, the noeud de mémoire imagines cultural memory beyond the confines of the hexagon and its identitarian legacies. In his argument for a cosmopolitan memory that would acknowledge the points of contact between slavery, colonialism, and genocide, Paul Gilroy invokes the “knotted intersections of histories produced by this fusion of horizons.”8 My use of the term noeud de mémoire here and elsewhere relies on this conception of “knotted intersections” as both a productive entanglement and a dangerous intersection. I contrast the fi xity of monumental, site-specific, and identitarian memory (similar to the immutability of paradigm) to the knots of memory woven by textual figures. These knots are unraveled and remade by their readership, they are reanimated in their traversal of different places and times, and their critical energy defies territorialization, yet their political charge can come at an ethical cost. The following analysis of Camus’s textual noeuds de mémoire seeks to shift the terrain of our critical engagement away from the biographical author and toward the tropes themselves in an effort to recover their dynamism and complexity in both the postwar context and our own. As we shall see, an allegory such as Camus’s plague gathers histories together in a gesture of folding, contamination, and complicity essential to its critical force both in the postwar context and beyond. By shifting the terrain to literary figures and their reading, we will also steer the question of responsibility away from the author, his biographical situation, and his existential choices to-

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ward reading itself as an ethical practice that catches hold of multiple historical possibilities simultaneously. My reading will not be an uncritical celebration of figural drift, which, in its evacuation of specificity, can also mirror the hollow repetition of paradigm. Instead, I seek to maintain a tension between the political vitality of figures in their circulation between memories and histories while remaining attentive to the ethical costs of such recycling. I focus on one particular memorial juncture that occurs in both Camus’s allegorical work and its reception by other artists: the intersection of the Holocaust and colonialism. This memorial juncture is particularly compelling in Camus’s reception given O’Brien’s claim that The Plague constituted an artistic “final solution” to the problem of Arabs in Algeria. How can the Algerian author be seen as the perpetrator of an aesthetic genocide and yet emerge as an exemplary witness to a historical genocide? How can his work be read as an unconscious symbolic extermination of native Algerians and, simultaneously, as one of the most self-reflexive ethical testimonies to the historical extermination of Jews? Must these histories erase each other or is there a way of reading them side by side? Although O’Brien’s very formulation betrays the extent to which the Holocaust continues to shape responses to other legacies of violence, revealing the imbrication of colonial and Nazi genocides in collective memory, his own postcolonial reading, like the many that have followed since, does not once engage with Camus’s literary reflection on the Final Solution itself. Conversely, readings that have pursued traces of the Holocaust in Camus’s literary works rarely mention the significance of their colonial settings. This reciprocal silence perpetuates the notion that the Holocaust and colonialism are mutually exclusive histories generating incompatible frames of reference, a notion that is belied by the rich postwar intellectual and artistic output that drew analogies between Nazism and colonialism to mobilize the memory of the Holocaust in the ser vice of decolonization. Thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre probed the affinities between Nazism and imperialism, as well as those between the concentrationary and colonial experience, identifying analogies, continuities, and even intersections between these distinct legacies of racialized violence. Postwar French cultural production abounds with allegorical figures that put the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust in dialogue with other histories of violence, notably colonialism.

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This chapter explores a series of figures—the plague, the camp, the intersection, the gray zone, the cry— and their cross-memorial migration. I will look at points of tension and overlap between the Nazi genocide and colonialism in both Camus’s works and postwar cultural productions responding to it. Camus’s confl ictual afterlives suggest that his work remains an exemplary site for the enactment of a guerre des mémoires, a memorial war in which irreconcilable claims to identity, community, legacy, and victimhood confront each another.9 These memory wars have been particularly acute in France, where histories such as slavery, colonialism, genocide, and the Final Solution compete for recognition. How might allegory—itself a figure of potentially infinite substitution—move memory across national and ethnocultural borders, thereby opening what Michael Rothberg terms “multidirectional memory”? How can we read several memorial claims as they jostle together within an allegorical work, and how might this crosspollination undo memory’s identitarian segregation? How can allegories challenge the boundaries defi ning French postwar history and historiography, as well as the contemporary cultural politics of identity? What ethical dangers accompany allegory’s potentially infi nite historical substitutions? These questions will be addressed in six sections. The first two sections focus on Camus’s The Plague, the contradictory readings it has produced, its contagious figures, and the multiple histories they evoke. The third traces the migrations of Camus’s figural plague in works produced in France and Algeria during the 1950s. The remainder of the chapter turns to The Fall as a laboratory for experimenting with allegory and history. The fourth section reads the novel as a reflection on Auschwitz and Algeria, and the fifth section investigates the politics of its gray zone in light of both histories. The chapter closes with discussion of the dangers of recycling history through figure.

Figural Contagion and Historical Cordon Sanitaire: The Plague Camus opens The Plague with a quotation from Daniel Defoe that from the outset puts the novel on the precarious terrain of allegory: “It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.”10 This is a curious epigraph for a narrative that subsequently announces itself as a chronicle of the

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events that took place in Oran in 194-, recorded by a narrator who plays the part of a historian and is guided by verifiable data. The opening pages stage a tension between fact and figure, or poetry and history, one that remains central to contemporary reflections on the representation of catastrophe. Berel Lang, for instance, has argued against figural representations of the Holocaust, privileging instead forms of documentary realism in which “the much-maligned ‘facts’ of simple chronicle—who and how many did what to whom and how many when—” might speak for themselves.11 For Lang, the chronicle and other supposedly nonfigural forms of representation provide a normative ground zero of Holocaust representation. As we saw, this position participates in a long-standing resistance to the poem and figure after Auschwitz. Yet as early as 1947, The Plague dismantled such dichotomies between fact and figure: Chronicle and allegory, empirical data and imagination, are put into dialogue and trouble the ground of historical representation. From the outset, the text refutes their opposition and suggests that only the displacement of figure can evoke certain catastrophic histories. Camus’s figure of the plague (ostensibly the plague of fascism) enacts an intermemorial movement, a viral spread with multiple references that we are invited to read in their simultaneity in order to grasp their historical significance and ethical pertinence. The novel’s Algerian setting is initially described by the narrator as a “lieu neutre,” a blank site of memory ready for multiple allegorical inscriptions. Oran under quarantine evokes the carceral gloom of occupied France, the exile of the Free French Forces, those separated by the demarcation line, and the internment of prisoners of war.12 The city also harbors traces of the Nazi genocide, a history that comes into stark focus in the pages that describe the disposal of bodies in mass graves, the stench of the crematoria, the cold bureaucratic efficiency of the administration. Yet despite the novel’s setting in Oran, described in the opening page as “nothing more than a French prefecture on the Algerian coast,” this French port city in Algeria never directly assumes its colonial face, nor are the Arab and Berber populations of Algeria mentioned. The obvious parallel between the German and colonial occupations, or between the plague and imperialism, is never drawn in the novel, this despite the date of its publication, two years after the Sétif and Guelma massacres of May 8, 1945, on Victory in Europe Day. On the day the armistice was signed, Algerians in most of the country’s cities paraded with banners bearing slogans such as “Down with fascism and colonialism.”

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In Sétif, gendarmes fired on the protesters, who countered, leading to riots and large-scale military reprisals by the French army that claimed an estimated 100 Eu ropean lives and up to 45,000 Muslim lives (the French army’s count was 15,000 and the Algerian nationalists’ was 45,000).13 Camus covered the massacres in the pages of Combat and announced that the bloodshed in Sétif revealed the end of colonial power in Algeria. In the aftermath of Nazi occupation, total liberation was Europe’s only way forward: “In the face of the acts of repression that we have exercised in North Africa, I want to state my conviction that the era of Western imperialism is over.”14 Camus was thus conscious of the historical irony of French repression in Madagascar, Indochina, and Algeria in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation. In a later article titled “La contagion,” written as The Plague came out, he denounced France’s contamination by the plague of racialized violence (toward Jews, Arabs, and Madagascans) and was among the first to articulate the proximities between Nazi terror and colonial “pacification” by means of torture and repression: “Three years after experiencing the effects of a politics of terror . . . the fact is as clear and hideous as truth itself: in these cases we are doing what we reproached the Germans of doing.”15 The title of the article conveys an awareness of the plague’s resurrection in different places and with different faces. Figures of disease and contagion would continue to engage multiple forms and legacies of terror in the press coverage of Algeria. Yet curiously The Plague itself makes no explicit gesture to the analogy between Nazism and colonialism so evident in the massacres of the Constantine Province. All the more curious, the omission of its colonial significance is conspicuously staged at the start of the novel, when the Pa risian journalist Rambert approaches Dr. Rieux to ask for assistance with an investigation into the living conditions (the “état sanitaire”) of the city’s Arab population for the metropole’s press. The doctor refuses to help Rambert because the journalist cannot guarantee that, if required, his testimony will be an unqualified and total condemnation: His newspaper, one of the leading Paris dailies, had commissioned him to make a report on the living conditions prevailing among the Arab population, and especially on the sanitary conditions. Rieux replied that these conditions were not good. But before he said anymore, he wanted to know if the journalist would be allowed to tell the truth.

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“Certainly,” Rambert replied. “I mean,” Rieux explained, “would you be allowed to publish an unqualified condemnation of the present state of things?” “Unqualified? Well, no, I couldn’t go that far.” ... He had put the question solely to fi nd out if Rambert could or couldn’t state the facts without paltering with the truth. “I’ve no use for statements in which something is kept back [Je n’admets que les témoignages sans réserves],” he added. “That is why I shall not furnish information in support of yours.”16

Rieux alludes to the possibility of censorship should an investigation expose the poor living conditions of Algeria’s native population and unveil their systemic causes, that is to say, colonialism. The exchange evokes the compromises of the metropolitan press at the time, but the novel neutralizes any further inquiry into the plague of colonialism. Instead, Oran’s doctor diverts the Parisian journalist’s attention to the epidemic of rats as a viable alternative to the story he was initially sent to cover. The narrative seems to trace its own cordon sanitaire around the conditions of the native Algerian population and their invisible battle with a plague of their own. Yet as I will suggest in a moment, this Algerian reality reemerges in the guise of figures and topographical markers within the narrative itself. The brief yet central exchange between Oran’s doctor and the Parisian journalist has been glossed in contradictory ways that illustrate the either/ or logic characterizing the critical reception of Camus’s oeuvre (either it is celebrated as an exemplary testimony to the Holocaust or condemned for its failure to engage colonialism). For Shoshana Felman, the reference to a “total condemnation” of Algerian living conditions is an unequivocal allegory of the Shoah and its testimonial imperative: “Rambert does not believe in the reality of a ‘total condemnation’ as people failed to believe in the reality of gas chambers.”17 In Felman’s account, the challenges of representing the Final Solution drive Camus to give up journalistic clarity for literary allegory in the novel. Remarkably, her commentary never considers that the explicit referent of this exchange is the condition of native Algerians in Oran. By contrast, Azzedine Haddour views the Algerian problem as the crux of The Plague, albeit in repressed form. Haddour reads Rambert as a figure for Camus’s journalistic investigation into the 1945 Sétif massacre, and he interprets the aborted reportage on the native population as characteristic of the author’s deployment of screens “to obscure and obfuscate the traumas

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of colonial history.” The suppression of the colonial other in the interests of representing a “universal” but Eurocentric plague replicates the strategies of fascism itself.18 Haddour’s critique echoes O’Brien’s notorious accusation that Camus’s exclusion of Oran’s Arab population was an “aesthetic final solution” and a “symbolic extermination of Algerians.” Thus if for Felman the Holocaust is the hidden impulse for allegorical form in The Plague, for O’Brien and Haddour it is the colonial repressed.19 If one approach celebrates the novel as a monument to Holocaust witnessing, the other condemns its symbolic propagation of colonialism. These mutually exclusive contextualizations are symptomatic of the reciprocal blindness vexing the relations between Holocaust and postcolonial studies. They demonstrate a characteristically compartmentalized approach to Camus’s allegory and miss the historical contamination conveyed by its figures of contagion and movement (rats, bacillus, plague), figures that defy territorialization. An account of The Plague that would grasp its significance for World War II, the Nazi genocide, and colonialism is invited by its setting and allegorical registers. The rats disgorged by the city in the initial days of the epidemic, for example, offer a troubling image of the plague’s initial victims as vectors of its propagation, but also as unsettling semiotic bodies. As Colin Davis observes, “The rats are not just rats; they are bearers of meaning, though no one can quite settle what that meaning might be.”20 The rats are evident harbingers of plagues in history, but in Camus’s narrative, they are also figures of figuration itself. Their unexpected appearance in public spaces recalls the structure of allegory, which, as chapter 1 proposed, is a form of “speaking otherwise” characterized by referential displacement. The rats are out of place; their elastic bodies obstruct apartment thresholds and trip up pedestrians as they walk the city streets. When Rieux automatically kicks one aside, he pauses and considers that “a dead rat had no business to be on his landing [ce rat n’était pas à sa place].”21 The citizens are suddenly confronted by the sound, sensation, and sight of innumerable dying rodents piled up in unexpected places in the city’s heart, its administrative halls, schoolyards, and terraces. The rats thus resemble the events that disrupt the regulated lives of Oran’s citizens: “The unusual events described in this chronicle occurred in 194- at Oran. Everyone agreed that considering their somewhat extraordinary character, they were out of place” (4, emphasis mine). If the inhabitants of Oran, engrossed in the normalcy of

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their everyday lives, exemplify a kind of consciousless modernity, the extraordinary events of the plague intrude into their lives just like the rats surge into the city spaces, tripping the inhabitants into “le soupçon d’autre chose” (12), an inkling of something else, other, alien. Yet what forms of otherness are embodied by these rats? If they retain their ambiguity in the novel, as does the plague itself, Camus must have been aware of the ambient stereotyping of Jews as rodents while crafting his figure in The Plague. Pierre Ramelot’s virulent anti-Semitic propaganda film Le péril juif (1941), portrayed Jews as analogous to rats who, as vermin and carrier, live in insalubrious, vermin-infested spaces. Similarly Der ewige Jude (1940), commanded by Goebbels, portrayed Jews as carriers of plague, typhus, and cholera. The film opens with scenes from the Polish ghetto said to reveal the true racial character of the Jewish people as a plague (the narrator declares, “There is a plague here, a plague that threatens the health of the Aryan people”). Camus’s allegory of fascism taps into these anti-Semitic valences, but to what end? Why risk reproducing this deadly stereotype in an allegory of resistance to terror? In The Plague, the rats are portrayed not as malignant vectors of the disease, but rather as its initial victims and harbingers of the disruptive events to come. By evoking anti-Semitic stereotypes, with all the perils of rehearsing their violence, Camus’s vermin allude to the subterranean presence of modern anti-Semitism in the European everyday. The rats’ sudden appearance, bleeding, and shuddering to death in the corridors and streets of this eminently normal modern city awaken in its unimaginative citizens “an inkling of something different” (4): the existential awareness of death, of uncontrollable menace, of vulnerability to annihilation. Yet this menace, like the plague itself, is not external but instead emerges from within the bowels of the city: “It was as if the earth on which our houses stood were being purged of its . . . humors; thrusting up to the surface the abscesses and pusclots that had been forming in its entrails” (16). Just as Europe’s latent antiSemitism comes to the surface, the inner workings of Oran’s soil erupt in boils and sores, leaving the city’s surface strewn with the plague’s initial victims. The suspicion they awaken must be managed and concealed at all costs by the authorities, who “disappear” the bodies each dawn but to no avail. If the rats may be read as a complex figuration of anti-Semitism, another referent is the indigenous Algerian so conspicuously absent in human form.

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The bloody carcasses that litter the streets of Oran find a striking echo a few years later in Camus’s portrayal of Algeria as a country that had to bleed before the world acknowledged its existence: “Who but the im mense majority of the French press shut its ears to the cries of Arab wretchedness, and allowed the repression of 1945 to occur in a climate of indifference? Who besides France waited with disgusting good conscience for Algeria to bleed before realizing its existence?”22 When read in this perspective, the rats figure the metropole’s awakening Algeria’s suffering, but also (as I suggested earlier) the eruption of nationalist claims for justice. Early on, Roger Quillot suggested that the semiotically charged vermin of the opening pages evoked the plague of colonialism, and especially its Algerian victims; the dying rats figured the famine and suffering of Kabyle Berbers, whose plight Camus investigated as a journalist for Alger républicain.23 Yet if we take this interpretive route, we must once again confront the troubling replication of racist stereotypes in such figuration. The portrayal of Arabs as vermin was familiar in the postwar context, for the racialized slur raton, or small rat, was used as early as 1937, later producing the term ratonnade (from 1955 onward) to designate violent expeditions against North Africans in both Algeria and France. Camus’s echo of these stereotypes is a risky gesture that nevertheless resignifies them to intertwine colonial racism and antiSemitism. The vocabulary of vermin in The Plague brought together at least two legacies of persecution, even if only one or the other seems to have been visible to recent critics. Their fl ickering interplay in the text’s imagery suggests that neither anti-Semitism nor colonial racism is foreign to the polis, and, further, that these violences are intertwined (as we shall see in Mohammed Dib’s reiteration of the plague). Camus was well aware of this intertwinement, and he had denounced the racial hatred that erupts in a sale bicot (dirty Arab) spat by a Frenchman at a North African worker for its echo of anti-Semitism: “Giving into the dirty solicitation of contempt and racial hatred means forgetting recent history and legitimating those who, for four years, attempted to convert us by force to their law of contempt.”24 In The Plague, the vermin is a vehicle of contamination between these histories of racialized violence. The rats are figures for the circulation of histories in Camus’s novel. They do not settle into a one-to-one referential equivalence, but in their “out of place-ness,” they suggest instead a contamination enacted by the plague it-

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self. These tropes also migrate beyond Camus’s corpus and implicate other histories; they are taken up by contemporary artists and redeployed in other contexts. The Plague gives us figurality in the mode of contagion, a kind of “viral figurality” too volatile to settle into the stable equivalences of traditional allegory. Unlike our current understanding of what happens when a meme “goes viral,” in a serial replication of sameness, these tropes mutate and recombine as they adapt to different histories and geopolitical sites. Viral figurality defies the fi xity of paradigm. I am suggesting that if the multiple valences of the vermin within The Plague open a dialogue between different histories of occupation, exploitation, and extermination, the novel’s figures for figuration (vermin, virus, plague) invite an ongoing reflection on the proximities, contacts, and collisions between such histories. As readers, it is our responsibility to hold these multiple valences in our minds and attend to their recombinations within proliferating frames of reference. Rather than indict or rehabilitate Camus, as author and subject, for being a “colonizer of goodwill” or a “prophet of multiculturalism,” we might attempt instead to recover the critical energies of his work’s mutating figures. This would require a reexamination of familiar reading practices in which allegories lead to identitarian decodings, for Camus’s allegorical expression challenges us to hold a confluence of legacies in one dialectical grasp. In The Plague, this confluence (including the occupation, the Nazi genocide, and colonial violence) is not crystallized in characters but in figures of movement, contact, and contagion. The novel is haunted by the histories of absent Arabs and Berbers, disappeared Jews, and others who vanished into the night and fog of the Third Reich, but also of colonial Algeria, later described by Camus as “that distant, forgotten land lost . . . in a fog of blood.”25 Attending to the multiplicity of reference harbored in the figures of The Plague will decolonize readings of Camus that co-opt him for one history or another and help us discern the stakes of their memorial convergence within an Algerian space.

Memory and Migration: Reenvisioning Algeria If the Arab inhabitants of Oran are dismissed from Rambert’s journalistic reportage and the novel’s explicit frame of reference, signs of the colonial

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resurface nevertheless, not as personified subjects, but as topographic markers and memorial sites. The absence of Algerian characters, particularly in The Plague, has been criticized numerous times as symptoms of Camus’s colonial unconscious. Since my readings seek to shift our focus away from the narrative’s authorial signature and toward the work of its figures, I do not defend the biographical Camus from these accusations, but rather, I consider what it means to place “history” under the sign of the plague. How might the narrative topography reconfigure the colonial relation and evoke alternate modes of belonging? Although the plague signifies history’s terror, its devastation also ushers in a curious form of collectivity. In another exchange between Rieux and Rambert, as they walk through Oran at dusk, the Parisian journalist seeks to convince the doctor to give him a medical document certifying that he is not infected: “Their way lay through the narrow streets of the Negro district [le quartier nègre]. . . . As they walked down the steep little streets flanked by blue, mauve, and saffron yellow walls, Rambert talked incessantly and with agitation. He had left his wife in Paris” (84).26 As the two men move from the city’s deserted Moorish periphery to its ghostly colonial center, Rambert argues that since he shows no symptoms of the plague, and since he is a stranger to the city, he should be allowed to return to the metropole where his beloved awaits him. Significantly, their discussion concludes at the place d’Armes, the imperial heart of the city (previously called place Napoléon and place Maréchal Foch): “Walking on, they came to the Place d’Armes. Gray with dust, the palms and fig trees drooped despondently around a statue of the Republic, which too was coated with grime and dust. Rieux stamped his feet on the flagstones to shake off the coat of white dust that had gathered on them” (86). As he stands in the dust and grime of the imperial monument, the doctor tells the journalist that there is no way out, that no document can wrap him in an official cordon sanitaire, because this plague, this chain of events, this history, involves everyone: “I know it’s an absurd situation, but we’re all involved in it [cette histoire nous concerne tous], and we’ve got to accept it as it is” (86). To Rambert’s repeated protest that he is not from Oran, Rieux replies that henceforth he will be from there, like everybody else (“A partir de maintenant, hélas! Vous serez d’ici comme tout le monde”). The place that Rambert happens to occupy through a set of contingent circumstances is where he now belongs, and,

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indeed, whence he comes. He is entangled in its history simply by virtue of being there. This spatial and positional concept of belonging will later form the crux of Camus’s defense of the necessary cohabitation of populations that history has placed at Algeria’s cultural crossroads: “This land brings together a million Frenchmen established for a century, millions of Muslims, Arab and Berber, installed here for centuries, several strong and vibrant religious communities. These men must live together, in this intersection of routes and races where history has placed them.”27 Like all those who fi nd themselves at these crossroads owing to the plague of history, Rambert is now also from Algeria, “like everybody else.” His obligation to remain announces the inevitable cohabitation of all those who find themselves on Algerian ground. Under the plague, the contingent traversal of space becomes a transient belonging that Rambert embraces when he joins Rieux, Tarrou, Grand, and others in their struggle.28 Although this form of belonging can be read as a justification for ongoing French presence in Algeria (albeit not of the colonial sort), I will suggest that it produces a more radical dislocation of the French nation, its essence, position, and identity. The emphasis on displacement as belonging is an attempt to rethink identity and affiliation not as givens but as solidarities forged within a collective confrontation with the plague’s many faces. As we shall see, Camus’s tropology will have influential repercussions for how to imagine and rewrite postcolonial Algeria.29 Yet how are France and Algeria mapped and configured in The Plague? If we return to Rieux and Rambert’s walk through Oran, the itinerary it traces from the peripheral Moorish quarters and its absent inhabitants to the equally deserted center of French imperialism puts into circulation the very notions of center and periphery, metropole and colony. As the two characters stand in a space configured and rationalized under colonial rule and look up at a dusty statue of the Republic, a return to the metropole or to a tradition of Enlightenment rationality twinned with imperial might seems impossible. It is no accident that Rieux looks up at a statue that stands in the twilight of idols when he defends himself against Rambert’s accusation that he speaks the language of reason and abstraction (source of all terror in Camus’s thought) rather than that of affect and solidarity: “The doctor glanced up at the statue of the Republic [leva ses yeux sur la République], then said he did not know if he was using the language of reason, but he knew he was

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using the language of the facts as everybody could see them—which wasn’t necessarily the same thing” (87).30 Rieux’s blank gaze upon an allegorical yet anonymous statue vaporizes the Republic’s solidity and the universal legacy it represents. The monument is a bleached-out cipher upon which any meaning can be attached and hence, at the same time, from which any transcendent investment falls away. The crepuscular Marianne, like other figures, signifies in several ways. If we consider the novel’s most obvious allegorical frame, the occupation, it suggests the treason of the Republic by Vichy and collaborationism both within and beyond the hexagon. Yet it discloses an even greater crisis: the ruins of colonial power and the waning of the French nation-state. Rieux’s blank look as he distinguishes between the discourses of reason and evidence suggests the irrelevance of the abstract principle incarnated by the statue, for his gaze is not rueful or ironic, signaling the mockery that is political life under the plague. The narrative’s refusal to qualify his gaze can be read as a refusal to invest lifeless matter with redemptive meaning. The Republic turns into what Frantz Fanon would later describe as a “hollow shell of nationality,” when the nation-state, portrayed as a living organic being (here France personified, presumably, as Marianne), is no longer animated by collective energies.31 The Republic is a dusty relic, a ruin eaten by the elements; its anonymous decrepitude is a sign of colonialism’s obsolescence. The scene is a figural recapitulation of Camus’s belief in the “evidence” of colonialism’s demise: “The colonial era is over; we need to acknowledge it and deal with the consequences.”32 Given Camus’s intimate knowledge of Oran, it is curious that The Plague would shroud this monument in dust and anonymity, especially since one of his early essays, “Le minotaure ou la halte d’Oran,” had made a scrupulous—if mocking—list of the city’s various lieux de mémoire, mentioning both the place d’Armes and its marble lions, sculpted by Auguste Cain.33 The historical version of this unnamed Republic was actually part of a monument erected in 1898 to commemorate the colonial soldiers massacred in 1845 at the Battle of Sidi-Brahim. The monument consisted of a gloire, a tall obelisk crowned by a winged glory bearing a crown of palm leaves. The historical statue to which Rieux refers would doubtless be Dalou’s Marianne, placed on one of the column’s bottom faces. She carries a flag in one hand and writes on a marble tablet with the other, committing to memory the

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last words of Louis Dutertre, captain of the French expeditionary forces: “Comrades, defend yourselves to the death!”, this before he is decapitated by the horsemen of Sultan Abd el-Kader.34 The historical monument of Oran’s place d’Armes served as an exemplary site of memory, for it commemorated the sacrifice of those who perished in the conquest of French Algeria. In hindsight, it might even be seen to foreshadow the price of France’s bloody struggle to remain there a century later. In 1962, two years after Camus’s death, the actual statue of Marianne, or the mère patrie, writing history on her tablet was repatriated to Périssac, in the vineyards of the Bordelais. The place d’Armes was renamed place du 1er Novembre, commemorating the Toussaint sanglante (Bloody All Saints Day) of 1954, when the newly formed FLN began its insurrectionary violence. The blank left behind by Marianne’s removal was filled by an engraving of Abd el-Kader’s bust, Dutertre’s final words were concealed by marble slabs. Today, under the sultan’s bust, an Arabic inscription reads, “And there is no victory outside Allah’s providence, Allah the omnipotent, the wise.”35 The current monument remains a palimpsestic site of memory that retains traces of French occupation, even if the signs of the colonial expedition have been covered over to celebrate the birth of the Algerian nation. Camus’s fictional Oran is shorn of any such palimpsestic texture. It remains a carefully constructed non– lieu de mémoire whose blank neutrality might appear simply to extend the universalizing reach of its allegory. Yet the omission of the monument, with its commemoration of the sacrifice of colonial troops in this central scene of The Plague is a telling choice that reveals something about the fate of Algeria’s pied- noir population. The Sidi-Brahim monument bore witness to the category of the victimperpetrator or persécuté- persécuteur that defi nes the pied- noir’s historical position for Camus, who in the autobiographical The First Man sought to reimagine the itinerary of these European settlers as they fled persecution in 1848 and 1870 to occupy the lands of indigenous Algerians. In The Plague, the monument’s anonymity seems a harbinger of the settlement’s demise. Marianne’s irrelevance—indeed her displacement from Camus’s narrative frame—foreshadows the literal removal of the Republic (and of France) fifteen years later. If Camus never exploited the colonial face of the plague by working out the implications of his allegory for the colonial subjects of

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Algeria, his haunted and haunting topographies leave traces of these curtailed representations. From the empty Moorish quarter to the colonial plaza, we witness the dead end of the French Empire and the irrelevance of the nation-state. Rieux’s declaration to Rambert that “from now on you will be from here, like everybody else” articulates a nonidentitarian, positional form of belonging that will come to the fore in Camus’s later writings. Oran’s symbolic topography in The Plague announces portrayals of Algeria as a site of multiple belongings, as an empty form that is occupied by precarious, heterogeneous, and nomadic contents. In The First Man, for example, the protagonist Jacques Cormery chases his father’s shadow across this im mense and hostile land without name or memory as he reconstructs the forgotten genealogy of Eu ropean settlers. Algeria is figured as a force that swallows up all traces of human passage. The waves of humanity unfurling on this vast anonymous terrain leave no trace; the country’s conquest by peoples and empires, the “immense jostle of now conquered conquerors,” is always provisional; their footsteps will evaporate under the ferocity of the elements: As if the history of men, this history that had not ceased to unfold on the most ancient of lands yet left so few traces, evaporated under the relentless sun, along with the memory of those who had really made it. History reduced to surges of violence and murder, flares of hatred, torrents of blood that quickly swell and quickly dry up like the country’s winds.36

In this geological timescape, human histories are transformed into a succession of unpredictable cataclysms. No claim to the land can be made on the basis of priority or genealogy, for each wave of occupants is made up of ephemeral “first men,” or premiers hommes, condemned to vanish without a trace. This is familiar metaphorical terrain for readers of Camus. From the murderous sun of The Stranger to the contaminating winds of The Plague and throughout the geological histories of The First Man, the Maghreb’s elements become unpredictable vectors of historical terror. Of course, this tropology is ideologically suspicious, insofar as it eschews an account of the evolution of historical violence in the Maghreb that would posit colonization as a foundational fracture. The primal violence of the land eclipses historical origins—such as the French colonial intrusion—that might

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legitimate the expulsion of European settlers from Algeria. Instead, violence is ejected from history and posited as a cyclical effect of the land itself. For Emily Apter, then, the appearance of these topoi firmly anchor Camus’s work within the late colonial imagination: Dissolving the contours of Algerian cities and coastal landscape into sibilant friezes or projection walls of the Eu ropean mind, erasing the signs of precursory Algerian secessionism by recording not a trace of the protests and massacres at Sétif in the immediate aftermath of Liberation; and converting the site specificity of a soon-to-be imploding colonial war into a labyrinthine tectonics of Eu ropean postwar melancholia, Camus presents colonial unease in a metaphysically abstract worldscape.37

Yet if the figures that write Camus’s Algeria can take on imperial resonances, their alchemy also produces a deterritorialized space that allows outsiders such as Rambert to be “from here, like everybody else.” These positional identities form an alternative terrain for kinship between the land’s different populations. Paradoxically, exile, misery, and amnesia are the precarious foundations for these disparate claims to belonging. As David Carroll observes, Camus proposes a model of “belated firstness” that resists exclusionary nationalist conceptions of collective identity, opening up instead a pluralistic vision of Algeria that is founded on nomadism and shared cultural nonidentity: First men are the nomads of history, not the founding fathers of a specific people or nation. . . . Camus’ Algerians are predominantly modest or extremely poor “French” Algerians of diverse Eu ropean ancestries . . . but . . . also include the Arab and Berber “subjects” or “natives” of French Algeria as well. . . . They belong first and foremost to a land, not a nation.38

For Daniel Just, Camus’s relativization of the colonial moment is an attempt to rethink Algeria’s future by establishing an alternate ground for solidarity between peoples scattered upon the same land that is ethical rather than political: Nativeness to Algeria is not a question of who—whether the nomads, the Berbers, Arabs, Jews, or the French—has been there the longest. Since the land turns all of them into nomads, and poverty prevents them from acquiring memory, Camus suggests that what unites Algerians is a memory of their rootlessness and oblivion.39

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Both Carroll and Just point to the emergence of nomadic, postnational subjects in Le premier homme, subjects whose tracks on the land vanish under the winds of time but are excavated and entangled by the text’s figures. The multiple histories and geopolitical frames in The Plague, along with Rambert’s fi rst coerced, then chosen, commitment to Oran, dissolve the equation of identity, land, and territory. The Plague does not give us a temporality of national emergence. Instead, it points to a nonparticularist, postcolonial, even postnational view of belonging consistent with its author’s understanding of Algeria as a carrefour de routes et de races, a dense intersection of historical and ethnocultural traffic. The forms of polity forged in the crucible of the plague prefigure later appeals to imagine different political arrangements during the escalation of the Algerian War. Camus’s writings in the 1950s, including his much- criticized refusal to envision an autonomous Algerian nation-state, may have been a failure in political imagination. Yet his support for a federalist model of FrancoAlgerian government (the Lauriol plan) in which Arabs, Berbers, and Europeans would have proportionate voices also belongs to a long-standing anarchist suspicion of national sovereignty. In this sense, Camus’s commitment to pluralist, decentralized forms of community converges with Hannah Arendt’s postwar critique of the nation-state and its regulatory violence.40 If Camus’s poetics of Algeria can be put in ser vice of a suspect Mediterraneanism that celebrates the land in order to better quell the emergence of an autonomous nation, it also points to a critique of the nation-state, which, as Judith Butler has observed, is “a political formation that requires periodic expulsion and dispossession of its national minorities in order to gain a legitimate grounding for itself.” 41 As we shall see in chapter 6, Camus’s tropes of Algeria as an intersection and palimpsest of disparate histories and peoples are reanimated by Algerian writers who challenge the self-grounding violence of the postcolonial nation-state today. My point in this discussion of Camus’s Algeria is not to prioritize one content for its narrative frames (colonial nostalgia) over another (postcolonial multiculturalism or postnational politics) in order to condemn or exonerate this author-subject for his representational choices. Rather, I have argued that figures in Camus’s works are imbued with more than one ideo-

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logical or historical valence. The Algerian land does not yield a fi xed content but is marked by unpredictable movement and heterogeneous affiliations. The disparate meanings that accrue to this movement do not lead to the abyssal indeterminacy of aporia. Instead, they force us to hold these contradictory readings together, to recognize that if Algeria is figured as a land beyond possession, this figure can be assimilated into contrasting political projects. Tropes are not essences that function identically across contexts. They are mobile transpositions that function according to the context of their use. Yet, as we saw in chapter 1, the temptation to fi x figures and invest them with an identical function in disparate frames haunts even the most sophisticated critical and philosophical approach (such as the essentialization of silence, shame, and implications in the theorists considered). But the deterritorialization of space in Camus’s Algerian landscape cuts both ways. If, on the one hand, this gesture vaporizes the specific impact of French colonialism and resonates with the tropes of imperial nostalgia, on the other, it conjures alternate modes of belonging— as a contingent state forged in the solidarity of a collective confrontation with multiple plagues. Rather than cordon off the fluidity of Camus’s figural plague to embed it within a particularistic politics of memory, let us contrast the fate of his tropes (of vermin, bacillus, and plague) to that other site of memory, the Sidi-Brahim monument of Oran, which despite its solidity remains curiously unnamed and unseen in Camus’s novel. If Dalou’s statue of the Republic and her commemorative marble tablet ends up repatriated and reterritorialized as a lieu de mémoire in the French Bordelais, Camus’s figure continues to migrate and mutate across aesthetic texts and geopolitical contexts. In this sense, Camus has crafted a figure for figuration— as viral spread—that opens up a multidirectional memory of Algeria. This dislocation and migration of textual figure leads me to a second telling contrast between the monument of the Republic and Camus’s figural plague in light of the kinds of memory each models. Marianne’s inscription on a marble tablet functions as a classic lieu de mémoire, reminding Oran’s citizens of those who died in their name. It also rehearses an ancient topos of memory as archive: The memory of the nation is materialized as text and located at the colonial center of the city. John Frow addresses this relationship between memory and spatial-cognitive maps by way of Mary Carruthers’s work on medieval memory systems, from which he quotes, “Anything that

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encodes information in order to stimulate the memory to store or retrieve information is ‘writing.’ ”42 Using this spatial conception of memory as retrieval, Frow goes on to propose: The logic of the archive is a logic of the inscription (or deposit) and the storage of information in systematically articulated space, and of ready retrieval on the basis of that articulation. The moments of inscription/deposit and of storage correspond to . . . two major metaphors through which Eu ropean culture has conceptualized memory . . . the metaphor of the surface of inscription, traditionally a wax writing-tablet (tabula rasa) and that of the thesaurus (the storehouse, and its metonyms . . .). Both metaphors suppose a direct relation between space and mental categories . . . and both suppose the physical reality of memory trace.43

In light of Frow’s definition, Marianne’s statue in Oran models the classic conception of memory as an archive and storehouse. The imperial past is inscribed or deposited by an allegorical France onto the tablet of collective memory, to be stored and displayed in the “systematically articulated” space of a military square within colonial Algeria. If the statue is broken down into pieces and removed, it is nevertheless replaced by Abd el-Kader in Oran and reterritorialized in France after independence: What remains are two national models of collective memory (though Marianne is, significantly, a fragment). By contrast, there is no tablet upon which Algeria or France finds inscription in The Plague. Instead, as a figure for figuration, the plague illustrates an alternate model of memory that operates through circulation, contamination, and rewriting as it migrates across sites and times. Tropes have their own generative life, a viral quality that is also a constant virtuality actualized in their reception. Camus’s plague is a figure that lets us see the field in which literature’s ethico-political questions are played out, not in the juridical treatment of biographical authors, but in readers who are beckoned to actualize the sometimes contradictory contents of aesthetic forms. As we shall see, in the postwar era, the plague becomes a key trope on both sides of the Mediterranean for examining those latent ideological intersections that Camus’s novel mapped out but did not explicitly pursue.

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Concentrationary Circulations: Le métier à tisser (1957) and Night and Fog (1955) Although allegory in The Plague may have appeared to inscribe one set of histories to the exclusion of another, I’ve argued that its figures can be read multidirectionally through the movement of the novel’s figures. This is part of a broader argument against reading Camus through the juridico-political processes of indictment and defense, as is so often done with this author, and instead approaching his work as a crucible from which some of the most politically charged figures of the period emerged. So it will only seem paradoxical that, despite the absence of personified native, racially marked subjects within the text, Camus produced a symbolic template for subsequent reflections on the proximities between Nazism, colonialism, and racialized terror. The plague that one day will resurrect and send its rats to die in a happy city becomes the site for a proliferation of histories in postwar cultural production, a figure that circulates in France and the Maghreb. Yet unlike the figure of the gray zone discussed in the preceding chapter, Camus’s plague is in constant mutation as it is manipulated by artists who use it to connect Nazism and colonialism during the escalation of the Algerian War. I will address Mohammed Dib here, and mention Jean Cayrol and Alain Resnais, whose fi lm Night and Fog is the subject of the next chapter. Camus, Dib, and Cayrol met at the short-lived Rencontres de SidiMadani, held on the Algerian coast a year after the publication of The Plague. At the time, Dib was preparing his Algerian trilogy, which traces the emergence of national consciousness from World War II and concludes with Le métier à tisser.44 Published in 1957, the trilogy’s fi nal volume supplies the journalist Rambert’s missing testimony on the living conditions of native Algerians and makes visible the plague’s colonial face. Set in Tlemcen under Vichy rule, Le métier à tisser depicts a swarm of starving vagrants that invade the city.45 Exactly like the rats that are mysteriously disgorged by the urban dwellings in The Plague, Dib’s vagrants “seem vomited up by the damp abyss” yet show no signs of returning underground.46 Instead, like Oran’s rats, they propagate and migrate toward the city center: “They wouldn’t disappear, wouldn’t returned to the lairs that had ejected them. They were embedded in the city’s heart . . . the

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newest neighborhoods, the commercial arteries, and noble parts of the city” (15–16). If Camus’s dying vermin prefigure and mirror the vulnerability of Oran’s inhabitants, in Le métier à tisser the displaced, dehumanized hordes are instantly recognized by Tlemcen’s citizens as a faithful mirror of shared subjection under colonialism: “These are our own kin. Hey! Look at them; like a mirror, they reflect back to us the most loyal image of what we are” (19). In Dib as in Camus, we witness the generation of a figurative style that instantiates a back-and-forth movement of recognition and contamination. It is through the figure of the abject and dehumanized vagrant that we are invited to read Algeria’s face under colonial rule. As the novel gradually elucidates, then, these exiled swarms are not universal figures of the absurd or the abject but the historical products of massive colonial land spoliation. Under Dib’s pen, the figure of the vermin that spill into the public spaces of Tlemcen indicts the pauperization of Algeria’s rural population by the colonial regime. The displaced population is explicitly classified by Vichy authorities in the novel as vermin requiring extermination—an image that once again brings to mind the period’s antiSemitic propaganda: “This vermin’s extermination is indispensable” says one official, to whom an anonymous voice from the crowd responds, in an expression of emergent historical consciousnes, that it is the colonial plague and its vermin that has caused this abject dehumanization: “These creatures are not vermin. It’s the vermin that has invaded our country that has turned them into this” (81–82). In Dib’s novel, as in Camus, the figure of “vermin” becomes the site of a reflection on overlapping histories of violence. The relations between the Holocaust and colonialism evidently concerned the author, who a few years later would ask in Qui se souvient de la mer, “How speak of Algeria after Auschwitz?” a query that resonates with Adorno’s meditation on the fate of the poem after Auschwitz.47 In Le métier à tisser, figure entangles Auschwitz and Algeria, their histories are interwoven in the portrayal of creatures on the verge of extinction, ambulatory wrecks covered with a dusting of ash: “The teeming army of the starved flowed forth. . . . A shameful mass that deloused itself in broad daylight, spreading its exhausted limbs, its purulent scars, its trachomatous eyes. A cold ash was sprinkled on these anonymous beings” (18).

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As these peasants are hunted down by the Vichy police, rounded up, piled onto trucks, and mysteriously disappeared, their proximity to the Jewish population and its fate under the Third Reich becomes more and more discernible. Once again, figure evokes the historical convergence between the Jewish and Arab-Berber populations of colonial Algeria during the Second World War. Although the Crémieux decree of 1870 had “declared all Indigenous Israelites of Algeria French citizens” under Vichy rule, General Pétain stripped Algerian Jews of their French citizenship. This retroactive revocation put Algerian Jews in the category of “Indigenous Israelites”; they now had the same juridico-political status as the Arab and Berber populations, gathered under the category of “Indigenous Muslim Algerians.”48 This anti-Semitic legislation did not earn Arab support for the Vichy regime, however. Algerian nationalists grasped all too well the links between the Crémieux decree and long-standing strategies of racialized violence, between the victims of Vichy anti-Semitism and of French colonialism. Messali Hadj denounced any attempt to exploit competition between Algeria’s populations under Vichy. Stripping Jews of citizenship “cannot be considered as progress for the Algerian people—lowering the rights of Jews did not increase the rights of Muslims,” and Ferhat Abbas denounced the multidirectional web of racist violence under Vichy: “Your racism runs in all directions. Today against the Jews and always against the Arabs.”49 The analogy that emerges implicitly in the narrative through Dib’s imagery thus reflects a historical intersection, and a knot of potential solidarity, that occurred in Algeria under Vichy rule. The figural register of the plague in Le métier à tisser makes visible the infection of colonial occupation while suggesting the intersection of two histories of persecution and elimination in a noeud de mémoire that is prefigured by the loom in the novel’s title. As my next chapter argues in depth, a similar intersection haunts Alain Resnais’s classic 1955 documentary on deportation. Night and Fog also deploys the figural register of the plague to make unexpected connections between Auschwitz and Algeria. For the poet-survivor Jean Cayrol, who wrote the screenplay, Camus was a pioneer in the exploration of these cartographies and of what he called concentrationary or Lazarean art. This art emerges from the camp experience and, like Lazarus, from death itself and “may already have its first historian and investigator in the anxious Albert

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Camus [l’inquiet Albert Camus].”50 It is not surprising, then, that Night and Fog would conclude its own investigation of Nazi concentrationary realms with a gesture to Camus’s plague. As the camera lingers over the deserted ruins of a crematorium, Cayrol’s text reads, “There are those of us who look at these ruins as if the old concentrationary monster lay dead under its debris, who feign to take heart before this receding image, as if one recovered from the concentrationary plague, we who feign to believe that this is only of one time and of one nation, and who do not think to look around us and to hear that one cries without end.”51 By resignifying the Nazi peril into a concentrationary menace that can infect any state at any time, Cayrol was faithful to Camus’s call for ceaseless vigilance against a disease that would inevitably reawaken. Night and Fog was not supposed to be a petrified monument sealed off by a historical cordon sanitaire. Although the imagery of the concentrationary inferno resonated with those of Stalin’s gulag archipelago, Resnais would later state that the film’s “whole point . . . was Algeria.”52 The circulation of this plague and its appearance in a documentary on the Nazi camps reactivates a history of colonial violence that was muted and displaced in Camus’s own allegory, such that the parallel between Nazism and colonialism that some view as a blind spot in The Plague (although I have argued that it is far more complex) becomes “the point” of Night and Fog. Camus was one of the first to articulate the ironic proximities between Nazi Germany and the postwar French Republic. His writings on Algeria in the press of the day opened a dialogue between these two repressed histories of occupation and racialized violence; they sought to make audible the “solitary cries of those slaughtered in that strange land lost in a fog of blood.” This indictment of France’s indifference resonates with the final words of Night and Fog on the murky waters of a faulty collective memory that is deaf to the endless cry of suffering. However disparate in genre, the works I have evoked so far (allegory, realist narrative, documentary cinema) suggest aesthetic figure to be the improbable site of recovery for overlapping concentrationary regimes, confi rming Jean Cayrol’s sense that Camus was an aesthetic pioneer of concentrationary realms. Yet the most detailed symbolic map of these realms is not The Plague, but rather Camus’s last completed novel, The Fall (1956). A veritable laboratory for experimenting with the historical, political, and ethical charge of aesthetic figure, The Fall

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opens a passage between different concentrationary histories, uncovering unexpected proximities and complicities between them. Camus’s final allegory illustrates how the recognition of complicity can have an animating effect on its readership Yet at the same time, the novel is a prescient meditation on the political and ethical perils of freezing such complicity into universal culpability, as we witness in the recent cultural turn to gray zones of history.

Figure as Archive: Reading The Fall with Auschwitz and Algeria As we saw in chapter 1, Camus’s The Fall is canonically read and taught as a meditation on the Shoah, on the impossibility of representing its trauma and the necessity for a post-Shoah literary ethics of silence and traumatic complicity. The novel is an anguished yet manipulative confession in the first person by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a former lawyer turned “judge-penitent” who exercises his peculiar profession in a seedy bar in Amsterdam. The narrator seeks to contaminate his various interlocutors (as well as the reader) with his ideology of penitence. By coercing them into acknowledging their own structural culpability, Clamence arrogates the right to judge humankind in order to escape definitive judgment. The text weaves a discursive gray zone of traumatic complicity from which there is no exit. Although The Fall predates Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved by some thirty years, its attunement to the coercion of complicity in an epoch irremediably marked by the concentrationary experience anticipates the survivor’s diagnosis of the gray zone and foreshadows our contemporary fetishism of this category. The overwhelming focus on The Fall as a “crisis of witnessing” precipitated by the Shoah pivots on the scene of a drowning, which is read as the text’s foundational trauma. This reading takes its cues from the protagonist, who painstakingly signals the importance of “the adventure I found at the heart of my memory, which I cannot any longer put off relating, despite my digressions and the inventive efforts for which, I hope, you will give me credit.”53 One night, as Clamence crosses the pont des Arts, he sees a woman leaning over the parapet. Upon crossing the bridge and reaching the quay, he hears the crash of a body hitting water behind him and cries that are borne

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down the river. In the grip of shock (“I was trembling, I believe, from cold and shock” [70]), he fails to jump into the Seine’s chilly waters to rescue her (“too late, too far”). He creeps home without turning back and refuses to read the newspapers the following day or to otherwise look into the woman’s fate. The protagonist’s refusal to jump into the Seine has been glossed in contradictory ways. As we saw chapter 1, Shoshana Felman reads The Fall as the allegory of a crisis of witnessing ushered in by the Holocaust: Clamence’s inability to either dive into the water or bear witness to the drowning allegorizes those who “drowned” in the camps and were betrayed by onlookers during and after the war, whether the Allies themselves, those who turned away from the survivor testimony after the war, or intellectuals such as Sartre, who forgot that the concentrationary inferno was an ongoing reality under Stalinist rule. Not only is this betrayal historical, it is also an epistemological condition with universal implications, for the failure to witness the drowning allegorizes the Holocaust as a trauma that defies representation. The Fall thus becomes an emblem of Levi’s gray zone, representing a transhistorical condition of wounded complicity that enmeshes victims, executioners, witnesses, survivors, and others in the Shoah’s aftermath. If for Felman and many others The Fall is an allegory of the Shoah, an alternate reading has emerged positing colonialism as its repressed subject. For instance, Azzedine Haddour reads the novel’s allusion to occupation as a screen memory for colonialism, a “transposition of the Algerian political problem into the context of the Second World War,” and as symptomatic of Camus’s inability, if not refusal, to grapple with the Algerian crisis and the plague of colonialism.54 As in the case of The Plague, two antithetical and mutually exclusive portraits of Camus are drawn: as an exemplary witness to the trauma of the Holocaust, whose experimental narrative forms record the impossibility of its representation, and as symbolic collaborator with the French empire, whose texts, once psychoanalyzed, reveal the return of the colonial repressed. Despite their opposition, however, both accounts posit the text as a symptomatic record of historical violence (whether genocide or colonialism) and view literary figures as the inscription of unrepresentable, traumatizing, and/or disavowed violence. Dominick LaCapra’s essay “Rereading Camus’s The Fall after Auschwitz and with Algeria” promises to put

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these two historical frames into dialogue within the novel. Yet LaCapra too ultimately suggests that the novel is a posttraumatic and disavowed response to the Algerian crisis, as the temporality of his title suggests (after Auschwitz and with Algeria, rather than with Auschwitz and Algeria): “Camus’s turn to the Holocaust may be read as functioning to displace or even obscure the problem of the Algerian war and his response to it.”55 This claim for a deep historicization (Algeria) that sees beyond the diversionary screen of the Holocaust risks simply substituting one traumatic history for another, thereby privileging a singular historical trauma as the structural core of the narrative. These approaches reflect a general tendency to compartmentalize readings of allegory within one history or another. This tendency may have something to do with the psychoanalytic orientation of the critics and their quest for a traumatic kernel that disrupts regimes of representation. A hierarchy of events still remains in which a screen memory is seen to conceal an original event at the narrative’s core. Yet a psychoanalytic model need not lead to hierarchies between the “real” trauma and its screen memory. The model of “screen memory” suggests that one memory displaces or silences another, but the belated temporality of trauma nevertheless promises the recovery of more than one event, insofar as the more recent events may trigger the memory of older ones in nonhierarchical relations. As Michael Rothberg suggests, screen memories need not cover up, silence, and block off the anterior memories but can open up a multidirectional engagement within individual, collective, and textual memory: As the concept of screen memory reveals, the content of a memory has no intrinsic meaning but takes on meaning precisely in relationship to other memories in a network of associations. . . . It is precisely that convoluted, sometimes historically unjustified, back-and-forth movement of seemingly distant collective memories in and out of public consciousness that I qualify as memory’s multidirectionality.56

The movement of displacement that characterizes screen memory, like the figure of allegory itself, opens up a relational account of the past that puts different temporalities into contact. The Fall resists any singular historicization of its eddying figures, inviting instead an allegorical reading that can hold multiple frames of reference simultaneously.

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In the face of critical approaches that privilege one history of violence or another, we might ask ourselves why multidirectional reading remains so difficult in critical practice. Why do histories such as the Holocaust and colonialism remain reciprocal blind spots or screens for each other in critical literature when so many versions of decentered dialogism, in the form of heteroglossia, polyvalence, hybridity, and creolization, are otherwise recognized and celebrated? What is it about trauma that makes the historicization of its figures an either/or dispute waged on identitarian grounds? Why is it so difficult for these historical legacies to be put into dialogue with each other when they are so insistently entwined in the narrative and through the work of its figures? Against the topography of depth evidenced in the critical approaches above, which assume that a singular or at least primary kernel of trauma founds and governs a text’s allegorical regime, I turn once again to the mobile plurality of Camus’s figures, which navigate between different histories even as they stage the political limits of such métissage. The following reading of The Fall examines three figures that function as repositories for converging legacies of violence: the concentration camp, the gray zone (that is to say, the circulation of victim and perpetrator, judge and penitent, innocence and guilt that defines complicity in the novel), and, finally, the victim’s cry. My reading will suggest that if these figures bring interlocking histories to the surface, they also illustrate the risks of such open-ended drift from one history to another. In order to tap into the multiple histories embedded within The Fall, we need to decenter accounts of its primordial trauma and attend to the resonance of its figures. Despite the tendency to privilege the scene of drowning as the origin of Clamence’s fall and the text’s foundational trauma, there is an equally compelling site that brings together several histories of occupation, deportation, and internment: the protagonist’s detainment in a North African concentration camp during World War II. Unlike the young woman who jumps off a bridge, this scene of detention explicitly addresses the concentrationary universe. Toward the end of the novel, Clamence recounts that after being mobilized without having seen battle during World War II, he traveled to North Africa with the vague intention of joining de Gaulle’s Resistance network but was characteristically paralyzed: “But in Africa, the situation was not clear; the opposing parties seemed to be

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equally right and I stood aloof. I can see from your manner that I am skipping rather fast, in your opinion, over these details which have a certain significance. Well, let’s say that, having judged you at your true value, I am skipping over them so that you will notice them the better” (123). (The statement resonates with both war time attentisme, or a “wait-and-see attitude,” and with Camus’s own double bind during the Algerian War.) Despite his political abstinence, however, Clamence’s connection with a young résistante in Tunis leads to his arrest and deportation to a concentration camp near Tripoli.57 The description of this camp, like the preceding one, is shrouded in blanks and ellipses: “We children of the mid-century don’t need a diagram to imagine such places. A hundred and fifty years ago, people became sentimental about lakes and forests. Today we have carceral lyricism [Aujourd’hui nous avons le lyrisme cellulaire]” (123–24, translation modified). If, as Cayrol affirmed, Camus is a pioneer of concentrationary realms, The Fall proposes le fait concentrationnaire, or the reality of the concentration camps, as the common ground of collective memory and its aesthetic representation. Like the plague, the camp near Tripoli becomes a palimpsest for overlapping concentrationary regimes. For “children of the midcentury” steeped in carceral lyricism, the camp would evoke not only the Nazi camps and Stalin’s gulag archipelago, but also the internment of Algerians in the postwar French Republic. By May 1955, a year before the novel’s publication, the press had exposed and denounced the network of camps de repression holding several hundred Algerians suspected of insurgency in what were euphemistically termed villages nouveaux (new villages) and centres d’hébergement (housing centers).58 Further histories accrue to the figure of the concentrationary, including that of the Vichy labor camps set up in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco for the construction of a trans-Saharan railroad in Algeria, where seven thousand prisoners were detained: Spanish republicans, Communists, anti-Nazi Germans, Gaullists, Arabs, and some two thousand Jews, many of whom had signed up with the French army in the hopes of acquiring citizenship.59 The location of Clamence’s internment would also recall Mussolini’s now-forgotten detention camps in Libya. Its placement near Tripoli is reminiscent of the Gharian labor camp. Under Mussolini, Jews with Libyan citizenship were interned in Tripolitania, in camps such as Giado, El Agheila, and Sidi Azaz. When the camp of Giado

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reached its capacity, Jews from Cyrenaica were transferred to a camp set up for foreigners in Gharian. For children of the midcentury, the allusion to North African camps would also conjure the convergence of colonial and fascist terror, for under Mussolini, the Libyan population (including the nomadic tribes of Cyrenaica) was deported to concentration camps in a drastic colonial demographic recomposition of the land that assumed genocidal proportions.60 Some of these camps for the indigenous population, such as El Agheila, were then used to detain Libyan and foreign Jews during World War II. The North African camp in The Fall thus brings into visibility an archive of concentrationary terror that is now forgotten.61 This archive requires a far more differentiated reading of trauma and testimony than has usually been conducted, one attuned to a proliferation of frames, even as we should bear in mind their eventual asymmetries (that is to say, the distinction between detainment, labor, and extermination camps). A year after the publication of The Fall, in the aftermath of the Stockholm incident in which Camus defended his mother before justice, Algerian poet Jean Sénac denounced the Nobel Prize winner’s withdrawal into silence over Algeria, writing, “To protest against the Nazi camps, Soviet’s and Franco’s too, but to be silent about the colonial camps, to raise your voice against the Russian tanks in Berlin and Budapest, and to be quiet about the massacres . . . [in Algeria] . . . there is the person who holds to the dignity of his work or silence.”62 Yet what Sénac’s accusation may have missed, made as it was from within the turmoil of war, is that if the biographical Camus withdrew into silence and chose to intervene “offstage” during the escalation of state terror and insurgent terrorism, his literary figures continued to do their ethical and political work throughout.63 A nodal point in the novel’s lyrisme cellulaire, the North African camp in The Fall radiates out toward the Nazi camps, the gulag archipelago, the Vichy regime, Franco’s Spain, and Mussolini’s Italy but also toward the postwar French Republic, and it would have been discerned as such by the children of the midcentury that were its contemporary readers. As in The Plague, figure becomes a site of history; its condensations and ellipses yield a global archive of state violence.

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The Gray Zone Revisited: The Politics of Complicity in The Fall The North African camp in The Fall is not only a point of unfurling histories, but it also stages the novel’s central ethical dilemma: the nature of one’s responsibility to another within a gray zone of ambiguity and compromise. As Clamence and his companions suffer from heat, sun, and thirst in the camp, they fall under the spell of a saintly French lunatic (“Du Guesclin”), who fought on the side of the Spanish Republic and passed through General Franco’s camps. Disillusioned by the collaboration between the Roman Catholic Church and the totalitarian state, Du Guesclin attempts to found an alternate community from within the conditions of the camp. He proposes that the detainees elect “a complete man with his vices and virtues and swear allegiance to him, on the sole condition that he should agree to keep alive, in himself and in others, the community of our sufferings” (125). The cultivation of a community of sufferings echoes Camus’s essay The Rebel, in which the anguish of noncoincidence (étrangeté)—with oneself, another, or the world—is a collective plague that at once grounds rebellion and founds community: “The evil/illness borne by one becomes a collective plague. . . . I rebel, therefore we are.”64 As we saw, this nonidentitarian community forged within plague also emerges from the exchange between Rambert and Rieux under Oran’s statue of the Republic. Yet unlike Oran, whose citizens’ solidarity emerges from a shared vulnerability to the plague’s blind virulence, the North African camp in the later novel functions according to the hierarchies of political life. The Fall and its web of complicity anticipate the moral topography of the camps rendered by Primo Levi as a gray zone. Indeed, Clamence’s entire confession appears under “the shadow of a suspicion: that each man is his brother’s Cain, that each one of us (but this time I say ‘us’ in a much vaster, indeed, universal sense) has usurped his neighbor’s place and lived in his stead.”65 This coercion into complicity and the guilt/shame of its aftermath is illustrated in Camus’s portrait of the Libyan camp and its aftereffects on the protagonist’s moral conscience. When Clamence responds to Du Guesclin’s call for a new pope who will “keep alive, in himself and in others, the community of our sufferings” (125), he becomes a cell leader whose tasks include distributing water, a resource over which the detainees fight. The camp’s structure and its production of scarcity forces Clamence to privilege some

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detainees over others, to establish hierarchies, and to participate in what Levi would later describe as the gray zone of camp life: “I could not maintain complete equality. According to my comrades’ condition, or the work they had to do, I gave an advantage to this one or that one” (126). Whereas The Plague unveiled the democracy of equal vulnerability to infection and death, the camp in The Fall takes us into a biopolitical system in which scarcity turns each man into “his brother’s Cain.” Clamence “close[s] the circle” of his private inferno (materialized in Amsterdam’s concentric circles) when he drinks the water of a dying comrade, “convincing myself that the others needed me more than this fellow who was going to die anyway and that I had a duty to keep myself alive for them. Thus, cher, empires and churches are born under the sun of death” (127). In his papal function, Clamence betrays the reciprocity of a “community of sufferings,” the solidarity of victims who confront a collective plague. By putting himself before the other, he repeats the sacrificial rites of pope and dictator, of religion and empire. The topos of water resurfaces in the incident of the alleged drowning off the pont des Arts: The water that Clamence drank to save himself in Africa is reflected in the chilly waters he refuses to drink to save another in France. The protagonist’s coercion into complicity with the camp’s regime, his participation in a gray zone of coerced complicity, and the failure of egalitarian reciprocity are the fundamental ethical stakes of The Fall.66 Toward the end of his confession, Clamence exclaims, “What can one do to become another? [Que faire pour être un autre?]. Impossible. One would have to cease being anyone, forget oneself for someone else, at least once, but how?” (144–45). The judge-penitent continues to be haunted by the failure to put himself in the place of the other, to forget himself even once for the sake of another. The logical solution to this fall is the methodical enforcement of a discursive gray zone that abandons a community of suffering for the hierarchies of “power and the whip” (135). Clamence’s confession reverses his ethical failure to put himself in the place of the other. Instead, others will be forced to take his place, to mirror his fall, and to speak his words, “The portrait I hold out to my contemporaries becomes a mirror” (140). “You yourself utter the words that for years have never ceased echoing through my nights and that I shall at last say through your mouth” (147). The interlocutor/reader is coerced into identifying with the protagonist’s

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“traumatic complicity” in the aftermath of his betrayal, much like the discourse of trauma and shame casts us as belated, shocked, and implicated witnesses to history’s violence. As we saw earlier, The Fall has been read as a parable of our ongoing collective complicity with the Holocaust’s traumatic legacy, as a narrative “whose legibility becomes transmissible only within a network of complicity,” as Felman writes.67 Yet I am suggesting that its ironic register leads us to resist colonization by this complicity. An unreliable narrator such as Clamence, with his poignant but suspect mixture of suffering, impotence, and bad faith, points to the abdication inherent in the notion that we are all victims and accomplices of a traumatic history we blindly perpetuate. The European war and its global reach into the colonies and beyond meant that Camus was well aware of living in an increasingly interconnected political environment, where actions could have consequences in far-reaching places, when anyone could contract the plague and become a vector of its infection: “We are at a knot of history when complicity is absolute.” Yet his project was not nihilistic surrender to this complicity but the elaboration of what, in The Rebel, he called a “principle of reasonable culpability.” 68 Throughout Camus’s corpus, complicity—like the other figures and stances we have examined— can serve as the foundation for both totalitarian terror and ethical responsibility. It is important to recall that for Camus, as for Levi, the very notion of universal complicity was a deadly fiction constructed in order to legitimate the Nazi concentrationary regime and totalitarianism more generally. For Levi the creation of Sonderkommando units eliminated the very concept of innocence, its logic ventriloquized thus: “You too, like us and like Cain, have killed the brother. Come, we can play together.”69 Levi conveys this diabolical contamination through the image of a soccer match that reduces victims and executioners to circulating positions on a level playing field in Auschwitz. In The Rebel, Camus makes an identical assessment of complicity’s ideological function in a totalitarian structure: He who kills or tortures knows only the shadow of a victory; he cannot feel innocent. It becomes necessary to create culpability in the victim, so that, in a world without direction, a general state of culpability may legitimate the exercise of force alone, and may only consecrate success. When the very idea of innocence is dispelled from the innocent’s mind, power reigns supreme in a

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The desperate world evoked by Camus is one in which each subject is caught up in the abuse of power and perpetuates the gray zone beyond the spatial and temporal confi nes of the concentration camp or the torture chamber. It is also the state of a “fallen” world as imagined by contemporary critics for whom each historical subject is locked into an unconscious, structurally determined collusion with terror. Camus’s scrutiny of this rhetoric of culpability and its ideological underpinnings should give us pause, for it illuminates the risks of critical approaches that place such a high moral price on twinning trauma and complicity in the aftermath of genocide. If the gray zones of The Fall open a critique of totalitarian uses of complicity, they also open a passage from Auschwitz to Algeria within Amsterdam, although perhaps not in the direction that we might initially imagine. Just as the topos of the camp near Tripoli signaled the resurgence of le fait concentrationnaire in North Africa, the rhetoric of expiation similarly brings an unexpected demographic entity into view: the European settler population in Algeria. Camus denounced the politics of complicity in totalitarian regimes, but he believed that a similarly coercive gray zone was at work a decade later, during the Algerian War, when the pied- noir population was being sacrificed by French supporters of the liberation struggle in expiation for the sins of colonialism: If some French people think that because of its colonial ventures, France (and only France among other saintly and pure nations) is in a state of historical sin, they have no business designating the Algerian French as expiatory victims (“Die, we deserve it”), they must offer themselves up as expiation. As far as I’m concerned, it is disgusting to beat one’s guilt on the chest of another, like our judge penitents, it is useless to condemn several centuries of Eu ropean expansion, it is absurd to curse Christopher Columbus and Lyautey in the same breath. The colonial era is over; we need to acknowledge it and deal with the consequences.71

Throughout the Chroniques algériennes, Camus asserts his faith in a politics of reparation and not a politics of expiation. The gray zones in The Fall can be seen to engage the legacies of Nazism/totalitarianism/colonialism but also,

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unexpectedly, with the Algerian War, to cast the impoverished pied- noir as the “other” sacrificed in penitence for colonialism.72 This startling portrayal of the pied- noir as sacrificial victim rather than colonizer, as persécuté rather than persécuteur, returns in Camus’s last autobiographical work. The First Man portrays the foundational moment of Algerian colonization as an ordeal experienced by the settlers rather than the natives whose lands they come to occupy. This account evacuates the violence of military colonization; instead, the conditions of the colonial settlements are described in what by then were familiar topoi of the concentrationary experience. Forced by torrential rain into crowded tents and barracks, the first settlers are portrayed as victims of a plague as they die by the dozens of cholera and malaria. The description of their nocturnal dances between two funerals, ordered by the doctors to warm the blood, is steeped in Cayrol’s Lazarean poetics and recall scenes from Rousset’s concentrationary universe. Despite the settlers’ conviction that “sacred work will save us all,” a motto eerily reminiscent of Nazism’s Arbeit macht frei, the majority of these settlers die while waiting for the French government to give them the lands of expropriated Arabs and Berbers.73 The survivors toil fruitlessly “in enemy territory that refused occupation and took revenge on whatever it could find,” only to be buried in colonial cemeteries, unmourned and obliterated in France’s collective memory.74 The appearance of concentrationary imagery in the foundational narratives of colonization should not come entirely as a shock given the author’s aim, in this autobiographical testament, to bear witness to these settlers’ anonymous legacy and to contest their dismissal as ungrievable life during the Algerian War. Still, that this imagery would appear in the depiction of colonial conquest does raise the specter of allegory gone wild. An incomplete autobiographical testament, The First Man could not be further from the ironic self-reflexivity of The Fall: Where the former’s tropes transport readers away from history and toward a geological, mythic, or otherwise timeless worldscape, the latter demands a reading attuned to the multiple histories harbored in its figures, just as its authoritarian irony requires our critical distance. The Fall, like The Plague, crafts figures of embedded history, yet it is also a cautionary parable for our contemporary tendency to derealize the specificity of each history into a transhistorical condition (such as the universalization of its gray zone). In what follows, I

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return one last time to The Fall to show that the novel’s enduring challenge is its restless, anxious play with figure as the site of political and ethical inquiry.

History’s Endless Cry: Allegory Unbound in The Fall As one who envisioned the artist as “a witness to the flesh and not the law,” who urged his readers to look at history with “the eyes of the body and . . . a physical notion of justice,” Camus was acutely aware of the ethical impact of aesthetic form, of the violence of figural abstraction.75 He had been criticized by Roland Barthes, Francis Jeanson, and Mouloud Feraoun for his representations’ derealizing effects on histories and populations. If for Barthes the figure of the plague removed the human face of the Nazi peril and risked turning history into nature and myth, for Jeanson and others, Camus’s Algerians were the victims of a figural assassination: “You love men even more when they are petrified, cleansed of their existence . . . this is why you also love them as symbols.”76 For Feraoun, the absence of embodied and personified indigenous subjects in Camus’s Algeria was a tragically missed opportunity for reciprocal understanding: “I will always regret . . . that you do not know us sufficiently and that we have no one who understands us, to make us understood, and who helps us understand ourselves.”77 Given these critiques of Camus’s representational exclusions, it may not be surprising that The Fall would open a meditation on the ambiguity of figuration and specifically on the perils of allegory’s infinite inclusions. The political limits of allegory’s limitless correspondences is a problem at the heart of The Fall. If for “children of the mid-century” carceral lyricism has become a universal commonplace, Clamence’s own quest for neutralized landscapes framed by smoking seas and ashen beaches reflects this obsession. Amsterdam is the allegorical landscape for an infinitely repeated fall into complicity, a fall that not only engages the Nazi, fascist, and colonial frames as we saw in the excavation of the North African palimpsestic camp, but that unfolds across a dizzying number of sites and times. Torture in the Middle Ages, Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, French colonialism in North Africa, the Nazi occupation, Vichy collaboration, Fascist Spain, Stalin’s gulag, the Holocaust, the H-bomb, all coalesce into an interminable

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gray zone of traumatic complicity. As in Agamben’s deployment of the soccer match across space and time, The Fall turns a proliferation of distinct histories into so many figures for the same event. This is conveyed by the narrative’s topography, which shifts from the intricate network of Amsterdam’s canals to the colorless horizontal expanse of the Zuiderzee. The shoreless sea that blends into the ashen skies becomes the figure of an unwavering gray zone that for Clamence both constitutes the human condition and justifies his own intellectual and moral abdications. The allegory of the fall becomes a master trope that recycles multiple histories into a primordial fall, one that ultimately lies outside of history and fi nds its emblematic witness in the biblical Rachel, whose lamentation over the massacre of the innocents implicates Christ himself in a gray zone of culpable survival. The proliferation of gray zones in this passage anticipates the dehistoricized portraits of violence in The First Man. As we saw in our reading of The Plague, the tropes that establish an alternate ground for solidarity among Algeria’s diverse populations are also those that throw the origins of violence into perpetual regress. For example, a dialogue on the longue durée of colonial struggle begins with the atrocities committed by both sides during Mondovi’s 1851 insurrectionary wars but concludes outside historical time with the archetypal fratricide of Cain and Abel: “We were at war, said Veillard.—Let’s be fair, the doctor added, we had trapped them in caves with their entire smalah . . . and they’d cut off the balls of the first Berbers, who themselves . . . and so we go back to the first criminal, whose name was Cain, and it’s been war since.”78 In The First Man, the historical forces behind these eruptions of barbarism are voided of relevance or displaced onto a bloodthirsty land; Algeria itself risks becoming an atemporal gray zone in which colonizer and colonized are perennially locked in a murderous embrace. Cain and Abel’s originary fratricide in The First Man echoes Christ’s culpable survival in The Fall. The gospel’s cry displaces the anecdotal cries of the girl that Clamence failed to save one night in Paris, and both anecdotal and historical falls are subsumed by the fall of Christ. The origins of complicity and violence are sent into dizzying historical regress and fi nally located in Christ’s guilt for having survived the massacre of Judea’s children: “He knew he wasn’t altogether innocent. . . . The lamentation would rend the night, Rachel would call her children who had been killed for him, and he was still alive!” (113). If Christ himself is tainted by the gray zone, innocence is

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structurally impossible, and complicity is a universal condition. As Camus’s experiments reveal, allegory is always at risk of losing its animating force and ossifying into a transhistorical, naturalized, even metaphysical, condition.79 The endless cry of history’s victims is a recurrent figure for innocent suffering in Camus’s oeuvre. Rachel’s lamentation over the children of Judea, along with the cry that resonates in Clamence’s memory, echoes that of the child struck by the plague, whose “long incessant scream” issued from “the small mouth, fouled by the sores of the plague and pouring out the . . . death cry that has sounded through the ages of mankind.”80 The trope of history’s endless cry reemerges again in Resnais and Cayrol’s documentary on the concentration camps and its final address to “we who do not hear that one cries without end.” But in The Fall, the poignancy of this cry is cut short by bursts of ironic laughter, “a good friendly laugh . . . that put things back in their place”; it invites us to question the displacements of the text’s allegorical mode.81 Clamence’s smug vision of history as a repetition of the same catastrophe points to the malfunctions of an allegory as capacious as the fall. If the melancholic autobiographical fragments of The First Man do not ironize its narrative mode and figural drift, The Fall is a highly crafted (and crafty) piece of fiction that knowingly shows us both the political reach of allegory—in its ability to grasp multiple histories— and its drawbacks. Its irony exposes allegory’s reduction of disparate histories into a paradigm that is impervious to variation or change. This chapter has sketched the itinerary of several figures (vermin, plague, the concentrationary, gray zones of complicity, and the cry) to propose that their circulation within Camus’s oeuvre, and the postwar cultural landscape more generally, wove together multiple strands of historical memory. These figures functioned as noeuds de memoire, historical palimpsests and vectors of political awareness during decolonization, while offering glimpses into nonterritorial modes of belonging and affiliation. The ongoing relevance of these figures, among the most influential images for terror in the past century, conveys the central place of literature for what Camus considered “the task of our time . . . to forge an art of living in times of catastrophe.” 82 Whereas a large portion of this chapter has been devoted to the animating force of Camus’s figures within his time, in closing I also suggest that their self-conscious uses shine a light on the dangerous intersections produced

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by unchecked allegory. The Fall probes the limits of allegory’s potentially limitless correspondences; it ironizes the protagonist’s figural drift; and it reveals the authoritarian uses of complicity itself. This irony is particular to literature, which, unlike philosophical and theoretical discourse, folds selfinterrogation into itself. My point in drawing attention to the Algerian resonances of allegory in The Plague and The Fall is not to rescue Camus from charges of imperial investments, but rather to tease out the significance of his literary figures for overlapping frames that include the Maghreb and its colonial history. This is not because I believe Camus was guilty of such investments or even that the multiple valences of his figures exonerate him from such charges. As I suggested earlier, Camus’s reception has been limited by adjudications of his life and work that turn to the historical record to prove him right or wrong, guilty or innocent. His corpus remains a battleground for competing memories and politics: His ideological legacy, his literary corpus, even his bodily remains (which Sarkozy wished to move to the Panthéon) are mobilized for competing interests. Rather, I’ve sought to displace the terrain of responsibility, ethics, and politics away from the author as subject to the figures in his texts and the practice of reading itself. Responsibility is not about rescue but about remaining responsive to a figure’s layered meanings, potentialities, and migrations across space and time. Camus’s reception has been limited by a persistent inability (or refusal) to read his allegories in their multiplicity; their referential instability is shut down so that only one history is visible and mobilized to various ends (whether it is the “war on terror” or the dismissal of repentance for colonialism in France’s memory wars, both of which are addressed in chapter 6). Yet, as we have seen, a figure like the plague gives us figuration in the mode of a plague, a kind of viral figurality that mutates and recombines with other sites and textual bodies. As examples of such movement I evoked Dib’s Le métier à tisser and Resnais’s Night and Fog, but many other contemporary works could be mentioned in this multidirectional politics of figure.83 Camus’s figures mark the tension between bearing witness to the past by preserving a figural archive of terror and mobilizing this past against current and invisible strains of the plague. Their contagious histories invite us to read several pasts side by side while reminding us that the pathways of memory can sometimes lead to dangerous intersections where distinct

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histories not only converge but also can collide and collapse into one another. The vitality and virality of figures such as the plague or the endless cry of history have been traced with reference to their textual migrations within and around Camus’s literary corpus in the 1950s. The next chapter takes this analysis of concentrationary figures into the cinematic medium with a reading of Night and Fog that tracks the reverberations of the documentary’s afterlife diachronically, from the postwar era to our contemporary horizon of terror.

T h r e e

Auschwitz as Allegory: From Night and Fog to Guantánamo Bay We are caught in a knot of history where complicity is absolute. —Albert Camus, Lettres à un ami allemand

What does it mean for the memory of atrocity to emerge from within the shadow of complicity, especially when it is the memory of others, of those who perished in the camps? And what happens when the particularity of that memory is turned into a figure for other causes, when those who are summoned to remember are torn between the competing demands of testimony and politics? France’s postwar aesthetics of complicity were shaped by the Nazi occupation and its gray zones, yet its practitioners also sought to fashion a future-oriented politics of remembrance. As the preceding chapters suggest, figures such as allegory conveyed unexpected proximities between then and now, here and there, but also between us and them or victims and perpetrators, awakening a recognition of ongoing regimes of terror and mindless forms of complicity. Camus conveyed this historical knot of complicity by entangling disparate memories of violence, as in the palimpsestic camp of The Fall; his narrative gray zones contaminated “us, children of the mid-century” with its coercive 99

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address. Form and figure became the sites for an investigation of memory-in-complicity. Camus’s fiction is allegorical and therefore explicitly at a distance from the singularity of historical events such as the Nazi genocide. What are the implications of a documentary such as Night and Fog when it abandons the objectivity associated with its medium, crafting instead an experience of complicity in the face of historical catastrophe? Serge Daney captured the contagious relay of complicity in Night and Fog when he described it as “a ‘just’ gaze—the gaze of guilty Europe, Resnais’s gaze and consequently mine.”1 We are to understand that the film’s refusal of innocence constitutes its justesse, its equity and integrity. Like Camus’s narrative gray zones, Resnais’s cinematic gaze coerces us to reflect on what it means to witness these images of atrocity from where we stand. Night and Fog also compels us to reflect on what it means to read these images of the camps, in all of their dreadful materiality, but also as hieroglyphs for other histories. Although the density of literary allegory seems opposed to the apparent transparency of documentary cinema, Night and Fog’s indexical reference to Nazi deportation and extermination (evidenced by its use of archival footage) nevertheless opens out into an allegorical meditation on the concentrationary plague and its contagion. Whereas in Camus’s work, figure became a site of multiplying historical reference, in Night and Fog the singularity of an archival image is fractured by figuration, by the scandalous possibility that words and images are haunted by something other than what we hear or see. The documentary oscillates between referential specificity and figural diffusion, between the demands of the past and those of the present, suspending its viewers between the ethical exigencies of testimony and an instrumental politics of memory. This oscillation between testimony and politics, opened by the documentary’s formal experimentation, may well explain Night and Fog’s contested legacy. Even though Night and Fog was the landmark film on the Nazi genocide in postwar Europe, it remains the object of vigorous critiques, in part because its historical subject seems at odds with the universalizing reach of its figures. Like Camus, who was accused of perpetrating an aesthetic extermination of the Algerians in Oran, Resnais too was accused of symbolic collaboration with genocide in his failure to convey the specifically Jewish nature of the Final Solution: “Night and Fog . . . silently buries six million Jews in

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universal genocide . . . and the Jews vanish with hardly a trace.” Once again, allegory’s foreclosure of difference produces accusations of historical transference whereby a representation is seen to rehearse the violence it records. The film’s poetic registers have also led to its dismissal as a stylization of atrocity. Claude Lanzmann objected to the beauty of Resnais’s tracking shots, along with what he perceived to be the idealistic lyricism of Jean Cayrol’s text, which recuperated the Shoah into a universal lesson of “man’s inhumanity to man.”3 The director of Shoah even condemned Resnais’s use of archival footage for “killing the imagination” and producing suspect forms of closure and catharsis.4 For Lanzmann, the Shoah’s memory must take as its founding principle the impossibility of understanding, or Auschwitz’s law, as Primo Levi memorialized it: Hier ist kein Warum (here there is no why). As we saw in chapter 1, for those who work within a model of trauma and representational crisis, the incomprehensibility of the Shoah is at once an epistemological fact and an ethical commitment: The Nazi genocide is envisioned as modernity’s emblematic trauma and its limit-event, as having shattered traditional frameworks and inaugurated a conception of representation and ethics in which the unintelligible violence of history must be conveyed as such, lest we succumb to the “obscenity of understanding.”5 Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah is described by its maker as a film that refuses comprehension and whose testimonial authenticity lies in its performative transmission of horror from the survivor-witness to the viewer. Shoah plunges us into the subjective thickness, immediacy, and particularity of the survivors’ experience; it seeks to become a memorial site of perpetual retraumatization in which viewers witness the past’s resurrection. Lanzmann’s objection to form and figure in Holocaust representation recalls Adorno’s ban on poetry and is echoed in theoretical discourses defending realistic purism or literalism. Discourses on the radical unrepresentability of the Nazi genocide continue to operate within the terms of Adorno’s dictum, “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric,” which is often misread as putting a ban on form and figure.6 But such a ban can hardly be taken at face value, since this very formulation is through a figure—“Auschwitz”— that functions here as a synecdoche for a radical historical crisis. In a later qualification of this aphorism, Adorno identified a central tension animating post-Holocaust art: On the one hand, art risks betraying the victims to whom it bears witness by casting their suffering into form and giving meaning to

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an otherwise unthinkable history. On the other, only art and its power of transfiguration can bear witness to forms of historical violence that defy direct representation: It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it. The most important artists of the age have realized this. The uncompromising radicalism of their works, the very features defamed as formalist, give them a terrifying power, absent in helpless poems to the victims of our time.7

For Adorno, form and figure enact a tension between testimony and betrayal, between an authentic representation of suffering and specious aesthetic distance. Resnais and Cayrol’s Night and Fog helps us engage with the complexity of Adorno’s aphorism and its later qualifications. A close reading of the film’s form shows us how memory-in-complicity can forge an ethical and political mode of Holocaust remembrance. The documentary shaped the collective memory of the Nazi genocide in postwar Europe, not only by crafting iconic images of the concentrationary plague, but by tracking its contamination in other times and places. Night and Fog models a relationship between aesthetic form and historical violence that is not about trauma but about complicity. The film navigates between traumatic and ironic modes of complicity, where identification between viewer and film is both invited and disrupted, opening up a volatile ethics and politics of remembrance. After the theoretical articulations of universal shame examined in chapter 1 and the literary analyses of postwar gray zones in chapter 2, this chapter takes my analysis of complicity’s multiple registers to the cinematic medium. By constructing a visual topography of the concentrationary experience that extends into post-Holocaust modernity, Night and Fog, like The Fall, is an early articulation of the gray zone and its propensity for universalization. Yet unlike the gray zone’s conversion into paradigm— as we saw in the philosophical reflection of Agamben or the critical discourses of trauma—the mobility of aesthetic figures in Night and Fog forges a collective politics of remembrance that continues to reverberate today.8 This politics emerges from within a multilayered recognition of complicity with violence at the individual and state levels. As with Camus’s allegories, a key dimension of the documentary’s politics was its overlay of Nazism and colonialism as ideological formations whose

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complicity was exposed to engage with the Algerian War. Within its historical moment, then, the documentary’s formalism and registers of complicity harbored a force of historical relevance and political critique that has been dislocated and diffused in the recent discourse of trauma, representational crisis, and the gray zone. Although it may initially seem to perpetuate a universalizing and depoliticizing vision of culpability, thus participating in the “gray zone” that is now so prevalent in approaches to Holocaust testimony, what is of particular interest in Resnais’s documentary and merits recovering today is the way it rehearses the perils of such a transhistorical deployment while investing Auschwitz with a powerful political charge in postwar France. More specifically, the dialectical force of allegory (its immobilization and animation of critique), along with the film’s visual and verbal positioning of the audience as a potentially complicitous witness, opens Night and Fog out to alternate historical projects, specifically in a colonial and postcolonial context. Whereas the preceding chapter observed the circulation of figures for historical terror within a synchronic slice of time, here we begin at the same time (1955) to trace the diachronic path of Resnais’s figures from Auschwitz to Guantánamo Bay by way of Algeria and Senegal. I thus put Night and Fog into dialogue with subsequent allegorizations of the concentrationary experience to demonstrate its ongoing political vitality while addressing the troubling ethical questions that such allegoresis raises even as it mobilizes action at particular historical junctures.

An Aesthetics of Complicity Commissioned by the Comité d’histoire de la 2e Guerre Mondiale to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, Resnais’s film was made in collaboration with Jean Cayrol, a Resistance fighter interned in Mauthausen under Himmler’s 1941 decree of Nacht und Nebel (which ordered the disappearance of the Third Reich’s enemies), a decree that Cayrol reappropriated, indeed resignified, in a poetry collection titled Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard, which eventually furnished the title of the film. The documentary’s challenge to what Georges Didi-Huberman calls the Nazi machinery of désimagination and its restoration of victims’ traces occurred paradoxically under the title of a decree responsible for their disappearance.9

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From its very inception and in its title, Night and Fog exploited the registers of contamination and complicity that would come to characterize the ambiguous charge of its legacy. As several critics have noted, Night and Fog pulls its spectators into the perceptual field of Nazism.10 From its opening sequence, the filmic perspective seamlessly connects norm to extreme and puts into circulation different positions, creating resonances between here and there, then and now, and, perhaps most uncomfortably, between victims, perpetrators, and viewers. Text and montage coerce us to enter into history through multiple dislocations, to step into a zone of contaminating identifications. As the camera pans across Auschwitz’s deserted landscape, the narrator reminds us that this ground was once marked by “le piétinement des concentrationnaires,” or the shuffling of the detainees. Today, however, there remains “plus aucun pas que le nôtre,” no footsteps save our own. The next sequence is footage from German newsreels and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will that shows Nazi soldiers marching in 1933 as the war machine gears up and steps into place (“1933, la machine se met en marche”). The shuffling of now-vanished detainees is figurally linked to our own visual footsteps as we follow the camera that paces restlessly through the camp’s remains and abruptly yields to the archival footage of the German military’s goosestep. In this dense sequence, the footstep becomes a rhetorical figure that binds together a number of disparate positions: the shuffling detainees, the pacing camera, and the film crew’s footsteps in Auschwitz “today” and the German army’s stiff gait “yesterday.” Both the text and image enmesh the detainees, Resnais’s camera, the viewers of the film, and Nazism itself into a perceptual web of complicity.11 From the outset, the documentary invites a peculiar form of identification, not with the experience of victims or of executioners in any stable way, but with a circulation of perspectives between victims, executioners, and primary and secondary witnesses. Contrary to the widely received notion that the film transmits the traumatic experience of victims, these shifts in perspective convey instead the shifting identifications and mobile circulation of positions characteristic of Primo Levi’s gray zone. The circuits of complicity within the concentration camps spill out and contaminate the viewer’s gaze, yet this circulation of innocence and guilt never freezes into a static condition of “traumatic complicity” but remains in motion. If at points the

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experience of the camps is delivered to us through the shocked gaze of victims, at others, the camera aligns itself with the perpetrator’s gaze. A pan across the remnants of Birkenau’s empty bunk beds resembles the deliberate sweep of a surveillance camera as the narrator describes the brusque nocturnal incursions of the SS into the barracks (shots 91–95). Even more disquieting is a later sequence, when the camera enlists the viewer’s complicitous gaze with extermination itself (shots 235–37). A forward tracking shot guides us into Majdanek’s gas chambers, and we follow the victims’ journey to their death. In a lateral pan, however, our perspective is shuttled from the gas chamber door to an SS observation post and then to another shut door, while the voiceover dispassionately utters, “On fermait les portes. On observait [One/we would close the doors. One/we would observe].” The viewer included in the address is indeed compelled to observe the now-empty gas chamber from the perspective of the SS.12 The perspectival shifts of Night and Fog place the spectator as victim, but also as a collaborator or accomplice to the Nazi gaze. In doing so, the film deliberately stages the cinematic medium’s capacity for transference and complicity with the violence that it documents. This formal self-reflection comes to the fore in sequences portraying Nazism’s aestheticization of terror. The unification of Germany through the exclusion of its undesirables is conveyed by a musical metaphor: “We need a nation without a false note, in perfect tune [sans fausse note].” The concentration camps that implement this murderous metaphor are inspired by various architectural designs; even the crematorium acquires the picturesque quality of postcards (“un petit air carte postal”). We are constantly reminded of the spectacularization of suffering in the concentrationary universe. From the theatricality of the deportee’s entry into the camp’s nocturnal setting (“a decor revealed by a very ‘expressionist’ mise-en-scène”) to the orchestras that accompanied a day of harrowing labor or even an execution, the film is a meditation on what Primo Levi describes as the “voice of the Lager, the expression of its geometric madness.”13 Over and over, Night and Fog reminds us of the production of art within the crucible of pain, humiliation, and annihilation, just as Theodor Adorno reminds us of the barbarism of creating poetry after—indeed, from within—Auschwitz. Yet, as we shall see, for Cayrol and Resnais, along with Camus and Adorno, aesthetic form is a paradoxical site of historicity and ethics. The testimony to suffering and atrocity compels a turn, however

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perilous, to poetry and figuration.14 The documentary’s unexpected meditation on form and figuration was central to mobilizing an ethics and a politics of memory. This meditation on the forms of concentrationary terror inevitably implicates the documentary itself, which points to the violence of its own formalizing procedures and their complicity with Nazi practices. Paradoxically, Resnais and Cayrol’s attunement to the potential violence of their aesthetics enables a material critique of the Nazi regime. The interplay of text and image suggests continuities between the concentrationary system and its historical and artistic representation, by staging their converging violence upon bodies that circulate within these economies. Aesthetics opens a passage between horror and the everyday by way of complicity, illustrating the proximities between extermination and the phantasmagoria of capitalist production. Early edits of Night and Fog show a far more direct link between capitalism and genocide, between the camps’ economy of production and the process of extermination. In the typed manuscript housed at the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Nazism’s technology of “productive extermination” is explicitly invoked and racialized: “The fi nal solution to the Jewish problem decided in [19]42. Inferior races must work for us: Jews, Poles, gypsies, Russians must be annihilated, but productively so: annihilation by work is the most productive.” A note scribbled by Resnais in the margin, “The two aspects of the system: economic/extermination,” signals this preoccupation with the economic dimension of extermination.15 Another excised fragment elaborates this linkage of extermination and production, or annihilation by work: Economic advantages of the camps. Buchenwald’s monthly profits from renting out detainees to businesses. Camp lands belong to Himmler. His wish to turn camps into independent businesses. . . . Camps are constructed beside factories, and factories beside camps. Burial of the detainees in underground factories. These secret factories require a growing, secret labor force subject to annihilation.16

In the final version of the script, on Himmler’s 1942 visit to Auschwitz, all that remains of this reflection on capitalism and genocide is the terse “Il faut anéantir, mais productivement [one must annihilate, but productively],” followed by a visual sequence on mass extermination and the recuperation

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of the victims’ property and remains. As we saw, the racial specificity of the Final Solution, signaled by Himmler’s visit to Auschwitz, is almost evacuated in Cayrol’s rewriting of the script, a point to which I will return. More pertinent here is that the subsequent version mutes the imbrication of genocide with capitalism so central to the initial project’s materialist critique. Nevertheless, the historical complicity that the prior version sought to establish between the camps’ deadly economy and the logic of capitalist productivity is not lost. Rather, it is displaced onto the film’s form and the narration’s poetic registers. Poetry becomes the improbable vector of this historicist critique; irony becomes a strategy of denunciation. Consider, for example, the grim symmetry of “Le charbon manque pour les crématoires. Le pain manque pour les hommes [Not enough coal for the crematoria, not enough bread for the men],” an ironic analogy that inserts the starving detainees and the crematoria into which they will be fed into a continuous cycle of consumption. Similarly, the industrial production of corpses is conveyed in the image of the victims’ bodies in serial alignment like so many commodities: “The alignment of bodies conforms to a model without age, that dies with eyes open [Les corps s’alignent sur un modèle sans age, qui meurt les yeux ouverts].” The textual irony underscores the complicity between capitalism and extermination, while the accompanying still— an emaciated face with protruding eyes wide open—particularizes the anonymity of these corpses and disrupts their visual consumption. The documentary creates a mobile web of ironic complicity: It does not allow us to identify fully with the victims’ suffering and annihilation. Rather, it compels us to feel the proximities between the horror of extermination and patterns of everyday production and consumption.17 The camps’ role in the wartime military-industrial economy is subtly yet continually underscored, just as Nazism’s ideology of productive annihilation is both expressly and figurally linked to capitalist modernity. The sequence on extermination, for example, deliberately lingers on the industrialization of death and the attempt to reap a posthumous profit from the victims by recycling their remains. These technologies of bodily expropriation, extermination, and recuperation are portrayed not as atavistic hiccups of barbarism in civilization, as they were at the Nuremberg trials and specifically in relation to the use of human remains, but as continuous with Western modernity’s instrumental logic of productivity.18

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The sequence that portrays the attempt to recycle human remains is the most chilling literalization of Himmler’s logic of “productive annihilation.” Sequence XXIIa (shots 246–68) begins with the narrator’s declaration that everything is recuperated from the detainees. Piles of glasses, combs, shaving brushes, and shoes are followed by masses of hair turned into cloth, charred bodies whose ashes are destined to fertilize cabbage fields, decapitated corpses that will be turned into soap, and finally a pile of skin that yields to an enigmatic display of images. Human bodies have become commodities in a mad capitalist phantasmagoria where product is literally reaped from the dead as their remains are recycled into fertilizer, cloth, soap, and artifacts. Yet Resnais’s camera visually returns these commodified remains back to nature. We see oceans of hair, fields of bone, torsos aligned like logs amid logs, and severed heads displayed in a bucket. The camera stages a nature morte in a dreadful literalization of the expression; it conveys the brute materiality of these remains and yet also gestures to the disquieting possibility of their aestheticization. If there is a moment in Night and Fog that might appear to stage a “crisis of representation,” it would perhaps be the series of shots that concludes the sequence on the recuperation of human bodies. Yet the shock delivered by this sequence is part of a deliberate reflection on figure and participates in the modes of ironic complicity I have been tracing thus far. The sequence on recycled remains is central to the documentary’s reflection on figure, complicity, and ethics. As we are taken through a gallery of mutilated corpses, the text recedes before the images and Michel Bouquet’s voice falters, “With the corpses . . . but we can say nothing more.” Yet the voice-over resumes: “With the corpses, one/we want(s) to make soap [on veut fabriquer du savon],” only to trail off in an ellipsis, “As for the skin . . . .”19 The narrative voice falls silent, and the flute’s pizzicato stutters as the camera slowly pans over a pile of human skin. This is followed by a swift panoramic shot of drawings displayed on an outdoor table, and their eerie flutter in the breeze (Figure  1, Night and Fog, Buchenwald display of tattoos). Although the viewer is prepared by the shots that precede this display, the images on the table are initially confusing in the absence of explanatory text. Are they drawings on paper? Plans of how the victims’ skin might be used for lampshades and other artifacts? Is it actual skin turned into some sort of canvas for art? Upon re-viewing the sequence, it becomes clear that these images

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Figure 1. Night and Fog. Buchenwald’s display of tattoos.

are sections of tattooed human skin, stripped from the victims and displayed as artifacts. This is footage from Buchenwald that Resnais would have seen in the documentary Les camps de la mort produced by Actualités françaises in 1945; the sections of tattooed skin were exhibited as evidence of Nazi atrocity at the Nuremberg trials.20 The excision of tattoos from the dead is the culmination of a process of bodily expropriation that begins at the camp’s very gates, where “under the pretext of hygiene . . . nudity delivers an already humiliated human being to the camps,” and the numerical tattoos of Nazism’s “delirious accounting system” are imprinted upon the detainees’ bodies. In sharp contrast to the numerical tattoos, those exhibited at Buchenwald were images presumably chosen or imagined and imprinted by the detainees’ own agency upon the intimacy of their body as markers of their personal history. Their surgical removal and subsequent display is the most shocking visual illustration of Nazism’s instrumentalization of bodies both living and dead. The body’s private materiality is brutally dematerialized into artifact or art in a logic that Resnais shows as continuous with the concentrationary logic of productive reification. Yet as we watch the exhibition of these human traces from Buchenwald, what unfolds before our eyes is a series of decontextualized images that initially we cannot help but consume as images. This seems particularly true

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of the final one of a woman’s face looking at the camera. That this decontextualization was a deliberate choice on Resnais’s part is suggested by his manipulation of the source footage. In stark contrast to Night and Fog, the montage documentary that provided the footage, Les camps de la mort, took care to frame Buchenwald’s display so that the spectator came upon these images with a foreknowledge of their status. In Les camps de la mort, a wideangle frame shows the table’s entire contents, followed by a left-to-right then right-to-left tracking shot over the human remains. The narrator explains, “The factory churned. The SS had fun. The camp commander’s wife liked original tattoos. Woe to those who bore one. They were instantly shot and their flayed and tanned skin served to make a new lampshade.”21 Resnais’s avoidance of such framing shots and explanatory narration suggests that the viewer’s disorientation was central to these images’ impact. Indeed, as viewers who may not instantly grasp the historical context and evidentiary status of these relics, we are forced into a bewildered consumption of what Brett Kaplan has called “unwanted beauty,” that is, the disquieting derivation of pleasure from representations of the Holocaust.22 The Buchenwald tattoos visually attest to a violence that remains unspoken by the text (“quant à la peau . . .”), perhaps because this violence is unspeakable in the normative sense of the word. Yet I wish to pause on this ellipsis and consider what the accompanying images convey. The silence that accompanies the exhibition of Buchenwald’s tattoos invites the viewer to carefully scrutinize these traces and decipher their provenance, context, and meaning so that we may “try to look. Just try and see,” as Charlotte Delbo challenges her reader to do in some of the most unbearable scenes of Auschwitz et après: “Essayez de regarder. Essayez pour voir.”23 Try to look. Just try and see, but also try to look so that you may see, if you can see; let’s see if you can see. If this sequence is rarely addressed in critical commentary on the film, it is due to an understandable reticence about transference in critical discourse, a resistance to complicity with the sadism that produced these images in the first place.24 How are we asked to look and see Resnais’s exhibit of the Buchenwald tattoos, to fathom their significance and the ethical stakes of their silent display? On the one hand, the entire sequence on attempts to recycle human bodies could be approached through Jean Cayrol’s Lazarean aesthetic of the remnant, of the poet as a chiffonier, or ragpicker, conducting a resurrec-

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tion of those who have perished through their discarded possessions and remains: “To give life again, so that a shoe lost in a garbage can be part of our legacy. The concentrationary experience had taught me to leave nothing aside. Man lives on in his remains.”25 Yet the legacy of Buchenwald’s aestheticized human remains (severed heads in a bucket, fragments of tattooed skin) is a difficult one to grasp within the Lazarean logic of a testimony solely devoted to the resurrection of the victims; it is difficult precisely because of the sadism that has yielded these images and the inadvertent aesthetic consumption they invite. Thus, to situate this imagery within a particular program such as Cayrol’s Lazarean art does not quite grasp the cognitive disorientation and complex ethical feeling it arouses in the viewer. Given the bewildering impact of the Buchenwald display, one might approach this sequence in light of the theoretical positions examined in chapter 1, where the silence that accompanies the images of atrocity is symptomatic of a “crisis of representation” conveying the unknowability of trauma and the only ethical response to it. Joshua Hirsch, for example, has argued that Night and Fog is a founding text of what he terms “posttraumatic cinema,” which employs realism to “traumatize the spectator” but also “stages a modernist break from realism in order to model a posttraumatic historical consciousness.”26 According to this approach, the film performatively transmits the traumatic nature of the Nazi genocide. Yet I have been arguing that the formal self-reflexivity of Night and Fog is far less engaged in trauma than in complicity. In the Buchenwald display and its arts of annihilation, as in the meditation on economy and extermination, the film cultivates complicity and its recognition in the viewer, reminding us that it is possible to have both an aesthetic and a banalized response to the imagery of atrocity. Night and Fog foregrounds the figurality of its documentary in order to suggest not that the past is unknowable or alien but rather that it is all too familiar. Emma Wilson has proposed that Resnais sensorially transmits an unsayable trauma even as he acknowledges the limits of such a transmission. In Night and Fog, Wilson contends, material remains are vehicles of a haptic rather than optic understanding of horror, a “tactile visuality over which we have no purchase,” which leads to an “unknowing and undoing of the viewer” by the “visceral shudder of indeterminacy.”27 Wilson’s reading of the nail marks left by the victims of extermination on the concrete ceiling of

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Majdanek’s gas chamber illustrates the obtrusively tactile, traumatic, and literal imprint of particular images and their resistance to assimilation. This is a compelling account of the nail marks’ singular testimonial force within the frame of Night and Fog. Yet given their status as literal traces of the victims, how are we to read the visual echo of these nail marks in Resnais’s subsequent film, Hiroshima mon amour (1958), when a young girl devastated by the loss of her German lover and buried alive in her family’s basement cellar can only fi nd relief by digging her nails into its walls and sucking her lacerated fi ngers? The nail marks in Hiroshima mon amour once again function as a tactile image of trauma, albeit of a different scope altogether.28 Their appearance in a damp cellar of Nevers, France, three years after the diffusion of Night and Fog, could not but remind viewers that they were quotations of an imprint whose dreadfully literal origins were found on the ceiling of Majdanek’s gas chamber. At the very least, the figural migration of such traces in Resnais’s own corpus suggests that the testimonial legacy of Night and Fog is far from stably anchored in the memory of those who perished in the Nazi camps. The material trace of these victims undergoes an aestheticizing historical displacement and becomes a trope that migrates across distinct histories, sites, and subject positions. As we saw in our discussion of figures such as the gray zone and the cry in Camus, the potential dehistoricization of such migration is a risk embedded in allegory. I do not fault Resnais for recycling the material traces of the victims in Night and Fog as figure in Hiroshima mon amour. On the contrary, it is a sign of his lucidity toward the potential betrayal inherent in any aesthetic representation of horror.29 My point is that, as in the nail marks’ intriguing reappearance in Hiroshima mon amour, the silent traveling shot of Buchenwald’s tattoo display does more than seek to convey trauma and epistemological crisis. Rather, it suggests the complicity of the fi lmic medium with the very atrocity that it documents and stages the spectators’ complicity with the images they consume. In other words, the “barbarism of poetry” or the betrayals of figuration decried by Adorno are precisely what enable viewers, or “those who were never there,” to reckon with the complexity of remembering the dead. The aesthetic mediation of Night and Fog introduced a contaminated kind of witnessing (through form) of what has happened to others (in history). As we shall see, this stylization of remembrance in complicity accounts for its imagery’s ongoing political vitality.

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The Buchenwald tattoos sequence conveys the four vectors of complicity I have traced thus far in Night and Fog: (1) the spectator’s coercion into a sensory collaboration with the perpetrators’ gaze, (2) the historical proximity between Nazi atrocity and an ongoing capitalist modernity, (3) the aestheticization of suffering and annihilation in the camps’ “geometric madness,” and (4) the cinematic image’s collusion with this aestheticism. These overlapping forms of complicity function not “traumatically” but ironically, and thus, I will suggest, they are politically animating rather than paralyzing. This cinematic complicity is entirely consistent with Resnais’s reflection on the violence of representation and the ethics of the image. From the “botany of death” performed in the colonial displays of African artifacts in Les statues meurent aussi to the museum’s framing of nuclear disaster as spectacle in Hiroshima mon amour, Resnais’s formalizing reflection constantly reminds us that the petrification and circulation of suffering bodies is the cost of representation. In Night and Fog, the mutilation of the human body and the dispossession of its most private inscriptions compel us to consider the complicit violence of documentary representation and its transformation of real bodies into reified images. The display of Buchenwald’s tattoos are a mise en abyme— as shocking as it might seem— of Resnais’s own montage, which cuts up, reassembles, and displays images of the camps’ victims as art. Resnais was still aware of the transferential violence of his representational practice thirty years later when he reported, “In the cutting room . . . I had the strange impression of manipulating documents of corpses, or what is even worse, of living people—when they’re dead it’s less terrible than when they’re alive— and of trying to conduct research on form.”30 This reflection on the violence of montage, the cutting or découpage and reassembly of images of bodies that are ripped out of context, shorn of their specificity, and recycled in the documentary, conveys Resnais’s recognition of the dangers of transference, of replicating past violence in the representation of this past.31 His feeling of contamination and shame at various stages of the film’s making, for instance as he manipulated still and moving images to create visual drama (“I was a bit ashamed during the montage”), also reminds us that the documentary risks turning the suffering of victims into a spectacle of circulating commodities.32 In their perilous capacity for beauty, such images recall Adorno’s cautionary words on the betrayal of the image in the artistic testimony of lived violence, for

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by turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, it wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of sheer physical pain . . . contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. The moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its opposite.33

Resnais’s attunement to the violence of his formalism refuses what Geoffrey Hartman has termed the realistic purism that we typically associate with documentary form.34 Instead, Night and Fog gives us a volatile, self-reflexive, even ironic testimony alert to the ambiguities facing representations of genocide. Just as the film reflects on its complicity and betrayal, it also forces us, as viewers, to reckon with our own complicity, not only as consumers of such images, perhaps engaged in our own forms of distancing or catharsis, but— most important for the film’s political thrust— as blind witnesses if not accomplices to an ongoing genocidal catastrophe that constitutes post-Auschwitz modernity. This turn to historical complicity (and its implicit political challenge) fi nds its fullest allegorical expression at the close of the film, as the narrator admonishes viewers about their own unwitting complicity with the violence of history. A close reading of the film’s concluding passage through a sustained consideration of allegory lets us discern more clearly the ethical, memorial, and political stakes of its often-criticized formalism and universalization of the Holocaust.

Allegory, Ruins, and History If you go there—you who was never there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again. Toni Morrison, Beloved Allegory views existence, as it does art, under the sign of fragmentation and ruin. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Night and Fog closes with a disquieting admonition: The narrative voice declares that we who have watched these images of atrocity fail to see the

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ongoing reality of concentrationary terror as it unfolds in different times and places, just as we fail to hear the endless cry of human suffering. The film’s final gesture breaches the limits of historical documentary and opens up an allegorical reading of its testimony. In so doing, it also positions the spectator as a blind and deaf witness, if not accomplice, to contemporary iterations of Nazi terror. The intersection of allegory and complicity with which the film closes—indeed, through which it refuses closure—might well explain the enduring force of its critique across historical horizons and geopolitical sites. Yet it also provokes a tension between the film’s documentary commemoration of those who perished in the camps and its allegorical mobilization of a politics of memory that serves victims of a different history. Once again, paradoxically, it is the film’s form and figural registers that open up a politics of memory, but in doing so they compromise the film’s testimonial specificity: As I speak to you, the cold water of marshes and ruins fill the hollows of the charnel houses, water that is as cold and opaque as our bad memory. War has sunk into slumber, one eye still open. Grass has faithfully returned to the Appel-platz around the blocks. An abandoned village, still full of menace. The crematorium is obsolete. Nazi ruses are out of fashion. Nine million dead haunt this landscape. Who among us stands guard from this strange observatory to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own? Somewhere, among us, there remain lucky kapos, recuperated leaders, unknown denouncers. There are those of us who sincerely look at these ruins as if the old concentrationary monster lay dead under its debris, who feign to take heart before this receding image, as if one recovered from the concentrationary plague, we who feign to believe that this is only of one time and of one nation, and who do not think to look around us and to hear that one cries without end. Au moment où je vous parle, l’eau froide des marais et des ruines remplit le creux des charniers, une eau froide et opaque comme notre mauvaise mémoire. La guerre s’est assoupie, un oeil toujours ouvert. L’herbe fidèle est revenue sur les Appel-platz autour des blocks. Un village abandonné, encore plein de menaces. Le crématoire est hors d’usage. Les ruses nazies sont démodées. Neuf millions de morts hantent ce paysage.

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Qui de nous veille de cet étrange observatoire pour nous avertir de la venue des nouveaux bourreaux? Ont-ils vraiment un autre visage que le nôtre? Quelque part, parmi nous, il reste des kapos chanceux, des chefs récupérés. Des dénonciateurs inconnus. Il y a nous qui regardons sincèrement ces ruines comme si le vieux monstre concentrationnaire était mort sous les décombres, qui feignons de reprendre espoir devant cette image qui s’éloigne, comme si on guérissait de la peste concentrationnaire, nous qui feignons de croire que tout cela est d’un seul temps et d’un seul pays, et qui ne pensons pas à regarder autour de nous et qui n’entendons pas qu’on crie sans fi n.

At the moment of the film’s testimony, when the narrator addresses the spectators viewing the ruins of Birkenau’s crematoria, Auschwitz is far from an established lieu de mémoire. It is a precariously receding image, susceptible to dissolution by the ebb of memory and the flow of time. The sequence thus admonishes the viewer to a devoir de mémoire (duty of remembrance), but at the same time, its own operations undermine the stability of Auschwitz as a collective memorial site. Indeed, the figures in this dense, poetic passage naturalize history by spatializing time and by merging history into setting (Walter Benjamin called this operation Schauplatz). Its metaphoric and mythopoetic elements convey the contamination of nature and memory by history, but at the same time, history is vaporized by allegorical figuration. In this landscape of ruin and desolation, nature—like postwar collective memory—bears the mark of historical time; it has been contaminated by genocide, and yet it still returns to claim its terrain. The peculiar grass that covered over the traces of the deportees’ footsteps (“Une drôle d’herbe a poussé et recouvert la terre usée par le piétinement des concentrationnaires”) now faithfully shows up to morning call on the Appel-platz, taking the place of those who were counted there under unbearable conditions each dawn (“L’herbe fidèle est revenue sur les Appel-Platz autour des block”).35 The bodies have vanished, and it is the landscape that is endowed with a disquieting kind of survival. Like the faithful grass that erases their trace and reclaims the terrain, war is figured as a watchful beast, a Cerberus at the gate of Hades, who can at any time reawaken. Despite the text’s allegorical and mythopoetic registers, however, the camera lingers on the material traces of the apparatus of extermination: The final images of abandoned ruins reclaimed by nature returns the viewer to

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the film’s materialist critique. We watch the remains of capitalist modernity’s most violent phantasmagoria: the industrial production of death itself. “The crematorium is obsolete; Nazi ruses are out of fashion,” the narrative voice assures us. Yet the discarded fetishes of genocide remind us that the forces once animating these ruins were no passing fashion, for the endless suffering of concentrationary experience continues even as we fail to heed its cries. Just as the muddy streams seeping through the terrain of Auschwitz reflect the bogs of collective memory, the closing sequence of the film erodes the dams of temporal, spatial, and memorial representation, revealing the precarious threshold between history and nature, memory and forgetting, here and there, then and now, and us and them. At the documentary’s end, Auschwitz emerges as an unstable temporalized space, one precariously poised between the “now” of address, the apparent obsolescence of Nazi extermination, and the timeless suffering of victims. Auschwitz becomes a spatialized time as well. Once a site of internment and extermination, its ruins become a hieroglyph for history as infinite catastrophe. Night and Fog thus concludes on a series of dislocations that bring the concentrationary legacy to bear on multiplying horizons, provoking a tension between its documentary project and its allegorical relevance for other times and places. Despite its apparently indexical status as a documentary, it illustrates the kinds of dislocations we noted in Albert Camus’s concentrationary figures. As we have seen, the visual and rhetorical strategies of the film deliberately destabilize a number of key distinctions: The categories of time and space are blurred such that the site and limit-event of Auschwitz become a figure for the violence of history itself, a synecdoche for a transhistorical phenomenon that Camus influentially defined as le fait concentrationnaire. Allegorized as the bacillus of the plague and concentrationary monster, the epic and pathological figures of Night and Fog, alongside The Plague, endow historical processes with the cyclical inevitability of myth or natural disease. What does it mean to read Auschwitz as allegory, as does Night and Fog at its “endless” end? What tensions are produced by this unexpected passage from the testimonial specificity of documentary to the shadowy realm of allegory? Does this figural turn immobilize the various strategies of complicity detailed thus far into a fixed gray zone? Do the cyclical temporality of catastrophe and the gesture to viewers’ ongoing implication echo Agamben’s

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philosophical construction of Auschwitz as paradigm, with shame (or what I call “traumatic complicity”) as the universal ethical foundation? The allegorical dimension of Night and Fog as a film not only about the Nazi camps but also as a cautionary parable about the concentrationary peril is precisely what constitutes the fi lm’s ever-actual political force. Yet as we saw in chapter 1, allegory is a double- edged sword that can immobilize the past into timeless catastrophe, just as it can animate the present in order to unleash future possibilities. In Albert Camus, figures of complicity entwine different concentrationary legacies, but they also risk reifying history as an immutable gray zone, freezing our collective fall into complicity into a quasi-structural, even metaphysical, condition. This is an ambivalence at the heart of allegory, indeed, of figuration itself. Yet unlike philosophical or theoretical paradigms that universalize historical formations into a permanent state of exception, or a transhistorical gray zone, allegory oscillates between capture and its insufficiency, between the derealization of history into abstraction and a reengagement with the messiness of the material world. To clarify the film’s oscillation between materiality and abstraction, or testimony and figurality, I turn to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on allegory, which help assess both the derealizing effects of “figuring” Auschwitz and the critical energies unleashed by such a gesture. How might Benjamin’s remarks on allegory tease out the full significance of the documentary’s concentrationary topography? As he famously expressed it, The allegorical physiognomy of nature-history . . . is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. . . . Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.36

This analogy between ruins and allegory, between material productions and processes of representation, underlines the converging violence of these practices on the bodies and things that inhabit their respective economies. Both the commodity object and the object of allegorical representation are hollowed-out ciphers that are unmoored from their context and injected with meaning, and yet that meaning itself is arbitrary and infinitely substitutable. As Benjamin describes it, and in terms that resonate with Jean Cayrol’s

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Lazarean aesthetics of the remnant invoked earlier, the allegorist is an avatar of the chiffonier: Through the disorderly fund which knowledge places at his disposal, the allegorist rummages here and there for a par ticu lar piece, holds it next to some other piece, and tests to see if they fit together—that meaning with this image, or this image with that meaning. The result can never be known beforehand, for there is no natural mediation between the two. . . . At no point is it written in the stars that the allegorist’s profundity will lead it to one meaning rather than another. And though it may have once acquired such a meaning, this can always be withdrawn in favor of a different meaning.37

The unmooring of image and object described by Benjamin is precisely what reinvests allegory with shifting and renewable meaning through time, as we saw in the Mediterranean migrations of Camus’s concentrationary plague. Yet this unmooring of object and significance is far more disquieting in a documentary such as Night and Fog, where the “allegorical objects” are the Nazi genocide’s nine million victims turned into so many ghosts whose memory is now pressed into the ser vice of other bodies, times, and places. Benjamin’s remarks on allegory recall us to the formalizing violence or the risks of transference that inhere in any attempt to represent Nazi production in art: the extraction of labor, life, and value from bodies both living and dead. As suggested by Night and Fog’s reflection on complicity, the documentary’s production of an allegorical landscape is contaminated by the historical processes that constitute the site-event of Auschwitz. Yet the documentary does not conceal this contamination, but rather stages its occurrence and tracks its spread. Of particular relevance to the dematerialization of bodies in Resnais’s film is Benjamin’s remark that allegory opens onto a desolate terrain in which “death digs most deeply into the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and its significance.”38 Cayrol and Resnais’s film both denounces and rehearses this “jagged line of demarcation,” or forceful sundering of the victims’ physical being and the meanings that are invested in them. From the fragile material traces of the victims’ passage through the gas chamber, to the exhibition of their private bodily inscriptions in the Buchenwald display, to their immaterial resurrection as nine million ghosts in an unpeopled landscape and their diffraction into the resonance of history’s universal cry of suffering, the arc of Night and Fog

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performs the spectralization that for Benjamin constituted the contradictory force of allegory in its destructive fervor and its redemptive thrust. As Gordon Teskey has argued, “Allegory oscillates between a project of reference and a project of capture.”39 Its inscription of matter into form cannot be exempt from the incorporative violence of capture. Also pertinent is Paul de Man’s formulation of the classic Coleridgean distinction between symbol and allegory, discussed in chapter 1. Whereas the symbol’s premise is the continuity between material perception and figuration, allegory exposes the temporal gap and arbitrariness of this link: The allegorical form appears purely mechanical, an abstraction whose original meaning is even more devoid of substance than its “phantom proxy,” the allegorical representative; it is an immaterial shape that represents a sheer phantom devoid of shape or substance.40

This formulation takes on unexpected material weight when we consider that the nine million ghosts that haunt Auschwitz’s landscape in Night and Fog themselves become allegorical representatives or “phantom proxies” of other bodies and histories; they risk vanishing under the abstraction of history as an eternal recurrence of the same catastrophe. Allegory’s ghosting effect on its objects, its spectral temporality of eternal recurrence, and its naturalization of history were some of Benjamin’s reservations about its baroque practice. As committed as he was to the rescue of material objects, Benjamin, like Cayrol and Resnais, was acutely aware of allegory’s tendency to reinvest dead matter with shifting and renewable meanings. As he put it, “These allegories fill out and deny the void in which they are represented. . . . The intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of the bones but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection.”41 One might recall Night and Fog’s final gesture, which distracts us— albeit knowingly—from the contemplation of Auschwitz’s bones and ghosts to the idea of their resurrection in alternate histories. Despite its cinematic form and habitual association with a modernist, even “posttraumatic,” aesthetics, Night and Fog provides an unexpected illustration of Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory and its melancholy vision of history as the eternal return of the same in the new and the new in the same. The film’s concluding imagery imprints history’s decaying physiognomy on nature, thus spatializing and naturalizing history itself. The rhetoric of

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ruins, cyclical pestilence, and contagion inaugurates a temporality of repetition that blurs the site specificity of Auschwitz and its history, placing it on the verge of a concentrationary mythology with its ghosts, plagues, and monsters. It creates “an opening in the passage of time in which the same ghostly image constantly reappears.”42 Auschwitz emerges as a synecdoche for a concentrationary catastrophe whose antecedents are as ancient as the plague but that paradoxically defines the new time, space, and psychic structure of post-Holocaust capitalist modernity. It is an emblem of what Jean Cayrol called the contemporary “golden age of the concentrationary” and what Camus designated as our contemporary concentrationary universe.43 By the documentary’s end, we seem to have entered into a timeless gray zone of eternal recurrence and universal complicity. In this sense, Night and Fog unveils an allegorical topography that continues to reverberate in contemporary discourses of trauma and complicity such as those examined in chapter 1. This is precisely the conceptual landscape that enables Agamben to deploy Auschwitz as a model for history as ongoing catastrophe, in a gesture of negative idealism that risks taking “politics out of history.”44 Night and Fog can thus be situated within a genealogy of the gray zone, as a precursor to current engagements with history as an infi nite cycle of traumatic complicity. Yet the film’s aesthetic formalism, with its mobile perspective and eddying ironies, prevents its images from settling into essentialist paradigms. If allegory is a form of repetition—indeed, of “recycling” (with the terrible resonance that the term takes on in light of our previous readings)—it is nevertheless not a form of repetition but rather a reiteration that contains ghostly remainders of the past and anticipations of the future. This next section illustrates the argument made in chapter 1 that allegory, unlike models and paradigms in philosophy or theory, is a figure that animates memory toward a future-bound politics. Benjamin will help us wrest figure and collusion out of their recent petrification into the “traumatic complicity” of recent discourses on Holocaust memory. For allegorical visions of history (whether as a gray zone or as cyclical violence) need not settle into a melancholy vision of perpetual catastrophe or a “politics of petrified unrest” but can instead harbor a critical force and open unexpected recognitions, thus responding to the documentary’s call for responsibility.45 Whereas chapter 2 demonstrated the political vitality of Camus’s allegorical plague within a synchronic slice of time, the rest of my reading of Night and Fog

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traces the figure of the concentrationary plague on a diachronic axis. I illustrate how its figural registers wielded a political charge, not only in the postwar context but also across a number of other sites, including our own horizon of concentrationary terror. As a rhetorical figure, allegory harbors a contestatory force that is evident from its baroque expressions through Baudelaire and beyond. Like irony, allegory is a structure of both violence and counterviolence; its destructive impulse retains the very state that it both contains and contests. For Benjamin, this doubleness animates allegory’s dialectical force of progression and regression. Allegory shatters the organic appearance of mythic history to expose the contingency, fragmentation, and ruin behind its official veil. In its disclosure of death as “the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and its significance,” allegory makes visible the costs of its own production. As Teskey puts it, the greatest allegorical poets “do not simply transform life into meaning. They exacerbate the antipathy between the living and the significant by exposing the violence entailed in transforming one to the other.”46 This exposure is made possible by allegory’s structural complicity with what it represents or contests, its capacity to mirror dynamically and critically the violence of history. Allegory’s complicity with instrumentality and its exposure of violence give this rhetorical figure its critical force and historical duration. As we have seen, allegory’s complicity with the violence of history is repeatedly performed in Night and Fog and its gestures to transferences between the fi lm’s aesthetic operations and Nazi technologies of production, destruction, and repre sentation. Paradoxically, it is through the figure of allegory, its contradictory structure and dialectical force of regression and progression, that the fi lm splinters the petrification and forgetting of monumental history, opening Auschwitz out to other proximate histories connected to the Third Reich in ideology, technology, and practices. The following section pursues the fi lm’s legacy as a counterblow to what Georges Perec, in his own brilliant allegorization of history, called “l’Histoire avec sa grande hache [simultaneously History with a capital H and History with its great axe].”47 Chapter 2 examined how Camus’s oeuvre furnished a figural template for crisscrossing the memory of World War II with a recognition of the Algerian War, as well as the Nazi genocide and imperial violence. As we saw, this figure was taken up by Resnais and Cayrol in the

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conclusion of their documentary, which came out not long before the publication of The Fall. In a similar vein, I address the reception of Night and Fog as an allegory of Algeria and then trace the documentary’s splintering effects on the cloisonnement des mémoires, or memorial walls, that remain embedded in French postwar history and historiography, but also in the discourses on the Holocaust’s unrepresentable singularity.

Transcultural Politics of Concentrationary Memory At the film’s release, both Resnais and Cayrol expressed anxiety that Night and Fog might be misconstrued as a purely testimonial monument to the dead, that its commemoration of history’s darkest chapter would close the book on a concentrationary reality that remained all too current in postwar France. As we have seen, their visual and textual rhetoric cautions against the ossification of memorial projects that would turn the ruins of the past into a monument or a paradigm that organizes forgetting.48 The film’s simultaneous performance of and resistance to this kind of memorial petrification is evident in its self-conscious montage and editing. Resnais’s use of heterogeneous archives, including Nazi footage, is an embrace of the film’s own contaminated status as a transient artifact, ruin, or commodity that can and will be subject to allegorical violence in its citation and recycling into alternate histories and political projects. In his protest against the film’s removal from Cannes, Jean Cayrol expressed this antimonumental and desacralizing intention in an evocative metaphor: “The canvas of the screen is not Veronica’s shroud. This is a film that burned the gaze . . . ,” referring here to Saint Veronica’s cloth bearing the imprint of Christ’s face.49 For Cayrol, the filmic screen was neither a blank page receiving the imprint of history nor a cultic object of commemoration. It was like a fire that burned the eyes with its contaminating force, one whose embers would continue to spark and light future representations of historical violence, and not only of the Nazi genocide. We could not be further from the critical orthodoxy of the Holocaust as a crisis of representation, a proposition that is both epistemological and ethical in its simultaneous interdiction of the comparative nature of human understanding and of figural representation. As we shall see, the spreading fires of Night and Fog and its

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mobilization toward alternate histories challenge the “ring of fire” that Claude Lanzmann will later seek to draw around the Holocaust: “The Holocaust is above all unique in that it erects a ring of fire around itself, a borderline that cannot be crossed because there is a certain ultimate degree of horror that cannot be transmitted.”50 The allegorical registers of Night and Fog are what forged this passage into the actuality of the “scandale raciste” decried by Cayrol at its release.51 The poet clarified the film’s rhetoric of complicity by suggesting that there was more than one history at stake in this documentary about the Nazi camps: “It told a story that didn’t only engage the Nazis, sweet Germany [la douce Allemagne], but also our country, for we had no right to modestly avert our gaze before a drama that had contaminated us all.”52 Cayrol alludes to France’s collaboration with deportation, a fact erased by the censorship of the képi, or military cap identifying a French police officer guarding the Pithiviers transit camp (Resnais was forced to remove this sign of collaboration by painting a beam through the cap). But Cayrol also gestures to the unnamed war with Algeria. The allegorical cartography of Night and Fog brought home the proliferation of concentrationary reality, from “la douce Allemagne” to the quotidian soil of douce France itself: “Nous avons voulu décrire cette prolifération concentrationnaire ou lazaréenne sur le doux humus quotidien [We sought to describe this concentrationary or Lazarean proliferation on sweet quotidian terrain].”53 The film’s meditation on contagion and complicity sought to show the historical proximities and ideological circulations that tied Nazi Germany to France, in relation not only to its occupied collaborationist past, but also to its occupationist present as the military entered into the most violent phase of the Algerian War, extending a concentrationary network that, as the historian Sylvie Thénault reminds us, had been in place in France since the Spanish Civil War and reached into the shadowlands of its colonial territories.54 In 1985 when Charles Krantz asked Resnais about the ultimate point of Night and Fog, the director provocatively responded that the point was Algeria: “Just as Camus’ tale was an allegory of the plague of Nazi occupation, Nuit et brouillard needs to be understood as an allegory—but of what? Resnais was quite candid when I asked him the obvious: What was the point of the film, ultimately? ‘The whole point,’ he replied, ‘was Algeria.’ ” Disquieted by Resnais’s allegorical use of the Holocaust as a screen memory for

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Algeria, Krantz concludes that “even the noblest of creations may begin with ulterior motives that may remain secret long afterward.”55 This unease with Night and Fog’s referential instability (is it a testimony of deportation? of the Holocaust? of Algeria? of the concentrationary phenomenon in general?) echoes other indictments since of the documentary’s failure to signal the Jewish specificity of the Nazi extermination, and of its collaboration with the erasure of Holocaust memory in postwar France. The paucity of explicit references to Jews has even led to accusations of Resnais’s complicity with the extermination that he documents. Robert Michael goes so far as to say that the silence over Jewish victims of the genocide is an unintentional enactment of Himmler’s order that “in public . . . we will never speak of the . . . annihilation of the Jewish people.”56 As we saw, this accusation echoes Conor Cruise O’Brien’s indictment of Camus’s The Plague as an aesthetic final solution to the problem of Arabs in Algeria. Both critiques illustrate the ease with which transference is adopted as a given in critical discourse, but they also illustrate critical discourse’s unease with allegory’s multireferentiality. In the case of Night and Fog, it is important to remember some historical factors that explain the incorporation of the Judeocide within a broader reflection on the Nazi genocide. These include the legacy of French Republican universalism and its resistance to isolating Jewish identity, the legacy of the Resistance that foregrounded the figure of the political deportee, a tendency to cast World War II as a war against fascism more generally, and the temporally belated emergence of the Holocaust itself as a category, one to which the 1961 Eichmann trial was crucial.57 To these reasons we might add the most important consideration: By not evoking the historical specificity of the Judeocide, the allegorical register of Night and Fog enabled the film to invoke the repressed events of Algeria and beyond. Charles Krantz’s view that Algeria serves as an ulterior motive for Night and Fog works within the classic view of allegory that chapter 1 sought to complicate. Algeria is posited as the second-order, ultimate reference “behind” Auschwitz. This inscribes allegory and the historical memory it conveys within a finite and hierarchical economy of petrified equivalences. It suggests that making one history visible happens at the cost of rendering another one invisible, as if there were an inevitable tension between a testimonial relationship to the past and the attempt to reanimate this past in service of current and invisible strains of the concentrationary plague. Such a

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view fails to account for what Michael Rothberg terms “multidirectional memory,” in its capacity to grasp historical similarity and difference across geopolitical sites. Yet cultural memory is composite; it is a palimpsest made of overlays such as Auschwitz and Algeria. As chapter 1 suggested, allegory’s operations are key vectors in memory’s multidirectionality, even as they remain a risky mode of engaging history. The challenge that Night and Fog continues to pose to viewers is how to reanimate the contestatory potential of its testimony to the Nazi camps across historical horizons, how to recover the ongoing force of its critique of complicity while resisting a kind of poetics of criticism in which its rhetorical figures (such as cries, plagues, and monsters) are cut off from their circumstances and diminished in their political as well as their commemorative relevance. In contrast to theoretical paradigms, figural operations are ambiguous and dialectical. Although allegory’s regressive pole can indeed petrify history into a zone of universalizing equivalence, its dynamic force can also actualize a differential memory across historical horizons. The film’s transhistorical figures for complicity may have compromised the testimonial specificity of the film as a documentary “about” the Holocaust, yet this compromise enabled an engagement with other histories of racialized violence. Allegory’s betrayal of specificity, including the specificity of the Holocaust, opened the film out to the political horizon of its day and constructed a figural iconography of the concentrationary experience that forged and mobilized its emblematic imagery to testimony with regard to the Nazi past and political engagement with regard to Algeria. The visual language of the film brought into relief a concentrationary reality that was all too proximate and yet repressed as massive government censorship over the Algerian War went into effect. By suggesting the historical analogies between the Nazi regime and the French Republic, between fascism and colonialism, the film performed an important décloisonnement des mémoires (bringing down of memorial walls) that was grasped even before the time of its release. Indeed, even before its battles with censorship, the documentary’s incendiary potential to connect the Nazi past to France’s present was grasped by the military and censorship apparatus. When Resnais was refused a photograph by the Ser vice cinématographique des armées (SCA), it was presumably because of his anticolonialist convictions. His Les statues meurent aussi was censored until 1963 because of its denigration of France’s work in black

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Africa. For the director, the SCA’s refusal signaled the military’s complicity with the double repression of Vichy collaboration and Algerian pacification: “I felt that there was already a solidarity between armies, whether these were French, English (or German, even) that made them unwilling to talk about all this.”59 To “talk about all this” would entail superimposing two histories of occupation and deportation, inscribing the Algerian “events” within a logic of complicity that France was at pains to disavow. Benjamin Stora later confirms Resnais’s historical intuition in similar terms: “To take a lucid look at the Algerian War’s unfolding is to risk thinking of Vichy. This will be a good reason to not talk about either period.”60 Resnais later makes this Algerian context quite clear: “We were right in the midst of the Algerian War . . . and there were already zones in the center of France with regroupment camps. . . . We made the film . . . with the idea that, in a way, it was all starting to happen again in France.”61 By projecting France into the mirror of Auschwitz, Night and Fog sought to give an allegorical face to the war without a name. Yet how might we recover traces of this history in the documentary’s physiognomy today? How might we read its archival images as a potential allegory for its superimposed histories? This involves an exercise in speculative imagination, a risky one to be sure, that won’t meet the standards of rigorous historicization. But I will gesture toward the figural potential of certain shots in an effort to convey the layering and texture of postwar memory that would have been activated by Resnais and Cayrol. The opening shots of fields suddenly sectioned and reframed by barbed wire and watchtowers would have visually brought home an apparently alien concentrationary reality, one that was not established in France until 1957, when the discretionary special powers were extended to the metropole and camps such as Larzac and Rivesaltes interned more than fourteen thousand Algerians suspected of harboring ties with the Front de libération nationale. But as we saw in chapter 2, in Algeria, a network of underground repression camps was already well in place, and as early as 1955 entire sectors of the rural population had been displaced into regroupment camps in an effort to isolate insurgents. Their numbers would soar to over a million by 1959. Michel Rocard’s report, published in the pages of Le Monde that year, describes the dire consequences of this policy. The displacement, regroupment, and internment of these Algerians stripped them of their means of subsistence

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and left them malnourished in terrible unsanitary conditions and with insufficient medical care, causing appalling rates of child mortality (an estimated five hundred deaths per day) in what Tassadit Yacine has denounced as “a genocide that does not speak its name.”62 It would thus not be farfetched to speculate that certain images in Night and Fog would be imbued with allegorical significance in light of the Algerian camps. The memorable shot of a young girl taken at Westerbork station is a case in point. She wears a head scarf, and her face is framed by two wooden boards on the doors of a train as she seems to stare right at the camera. As Sylvie Lindeperg notes, this image was erected as a symbol of the destruction of European Jewry from the 1980s onward.63 Thanks to a Dutch journalist, however, we now know that Anna Maria Steinbach, as the young girl was named, was not Jewish but Sinti. She was deported to Auschwitz on May 19, 1944, along with 244 other Roma and killed that summer. An emblem of the Judeocide turned out to be a Sinti victim. Yet the memorial legacy of this face is even more complex than this overlay of Jewish and Sinti identities in the collective imagination. In the Algerian horizon we have sketched out, Anna Maria Steinbach’s face with its head covering also would have evoked the children dying in the Algerian regroupment camps.64 Along with Camus, Resnais and Cayrol were thus pioneers in the disclosure of a concentrationary topography that was reaching into the French homeland itself. They joined ranks with Robert Antelme, David Rousset, Marguerite Duras, Dionys Mascolo (and later Jean-Paul Sartre, Aimé Césaire, and Jean Amrouche, but not Camus) in one of the earliest intellectual mobilizations against the Algerian War and the only unified postwar anticolonial movement, the short-lived Comité d’action contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique. In the autumn of 1955, several months after the Philippeville massacre (in which the FLN killed 123 French settlers, leading to French military reprisals that claimed an estimated 15,000 Algerian lives), and as Night and Fog was in production, Resnais signed the committee’s letter to Jacques Soustelle, then governor-general of Algeria. Published in Combat, the letter denounced the establishment of a concentrationary universe in Algeria precisely by superimposing histories that France did not want to see implicated, and in terms that would haunt the decade. The initial letter begins with the analogy between Nazi violence and military repression in Algeria: “This war is shameful. We have no right to impose methods we

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condemned ten years ago on our soldiers, methods that risk turning them into war criminals.” Several years before the explosion of the debate around torture on the French public scene, then, the committee’s letter to Soustelle drew its rhetorical force from the analogies it traced between Nazism and colonialism, Gestapo techniques and French pacification. It concluded that a systematic concentrationary regime was already operating at all levels of the French bureaucracy, police, and administration in Algeria, implementing an order of terror that mirrored that of the Third Reich.65 Throughout the Algerian War, the legacy of the occupation, collaboration, and deportation provided a template and a justification for resisting French military policy and its practices of internment and torture. Night and Fog was a crucible for shaping this resistance, for its concluding imagery was charged with a recognizable force in the war’s aftermath. The concentration camp as an incurable disease or a world with no exit, the victim turned executioner, the unheard cry of unseen suffering, the enemy whose face is one’s own, the culpable blindness or deafness of bystanders—these are all tropes that circulate in Camus’s allegories, in Resnais’s documentary, and throughout films, plays, and novels of the period. These figures brought into relief the proximities between the wartime experience and colonial history, addressing the disquieting irony of a nation previously occupied and victimized by Nazi Germany, yet guilty of internment, torture, and summary executions in the ser vice of an ongoing occupation less than a decade later. Their movement of reversal and complicity opened a passage in postwar cultural production between France and Algeria, fascism and colonialism, liberation and decolonization, thus serving as a powerful call to political resistance. As we saw in chapter 2, the concentrationary plague is a key figure for these analogies. For Jean Cayrol, Camus was one of the fi rst historians and explorers of Lazarean, concentrationary art; his cautionary words in the French press were crucial to building an awareness of the Algerian confl ict during the making of Night and Fog. It is therefore fitting that the documentary would end its investigation of the camps by evoking Camus’s influential allegory of the fascist peril as a plague. The preceding chapter evoked the pied- noir’s warning that late-colonial France was infected by the Nazi plague in the press of the day. After the Philippeville massacre, in the columns of L’Express, Camus reminded the public that the cries of French and

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Arab Algerians alike had been falling on deaf ears since the Sétif massacre and demanded that France examine its historical conscience: “Who shut its ears to the cries of Arab wretchedness? Who but France has waited with disgusting good conscience for Algeria to bleed before fi nally noticing its existence?”66 Night and Fog, with its refusal of good conscience, its cultivation of complicity, and its figures—the concentrationary plague, the victim turned executioner, the endless cry, and the culpably blind or deaf bystander— was engaged in an intertextual dialogue with Camus to make the Algerian crisis both visible and audible to the French public. In his investigation of how the memory of World War II fueled opposition to the Algerian War, Martin Evans gives us a compelling example of Night and Fog’s power to convert a reflection on complicity into an act of resistance within the horizon of its immediate reception. Evans interviews Aline Charby, the daughter of Catholic settlers in Algeria who moved to Paris in the early 1950s and viewed the documentary as it opened in theaters. She describes its impact on her as a shock that forever reconfigured her identity, historical consciousness, and political commitments: I was shattered. . . . At that moment it brought home to me what Nazism amounted to. . . . It was truly a horrifying shock. And rightly or wrongly, I made the link between those around me who’d supported Marshal Pétain and those who’d aided Hitler and the Nazis. . . . It shouldn’t be thought that all Nazis were very wicked, utterly vile and hateful people. Your neighbor or your brother might be one; that’s what I thought to myself . . . and I’ve never changed my mind on that matter.67

The documentary’s images and its meditation on complicity awakened Charby to a constellation of links, specifically those between pieds-noirs who supported the Vichy regime in Algeria (including her immediate family), French collaborators, and German perpetrators. The representation of Nazi atrocities alerted her to a series of complicitous links between perpetrators, accomplices, and various kinds of enablers and bystanders, including neighbors and brothers whose faces were no different from her own (“Who among us stands guard from this strange observatory to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?”). The transnational deployment of these links, from Algeria to France to Germany, indicates the productive force of allegorical displacement in its invitation to

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link (“rightly or wrongly,” as Charby puts it) different sites of historical violence by pointing out their ideological kinship and physiognomical resemblances. Charby’s rhetoric of kinship and proximity rather than of identification, affect, and intimacy shifts the focus of her reception to analysis and agency rather than trauma. The “gray zone” woven by these links did not paralyze her into an identification with the perpetrators or the victims in the kind of spectatorial “traumatic complicity” examined in chapter 1. Instead, the complicities woven by Night and Fog galvanized her into joining the clandestine Jeanson network, which, among other things, provided arms to the Front de libération nationale. For Charby, the film’s fi nal interpellation translated the values of the French Resistance into the anticolonial struggle, and in this she was like many other dissenters for whom the wartime legacy made support of French Algeria and the military tactics that this entailed unthinkable. At the time of its reception, then, the documentary’s register of complicity, its allegorical overlay of multiple legacies of violence, proved a catalyst for political action in an altogether different context than the one represented. In one of the earliest representations of the Nazi genocide, then, the petrification of Auschwitz into modernity’s emblematic landscape was at the same time fractured into a differential site of memory and political mobilization. Although the film’s allegorical allusion to the violence of French colonialism in Algeria was readily grasped by certain audiences, such a reading also met with resistance. Perhaps the most astonishing illustration of an attempt to recontain the film’s allegorical relevance for the anticolonial struggle is by one of its founders, Henri Michel, secretary-general of the Comité d’histoire de la 2e Guerre Mondiale, which commissioned Night and Fog, and, with Olga Wormser, coeditor of its central historical source, Tragédie de la déportation. In 1965, as Michel and Wormser sought to integrate Night and Fog into school curricula, Michel worried about the links that could be made between the history of Nazi deportation and the Algerian crisis, presumably the wrong ones this time, since he qualifies them as “tendentious and inopportune.”68 In an educational plan submitted the same year to the Ministry for Cooperation (formerly the Colonial Ministry), Michel sought to rehabilitate French colonialism in light of the antifascist struggle by proposing an educational program for France’s ex-colonies in Africa and Madagascar that would show Night and Fog in tandem with a documentary by

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François Villiers on wartime colonial troops, Ils étaient tous des volontaires (They were all voluntary conscripts). This double bill was intended by Michel to remind the former colonies of their voluntary enlistment against Nazism so that they would “measure the peril from which people of color have escaped, in order to allow them, by comparison, to judge French colonization more equitably.”69 It was through a comparison— or, rather, a contrast— between Nazi Germany and France that Michel attempted to mitigate and relativize, if not rehabilitate, French colonialism and its regime of racialized violence. Despite such attempts to discipline the allegorical legacy of Night and Fog, the film’s text and images have continued to reverberate in colonial and postcolonial cultural production. Like Camus’s figural plague—indeed, in dialogue with it— Resnais and Cayrol’s documentary activated a politics of memory that crossed the Mediterranean, migrated through the Maghreb into sub-Saharan Africa, and continued to illuminate the continuities between Nazism and colonialism. I now turn to Camp de Thiaroye (1988), by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, which provides the colonial countermemory to the history that Henri Michel sought to mobilize for the education of France’s former colonies. Camp de Thiaroye not only juxtaposes the concentrationary horrors of Nazism with the violence of French colonialism, but it also uses footage from Night and Fog in order to pursue the very analogy that Michel sought to forestall and repress. Sembène probes the overlapping violence of the Nazi and colonial regimes of concentrationary violence precisely through the example of the tirailleurs sénégalais, or colonial conscripts in the war, who, as he suggested in his earlier film Emitaï and presumably in sharp contrast to Villiers’s documentary, were far from being “all voluntary conscripts.”70

Colonial Countermemories: Night and Fog in Thiaroye Camp de Thiaroye reconstructs the historical circumstances of a little-known massacre by the French military that took place at an army demobilization camp near Dakar on December 1, 1944, after France’s liberation. The film as a whole constitutes a colonial countermemory to the festive images of France’s liberation, in a symbolic reconfiguration where Allied victory is but

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a continuation of Nazi terror. A troop of colonial conscripts have returned from waging war on behalf of France and are processed through a transit camp before being sent back to their native villages. Among the humiliations they encounter upon returning to their status as mere colonial subjects, the French military authorities refuse to pay the full amount of their military pay and demobilization premiums. The troops rebel and take the general of the French West African army hostage in what appears to be a successful mutiny. They are promised their initial pay, but in the middle of the night, army tanks roll in, gun them down, and raze the camp, killing thirty-five tirailleurs and wounding hundreds of others. Sembène Ousmane was well placed to assess the hypocrisy of the French army and its promises to the tirailleurs sénégalais: He had joined the colonial army as a “voluntary conscript” during World War II. As colonial tanks rolled into Thiaroye and shot down the tirailleurs, he was risking his life in the Nigerian desert under the French flag. France’s betrayal of its colonial army was central to awakening his anticolonial consciousness, just as the massacres of Sétif and Guelma would be for Algerian nationalists a year later.71 Sembène’s ideological formation as a militant Communist was transnational in its scope, shaped by a diversity of struggles for justice. After the war, as a docker in Marseilles, he was active in demonstrations against the Korean War, the war in Indochina, and the Algerian War, and was one of two African militants in the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP), an organization founded in resistance to the occupation’s anti-Semitic legislation. In the 1950s, the MRAP included a number of Resistance fighters and Jews with whom Sembène developed tight bonds of friendship and solidarity.72 It is possible (although I have no evidence of this) that Sembène would have initially watched Nuit et brouillard with this community when it came out in theaters. In any case, the recent memory of anti-Semitism and deportation was integral to his ethico-political commitments. As we shall see, Resnais’s work reappears thirty years later in Sembène’s attempt to represent the occluded massacre of Thiaroye and proves a compelling illustration of how the allegorical force of Night and Fog continued to splinter the memorial walls that separate histories of violence. In Camp de Thiaroye, several visual cues alert viewers to the continuities between the Nazi and French concentrationary regimes. From the outset, an ominous sign at the entrance of the demobilization camp indicates that

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Thiaroye is a camp des isolés coloniaux, which echoes the Third Reich’s camps but might also remind viewers of the French camp of Gurs, a camp des indésirables that detained Spaniards, Basques, French political prisoners, and foreign Jews. The central irony of Camp de Thiaroye, of course, is that the conscripts who return to the injustice of French colonial occupation had risked their lives to defend and then liberate France from German occupation. A related irony is that the conscripts’ encounter with the brutality of war and the concentrationary inferno are precisely what legitimate their bid for humanity—a humanity that is founded on a shared experience of the limits of human endurance itself. Thus one conscript rouses his comrades with a reminder that on the front and in the camps they both slept with the dead and ate with their white comrades, such acts being incontrovertible proof that white and black are one and the same, kif-kif bourricot.73 Another reminds them that bullets make no distinction between white and black bodies: “Cadavre noir, cadavre blanc, kif-kif!” This claim for the representation of their fundamental parity with white citizens—paradoxically forged within an experience of shared vulnerability to dehumanization and death—is shut down on their return. In an act of symbolic humiliation, the French army forces the African conscripts to shed the American uniforms they were given in France (emblems of their borrowed humanity) and to don the buffoonish costume of the tirailleur, complete with its red “Y’a bon Banania!” fez, or chéchia.74 The camera lingers over a pile of clothing, and then a pile of shoes, in a distinct recollection of the Nazi camps and the last visible remains of those who perished there. This visual analogy between two radically different deployments of violence—a massacre in retaliation for mutiny and the systematic genocide of an entire people—may seem shocking today, but it is important to restore this gesture to its historical context. When I show this film in courses, students sometimes object that the visual conflation of such different regimes risks banalizing the Nazi genocide. Yet invoking the analogy between the Nazi concentrationary inferno and colonial dehumanization in the 1980s was not to banalize the Holocaust so much as to lend rhetorical force to an argument that had been eloquently made by Aimé Césaire and others decades before, only to be subsequently repressed by discourses on the Holocaust’s radical singularity. Sembène’s juxtaposition of Nazism and colonialism in Camp de Thiaroye is a faithful pedagogical illustration of Frantz Fanon’s dec-

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laration: “Not so long ago, Nazism transformed the totality of Eu rope into a colony.”75 By dismantling the opposition between the Third Reich’s genocidal practices and the imperial violence of the French Republic, the film encapsulates Césaire’s influential diagnosis in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) of Hitlerism as the application of colonial violence on noncolonized peoples: And then one fi ne day, the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect [un formidable choc en retour]: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refi ne, discuss. People are surprised . . . and they hide the truth from themselves . . . that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated Nazism before it was infl icted upon them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples, that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfi ng the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.76 Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanist, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “niggers” of Africa.77

Césaire’s analysis of Nazism as the application of dehumanizing procedures previously reserved for colonial subjects, and thus not an aberration foreign to Europe but intrinsic to its imperial might, is visibly at work in Sembène’s portrayal of the camp as a synedoche for both the French Republic and the Third Reich. More generally, by representing both the massacre of the Diola people by Pétain’s army in Emitaï and then the Thiaroye massacre under de Gaulle in Camp de Thiaroye, Sembène conveys that the specter of Hitlerism is harbored even within his apparent antinomies (the bourgeois humanist, the Gaullist protagonist, as well as the Pétainist collaborator), that the Nazi terror in fact suffuses the quotidian legacy of French imperialism.78

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In Camp de Thiaroye, the continuities between Hitler, Pétain, and de Gaulle, as well as those between the Third Reich and France, emerge in an exchange between the educated and assimilated but resolutely African Capitaine Diatta and his French friend, the Gaullist Capitaine Raymond. Diatta’s family has been massacred in Effok by Vichy soldiers raiding the village and requisitioning its grain, a historical event that Sembène reconstructed in his prior film Emitaï. In their last substantive conversation before his death, Diatta compares the slaughter of Effok’s civilians to the Oradour massacre, when 642 of the French town’s inhabitants were murdered by the Waffen-SS in retaliation for resistance activities (as we shall see in the next chapter, Oradour became an emblem of Nazi atrocity in postwar France). However, Captain Raymond rejects Diatta’s analogy between “Nazi barbarism and the exactions of the French army: It isn’t the same thing,” he repeats. His dismissal both recalls and negates the African conscripts’ discovery that black corpses and white ones are kif-kif. Barbarism is sutured off from French civilization and relegated to the Nazi other, whereas the violence of the Pétainist army that massacred the Diola villagers are cast in the rationalistic and administrative language of “exactions.” Diatta’s response to Raymond’s dismissal is worth a pause: “It’s the colonial army, same mentality,” he states in a reminder of the colonial dimension of the Nazi genocide. The imperial quest for Lebensraum and its extermination of political and racial undesirables is explicitly posited as continuous with the mentality and practices of French colonialism (a continuity addressed in chapter 5 on Les bienveillantes). The convergence of Nazi and colonial violence in the film is personified in the character of Pays, a ser viceman who was interned in Buchenwald and, on entering the Thiaroye camp, comes upon its barbed wire. Pays (country or nation) becomes a complex allegory for the traumas of postwar colonial identity: He lost his mind and ability to speak during the war and carries an SS helmet with him at all times as an insignia of power and perhaps as a protective talisman. Despite his apparent madness, Pays is the only one to see the continuities between Buchenwald and Thiaroye. While the other demobilized ser vicemen are settling into their provisional barracks, Pays approaches the camp’s perimeter and runs his fingers along the barbed wire. He grips the knots that bind the wires together, knots that visualize the entwinement of concentrationary histories that he is the only one to

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Figure 2. Camp de Thiaroye. “No more Buchenwald. It’s over.”

“grasp” and that he is also unable to release. His friend Corporal Diarra approaches him, takes his hand off the wire, and gently rubs some native soil onto it, reassuring him that Buchenwald is over and that Pays is safely back on African land: “Plus Buchenwald, fini, ici terre Afriki, terre sauve [no more Buchenwald, over, here is African land, safe land].”79 Unconvinced, Pays dons his SS helmet and coat and guards the barbedwire fence from some conscripts who want to hang their clothes out to dry, pointing to the watchtowers with inarticulate cries. Pays’s profile then dissolves into that of a German guard holding binoculars in a camp tower in a curiously mediated flashback to Buchenwald that passes through his own gaze and that of the SS guard. We hear the rattle of machine guns followed by three shots of dead bodies. Pays’s traumatic flashback is composed of a sequence of three stills from Resnais’s Night and Fog (shots 143–45). The first two photographs are from the archive of the Amicale Mauthausen; the last one (two bodies lying beside the barbed wire) is from Buchenwald. We do not know if, in shot 143, the dead person hanging by his hands off the electrified barbed wire has been killed or has killed himself, although in Sembène’s montage, the sound of shots accompanying this photographic still suggests an execution.80 In this scene the Nazi camps erupt in Lazarean fashion within the barbed wire of an African landscape. As in Night and Fog, the camera binds the experiences of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, shifting from Pays’s hands clenched on the barbed wire to his gaze upon the guard at the top of the watchtower and fading into the binocular-wielding SS officer who

Figure 3. Camp de Thiaroye. Thiaroye’s dissolve into Buchenwald.

Figure 4. Camp de Thiaroye. First still from Night and Fog (Mauthausen).

Figure 5. Camp de Thiaroye. Second still from Night and Fog (Mauthausen).

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Figure 6. Camp de Thiaroye. Third still from Night and Fog (Buchenwald).

presumably observes the shooting or suicide of the camp detainees in the photographic stills from Mauthausen and Buchenwald. The sequence visually conveys the violence of the gaze, echoing Resnais’s meditation on the complicity of representation: The binoculars of the SS on the surveillance tower point at the victims as we hear the sound of shooting, recalling the “point and shoot” of a camera. Even though there is no direct correlation between the SS gaze and the dead that hang from the barbed wire, the sequence invokes a familiar comparison between camera and gun, photography and death.81 Sembène’s choice of archival stills from Resnais’s landmark documentary pursues the latter’s meditation on the instability of the photographic and filmic image. Indeed, Pays’s hallucination is simultaneously indexical, phantasmic, and allegorical. Although in the diegesis, these images are hallucinations, phantom traces of Pays’s damaged psyche, their black-and-white flicker on the screen reminds us of their indexical relationship to the Nazi archive. The concentrationary inferno that Pays sees in his mind’s eye is incontrovertible proof of Roland Barthes’s ça a été (it has been) in both a personal and historical sense, but it also serves as an allegory of what is to come. Pays’s hallucination signals a dépaysement, or dislocation, that is at once psychic, spatial, and temporal. The Nazi genocide is lodged in his psyche, and this intermemorial splinter attests to his historical entanglement with the Holocaust. The resurrection of this imagery belies his companion’s faith that the concentrationary terror is over and that they are on safe, native land, for it visually brings home the murderous continuities between two regimes of violence and foreshadows the massacre of the conscripts.

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The photographs, as “a literal emanation of the referent” (Barthes), emerge from within the hallucination of a traumatized psyche that misrecognizes its spatiotemporal coordinates and yet, in so doing, profoundly grasps its historical situation. It is a visual experience triggered by the haptic memory of clutching the barbed wire. Pays holds fast to a picture of the past, while other concentrationary images thrust themselves upon him in the face of danger. This surreal recollection of Mauthausen and Buchenwald in Senegal is far from a subjective and private trauma; indeed, it marks the emergence of historical consciousness as Walter Benjamin conceived it: “To articulate the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it fl ashes up at a moment of danger.”82 The dislocation of Holocaust imagery from Germany to Senegal by way of French imperialism allegorically conveys a psychic trauma with concrete historical roots. As Pays stands inarticulate on a land that eludes his grasp, caught in a time of extermination that seems to have no end, we understand that the condition of imperial assimilation is the subject’s willingness to die over and over again— as bare and unqualified life—for a nation or pays to which he will never belong. As Camp de Thiaroye approaches its tragic end, Night and Fog once again resurfaces and turns the image of Thiaroye on the screen into a palimpsest. After the tirailleurs have released the general and apparently secured their “victory” (the full rate of their demobilization premium), and they begin to celebrate with song and dance, Pays clambers up on a watchtower with his SS helmet and stands guard with his hands behind his back in a position of bodily defense rather than optical surveillance. This image virtually becomes a palimpsest before the viewer’s eyes, for the shot of Pays with the beige of his uniform framed by the beige watchtower subtly but unmistakably dissolves into one last black-and-white shot from Night and Fog that shows barbed wire underneath an implacable full moon, with the silhouette of a watchtower mirroring the one in which Pays stands. Camp de Thiaroye and its dissolve into Auschwitz does not merge these two concentrationary histories into a single paradigm of trauma and terror so much as allow their memories to flicker in and out of visibility. Sembène’s dissolve illustrates what Achille Mbembe has described as “time as lived, not synchronically or diachronically, but in its multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences” in the context of the African postcolony.83 Just as

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Figure 7. Camp de Thiaroye. Thiaroye and Auschwitz, a palimpest.

the figure of allegory retains a mobile, animating quality that enables it to bring two disparate entities or events into proximity, illuminating the simultaneities and multiplicities in the lived experience of time, without collapsing them into identity, the camera’s gradual dissolve brings these two concentrationary sites into interplay. This mobile, kaleidoscopic image does not reify both temporalities into one seamless continuum of terror. Rather, it functions again as an intermemorial splinter that resists the cloisonnement de mémoire (memorial walls) characterizing the legacies of Nazism and colonialism, but also the memory of Allied “liberation” as it is experienced in the concentrationary colony and the metropole. As he stands guard and sees the tanks roll in, Pays visually embodies the fi nal warning of Night and Fog: “Who among us stands guard from this strange observatory to warn us of the coming of new executioners?” His position recalls Elie Wiesel’s prophetic figure Moshe the Beadle, who witnesses extermination and yet fails to persuade the Jews of Sighet to flee. Like the mad prophet of Night, Pays tries to warn the celebrating troops but fails to avert their massacre. He cries out unintelligibly and brandishes his SS helmet as a metonym for the surrounding French tanks, but he is dismissed for seeing Nazis everywhere. Whereas Night and Fog had closed on the question of historical complicity by asking whether the new executioners’ faces differ from our own, Sembène’s Camp de Thiaroye does not show us the faces of those inside the gleaming French tanks that anonymously spit fi re at the soldiers in fl ight.84 Yet historically these faces were not so different from the faces of those

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killed, since the massacre was implemented by loyal colonial troops. This elision is no doubt owing to Sembène’s investment in maintaining the polarity between victims and executioners, colonizer and colonized. But such polarities are complicated by the very figure of Pays, who is at once witness, victim, and embodiment of the kind of complicity I have sought to trace in its various postwar articulations. He is a tirailleur, and as such a structural agent of colonial power as well as a supposed example of the assimilated imperial subject.85 Yet on his own native soil and abroad, he is a ghost whose mind and body are destroyed by overlaying regimes of violence. The historical circumstances of the Thiaroye massacre, one implemented by colonial troops following French military orders, remind us that imperial regimes deploy a gray zone binding executioners and victims to implement their territorial reach into both the spaces and psyches of their subjects. Although Camp de Thiaroye and the allegorical figure of Pays might appear to stage history as a hyperbolic gray zone in which victims and executioners are infinitely circulating positions locked into a rehearsal of the fait concentrationnaire as it migrates around the globe, it is the figure of connection and entanglement rather than melancholy repetition that interests me here. In the aftermath of Césaire, Fanon, Camus, and Resnais on the converging memories of colonialism and Nazism, Camp de Thiaroye resurrects a multidirectional countermemory to World War II and decentralizes Eurocentric commemorations of the event (as did Hiroshima mon amour in the postwar context, and, more recently, Bouchareb’s Hors-la-loi with its reconstruction of the Sétif massacre). The film restored a differentiated memory of the war itself, one that had been actively suppressed by the Allies, for, as we now know, the Allied High Command ensured that the liberation of Paris was seen as a “whites only” victory. It removed West African conscripts who made up about two-thirds of the Free French Forces from the Paris-bound troops, thus visually expunging the role of the tirailleurs from the historical archive.86 Camp de Thiaroye brought these dead back into the picture not only for national but also for global commemoration. This testimonial gesture was central to Sembène’s intentions: “These men will no longer be dead, thanks to the cinema. The French killed them, but they still have a cemetery in Dakar. . . . Until this film they were nameless. No longer. . . . This is the memory of history, which we keep alive.” 87 Sem-

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bène thus sought to perform a Lazarean resurrection of the tirailleurs sénégalais. Yet I would argue that the film does more than bring into visibility unknown or forgotten actors and victims of the war in a straightforward politics of representation and memorial restitution. Its vision of history is constituted by entanglements and reciprocal transformations that perform a décloisonnement des mémoires, a task that remains urgent both in France and elsewhere today. This vision of history as entanglement and mutual modification is evident in Sembène’s defense of the film at its opening in Dakar, when the French ambassador to Senegal marched out of the theater in protest: The history of the world involves everyone, all races. We are going to highlight our participation in history [extraire de l’histoire notre participation] but it will also be your history. . . . You don’t create a history to take revenge but in order to be rooted in your history and culture. That is why we made the film for the whole world, not for any one race. So that you could see that blacks participated in the war and we are not yet done with our history, which is your history as well.88

This articulation of history as a continuous and open process of retrospection and projection, memory and futurity, differentiation but also convergence, points to a temporality that has been elaborated by Mbembe as the “emergent” or “entangled” time of African existence, neither a linear time nor a simple sequence in which each moment effaces, annuls, and replaces those that preceded it, to the point where a single age exists within society. This time is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other pasts, presents, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones.89

This “time of entanglement” is distinct from the traumatic temporality of repetition examined in chapter 1, where history is turned into an infinite series of identical catastrophes (for instance, a series of “states of exception”). Its focus on collective multiplicities resists the privatization of pain in trauma theory, where we are entangled in the wound of the other by virtue of our own ontological fracture. Mbembe’s emergent time is the dialectical time of allegory, which in its destructive retention of the past, its com-plicity or folding together of distinct experiences and histories, continues to both particularize and

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bind histories in asymmetrical and differential relations of reciprocity. The entangled temporalities I have traced in this itinerary of Resnais and Cayrol’s iconography of Auschwitz constitute so many noeuds de mémoire, or knots of memory. As we saw in chapter 2, such knots of memory exceed the borders of Pierre Nora’s sites of memory: They are figural knots that migrate across national, ethnocultural, and temporal borders and resist— even reenvision—a memory politics anchored in the nation-state, for by putting pressure on identitarian and particularistic memory projects, the entangled time of allegory questions the rhetoric and temporality of a guerre des mémoires. In Night and Fog, as in Camus’s oeuvre, form and figure are the historical tissue of these memorial knots: It is allegory that pulls together disparate strands of racialized violence without ever merging them into a singular and universal memory of trauma and terror. The interplay of allegory, irony, and complicity— all features that constitute an aesthetic memory of the past— disclose unexpected affinities, open up unpredictable alliances, and animate ongoing engagements.

Coda: From Postwar France to Guantánamo Bay Jean Cayrol’s postwar reflections on the escalating reach of the concentrationary phenomenon into territories that are both geopolitical and psychological remain strikingly resonant to this day: “Concentrationary influence, solicitude, continues to grow not only in its uninterrupted materializations (one imagines new maps in which the kingdoms of Murder will be marked for the next ‘explorers’ of these desolate lands) but also in the Eu ropean and even global psyche.” “With horror, I think of the refi nements that could be brought to the next concentration camps and their even more singular forms, where even the gift of suffering, the ultimate withdrawal of their nights, may be denied to human beings.” 90 Similarly, the concentrationary cartography that Cayrol drew in World War II’s aftermath, with Albert Camus’s pioneering figures, is uncannily prescient of new technologies of internment and torture developed during the war on terror and the indefi nite state of exception it has opened, a state that found one of its most obvious territorial locations in the U.S. detention camp of Guantánamo Bay.

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For David Rousset, writing in 1945, the Third Reich may have crystallized the concentrationary universe in its most recognizable form, but its bacillus continued to circulate in capitalist and imperial itineraries that could at any point coalesce into new regimes of terror: Germany interpreted with an originality in keeping with its history the crisis that led it to the concentrationary universe. But the existence and mechanisms of that crisis were inherent in the economic and social foundations of capitalism and imperialism. Under a new figuration [sous une figuration nouvelle], analogous effects may reappear tomorrow. There remains a very specific war to be waged.91

In his account, Rousset does not isolate the concentrationary as a paradigm that replicates itself over time, or as a logic that is deployed identically across geopolitical sites and historical formations, yielding a structural and static “state of exception.” Instead, he evokes “analogous effects” that may appear under “new figurations,” new physiognomies or forms and their particular deployments of terror. In that spirit, I conclude by responding to Night and Fog’s invitation to link (“rightly or wrongly,” to echo Aline Charby) different forms, sites, and effects of concentrationary violence within the contemporary horizon of post-9/11 terror. My juxtaposition of two very different images of detainment seeks to discern how their figural interplay illuminates penitentiary complexes of the post-9/11 era in relation to the Nazi concentrationary apparatus examined thus far. In a sense, this coda stages the “dangerous intersections” investigated in this book insofar as it risks conflating distinctive forms of detainment and their victims: the Nazi complex for enemies of the Reich that includes sites of extermination and a U.S. detention camp for suspected terrorists, termed “unlawful combatants.” Yet in the spirit of this book, my excursus seeks to illustrate the power of such overlays even as it is bound by the limits I have evoked. The fi rst image, from Night and Fog, is the photograph of the detainee who has either committed suicide or been killed by the SS and whose hands still cling to the barbed wire of Mauthausen (Figure 4). As we have seen, it is one of the photographs that appears in the traumatic flashback of Camp de Thiaroye. The second image is a still from the 2006 docudrama The Road to Guantánamo, by Michael Winterbottom and Mat

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Figure 8. The Road to Guantánamo.

Whitecross, which portrays a detainee kneeling before a barbed-wire fence in Guantánamo. My juxtaposition of these two images does not seek to analogize and conflate their irreducibly distinct historical contexts and generic status (the photographic still of a victim in the Nazi camps and the figure of a prisoner in a fictionalized documentary on the moral costs of the U.S. war on terror). Rather, I want to probe what their visual continuities and differences convey about the deployment of what Albert Camus called le fait concentrationnaire and Jean Cayrol described as “concentrationary solicitude” in a site like Guantánamo Bay and its particular state of exception. The still from The Road to Guantánamo represents a mock-up of the detention center and uses the visual iconography of the Nazi camps that Night and Fog centrally established to stage what is distinctive today in the technology and administration of sovereign power over the bodies it detains. The panoptical surveillance of the concentrationary system is visually conveyed by the contrast between the prostrate prisoner wearing earphones and an eye mask and the panoramic gaze of the camera-wielding guard in the watchtower. Fully

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hooded and clad in orange jumpsuits, covered in sensory deprivation equipment, the detainees dropped by their airplane transports into Guantánamo present a sharp visual contrast to the humiliated nudity of those who entered the gates of the Nazi camps in Night and Fog. The apparatus worn by Guantánamo’s prisoners are visual markers of the disquieting “solicitude,” as Cayrol called it, of touchless torture, the engineering of new techniques such as sensory and sleep deprivation, hyperstimulation, and individualized phobia programs. Sleep deprivation and its inducement of hallucinations and psychosis illustrate Cayrol’s chilling prediction that new concentrationary forms will deny detainees “the ultimate withdrawal of their nights.” Although the apparatus of touchless torture may be new, there is a historical continuity in its development. From the psychological warfare developed by the French military by way of Indochina during the Algerian War to Guantánamo Bay’s behavioral scientific laboratory, technologies of power have expanded their terrain of inscription. From the body and the visible marks of violence that it bears, torture now reaches invisibly into the detainees’ entire psychosomatic organism. A final particularity of recent concentrationary deployments that seems visually conveyed by the image of Guantánamo’s kneeling prisoner in relation to the photographic still of the victim at Mauthausen is the denial of the right to die. The figure of the kneeling detainee isolated and immobilized at a short distance from a fence he’s been ordered not to touch, even though Guantánamo’s razor wire, unlike Mauthausen’s, is not electrified, conveys the growing reach of sovereign power.92 Suicide constitutes the detainee’s right to the ultimate retranchement, or withdrawal by death at one’s own hand; it is a last sliver of agency in the face of unbearable physical and moral anguish. Although I do not suggest that this right was in any way “granted” by the Nazi concentrationary regime, though it was certainly taken by desperate detainees, I am recalling the many testimonies and visual images of detainees committing suicide by touching the camps’ electrified wires.93 The Road to Guantánamo came out in the wake of several suicides. As I write this now, detainees have been languishing in Guantánamo, held without trial and tortured for more than a decade. Suicide attempts and hunger strikes are multiplying, leading to intravenous force-feedings and increased security measures. In stark contrast to the Nazi state of exception and its mass production of death, the state of exception located in Guantánamo

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today ensures that its detainees remain alive, if not to confess their complicity with terror—that most slippery of metonymies—then perhaps to show the world that the enemy has been located, made visible, embodied, and contained. “The ruses of Nazism are out of fashion,” Night and Fog assures us while reminding us that the concentrationary deployment of imperial power takes on new faces and engineers new ruses as it reaches into uncharted territories, beyond the skin and into the psychic intimacy of the subject. We may someday see the ruins of Guantánamo Bay, but we would also do well to heed Cayrol and Resnais in their ever-actual injunction and watch keenly from the multiplied observatories of our global information network for the coming of new executioners whose faces may be no different from our own.

Fou r

Crabwalk History: Torture, Allegory, and Memory in Sartre They began torturing one of them and we could hear what was happening. We listened as his soul cracked. The sound of his voice really twisted our minds and made our hearts stop. — Iraqi prisoner recalling Manadel al-Jamadi’s death at Abu Ghraib Someone scuttling crabwise like me, sniffi ng for the scents and similar exudations of history. — Günter Grass, Crabwalk

How can writing do justice to the sheer violence of torture while investigating its interlocking meanings at a particular historical juncture? In literature, the bodily encounter of torture has often given rise to the allegorical imagination and its displacements: Kafka’s executionary harrow, the scarred body of the barbarian at the heart and margins of Coetzee’s empire, or, as I shall suggest in this chapter, the crabs that haunt Sartre’s play The Condemned of Altona. It is as though torture’s embodied experience could be conveyed only paradoxically, by veering away from materiality into abstraction. Yet there is an understandable reluctance to consider the immediacy of torture through abstract modes of representation. The “body in pain” is now a universal figure for thinking about human rights abuses. The victim’s agony is part of a shared, yet deeply singular, truth: All bodies are vulnerable and subject to forms of suffering that defy transmission. Given this ethical focus on the victim, allegorical treatments of torture seem risky business, signaling too hasty an embrace of pain’s conversion into a fiction of truth, 149

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meaning, or power.1 As the allegorical turn in Night and Fog suggests, figuration inevitably betrays the singularity of an experience by invoking it through substitution and analogy, a gesture that is particularly fraught when addressing historical events considered unique in the depth or magnitude of their destruction. The allegorical mode could not be further from the identificatory force of testimony, such as the firsthand account of the torture of al-Jamadi in Abu Ghraib. What is more, there exists a disquieting kinship or complicity between torture and allegory, for if torture (from torquere, “to twist, turn, wind, wring, distort”) is a process that twists and turns the body and psyche of its victims into signification, allegory is a rhetorical figure that similarly distorts or twists bodies and objects into emblems whose meanings shift according to different historical horizons. Yet “speaking otherwise” about torture may be the only way to speak of it at all under regimes of censorship, where only the ruses of allegory can convey the state’s dirty secret. Further, the traumatic nature of experiences such as detainment, torture, and extermination seems to prompt such figural displacements in order to become communicable, if not fully legible. In Ross Chambers’s perceptive account, Allegory (or “speaking other”) as a device for “speaking of” the unspeakable in this way, has the characteristics that make it a particularly appealing mode for testimonial purposes. For although allegory has an object (it is an “allegory of” X or Y), it presents as objectless: the object is not necessarily identified, the recognition of its object being left to the reader, who may well discover it to be infi nitely elusive. Allegory does not claim to represent its object in some kind of simulation thereof, but only to be structurally homologous with the object it thus fails to represent.2

The dislocations of allegory can convey the contours of an experience of extreme violence without claiming to simulate its content, just as its hollowing out of reference (examined as productive betrayal in chapter 3) allows allegory to accrue meaning over time. Our investigation into modes of remembrance that emerge from strategies that make readers and viewers complicit with the violence they regard suggests that any politics of memory comes at a price. The present uses— indeed, manipulates—the past, its victims, and their memory to wage contemporary battles. Yet the figural displacements of allegory also compel us

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to decipher its twists and turns in relation to our own cultural moment and its invisible violence. The preceding chapters traced how allegory, or speaking otherwise, opened up proximities between the French Republic and the Third Reich in a double reference that was both testimonial with regard to the Nazi terror and admonitory with respect to the Algerian War. Figures of contamination and reversal such as the victim-turned-executioner or the enemy whose face is one’s own sought to shore up anticolonial dissent by underscoring France’s turn from victim of the Nazi occupation to perpetrator of terror in ser vice of what was an ongoing colonial occupation. We have also seen how these knots continue to reverberate for our own contemporary horizon of trauma, torture, and terror. This chapter shifts from the concentrationary universe invoked by Camus, Resnais, and others to Sartre’s engagement with torture during the Algerian War in his play The Condemned of Altona and his other writings on the subject. More specifically, I investigate Sartre’s tropology of torture in dialogue with contemporaneous reflections on the relationship between the Nazi genocide and torture in late colonial France.3 If the preceding chapter revolved around the noeud de mémoire as a model for memorial entanglement, here I propose the concept of “crabwalk history.” “Crabwalk history” is inspired by Sartre’s crustacean imagery and Günter Grass’s 2002 novel Crabwalk (Im Krebsgang), whose narrator-historian proposes to “sneak up on time in a crabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways.” 4 If critics such as Richard Golsan have noted that the path leading back to the memory of Vichy often runs through Algeria, Sartre’s figures move crabwise—backward and sideways—between these sites and times, weaving together genealogies of state violence such as Nazism and late colonialism. Ostensibly about postwar Germany and collective guilt but also an allegory of French torture in Algeria, The Condemned of Altona is a complex example of memorial entanglement and crabwalk history that continues to speak to us with relevance today. In addition, Sartre’s play illuminates the aims and effects of torture both as an embodied confrontation and as the outcome of a web of relations, for if torture is a devastating bodily encounter, its exercise remains embedded within a web of power and signification, a system that both positions and exceeds its perpetrators and victims. As Marnia Lazreg observes, torture “is a structured environment with a texture of its own, a configuration of meanings, a logic and rationale without which physical,

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let alone, psychic, pain is incomprehensible and ineffective. In the social situation of torture, memory, identity, and culture weave a network of ideas and perceptions, experiences and ideals that define a genuine battle between two embodied realities.”5 Sartre developed a set of figures that helped his contemporaries grasp the phenomenon of torture, not as an aberration practiced by a few, but as standard operating procedure within a social matrix of violence, that is to say, colonialism. His tropes navigate between what Lazreg calls “the structured environment of torture” and its lived, embodied experience for victims, perpetrators, and complicitous witnesses, including a public that turned away from its evidence. As we saw in chapter 2, Sartre and Camus continue to represent antithetical values: The former is a philosopher of systems; the latter is witness to the flesh, leading to a series of related dichotomies such as transcendence/embodiment, abstraction/particularity, praxis/morality, dirty hands/lofty soul, consciousness/corporeality, realism/idealism, and so forth. Yet in The Condemned of Altona and other writings, Sartre’s phenomenological approach to historical violence unexpectedly converges with Camus’s invitation to approach history “with the eyes of the body” and “a physical notion of justice.”6 Just as Camus’s plague disclosed the contamination of the concentrationary universe in multiple locations, Sartre’s metaphors exposed the psychic costs of torture in relation to multiple histories. His corporeal imagery fuses with a Marxist analysis of reification under colonialism and capitalism, yielding haunting literary tropes that move between different historical frames. This connective movement or crabwalk sheds light on how torture functions within a “structured environment” while giving a glimpse of its psychic and bodily aftermath, not only for victims, but also— and this is the originality of his approach—for perpetrators and bystanders. For survivor Jean Améry, torture was the essence of the Third Reich “materialized in all the density of its being”; it was the bodily recapitulation of the Nazi will to power.7 For Sartre, however, torture materializes a far broader genocidal principle at work in distinct sites, whether these are the Nazi camps, the Gestapo quarters of occupied France, the racialized spaces of French colonialism, or the torture chambers of the late-colonial state. Torture embodies a battle for the species; it is an attempt to secure and consolidate the boundaries between the “human” and the “inhuman” from within a territorialization of bodies and spaces. This occupation of another’s body/space

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and the forms of inhumanity it produces are at the heart of Sartre’s allegory of torture in Algeria.8 The Condemned of Altona (1959) takes place in the German mansion of old von Gerlach, a wealthy industrialist who collaborated with the Nazis during the war and sold his land to Himmler for the construction of concentration camps. Now dying of throat cancer, he bequeaths his ship-building empire (enriched by U.S. investments) to his younger son, Werner, and he commands him, along with his daughter-in-law Johanna and sister Léni, to remain sequestered in the house and look after his eldest son, Frantz. A Nazi war hero who supposedly died in Argentina, Frantz von Gerlach in fact has locked himself up in a room and receives only his sister Léni for food, care, and occasional bouts of incest. In flashback sequences we discover that during the war Frantz had stumbled upon the concentration camps built on the family’s property. In order to atone for his father’s collaboration, he attempted to save a mad rabbi who escaped from the camp. But the rabbi was caught and slaughtered by the SS before his very eyes, and shortly afterward Frantz joined the army on the Eastern Front. At the end of the war he returned to his father’s mansion and sequestered himself upstairs, presumably traumatized by Germany’s defeat. Frantz now believes that Germany has been turned into a concentration camp, that humankind is doomed to extinction, and that crabs will reign over the thirtieth century. For much of the play, under the surveillance of these crabs, he records testimonies that will vindicate humanity to this posthuman, crustacean posterity, but he also turns into a crab onstage, scuttling sideways when his mysterious war time past comes up. The play ends on the disclosure that Frantz tortured villagers on the Eastern Front and was known as “the Butcher of Smolensk.” Despite the intricacies of its plot, when The Condemned of Altona opened in Paris in September 1959, the play’s audiences readily grasped its significance for the Algerian “events” and the comparison it drew between Nazism and the French army. Torture was routinely practiced after 1956 under Generals Massu, Challe, and Salan as the Special Powers went into effect and constructed a state of exception. Torture techniques included beatings (le passage à tabac), hanging in various positions, water torture, electrotorture, and rape.9 The Battle of Algiers (1956–57), which dismantled urban circuits of terrorism in Algeria, had revealed the full extent of torture’s institutionalization to the French public. Prominent figures such as the

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former résistant General Bollardière had resigned in protest, and testimonies such as Des rappelés témoignent (1957) denounced crimes witnessed by mobilized soldiers. The Communist mathematician Maurice Audin had been “disappeared” from Algiers, and a committee led by Pierre Vidal-Naquet was investigating his fate. The editor-in-chief of L’Alger Républicain, Henri Alleg, had written La question, a testimony of his torture by French paratroopers, that was published by Minuit. Sixty-five thousand copies were sold before the book was seized, and Sartre’s powerful preface to Alleg’s testimony, though also censored, appeared fragmentarily in the press of the day.10 Sartre was convinced that despite the public’s disavowal of torture during les événements, and despite the play’s German setting, his allegory of the nation’s dirty secret had been deciphered by all: “I wanted a fairly wide audience, and that wouldn’t have been possible if I had directly tackled [abordé de front] the problem of violence as it occurs in French society today,” Sartre declared, but nevertheless, “behind this Germany everyone read Algeria.”11 Under the Special Powers of 1955, censorship and the general atmosphere it produced forbade what Sartre described as a frontal approach to the question of torture. Only an oblique, indirect allusion— a crabwalk— would bring “the question” home to French terrain. In The Condemned of Altona, Frantz/France’s ethical trajectory from helpless witness of the Judeocide (figured by the rabbi’s slaughter) to torturer in the ruins of the Third Reich allegorizes the French nation’s historical mutation from victim to perpetrator of occupation, internment and torture in the ruins of the colonial empire. The play also contributes to a postwar meditation on what constitutes the “human” in the aftermath of genocide. The slippery distinction between the human and the inhuman is a leitmotif in The Condemned of Altona. The precarious threshold between the two is embodied by the protagonist, Frantz, who in the aftermath of torture both defends humankind before an inhuman, crustacean future and periodically mutates into a crab himself. As in the case of the previous authors examined in this book, the allegorical approach to historical violence imbues Sartre’s writing with a decidedly contemporary political force as well as pronounced ethical ambiguities. The mad protagonist of The Condemned of Altona is a former idealist who grew up with clean hands, unlike his shrewd and pragmatic father, who sold

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his lands at a great profit to the Nazis. Frantz von Gerlach’s life prior to his self-sequestration is evoked in a series of flashbacks. The first one reconstructs the circumstances of his fall into the contamination of history. In 1941, Frantz stumbles upon the concentration camp built on his family’s grounds and, horrified by what he sees, goes to his father: Frantz ( youthful voice; soft, affectionate, but worried): Father, I would like to speak to you. Father (looking at him): Have you been down there? Frantz: Yes. (Abruptly and with horror) Father, these are no longer men. Father: The guards? Frantz: The prisoners. I am disgusted with myself, but it is they who fill me with horror: their dirt, their vermin, their sores. (A pause) They look as though they live in perpetual fear. Father: They are what they have been turned into. Frantz: You couldn’t turn me into that. Father: No? Frantz: I would withstand it. Father: What makes you think they don’t? Frantz: Their eyes. Father: If you were in their place, yours would be the same.12

The distinct emphasis Frantz places on the possessive in his enumeration (their dirt, their vermin, their sores) suggests that he sees the signs of the prisoners’ expropriated humanity as an expression of their inner inhumanity, as a failure to hold onto humanity under inhuman conditions. This confusion of what has been done to them with what they are constitutes a refusal of his vulnerability and complicity within a field of dehumanizing violence. Frantz represses the knowledge that these men are the abject face of his subjecthood, that their apparent inhumanity reflects a common condition of radical exposure to annihilation, one that Giorgio Agamben has termed “bare life.” Frantz’s refusal of kinship is a failure to put himself in the place of the other (as his father points out, if he were in their place, his eyes would be

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the same). His gaze upon the detainees is blind to the human element that remains in the wake of the “demolition of a man.”13 Sartre later describes this repugnance for the detainees’ abjection as a failure of human contact that triggers the protagonist’s moral fall. If Frantz eventually succumbs to the temptation of torture, it is because in this critical scene he failed to have an immediate, affective recognition of the prisoners as his human kin: I think he begins slipping [il glisse] from the start. . . . He has started to slip the moment he is filled with horror by the prisoners in the camp, the moment he condemns not only the system of concentration camps in the name of the dignity of man . . . but the prisoners too, emotionally, as it were by instinct, when he says, “They are no longer men.” From that moment he has slipped [il a glissé]. . . . What he will always lack is . . . a human contact which will be strong enough, when he is tempted to become a torturer himself, to render him incapable of carry ing it out because he is dealing with a human being.14

For Sartre, this missed encounter with the residual humanity that remains in the aftermath of Nazi dehumanization precipitates Frantz into a murderous system of relations. The failure of contact with the detainees’ human vulnerability will eventually unleash the violent touch of torture. When Frantz confuses cause and effect upon witnessing the detainees’ dehumanization, he voices the logic of the camps themselves, which produced in its victims the very inhumanity that legitimated their extermination. Robert Antelme exposed the mechanism of this conversion into abjection in his testimony L’espèce humaine (1947), a key source for Sartre’s play. Antelme portrays in meticulous detail the ways in which the concentrationary universe challenged the detainees’ belonging to the human species and forced them into a constant proximity to beasts and things, as if the “human” were a precarious zone that one could only partially inhabit or from which one could be exiled (“Father . . . these are no longer men,” Frantz declares). In his ironic portrayal of the Nazi gaze, Antelme identifies the same confusion of cause and effect that leads Sartre’s protagonist to conclude that the detainees are exiled from the human realm into abjection. Antelme recalls, “We are becoming very ugly to behold. For this the fault lies with us. It’s because we are a human pestilence. . . . If we weren’t pestilential we wouldn’t be violet and gray; we’d be clean and neat; we’d stand up straight.”15 Yet the Nazi attempt to sunder the species and expel its victims from humanity is blocked

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by a relationality that can never be fully extinguished. As Antelme observes, if a civilian woman on the streets recoils in horror at the sight of Buchenwald’s skeletal survivors, it is not because their faces are irrevocably alien but because the kinship between them cannot be masked: “It is the human in me that makes her back away,” for even the most ruthless degradation of a victim cannot mask the underlying unity of the species.16 Antelme’s meditation on the inescapable relationality of victim, executioner, accomplice, and witness within a field of dehumanization is at the very heart of The Condemned of Altona and enables Sartre’s allegory to invoke multiple frames of historical reference. His protagonist’s attempt to save the rabbi is an atonement for his father’s collaboration with the Nazis but also for his prior disgust and his unwitting complicity with their ideology of dehumanization. Frantz finds the mad, frightened rabbi wandering about the property and hides him in his room in a gesture that prefigures his own mad sequestration after the war. At the end of the play, Frantz discloses that the memory of his impotence when the SS slit the rabbi’s throat before his eyes led him to embrace Hitler’s cult of pure power. During the ten days that he tortured Russian partisans and villagers to death on the Eastern Front, Frantz was no longer a witness watching helplessly while another human being was slaughtered like a beast. As the Butcher of Smolensk, Frantz unleashes the violence himself and produces the inhuman with his own hands: The rabbi was bleeding, and I discovered at the heart of my impotence some strange sort of approval. (He is back again in the past.) I have supreme power. Hitler has made me an Other, implacable and sacred: himself. I am Hitler and I shall surpass myself. . . . Never shall I fall prey to abject powerlessness. I swear it. It’s dark. The horror is still chained. . . . If anyone unleashes it, it shall be me. I will claim evil, I will display my power by the singularity of an unforgettable act: change living men into vermin [changer l’homme en vermine de son vivant]. I alone will deal with the prisoners, I will hurl them into abjection: they will talk. Power is an abyss and I see its depths. It isn’t enough to choose who shall live and who shall die; with a penknife and a cigarette lighter, I will determine the reign of the human [je déciderai du règne humain]. (163–64, translation modified)

Once repelled by the concentration camp victims’ proximity to the inhuman, Frantz now enforces a radical divide between human and inhuman, himself and his victims. Under the swastika’s rule he inscribes his absolute power upon the body of another. Not content with extermination, with

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choosing who will die, he will work instead to transform living humans into vermin and materialize the Third Reich’s enemy as an abject, inhuman thing. Frantz’s character illustrates the process by which the state’s imposition of gray zones of complicity (such as witnessing the slaughter of a Jew within an occupied home) leads to collusion rather than resistance. In order to escape the memory of his complicity with Nazi brutality in Smolensk, Frantz later takes refuge in an imaginary gray zone where victims and perpetrators appear to be circulating across reversible positions. He usurps the position of the victim to expiate his own crimes and doubles himself into victim and executioner, vermin and crab. These evasions of responsibility are carried out linguistically as well. Posturing as the last sacrificial witness to humanity, Frantz unravels the distinction between victim and executioner altogether. His self-immolation as witness and martyr to the crimes of humanity transpire in the chiasmus: “Men, women, hunted perpetrators, ruthless victims, I am your martyr” (65). This logic of reversal and undoing of responsibility is ubiquitous throughout the play: Germany is the victim and not the perpetrator of genocide; Frantz is a martyr to humanity rather than an agent of dehumanization; and the repugnant vermin of the past mutate into the menacing crabs of the future. Sartre’s portrayal of torture as a deadly combat for ontological sovereignty can be traced back to his prewar writings. The torturer not only wields absolute power over the life and death of another, but he also seeks to expel the victim from the species altogether. The vermin is a recurrent figure for the vulnerability of a human body facing its imminent devastation at the hands of another. As the protagonist of The Wall (1939) awaits his execution, for instance, he perceives his body as an enormous vermin to which he is tethered. In the immediate aftermath of the occupation, Sartre once again vividly evoked this sense of a radical banishing from the species through the disquieting image of the vermin. The Resistance fighters’ experiences of torture by the Gestapo were imagined by him as a mutation from one species to another. As they suffered under the watchful gaze of their tormentors, the résistants come to believe that they would awaken on the other side of pain not as human beings, but as vermin: “These faces bent over them, this pain inside them, all this led them to believe that they were only insects, that man is the impossible dream of cockroaches and woodlice, and that they would awaken as vermin, like everybody else.”17 Sartre gave a hallucinatory

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image for the dehumanization experienced by victims of torture: Their suffering is lived as an expulsion from the human condition and an awakening to their dehumanized abjection as vermin, or bare life. Sartre’s nonfiction occasionally and questionably idealizes torture as the ultimate limit-situation (“situation limite”) of existential self-fashioning. In the Liberation’s immediate aftermath, for instance, his “The Republic of Silence” refashioned occupied France in the image of universal resistance and portrayed torture as the deepest source of self-knowledge (in terms of a subject’s capacity to resist it), and thus as a paradoxical opportunity to exercise freedom: “Total responsibility in total solitude—is this not the very definition of our liberty?”18 Yet Sartre’s literary writings give us a far more complex view of the question. They complicate such redemptive accounts of torture as a means of masculinist subject-formation and foreground instead its circuits of dehumanization. To survive the trauma of torture is to rediscover oneself as alien, to be cut off from the rest of humanity, to become the depository of an incommunicable secret. In The Victors (Morts sans sépulture, 1946), a play about incarcerated résistants who prepare to face their execution by the French milice (a paramilitary organization established to fight the Resistance), torture may unveil the limits of the human condition, but the knowledge that arises from this experience remains unredeemed and incommunicable. After her rape by soldiers, Lucie says to her lover, “Oh Jean, you don’t understand, we have nothing left in common. . . . I am another. I don’t even recognize myself.”19 The knowledge that emerges from torture is not “the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself,” as Sartre had optimistically declared two years earlier, but rather the traumatic knowledge of oneself as other. The Victors stages this loss of selfhood as the aim of torture, a struggle in which the perpetrator seeks to turn the victim into an abject, inhuman thing. “I wonder if I shall come to know myself,” a résistant says as he walks toward his ordeal, yet what is revealed instead is the ontological competition of torture. As he is viciously interrogated, the résistant taunts his perpetrator, “We’re brothers. I attract you, don’t I? It’s not me you’re torturing, it’s you” (103). The response of the Milicien to this assertion of intimacy reveals the underlying stakes of torture: He accuses his victim of being a Jew and orders a merciless beating, thus reinforcing the rift between the human and the inhuman that torture attempts to rehearse. In the battle for sovereignty, the torturer consigns the victim to an abjection

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that is constructed as irremediably other, in categories such as vermin or Jew, and denies, in bad faith, the commonality that binds them. Sartre revisits this conception of torture as an ontological battle for sovereignty during the Algerian War, when he observes that “it is for the title of man that the torturer pits himself against the tortured, and the whole thing happens as though they could not both belong to the human species,” in an echo of Antelme on Nazism’s attempt to sunder the species.20 As we saw in our discussion of Camus, the portrayal of the inhuman as vermin in The Condemned of Altona would evoke not only familiar anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda of Jews as vermin, but also French racist designations of North Africans as parasites, thus opening a dialogue between these two legacies of racialized violence and their construction of the enemy as external to the human species. This sense of expulsion from the human species haunts the contemporary testimonies of Algerian victims of torture as well. Djamila Boupacha would later declare, “When I endured the pain from my torturers’ blows, I was sure that we no longer belonged to the human species.” In her recollection of torture and rape, Louisette Ighilahriz remembers the collective ordeal of independence fighters as part of a “terrible enterprise: the human subject’s psychological demolition.”21 To the extent that the discourse of torture as dehumanization had been well established in discussions of the Third Reich, such declarations in Algerian testimonies of French torture produce an eerie echo of the archive of the Nazi genocide. Sartre’s writings thus operated within an ambient tropology that wove together the concentration camp, the occupied nation, and the colonial territory as settings for torture. Sartre’s vision of the human as a dream of cockroaches under the Nazi occupation returns a decade later in the context of France’s colonial occupation of Algeria. In The Condemned of Altona and its dream of crabs, however, the trauma of torture is portrayed through its effects on the perpetrator and not the victim. For the possibility that Frantz could “awaken as vermin, like everybody else” and encounter his vulnerability as bare life is precisely what he disavows. Initially repelled by the detainees and their vermin, as torturer he seeks to turn other human beings into vermin, yet paradoxically he comes to embody the vermin he reviled when he declares humankind to be an impossible dream, not of cockroaches or woodlice, but of crabs. Frantz von Gerlach thus comes to embody the inhumanity from which he recoiled as witness and attempted to produce as perpetrator. In a scene

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that stages this paradoxical turn, he imagines the future as a tribunal of good, beautiful men, and it is he who is the crab scuttling under their gaze: “The crabs are men. (Pause.) What? (He sits down.) . . . Real men, good and handsome, on all the balconies of the centuries. Me, I was scuttling in the courtyard; I thought I heard them saying: ‘What’s that, brother?’ And that, that was me. (He stands up, springs to attention, gives a military salute, and speaks in a loud voice.) I, the Crab [ Je croyais les entendre: ‘Frères, qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’ Ça, c’était moi. . . . Moi, le Crabe]” (132, translation modified). Frantz’s designation of himself as an abject inhuman thing, as that (ça), recalls his youthful response to the abjection of the camp inmates when he declared to his father that “they couldn’t turn me into that [on ne ferait pas cela de moi],” that is to say, into vermin. Yet his military salute under Hitler’s portrait in this scene suggests that his abject crabhood is the result of his participation in the circuit of Nazi dehumanization. Frantz’s will to torture produces within him the very metamorphosis he seeks to inscribe on others. His crustacean mutations occur whenever the memory of having tortured comes up and illustrate the point that, far from consecrating the sovereignty of one species over another, the boomerang effect of torture unravels the distinction between human and inhuman altogether in a reciprocal petrification where both victim and perpetrator become insect, vermin, cockroach, or crab. These figures of mineral hardness and impermeability recurrently link the Final Solution to colonialism, occupation, and empire in Sartre’s thought. In his essay Anti-Semite and Jew and his novella Childhood of a Leader, Sartre portrays the anti-Semite’s desire to become a “ruthless rock,” a gleaming knife, even a towering stone cathedral, “anything but a man.”22 Colonialism is similarly diagnosed in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as a petrified and petrifying ideology, for in order to occupy the colonial space—one that Fanon himself described as a quasi-mineral setting— the colonizers must reify the native into a “speaking beast,” and in turn “they must harden, give themselves the opaque consistency and impermeability of stone; in short, they must in turn dehumanize themselves.”23 Sartre’s figures of petrification draw analogies between distinct sites and regimes of violence. Their crabwalk through history suggests that the battle of the species enacted with such bodily immediacy in torture is a genocidal matrix of the concentration camp, the occupied territory, and the colonial empire. By

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figuring particular historical forms of dehumanization through images of petrification (such as the cockroach, vermin, or crab), Sartre points to the productivity of figures as vectors of pluralized memory. His writing reveals a fundamental practice or process within what Michael Rothberg terms multidirectional memory,24 one that inheres within allegorical figuration and its displacement from one scene to another. Torture is the territorial occupation of another’s body, and as such it is the most concrete embodiment of imperialism: The prisoner is reduced to abject sentience or vermin in contrast to the torturer’s self-extension; the boundaries between the human and the inhuman are thus secured; and, as Elaine Scarry puts it in her analysis of its structure, real pain is converted into the fiction of absolute power.25 For Jean Améry, torture’s inscription of power upon the human body is structurally akin to imperial conquest; both are forms of occupation, whether bodily or territorial. Améry’s own account is imbued with the rhetoric of imperialism: The Gestapo’s blows upon him were felt as a terrifying border violation, an orgy of unchecked self-expansion in which his torturers’ “faces were concentrated in murderous self-realization” as they exercised their “agonizing sovereignty” upon his body and mind.26 For Améry, who was deported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, torture was both the most tangible incarnation of the Third Reich (“materialized in all the density of its being”) and the summation of its imperialist logic. This imbrication of torture and imperialism has been echoed more recently in J. M. Coetzee’s allegory of apartheid, Waiting for the Barbarians, where the body of the tortured victim is both the material foundation and the symbol of empire, for it is by marking the body of its enemy as an illegible barbarian that imperial boundaries are traced and consolidated. Coetzee, like Sartre before him, gives us a parable of unwitting complicity, for although he is a man of conscience, the magistrate who makes love to the barbarian woman colludes with the empire’s logic by seeking to recover the traces that her torturers left upon her body, “casting one net of meaning after another over her” to make this body readable and to possess the significance of its damaged history.27 The imperial structure of torture is unveiled at multiple levels in Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona. Frantz’s own acts as a perpetrator are rhetorically linked to his family’s ship-building empire: just as the father’s fleet of ships traced the von Gerlach name on the seas, similarly, with the cruder instru-

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ments of a penknife and lighter, Frantz will inscribe his name on the bodies of his prisoners: Johanna: To act means to kill? Frantz (to Johanna): That’s acting. Writing one’s name. Klages: On what? Frantz (to Klages): On what’s there. I write mine on those fields there. (145)

It is no accident that Frantz resorts to torture, or writing his name on what is there, in the ruins of the Third Reich’s eastward imperial expansion. The analogy with France faltering in Algeria as its soldiers labor upon the bodies of insurgents would not have been lost on contemporary audiences.28 More generally, given the homonymy of Frantz and France, the protagonist’s trajectory from powerless witness and imaginary “proxy victim” of Nazi violence to accomplice and perpetrator of torture in the Third Reich’s name would have harbored allegorical resonance for a nation whose recent, albeit repressed, memory of defeat, occupation, and imperial loss played a role in the generalization of torture during the Algerian War. At the start of this chapter I suggested that Sartre’s crabwalk through different regimes exposes torture not as the aberration of a few bad apples or the excesses of a limit-situation but as standard operating procedure within a coherent ideological system. For Sartre, torture was the bodily enactment of colonialism’s ideological structure. In The Condemned of Altona, the Nazi camps’ production of inhumanity enables the idealist Frantz’s descent into torture. Similarly, the late-colonial French state produced the racialized hatred that Sartre describes as an anonymous magnetic force field passing through and corroding its agents, thereby enabling perfectly decent French soldiers to torture in Algeria: In this business, the individual does not count; a kind of stray, anonymous hatred, a radical hatred of man, takes hold of both torturers and victims, degrading them together and each by the other. Torture is this hatred, set up as a system, and creating its own instruments.29

Sartre’s view of torture as a system of relations was shared by Simone de Beauvoir, who declared,

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To protest torture in the name of morality against excesses or abuses is an error that hints at active complicity. . . . There are no abuses or excesses here, simply an all-pervasive system.30

For Beauvoir, the system was put in place by a diseased government and judiciary and contaminated even the civilian sphere, which was complicit in its silence.31 Numerous testimonies of perpetrators in Algeria illustrate how the colonial system conditioned this racialized dehumanization even before the conscripts landed, offering ample evidence that torture is not the result of a few bad apples but of an established and sanctioned system of relations. General Bollardière reflects: “We didn’t refer to the Algerians as human beings. We called them rats. Or bougnouls. And it’s easy to torture a bougnoul, because you figure he’s not a human being.”32 A conscript also remembers that “from the start we were taught to consider and to treat them [Algerians] like dogs. Really like dogs. Even when we were in France at school, all they talked about were bougnouls.”33 We might recall a more recent illustration of this institutionalized dehumanization in the military, when Major General Geoffrey Miller, who implemented Guantánamo’s interrogation techniques in Abu Ghraib, declared to his officers that if they didn’t “treat these prisoners like dogs” they had lost control of the interrogation.34 The debate on torture’s “slippery slope mechanism” has reemerged in the past decade, along with a concern for the wider institutional structures that legitimate the use of excessive force, such as the slippery slope that led from interrogation techniques authorized in Guantánamo to the brutalities of Abu Ghraib. For many young French soldiers in Algeria, as with their more recent counterparts in Iraq and elsewhere, the descent into torture mirrors Frantz’s slipping into a murderous relation with the other (il a glissé) when he fails to see the abject detainees as human beings. A French conscript in the Aurès remembers the slippery slope of torture in remarkably similar terms: “We let ourselves slip [on se laissait glisser]. And then we became indifferent; the slaps, the insults, the blows we inflicted on the prisoners, it didn’t affect us anymore. We were caught in a dirty game, everything seemed natural.”35 The slippery slope of murderous dehumanization—its incarnation as a system of naturalized relations under colonialism and its bodily enactment in torture—are what Sartre seeks to convey and denaturalize through his bi-

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zarre dialectic of vermin and crab. In this sense, Sartre’s crustacean allegory knowingly staged the kind of alienating shock produced by the diffusion of Abu Ghraib’s photographs. As Mark Danner observed, “Abu Ghraib made torture televisual. For the first and only time in the nearly five years of the war on terror, torture raised its repellent form from the grey swamp of newspaper reporting and pundit commentary to stand front and center in the American consciousness: shocking, bewildering, disgusting—undeniable.”36 Sartre’s play performed a similar function in its time, albeit with the twists and turns of allegory required by censorship and within the fictional form of a play. Given the constraints of censorship and the public’s unwillingness to face the ugly realities of the Algerian War, it was through the ruses of form, staging, and symbolism that The Condemned of Altona raised the question of French torture. Like the montage and the camerawork in Night and Fog, Sartre’s dramaturgy opened a reflection on figuration itself. The play spatialized allegory for its audiences: below, the pacified quotidian of a wealthy bourgeois interior, and above, the abjection of wartime memory. Downstairs, a drawing room filled with pompous furniture (a Sartrean tableau of the bourgeoisie’s domestic inferno) provided what R. Clifton Spargo calls the firstorder context, the contemporary reality through which the second-order reference was to be discerned. Upstairs, the moldy room strewn with debris and haunted by decapodes stood for the repressed junkyard of Nazi memory, the historical truth that must be locked up and forgotten and yet returns in the form of a future crustacean judgment. Frantz and the Nazi legacy he embodies with such compelling torment is Germany’s dirty secret. He is the historical déchet, or waste product (as his brother Werner calls him), that the nation must shed to assume its place in a new world order. In fact, Frantz explicitly proclaims himself to embody the stench of national conscience, thus also evoking the unwelcome truth of French torture in Algeria: “The corpse of murdered Germany. (Laughing ) I shall stink like a bad conscience” (62). Sartre later declared that his initial project was to portray a generation of youths who served in the army and returned demoralized, if not traumatized, by their complicity with torture and walled themselves in silence: To me the ideal subject would have been one that showed not only the return of the man who has made himself what he is, but also his family around him, around his silence. He acts as a ferment generating a multiplicity of contradictions, and he himself is nothing but contradictions.37

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Frantz’s self-portrait as a rotting corpse concealed in the mansion conveyed France’s secret infection by torture.38 The domestic sphere might initially contain the soldier’s silence, yet the destructive ferment of torture would eventually seep out into the public sphere. And seep out it did as accounts of torture multiplied after 1958, confronting a republic founded on human rights with its contradictions. The divided domestic space of The Condemned of Altona visually conveyed the play’s double reference to Germany and France as nations whose pacified interiors held skeletons (or crabs) in their attic. Sartre’s staging of the play dramatizes Kristin Ross’s influential account of France’s postwar retrenchment into private spaces as a “monstrous and distorted double” of violence in Algeria.39 This withdrawal or sequestration from history and the international scene into domestic cocoons of consumption and hygiene compensated for the hardships of the war. But it was also both a displacement and repression of decolonization’s violence. The colonies’ battle for national sovereignty on the global stage and its savage repression was the occluded other of France’s shiny, inward-turning modernity. As we saw in the preceding chapters, one of the era’s recurrent themes is the metropole’s systematic deafness and blindness regarding conflicts beyond its borders. In this play, Algeria’s dirty war is not consigned to the other side of the Mediterranean, in an alien land lost in a sea of fog and blood, as Camus had described it. It is buried inside the private realm of a bourgeois household, a source of ferment that gradually spills out and infects its surroundings, including the play’s audiences. Sartre’s staging visually conveys the afterlife of torture; the play’s various flashbacks intermingle different temporalities to engage the present of its performance. This contagion of fiction and reality is conveyed after an encounter between Frantz and his sister-in-law Johanna. The former has just claimed that seven hundred orphans are starving to death in a concentration camp in Düsseldorf. Although this is another example of Frantz’s retreat into delusion in order to assuage his guilt, Johanna remains haunted by the alternate reality he lives out upstairs, one that she comes to experience as coextensive with the prosaic reality downstairs: Johanna: Two languages, two lives, two truths— don’t you think that’s too much for one person? (She laughs.) The orphans of Düsseldorf—well, I shall never get rid of them.

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Father: What’s that? A lie? Johanna: A truth from upstairs. They are abandoned children; they are dying of hunger in a camp. They must exist somehow or another [Il faut qu’ils existent d’une manière ou d’une autre], since they pursue me to the ground floor. Yesterday evening I almost asked Werner if we couldn’t save them. (She laughs.) That wouldn’t mean anything. But up there . . . . (105)

The dialogue opens a reflection on the relationship between allegory and truth, that is to say, between Frantz’s (and Sartre’s) mad fictions and historical reality. If the father dismisses his son’s delusions of starving children in Düsseldorf as a lie, Johanna sees them instead as a displaced truth, as a reality that exists “somehow or another.” Their exchange, “A lie?” and “A truth from upstairs,” echoes Dante’s well-known definition of allegory as a truth hidden beneath a beautiful lie. Truth is fractured by allegory, a fracture rendered spatially as the distance between Frantz’s moldy room and the bourgeois drawing room, between the fantasies of crabs and memories of war upstairs and the apparently benign, stolid interior downstairs. Yet the “truth from upstairs” pursues and contaminates Johanna, who is racked by two incommensurable meanings, languages, and histories. If the genocide of German children appears to be a lie, it may still be true in some other space or time; the orphans must exist “somehow or another.” Within the play’s diegesis, the fictional orphans conjure an inverted historical truth: The German children dying of hunger in the camps stands on its head the extermination of Jewish children, a typical form of exculpation by inversion for Frantz (which may also remind us of Clamence’s reference to the massacre of the innocents). Yet for contemporary audiences, the continued existence of these starving children “somehow or another” would also have conjured the concentrationary network discussed in the previous chapter. For an audience that was familiar with the press reports released earlier that spring on the Algerian camps de regroupement and their rates of child mortality, the reference to starving orphans would have had an ominously familiar ring. If Sartre seems to conceptualize allegory as a vertical relation between lie and a truth, where Frantz’s room harbors a truth that the drawing room conceals, his play suggests that these orders of reference ultimately contaminate and dissolve into one another. Instead of a vertical relation between fi rst- and second-order reference (German repression, French

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disavowal) Sartre gives us a back-and-forth, sideways crabwalk between different sites and times. Just as the lunacy upstairs contaminates the rationality downstairs, the Nazi past filters into France’s present; the play infects its audience with multiple references and temporalities of violence. Of course The Condemned of Altona used more direct strategies to make contemporary audiences face their unwitting collaboration with torture and terror in Algeria. The magnétophone or tape recorder Frantz uses to record his testimony for a crustacean future would have reminded audiences of the homonymous device used for torture, the magnéto, a field telephone adapted with alligator clips. Various forms of electrotorture developed in Indochina were ubiquitous in French Algeria, not the least because these weapons left few traces on victims’ bodies. As Kristin Ross and others have detailed, benign household objects were repurposed to this end and became instruments for the delivery of pain: Hand-operated dynamos normally used to power car batteries, radios, or field telephones were connected to electric leads whose ends were applied to various parts of the body. The transformation of banal objects and settings into instruments and sites of excruciating pain contributed to the surreal atmosphere in which torture took place, whether at the “torture factory” of El Biar or in an apparently harmless school building such as the Ecole Sarrouy, which was turned into an interrogation center. This atmosphere of carnivalesque banality is captured by H. G. Esmeralda, a Jewish Berber who provided medical aid to wounded FLN combatants. Esmeralda describes how a paratrooper tending to her after a brutal session of electrotorture jovially exclaimed, “Ah, that’s nothing, a bit of a telephone session, it’s good for rheumatisms! The gégène [electric dynamo] now that’s something else. But it’s a bit much for women.”40 Sartre’s writings plunged audiences into the atmosphere of torture’s mechanization and its systemic use while denaturalizing its banality. This diagnosis of torture as the face-to-face outcome of a mechanized structure of relations resonates with contemporary testimonies by its victims as well. In his account of the pain endured at the hands of the paras in El Biar, Henri Alleg describes torture as a petrifying technology that transforms the human into a machine. In an image that may have inspired Sartre’s crabs, Henri Alleg recalls a sergeant waving shiny steel claws in his face, claws attached to electrodes to be applied to his earlobes and genitals.41 Alleg is actually plugged into his torture device when an electrified wire is

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inserted into his mouth and his jaws are soldered to the electrode by the current so that he cannot unlock his teeth. In another horrific ordeal of electric torture, Alleg describes how “at each shock, I started but did not cry out. I had become almost as insensitive as a machine [presque aussi insensible qu’une mécanique].”42 In his agony, Alleg feels himself to be an inhuman machine, an extension of torture’s instruments. The victim’s sense of petrification and insertion into an implacable machine is powerfully captured in a contemporary painting by Chilean-born former surrealist Roberto Matta. Matta’s painting was titled La question ou le supplice de Djamila (1961), a double reference to Henri Alleg’s La question and to Djamila Boupacha, a young Algerian freedom fighter. Accused of depositing a bomb in Algiers, Boupacha was arrested with her family, tortured for one month by the French army, and raped with a bottle. Simone de Beauvoir collaborated with Gisèle Halimi to expose Boupacha’s ordeal to the public. The young insurgent became a cause célèbre, and a volume published in 1962 contained her testimony, photographs, and essays by Simone de Beauvoir and others along with works of art by Pablo Picasso, Robert Lapoujade, and Matta. La question ou le supplice de Djamila was painted during Matta’s postsurrealist, totemic, and political phase. It depicts a disjointed body that is virtually “processed” by the machinery of torture in a room with barred windows. We cannot distinguish between the victim and the mechanism that torments him or her, between the organic body and the metal or glass machinery. The victim’s splayed limbs and those of the tormentors appear fused by various instruments that are difficult to discern but appear to consist of a hoe, a shovel, a bottle, and perhaps a rifle, some of which are positioned phallically. The indistinction of body and instrument makes visible Henri Alleg’s sensation of fusion with the apparatus of torture. Both the victim and the tormentors are anonymous in this scenario: The former has no face; the latter have masklike faces covered by helmets. Matta depicts the ordeal as a mechanized process that embeds the victim into the executioner’s apparatus. The confusion of organic and inorganic forms, of victim and perpetrator, is a chilling image of torture’s reciprocal petrification. Matta’s painting has fallen into obscurity, but in its time it was compared to Picasso’s Guernica and won the Marzotto Prize. As Edouard Roditi observed, its portrayal of torture was a rather courageous gesture since Matta

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Figure 9. Roberto Matta. La question ou le supplice de Djamila.

was a foreign-born resident of France during the Algerian War. Yet for Roditi, La question ou le supplice de Djamila could not be converted into an immediately legible political message: However political the reality of the subject of the painting . . . his treatment of its dangerous theme remains similarly free from all immediate or direct political implication such as one fi nds, for instance, in Picasso’s Guernica, which was deliberately conceived and painted as a work of propaganda, a real political action in the life of the artist and citizen.43

Of course, we should remember that Guernica was also decried for its formalist treatment of atrocity. If Picasso’s denunciation of the bombing seemed clear to contemporary viewers, the significance of his imagery was hotly debated. Yet Matta’s painting seems to have produced another kind of ambivalence in its viewers, more affective than intepretive. Roditi noted a “disconcertingly ambivalent sympathy for the sadism of Djamila’s torturers.” If Picasso’s painting unequivocally sided with the victims, “Matta urges us, as Homer did, to weep for both the Greeks and Trojans and to under-

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stand and pity the sufferings and aberrations of both the tortured and the torturers.”44 Although I do not think that the perpetrators or the victim are sufficiently humanized by Matta to become objects of pity or compassion, Roditi’s response captures an ambiguity that must have been central to the painting’s denunciatory force. For much like Sartre’s play, Matta stages torture as a circuit of dehumanization. What viewers see is the sexualized violence of the act, the system that frames it, and the alienation of its agents and recipients, all of which would likely cause moral unease. In La question ou le supplice de Djamila, the ambiguities of the forms and figures, their mutation from organic to mechanic, forces a decoding that pulls viewers into a relationship of complicity with the depicted violence. Furthermore, both Boupacha’s ordeal and Matta’s disquietingly erotic representation underscores a recurrent linkage of torture and the sex act in the cultural imagination, one that is evident in testimonies and analyses of torture but also in its aesthetic representations. Most important, the mechanical register of Sartre’s, Alleg’s, and Matta’s representations of torture suggests that it is the material incarnation of an existing web of relations. Far from consecrating the victory of one species over another, it is a magnetic force field that processes victims, perpetrators, and accomplices alike into anonymous vectors of terror. As Frantz’s mutations illustrate, torture is a contagious circuit that inevitably infects perpetrators, locking them into a mutual dehumanization with their victims. The contaminating circuit corporealized as machinery in Matta or as a dialectic between vermin and crab in The Condemned of Altona offers a hallucinatory image for Aimé Césaire’s contemporary writings on the reciprocal dehumanization of colonialism. They also provide a vivid bodily image for Césaire’s historical diagnosis of Nazism as the choc en retour, or boomerang effect, of European colonialism come home to the metropole. Césaire had indicted colonial atrocities as an unleashing of slavery on the European continent. Such atrocities prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms

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himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.45

Sartre embodies this boomerang effect as the reciprocal petrification of perpetrator and victim, crab and vermin. In The Condemned of Altona, the victims of torture— camp detainees, the dead rabbi, and the tortured partisans in Smolensk— are implicitly linked in their racialized abjection. Frantz’s victims in Smolensk, which he attempted to transform into vermin within their lifetime, also remind viewers that Hitler’s own eastward production of volkloser Raum was a racialized imperial project in which Slavs were cast as a subhuman slave population occupying a space to be conquered in the model of European colonial rule (“The Russian space is our India,” Hitler declared).46 It is probable that these silent, indeed silenced, figures in Smolensk and their links to Jewish victims would have simultaneously evoked the Algerian subject during decolonization. Sartre’s figures of petrification thus brought Nazi barbarism and its own colonial archive home to French terrain. Although the dialectic of vermin and crab convey something of the phenomenological texture of torture’s effects, the migration of victims in the play, from the Nazi camps to Hitler’s imperial expansion and its Ostpolitik, comes to allegorize the genocidal kernel of French colonial rule and its bodily materialization as torture in both the colony and the metropole. This figural dislocation and migration comes at a price, however. In The Condemned of Altona, the victims of distinct histories of racialized violence are never represented on stage. They are ghosts invoked in dreamlike flashbacks who exist only in their somatic incorporation by the von Gerlach family. The rabbi whose throat is slit resurfaces metaphorically as the father’s throat cancer and suggests that the specter of the Holocaust continues to contaminate postwar Germany’s industrial empire. Similarly, Frantz, the mad crabman in the attic, comes to allegorize the gangrene of torture infecting postwar France. Both father and son are subject to forms of psychic and bodily occupation by the ghosts of their past, yet their victims are never embodied or given voice. Instead, they are incorporated by the agents of their death. Frantz’s thirst for martyrdom, his case of survivor’s guilt, his willed incarceration in a dank cell reminiscent of concentrationary barracks, ema-

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ciated and in rags, and even his obsession with crabs— all are attempts to embody the victimized inhumanity he disavowed. Haunted by a suffering that he once inflicted and yet was unable to feel, his anguish is a form of ontological hunger that usurps his victims’ voices. In sharp contrast to Sartre’s The Victors, The Condemned of Altona never represents the victims’ bodies or voices. They come into being only through the traumatic imprint they leave behind on those who were involved in their murder.47 This dramaturgical choice turns the victims of torture and extermination into so many ghosts that inhabit, haunt, and indeed occupy the play’s embedded historical landscapes. This ghosting of bodies and histories can be linked to Sartre’s tendency to subsume the specificity of racial and cultural identities under totalizing analyses of violence. The ghostly, silent rabbi recalls Sartre’s postwar vision of the Jew as a “phantom personality, at once strange and familiar, that haunts him and is nothing but himself—himself as others see him,” that is to say, as a spectral construct that circulates in French culture.48 This analysis of Jewishness as the reactive product of anti-Semitism is replicated in Sartre’s definition of the colonial subject as locked in an embrace with the colonizer: “The colonialist and the native are a couple, produced by an antagonistic situation and by one another.”49 Throughout his writings the colonized subject and the Jew are evacuated of their historical, religious, or racial specificity. They are seen as structurally interchangeable subject positions, as evidenced in Sartre’s blithe declaration regarding On the Jewish Question, “Replace the Jew with the Black, the antisemite with the supporter of slavery and there would be nothing essential to be cut from my book.”50 In his attempt to de-essentialize identities, Sartre’s existential dialectic reduced them to purely reactive subjective formations, a derealization that Frantz Fanon criticized as a denial of the “lived experience of blacks.”51 A variant of this problematic indistinction, Sartre’s account of torture as a reciprocal circuit of petrification/dehumanization eclipses the all-too-real difference between the one who tortures and the one who is tortured. This erasure of real differences within a topography of violence might remind us of the conflation of victims and perpetrators in recent commentary on Primo Levi’s concentrationary gray zone. The evacuation of specificity in Sartre’s dialectical thought can also be linked to the derealizing tendency of allegory itself. As we have seen, allegory

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unmoors image and meaning; its structure of substitution turns its objects of repre sentation into so many ghosts that can be pressed into service of other times, bodies, and places. The allegorical registers of Sartre’s play erase the particularity of the Final Solution, to be sure. Yet as in Night and Fog, the betrayal of testimonial specificity opens up a politics of memory in the play. Allegory’s separation of objects and bodies from the meanings invested in them is precisely what allows Sartre to mobilize the memory of ghosts such as the mad rabbi and the mute Russian partisans in ser vice of contesting other histories of imperialism. By casting France as a mirror of Nazism, Sartre lent a face to the “war without a name,” one whose monstrousness exploded the fiction of Algeria’s incorporation into the metropolitan body and exposed the moral petrification that was its price. In his preface to Alleg’s La question, Sartre—like Camus— denounced the irony of France’s gestapo tactics in Algeria, noting that it had taken only fifteen years to turn victims into perpetrators: “Depending on the circumstances, anyone, at any time will become a victim or a perpetrator. . . . Victim and perpetrator are one and the same image: and it is our image.”52 This vision of history as an unstoppable wheel of violence that turns victims into perpetrators, witnesses into accomplices, vermin into crab, is at the heart of The Condemned of Altona and illuminates the play’s bewildering conclusion. Frantz’s final ravings, which are recorded and posthumously played on an empty stage, explain his century’s inhumanity in the following terms: “The beast was hiding, we would suddenly catch its gaze in the intimate eyes of our fellow men; so we struck. I caught the beast, I struck, a man fell and in his dying eyes I saw the beast, still alive, myself” (178, translation modified). Whereas Frantz had previously recoiled from the camp inmates because of the inhumanity he saw in their eyes, in the end it is his own inhumanity that is reflected in his victims’ eyes. This mutation into the very beast that is to be destroyed also characterizes France as a nation. Once horrified by the atrocities committed by the Nazis, the French public has gradually slipped into their footsteps: “Everything occurred unnoticed, by imperceptible abdications; and then when we looked up we saw in the mirror an alien, hateful face: ourselves.”53 “I saw the beast, still alive, myself”; “we saw in the mirror an alien, hateful face: ourselves”: Both Frantz the protagonist and France the nation are

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compelled to assume a face that appears murderously alien and yet turns out to be intimate, if not constitutive. The enemy whose face is our own is, as we have seen, a recurrent figure in the postwar rhetoric that analogized Nazism with French colonialism. This mutation from victim to executioner, from human to alien, is staged in the closing moments of Sartre’s play. As Frantz’s disembodied voice emerges out of the inhuman technological medium of the tape recorder from a stage that is void of human presence, the spectators become the tribunal that will pass judgment on his life and century. Yet these spectators are not positioned as fellow human beings but as the crabs of the future. Frantz’s final address, voiced by a tape recorder to a crustacean audience, from one dehumanized entity to another, staged the petrifying consequences of sanctioning torture while seeking to establish the sovereignty of one species over another. If the enigmatic crabs of Sartre’s play portray “the burning judgment of some unimaginable and alien posterity,” this judgment continues to speak to audiences who inhabit other historical junctures.54 Because of its intricate plot and its sheer length (its running time is three to four hours), Sartre’s play has not been frequently staged. Yet one of its few American productions in 1966, during the Vietnam War, illustrates the transnational resonance of its indictment of empire, race, and citizens’ complicity with atrocities committed in their name. In a review of a production at Lincoln Center, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick addressed this allegorical relay from Germany to the United States by way of France and Algeria: The play, about German guilt, was meant, when it was produced in Paris in 1959, to take the audience beyond Germany to the French guilt for atrocities in the Algerian War. We, here in New York in 1966, are in the midst of a war defi ned by bestial atrocities on both sides; hideous documents will one day, if the war is ever over, present themselves for our contemplation, for our moral judgment on the victims and the victors, for our atonement perhaps. In the interval at the play, I heard the title called “the condemned of Altoona,” and I wondered if we could ask ourselves to make the leap from Germany to Algeria to ourselves.55

Hardwick sought to convey the resonances between Germany’s Altona and Pennsylvania’s Altoona and wondered if the lesson of Sartre’s allegory could

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“make the leap” (or crabwalk) from France in Algeria to the United States in Vietnam. The choice of Sartre’s play for an American production during the Vietnam War suggests an attunement to the significance of its denunciation of war crimes, complicity, and atonement. The play’s ongoing contamination of its audiences was reflected in Hardwick’s provocative title, “We Are All Murderers.” A subsequent Vietnam War– era production highlighted the critical force and contagious effects of Altona’s historical crabwalk. R. G. Davis, founder and director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe (which invented antiwar “guerrilla theater”) found the realistic bourgeois setting of Lincoln Center’s production of The Condemned of Altona far too tame for its political significance. Instead, his troupe produced the play in light of Brechtian principles in order to release its contestatory energies for the antiwar movement. In the aftermath of Vietnam’s atrocities, Sartre’s crabwalk through the back door of Nazism to denounce France was a clear signal that American audiences needed to confront their collaboration with institutionalized murder. Accordingly, the play was set in a boxing ring and Frantz addressed all of his “crab monologues” directly to the audience. A year before the My Lai massacres, Davis put Sartre’s lesson in the following terms: Let’s do it backwards. That’s how it was learned anyway. The past is only understandable from the present. We’ll start from now: the U.S. must be destroyed. This is what Sartre’s Condemned of Altona taught me. . . . What the French did in Algeria and Vietnam, we now do for slightly different (larger) reasons. Sartre shows the system as a death-bonnet; wear it and you are bloodied or destroyed.56

For Davis and the guerrilla theater group, the “death bonnet” was a capitalist/imperial/colonial system whose material embodiment was torture or civilian massacre and whose boomerang effect morally destroyed perpetrators and complicit civilians alike. In its rare productions, then, Sartre’s eerie figures for guilt, disavowal, and atonement activated the spectators’ political imagination while disclosing terror (in the form of torture or genocide) to be the material effect of a system of relations in which the public “back home” was fully complicit. “I lacked imagination . . . Out there,” Frantz says of his days as torturer in Smolensk (162). Frantz is haunted by a suffering that he once inflicted and

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yet was unable to feel himself; his anguish is made up of guilt and ontological hunger. Like his fictional contemporary Jean-Baptiste Clamence, he simultaneously longs for a capacity to imagine another’s pain and for definitive judgment on his trespasses.57 In The Condemned of Altona, Sartre’s typically systemic approach to violence opens into an unexpected a dialogue with Albert Camus’s call for an imaginative approach to history through “the eyes of the body,” that is to say, through a sensory and affective reception of its violence and injustice, one for which the figural displacements of literary form, and of allegory itself, are paradoxically most suited. Camus’s embodied apprehension of history haunts Sartre’s own oeuvre and its phenomenology of racialized violence through figures of petrification. The sheer strangeness of the crustacean imagery in The Condemned of Altona and its fi nal address to an audience of future crabs were ways of restoring to torture some of its alien horror and of wrenching the postwar French public out of what Simone de Beauvoir diagnosed as its “tetanus of the imagination.”58 “Behind this Germany, everyone read Algeria.” Instead of confronting torture head on, Sartre’s allegory approached the French presence in a zigzag, defensive crabwalk that engaged at least two different geopolitical situations. When Sartre recalls the play’s reception, German guilt serves as an alibi for France’s guilt in Algeria, with one context clearly subservient to the other, a gesture that might remind us of Charles Krantz’s comment that Auschwitz served as an alibi for Algeria in Night and Fog. And yet the order of Sartre’s double reference to Nazi Germany (as first-order context) and French Algeria (as second-order reference) has been challenged by critics. Jean-François Louette, for instance, argues that despite Sartre’s intention to grant primacy to Algeria rather than Germany in the play, its genesis suggests that it was Algeria that redirected the author to Nazism: “The order of reception is as follows: behind a Germany that tortures, we saw and still see France’s misdeeds in Algeria. But it is the opposite in the play’s order of genesis: Algeria’s events return Sartre to Germany.”59 This account of the play’s genesis and reception once again suggests a hierarchy of meaning, whereby one site marshals us to another site in a classic conception of allegory with its fi xed hierarchy of fi rst and second orders of reference. We have already seen how this critical assumption (wherein one memory or history functions as a screen for another

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foundational one) fails to grasp the rich complexity and omnidirectional vitality of figuration in Camus, Dib, Cayrol, Resnais, and now Sartre. My reading of The Condemned of Altona and its discursive context has sought to address Germany, Algeria, and France simultaneously and dialectically, as I believe Sartre’s figures invite us to do, rather than alternately and hierarchically. Yet we might go even further and consider that Sartre’s crustacean motif invites us to consider the crabwalk as an alternative to the dialectic as a figure for history. Indeed, the dialectic works toward an Aufhebung, or totalization of its contradictory terms, one that subsumes their difference and specificity. This is why Frantz Fanon condemned Sartre’s conversion of “black lived experience” into a negative term and a mere stage of historical process. But as we have seen, the figures of petrification in The Condemned of Altona do not lead to a totalizable account of identity and difference, or a vision of history as progress toward an eventual abolition of difference. If anything, the temporality that Frantz inhabits comes dangerously close to the cycles of a perpetual “gray zone,” implicit in his diagnosis of history as a continuous reversal of victims and executioners. However, the crabwalk offers an alternative figure for history that is consonant with Camus’s noeuds de mémoire, Mbembe’s “entangled time,” and the destructive illuminations of Resnais’s allegorical time. The crabwalk’s zigzag motion across sites and times pulls disparate histories into proximity and allows momentary flashes of recognition. The complexity of Sartre’s play prevents a transparent allegorical transposition; the texture of its figures resists a totalized system that can be abstracted and applied to all historical situations. Instead, these figures awaken the imagination and give visible, embodied form to torture’s petrifying violence and ethical costs. In a novel titled Crabwalk (2002), a meditation on the infernal repetitions of history in postwar Germany, Günter Grass describes historical investigation as “scuttling crabwise” in a defensive, diagonal move forward, an image that captures Sartre’s use of allegory in The Condemned of Altona. The narrator of Crabwalk has been commissioned to tell the story of one of the worst maritime disasters in history: the sinking of the Nazi cruise ship the Wilhelm Gustloff, which at the end of the war was turned into a refugee ship containing nine thousand Germans, most of them civil-

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ians fleeing East Prussia. It was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine on January 30, 1945. The disaster remains unacknowledged in Germany due to a taboo around the suffering of the perpetrators, yet the novel suggests that such repression is bound to produce dangerous resurgences of the past’s violence. Born to one of the passengers as the ship sank, the narrator skirts the edges of official history and wonders how to proceed in the event’s reconstruction: Should I do as I was taught and unpack one life at a time, in order, or do I have to sneak up on time in a crabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttling sideways, and thereby working my way forward fairly rapidly?60

The narrator scuttles from one archive to another, intertwining different sites and times of violence (including cyberspace) and disparate subject positions: Nazi functionary Wilhelm Gustloff, whose name adorns the cruise ship; the young Jewish student David Frankfurter, who assassinated Gustloff in 1933; the captain of the Soviet submarine that torpedoed the ship in 1945; the narrator’s mother, who survives the catastrophe and is obsessed by its unacknowledged memory; the narrator’s son, Konrad, who, unbeknown to his father, relives this history in the virtual space of the Internet and reanimates its violence. The narrator moves from the large-scale events of history to his present- day personal tribulations: “Let me leave the ship lying where it was relatively safe . . . and crabwalk forward to return to my own private misery” (91). Yet he soon discovers that his private misery is intimately linked to a forgotten or disavowed collective past: His son has fallen under the spell of the maritime catastrophe, dabbles in neo-Nazism, and impersonates the Nazi Gustloff on his revisionist website. In the virtual space of the chat room, Konrad as Gustloff spars with an anonymous young interlocutor who is equally obsessed with history and impersonates his Jewish assassin. In their shared virtual space-time, the two youths rehearse and reinvent the circumstances of the assassination of the Nazi functionary by the Jewish student in 1933. When they fi nally meet, Konrad—impersonating Gustloff—kills the youth who impersonated Frankfurter. The victim of history’s resurging violence was a gentile whose identification with Jews was a form of atonement for the previous generations’ complicity with the Holocaust.

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Beyond its crustacean title and methodology, Grass’s recent novel resonates with Sartre’s postwar play. Both works engage with gray zones of complicity; both recognize the moral toll that violence takes on perpetrators as well as victims; both warn against collective amnesia and the temptation to bury an inconvenient past within a shiny, reunited, and pacified modernity; and both probe the afterlife of violence in their contemporary moments. Most important, both works envisage historical representation as a zigzag movement between different places, times, scales, and subject positions. The narrator of Crabwalk is mindful that “comparisons are odious” (16), for they are prone to collapsing difference into identity. Instead, he “sneak[s] up on time in a crabwalk,” in a temporal weaving that gives flashes of insight into the past’s reverberations in the present. In The Condemned of Altona, it is through the back door of the Nazi past that Sartre sneaks up on France’s late-colonial present and works forward to illuminate the ever-actual centrality of torture to empire. Yet what is distinctive about Grass’s figure for historical inquiry is the sideways motion of the crabwalk and the alternative it offers to reading allegory in univocal, chronological, or hierarchical terms, as even Sartre did when he positioned Algeria “behind” Germany in his play. The spatial figure of the crabwalk invites us to read time allegorically, such that Nazism and imperialism, genocide and colonialism, the Holocaust and decolonization are addressed side by side in relations of mutual illumination rather than of petrified equivalence and identity. The crabwalk suggests a circuit of communication that travels forward and backward in time as well as sideways in space; it offers a mode of reading that brings different histories into proximity and adjacence without reducing one to the other or positing them as analogous, symmetrical, and reversible. Finally, crabwalk history opens the possibility of tracing intersections and interferences between multiple histories that are bound together in the fabric of the cultural imagination and yet distinguished by knots of historical specificity, of attending to noeuds de mémoire as well as lieux de mémoire. In such a formulation the Nazi genocide, late colonialism, and postcolonial iterations of imperialism would inevitably inform one another, but they would not necessarily be abstracted into the same unwavering historical paradigm. Similarly, these histories might continue to be invoked to illuminate our own present without suggesting that contemporary political

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configurations mirror those of the past. Indeed, the fact that “occupation,” “torture,” and “genocide” are terms suffused with distinctive histories and yet, at the same time, remain markers of an unfolding present suggest that Sartre’s crabs are still speaking to us in allegories that have yet to be deciphered.

F i v e

Reading Nazi Memory in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

What is the cultural significance of Jonathan Littell’s monumental The Kindly Ones (2006) and its narrative of Nazi perpetration within what Annette Wieviorka has described as our contemporary “era of the witness,” a time in which the act of testimony and the victim’s voice have acquired unprecedented historical and moral authority.1 Along with other scholars of collective memory, Wieviorka identifies the Eichmann trial and its global transmission of Holocaust testimony as a turning point in the rise of the witness. By giving voice to the suffering of survivors, the trial established the witness, subjective memory, and lived experience as key sites of historical understanding.2 Whereas the immediate postwar era perceived the political detainee as the emblematic victim of Nazism, the Eichmann trial displaced Buchenwald with Auschwitz, highlighting instead the innocent racial victim and the specificity of Jewish extermination. The trial can thus be seen to inaugurate a cultural regime of trauma, testimony, and identification that is alive with us today. From the survivors’ voices carried by television and radio waves from 182

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Jerusalem in 1961 to the fifty-two thousand testimonies videotaped by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation and housed at Yad Vashem, Holocaust memory remains deeply anchored in the victim’s living voice. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has consecrated this ethical focus on the victim’s experience by suggesting that any attempt to enter into the logic of perpetration and ask “why” rather than “how” constitutes a betrayal of Auschwitz’s reign of senseless violence (Hier ist kein Warum). “As the last Holocaust survivors age and pass away, the awareness that all living memory of the events themselves will soon be extinguished has fostered in regard to survivor testimony what one could call an anxiety of historical transmission,” Thomas Trezise observes.3 The victims are a repository of historical knowledge and cultural memory; the fate of their testimony in subsequent generations is a source of concern. Yet the emergence of the victim as a figure in the public sphere also belongs to a broader shift in focus characterizing postwar collective memory, from heroes to victims and from “triumphant to traumatic memories.”4 The ongoing effects of mass atrocity on Eu ropean late modernity have transformed its sense of time and history, which “from being the story of the victors . . . has become a ‘historiography of the vanquished.’ ”5 In France, this transition in memorial regimes is frequently cast in terms of Henry Rousso’s Vichy Syndrome, that is, from the postwar Gaullist mythology of Resistance to ongoing obsessions with a “past that refuses to pass.”6 If, after Liberation, commemorations of the war were made in the heroic mode and celebrated those who died for the nation, in recent decades, with greater recognition of collaboration, deportation and Holocaust, the focus has shifted from those “morts pour la France” to those “morts à cause de la France,” from those who sacrificed themselves to the nation to those sacrificed by the nation.7 This shift from heroic to tragic registers reorients the exigencies of memory, from the droit au souvenir (right to remembrance) demanded by the figure of the Resistance fighter to a devoir de mémoire (duty of remembrance) that is owed to the victims of occupied and collaborationist France.8 This shift from the resistance hero to the innocent victim, from agency to suffering as the ethico-political kernel of collective memory, is also explained by the institutionalization of trauma in France. As Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman demonstrate in The Empire of Trauma, in the past three decades, legal decrees and psychiatric categories have converged upon the

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figure of the victim, the centrality of suffering, and the right to recognition and reparation. Initially a category of psychological injury, trauma in the 1980s was gradually dissociated from the field of medicine and inserted into the social domain to become a platform for political claims. The psychomedical category of trauma was thus moralized into a harm that requires social action and reparation. In our current moral economy, the position of victimhood affords the audibility of one’s claims for recognition, testimony, and reparations. Suffering is placed at the heart of society and acquires a prescriptive, normative function with symbolic, but also material, results. Political and psychiatric processes have thus contributed to articulate a memory field in which the history of injury (whether individual or collective) is now bound to a discourse of social rights and recognition, if not of reparation.9 I have sketched out four major divergences between the postwar culture of remembrance examined in the preceding chapters and contemporary practices of Holocaust memory: the specificity of the Shoah in relation to the Nazi genocide; the victim as a historical and an ethical point of reference; the privileging of testimony in its uniqueness and the corollary privilege of memory over history; and the rise of trauma as a psychiatric, social, and political category.10 We thus observe a turn away from the phenomenon of complicity (with the memory of perpetration) and of contamination (between disparate histories of violence) and an orientation toward the innocent victim’s memory along with the Shoah’s singularity. For the postwar French and Francophone intellectuals discussed in earlier chapters, Nazism was an ideological structure continuous with other regimes of racialized violence. Their strategies of complicity sought to awaken the French and Algerian public to these contaminations and convergences; their focus was on readers and viewers as potential agents of collective, future-oriented change in addition to witnesses of past suffering. The emergence of a collective devoir de mémoire, however, signals a shift from the action-oriented models of postwar political commitment to the ethical focus of postmodern trauma and testimony. The ambiguities of postwar allegories examined thus far, with their instrumental politics of memory, could not be further from the assumptions implicit in the devoir de mémoire: that we identify with the victims’ history, honor the untranslatability of their experience, and remember them through modes of trauma, melancholy, and mourning. Bearing in mind the domi-

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nance of identificatory models for the reception of Holocaust memory, we could say that the “era of the witness” is one that unfolds under the “empire of trauma” and “the duty to remember” the victim’s suffering. These are broad brushstrokes, but they evoke something of the climate in which Jonathan Littell’s fictional account of a Nazi perpetrator, The Kindly Ones, unleashed its provocation. 11 A controversial illustration of “Holocaust impiety,” The Kindly Ones seems to mark the emergence of yet another phase in the cultural memory of trauma.12 Although not unprecedented, Littell’s fictional testimony of a Nazi struck several blows to established taboos on Holocaust representation.13 The fi rst-person narrative of an SS officer’s itinerary through the rise and fall of the Third Reich, it compels readers to enter into the psyche of a perpetrator and to witness the war, occupation, and genocide in both their visceral horror and bureaucratic abstraction. This coerced complicity with the perpetrator’s gaze is a transgression of well-known limits on the representation of the Holocaust and the commemoration of its traumatic legacy. For some, the novel’s literary success threatened to displace the historian’s authority with the novelist’s imagination, inaugurating yet another phase in the old battle between history and literature. In a journal issue significantly titled L’histoire saisie par la fi ction (History captured by fiction) Pierre Nora diagnoses the “atomic effect” of The Kindly Ones on the literary landscape “in a time when fiction, whether literary or cinematic, tends to literally invade the historical field.” Its publication is “a major offensive that set up camp right in the historian’s sanctuary, and seized its most sacred subject, the Nazi genocide.”14 When it comes to the Holocaust, fiction’s occupation, if not conquest, of history provokes understandable anxieties about revisionism, if not negationism. Claude Lanzmann, for instance, initially expressed concern that the success of Littell’s novel would displace historical understanding with the unreliability of fictional memory, an especially disquieting prospect given that it was the fictional memory of a perpetrator.15 Yet The Kindly Ones is not alone in its embrace of the perpetrator’s perspective, but belongs to an international cultural phenomenon that examines the figure of the perpetrator in a wide range of contexts, from American slavery to Rwanda. Titles include Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1995), Rithy Panh’s documentary on the Khmer Rouge, S21 (2003), Toni Morrison’s

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A Mercy (2008), Gilbert Gatore’s Le passé devant soi (2008), and Joshua Oppenheimer and Christina Cynn’s The Act of Killing (2012). Do these works signal the waning of the victim as witness and the dawn of an “era of the perpetrator”? For Charlotte Lacoste, in Séductions du bourreau: Négation des victimes (2010), The Kindly Ones is the product of contemporary culture’s unhealthy fascination with complicity and perpetration. In a time of compassion fatigue caused by mass media’s saturation by images of atrocity, Lacoste argues, victims no longer hold the public’s attention. Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil has been generalized to the point of meaninglessness; the perpetrator is now an everyman and rehabilitated as a hero of our time. Further, this humanization leads to the erasure of victims, the relativization of crimes against humanity, and the rise of negationism. The Kindly Ones, in Lacoste’s account, is a revisionist narrative that exemplifies the moral abdications of “the era of the perpetrator”: Its Nazi narrator, who invites readers to fraternize with evil in a guided tour of the Jewish genocide, is the product of an era so mired in obscurity that the dilemma running through twentieth-century literature—“Would I speak under torture or not?”—is displaced by another that now invades contemporary fiction: “If ordered, would I resist the temptation to murder?16

For Lacoste, what distinguishes the preoccupations of twentieth-century literature from those of the twenty-first is a shift in identification from victim to perpetrator, from the question of whether we would speak under torture to whether we would kill under orders—in short, from resistance to complicity. If there is an author who incarnates her version of twentiethcentury literature’s ruling dilemma, it would be Jean-Paul Sartre (Lacoste often cites his contemporary Henri Alleg). As we saw, Sartre’s “Republic of Silence” envisioned torture as the ultimate “limit-situation” and silence under torture as the measure of human freedom. This heroic vision of resistance reappeared in Sartre’s preface to Alleg’s La question and explains its paradoxical title, “Une victoire.” However, Alleg, Sartre, and other postwar intellectuals who might fit into Lacoste’s vision of twentieth-century existential and ethical preoccupations were nevertheless also invested in understanding the phenomenon of perpetration, and saw complicity as an essential vector of critical memory and resistance. The preceding chapter suggests that long before Christopher Browning’s study of ordinary men’s capacity

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for mass murder, Sartre, among others, believed that “depending on the circumstances, anyone, at any time will become a victim or a perpetrator.”17 The turn to perpetration and complicity in our era of the witness is thus not a novel phenomenon but a return. The question is whether this return to complicity annihilates the victim, perpetuates a universal “gray zone,” and induces political paralysis, or whether it continues to wield a critical force in contemporary culture. My leap from the postwar works of Camus, Cayrol, Resnais, and Sartre to the contemporary era does not mean to suggest that transcultural approaches to Holocaust memory simply vanished between the Eichmann trials and the 1990s, even though the kinds of complicities I examined in the postwar context do recede from the 1960s to the 1990s. Michael Rothberg has illuminated the “long-term minoritarian tradition of ‘decolonized’ Holocaust memory” that crystallized around 1961 just as the specificity of the Holocaust was emerging.18 His book traces this cultural stream through works by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin through Charlotte Delbo and Marguerite Duras and into André Schwarz-Bart and Caryl Phillips in the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. Similarly, Max Silverman gives a panoramic view of the memorial relations between the Holocaust and colonialism from the postwar to the contemporary era, engaging works by Charlotte Delbo, Jean-Luc Godard, Georges Perec, and Patrick Modiano. The focus of my intervention, however, is the role of complicity in forging these connections, as well as the modalities and stakes of complicity’s reemergence as a political gesture in the third millennium. Contemporary reengagements with memory-in-complicity raise several questions in relation to the postwar intellectual tradition. In a global culture saturated with the Holocaust’s iconography of suffering, what are the aims and effects of representing a perpetrator as a hero of our times?19 Given the critical orthodoxy on the Holocaust as a trauma accessible only through a crisis of representation, what is at stake in Littell’s portrayals of atrocity, and how do these position his readers? Does the publication of The Kindly Ones signal the return of la mode rétro, the cultural movement that fetishized complicity, banalized collaboration, aestheticized Vichy, and eroticized fascism in the 1970s?20 Exemplified by fi lms such as Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974), la mode rétro was denounced by Michel Foucault for evacuating history of

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its conflicts and short-circuiting political struggle in the aftermath of 1968. If Foucault criticized la mode rétro on political grounds, Primo Levi condemned one of its emblematic films on ethical grounds: Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) portrayed the sadomasochistic attachment between a concentration camp inmate and an SS officer during and after the war. Levi objected to the film’s eroticization of power and its fascination for “the perpetrator within.” In fact, it was in response to The Night Porter that Levi declared, “I do not know, and it does not interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that murderers existed . . . and to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or else a sinister sign of complicity.”21 As we saw in chapter 1, Levi cautioned against extending the concentrationary gray zone to the pacified everyday of postwar liberal democracies. Does Littell’s fictional testimony of perpetration and psychosexual transgression play a similar role in contemporary culture, deploying the tired tropes of the banality of evil and the erotics of violence to generalize complicity as a structural fact of existence? Is it symptomatic of the universalization of traumatic complicity in high theory and popular culture alike? Or worse still, a symptom of flabby postmodern relativism and voyeuristic Holocaust kitsch that characterize an “era of the perpetrator”? Richard Crownshaw has argued that the turn to the perpetrator in recent cultural production corresponds to a critique of trauma theory’s universalization of the victim as a figure of identification. Yet he cautions against empathy for perpetrators, proffered as an antidote to the victim’s universalization, since it risks making “the perpetrator an appropriable figure available for facile identification across different cultural memories where once the victim figured such availability.”22 I suggest, however, that unlike the universalizing or identificatory thrust of current theories of trauma, Littell reenergizes the oppositional force of complicity and returns to the connections examined in previous chapters between colonialism and genocide, and between perpetration and victimhood. Like Sartre, whose concern was to illuminate the logic of occupation and empire in a crabwalk through the Nazi past and whose approach to torture as the bodily incarnation of imperial forces resonates with Vietnam and Abu Ghraib, The Kindly Ones illuminates the costs of imperial strategies today, albeit in a postmodern, ironic rather

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than allegorical vein. As various interviews suggest, Littell’s objectives in the novel were not simply historical, with the implicit relegation of an event’s significance to the past. His dizzying documentation of Hitler’s Germany was intended to reverberate within the contemporary global political horizon, in relation to Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and other sites of conflict and war. Raised in the shadow of Vietnam and its stream of televised images, Littell worked for NGO humanitarian missions in Bosnia and Chechnya before writing The Kindly Ones and has since traveled as a journalist to Sudan, Congo, Ciudad Juárez, and Syria.23 Without suggesting that we should explain his novel by way of his biography, I hope to show that The Kindly Ones can be placed in the cultural legacy of ironic complicity this book has traced, and that its memorial knots entwine forms of terror both in the European past and within our contemporary world. If the pursuit of continuities between colonialism and the Nazi genocide is by no means unprecedented, such investigation remains a perilous gesture today. Comparative gestures between these legacies have been decried for reinstating the kinds of specious relativism seen during the Historians’ Debate in Germany (1986), when the crimes of Stalin were used to relativize those of Hitler, or during Klaus Barbie’s trial (1987), where Jacques Vergès’s defense of the Butcher of Lyon invoked France’s military colonial crimes in Algeria. In the context of the Nazi genocide, comparisons have been deployed for revisionist ends. What is provocative about Jonathan Littell’s decolonial reading of the Nazi genocide is its knowing evocation of such strategies of relativization and exculpation. The challenge that his novel poses to its readers is how to parse the validity of its historical analysis of complicity between different legacies and regimes of terror given its site of enunciation. Indeed, the greatest interpretive difficulty posed by The Kindly Ones is that the perpetrator’s voice is fully mediated by the historical and testimonial archive of the Holocaust. Littell’s protagonist, Maximilien Aue, is not a realistic protagonist but a discomfiting blend of postmodern picaresque and Bataillean abjection whose account is a “ventriloquism of history books.”24 His journey from the killing fields of the East to Stalingrad, where he is shot in the head, through Berlin, Auschwitz, Belzec, Hungary, and even Hitler’s bunker, where he tweaks the Führer’s nose, makes him a fictional firsthand witness of the Nazi extermination who has absorbed the past decades’

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historical archive and projects this anachronistic knowledge back into his itinerary. The scandal of Aue’s creation is that his account of perpetration is steeped in the cultural memory of the Holocaust as it has been configured by the victims’ testimony. This is Holocaust memory for the postmodern age, when the archive circulates indiscriminately from victim to perpetrator to bystander and can be ventriloquized without quotation marks, when extermination can become a cultural meme that is recycled through the registers of trash, porn, and gore. Within this book’s corpus, The Kindly Ones is the first novel to engage the Nazi genocide in a nonallegorical mode. As a thoroughly documented historical novel, its mediation of the Third Reich’s legacy occurs not by means of allegory but irony. Of course irony is a subset of allegory: If allegory says one thing but means another, irony says one thing but means its opposite. In Paul de Man’s formulation, irony’s structure is “the reversed mirrorimage” of allegorical form insofar as in irony, the discontinuities within registers of meaning occur simultaneously, in the flash of an instant, rather than unfolding through the duration of narrative.25 Littell’s wager is to create a narrative voice propelled by irony over a vast textual space, challenging readers to sustain the tension between proximity and distance for over nine hundred pages. I suggest that this is the novelty of his brand of ironic complicity in the postmodern age. Given the length and complexity of The Kindly Ones, the following reading does not seek to offer an interpretation of the work as a whole, nor will it assess the integration of the Oresteia myth within the novel’s historical picture of Nazism or consider the tensions between Aue’s alleged ordinariness and his extraordinary characterization as an incestuous matricide. Rather, I focus on ironic complicity as a mode of narration, the strategies of reading that this mode requires, and the approach to historical violence that it opens up. More specifically, I take up the novel’s dialogue with an earlier French literature of complicity, its meditation on the consumption of history as spectacle in postmodernity, and its investigation of overlapping memories of historical violence in the context of “new genocide studies” and decolonial approaches to the Holocaust.

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Memory’s Manufacture: The “Complicity Effect” of a Perpetrator’s Testimony I am a veritable memory factory. I will have spent my whole life manufacturing memories. Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones

“Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.”26 The novel’s first line ushers us into a familiar textual regime of complicity. Like the intricate lace produced in Maximilien Aue’s postwar factory, the opening allusions to Villon, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Céline, and Camus weave us into a web of recognizable literary resonances, and this intertextual web establishes France as the national ground for the narrative’s reception. It is no accident that the inaugural section of this narrative suite is titled “Toccata,” named for an improvisational musical piece whose Italian root, toccare (to touch), evokes the novel’s unwelcome impetus to make intimate contact with its “kindred reader.” The opening address harbors a coercive force that is palpable from the initial Baudelairean interpellation of a hypocritical fraternal reader (hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable mon frère), to the chapter’s close, “I am a man like other men, I am a man like you, I tell you I am just like you!” (24). The reader is summoned into complicity in multiple senses of the word, as a partner in crime, but also as an intimate whose involvement will lead to understanding. It is a gesture reminiscent of the insidious pronoun on that weaves the spectator into the web of extermination in Night and Fog, and similar instances of complicitous address in Camus and Sartre. What sort of reading contract is proffered in this introduction? Aue’s gestures of coercive kinship expose the governing strategy of the narrative deluge that follows and with which we are now familiar— that of ironic complicity. If the gray zone and its traumatic complicity is now a dominant ethical model for approaching the Holocaust’s legacy, I have been arguing that French-speaking postwar intellectual culture gives us alternate models of ironic complicity that harbor an animating, critical force. As a mode of narration, ironic complicity coerces the reader into solidarity with the narrator, yet simultaneously sabotages this identification through irony. Although a comparison to Camus’s sparse The Fall may startle given the sheer volume and documentary specificity of The Kindly Ones, Aue’s “morality play”

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(3) functions much like Clamence’s wily and despotic monologue. Both protagonists are abject figures who claim to mirror a collective fall into complicity with the genocidal inferno of their century; both narratives demand a vigilant reading that must simultaneously consent to and resist the seduction of the narrator’s ceaseless rhetoric; and both assume that the reader partakes in the collective imaginary of concentrationary modernity. If Camus’s protagonist skips over the description of a camp near Tripoli, it is because “we children of the mid-century don’t need a diagram to imagine such places. A hundred and fi fty years ago, people became sentimental about lakes and forests. Today we have carceral lyricism.”27 Similarly, when Aue visits Majdanek and Auschwitz, he spares us the tedium of their description: “I won’t describe all these installations: they are very well known and are described in many other books. I have nothing to add” (612). In both works, the reader is situated within the aftermath of historical disaster and evoked as a potential perpetrator, accomplice, or knowing bystander. Perhaps the greatest challenge posed by Littell’s monumental narrative is the demand that readers maintain the simultaneous intimacy and distance that irony requires over the course of nine hundred pages. A consideration of irony’s operations in this text is crucial in order to avoid the misreadings and conflations that have vexed its contemporary reception. In Les complaisantes (The Complacent Ones) for instance, the authors mount large portions of their argument against the moral bankruptcy of the novel on a refusal to distinguish between its “nihilistic postmodern narrator” and the author. Similarly, Lacoste’s attack assumes that The Kindly Ones is an unmediated reflection of its Nazi protagonist’s values, which are defended by the author.28 As I suggest in what follows, part of Littell’s accomplishment is the sustained tension he orchestrates between the beguiling intimacy of Aue’s voice on the one hand and his status as an object of the reader’s critical reflection on the other. Let us turn to what one reader designates as the most abominable metaphor of all literature: “Often during the day, my head begins to rage, with the dull roar of a crematorium” (6).29 The opening analogy between Aue’s psychic space and the crematorium situates the subsequent outpouring of facts and reflections within the roar of industrial-scale extermination and links the manufacture of his prose to the production of death. It suggests

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that Aue’s memory is entirely woven into the Nazi machinery, this despite his own marginal and precarious position within the Reich as homosexual, as critic of wasteful extermination in the camps, as half French, as European intellectual, as incestuous brother, and Oresteian matricide pursued by detective-furies (these peculiarities also make it hard to take Aue’s selfproclaimed ordinariness at face value). If he is, as Susan Suleiman argues, a reliable historical witness to the Nazi genocide whose accounts are informed by firsthand experience and retrospective knowledge, his testimony is nevertheless firmly anchored within the perspective and memory of a perpetratoraccomplice.30 Aue’s horror upon visiting Auschwitz and the Buna factory, for instance, is caused by the inefficient treatment of the Jewish labor force and his visceral disgust at the detainees’ degradation rather than any compassion or recognition of their humanity; his own gaze casts them as ants. The novel’s embrace of this perspective constitutes its originality and force but is also its challenge. As in Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona, where the victims have been incorporated into the memory of perpetrators and accomplices, here too the victims are erased or ingested by the narrator. It would be fruitless—indeed, contradictory—to seek traces of their experience, subjectivity, or voice in the pages that follow. What we find instead are various incarnations of the victims as these are filtered through the eyes of an unrepentant Nazi. The relentlessness of this perspective is particularly challenging given that for several decades, cultural production has approached the Shoah almost exclusively from the standpoint of its victims. It is no surprise that as readers and critics, we would search for traces of their experience in the fictional testimony of a limit-experience. For example, in a reading of excess and transgression in The Kindly Ones, Liran Razinsky argues that the novel’s focus on the Nazi gaze yields an inverted glimpse into the suffering of victims. This point is illustrated by a scene in Lublin, when Aue defecates in a bathroom and an anonymous Polish hand rises from below to wipe his rear. For Razinsky, this hand “serves to convey, to bring to life, the presence, not only of the human subject to which it belongs, but of all those other absented subjects. . . . Precisely because we follow the perspective of the SS officer, we once again catch a glimpse into their suffering, and thus, that which cannot be represented is, for a moment, realized.”31 Yet I would argue that such attempts to recuperate the perpetrator’s gaze as an inverted, ethical testimony

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to the victims is systematically blocked throughout The Kindly Ones, raising the question of whether the knowledge gained from a fictional perpetrator’s testimony is worth its moral discomforts. How can the narrative be dedicated to those who perished at the hands of Nazi perpetrators, as stated in the epigraph For the dead? In other words, is there an ethical imperative guiding our encounter with Aue’s gaze as it mediates the memory of extermination? One of Aue’s most intimate confrontations with a victim’s annihilation might serve as a starting point to unravel this issue. In Kharkov, where he serves as an officer of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS Security Ser vice following the Wehrmacht operations on the Eastern Front, Aue compulsively attends the execution of Russian partisans, Jews, and gypsies in an attempt to grasp the finality of death. Although he does not participate in the killing, he studies both the executioners’ and his own growing numbness: What I was trying, desperately but in vain, to regain was actually that initial shock, that sensation of a rupture, an infi nite disturbance of my whole being; instead of that, I now felt only a dull, anxious kind of excitation, always briefer, more acrid, mixed with fever and my physical symptoms, and thus, slowly, without truly realizing it, I was sinking into the mud while searching for light. (179)

Aue’s reflection on the waning sensations of spectatorship also implicate the reader, who might well share this feeling of besmirched numbness during the gruesome passages on annihilation. Yet this numbness recedes when Aue watches the execution of a young female Russian partisan. In a fi nal act of defilement, he joins the German officers who queue up to kiss the victim before she is hanged: When my turn came, she looked at me, a clear, luminous look, washed of everything, and I saw that she understood everything, knew everything, and faced with this pure knowledge I burst into flames. My clothes crackled, the skin of my belly melted, the fat sizzled, fire roared in my eye sockets and my mouth, and cleaned out the inside of my skull. The blaze was so intense she had to turn her head away. I burned to a cinder, my remains were transformed into a salt statue; soon it cooled down, pieces broke off, fi rst a shoulder, then a hand, then half the head. Finally I fi nished collapsing at her feet and the wind swept away the pile of salt and scattered it. (179)

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The young partisan hanged in this passage is based on the historical figure of Zoja Kosmodemjanskaja, whose mutilated corpse was photographed and became an icon of Soviet war propaganda, also providing an early inspiration for Littell’s fictional project. The narrative encounter fashioned out of this photographic trace is a complex mise en abyme that rehearses the temptations and perils of reading as identification. Indeed, the passage blocks identification on multiple fronts. In what reads like the parody of a Levinasian face to face, the prose suggests that the victim’s luminous gaze of pure knowledge serves Aue’s own quest for light, for the knowledge of a subject’s confrontation with the mystery of death. The solipsism of this eroticomystical communion is exposed, as is the instrumental violence of Aue’s gaze upon a human being who faces an execution in which he is fully complicit, both as voyeur and as enabler of extermination.32 Aue’s hallucination of self-annihilation is suggestive in this regard: As he contemplates the imminent death of another, it is he who explodes into the roaring flames of the crematoria that are yet to come, he who embodies the fate of its future victims as anonymous ashes scattered by the wind. In this scandalous image, Aue embodies the burnt offerings to God that defi ne the Holokaustas in the Bible’s ancient Greek translation. These incendiary tropes echo the initial analogy between Aue’s psychic space and the crematoria ovens. They also recall his hallucination of dismemberment at Babi Yar, when he repeatedly shoots at a beautiful dying Jewish woman who has gazed up at him, and he sees his arm fly off, still shooting, into the ravine. The dissociation experienced in both episodes cast the perpetrator-accomplice as the subject of a trauma that is inflicted, paradoxically, by the victim. Such passages draw attention to their figural extravagance, since the novel’s prose otherwise alternates between hypernaturalist registers and documentary reportage, with intermittent eruptions of Bataillean excess. The passages on extermination do not solicit what Dominick LaCapra has described as “empathic unsettlement,” that is to say, the alternation of identification and distance that constitutes an ethical, nonappropriative reception of a victim’s trauma.33 Yet neither do they co-opt the reader into uncritical identification with the perpetrator’s perspective, as some critics have argued.34 In the passage above, if we see the partisan through Aue’s eyes, we are held at bay by the queasy lyricism of his prose and prodded into a recognition of what he does not, cannot, or will not see. To be sure, we do not see through the blindness

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of Aue’s gaze into the victim’s experience, we only witness her incorporation into his traumatic fantasy of victimization. Such is the provocative perversity of Littell’s project: As in Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona or Camus’s The Fall, although we witness the atrocities of war from a range of compromised and complicit positions, we are never given a passage into the victims’ subjective experience or voice. Yet any wholesale identification with the perpetrator is similarly blocked by the circulations of the gray zone. In passages such as this one, where a perpetrator who stares at an execution is annihilated by a victim’s gaze, the inversions of victim, perpetrator, and onlooker are so ostentatious that they compel a reading attuned to Aue’s manipulation. The circulation and exchange of victims and perpetrators is a recurrent topos in The Kindly Ones, although I am suggesting that these rhetorical gray zones are rife with irony. A case in point is Aue’s meditation on the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units, whose traumas are compared to the suffering of those shot in the ravine of Babi Yar. If the executioners suffer, Aue argues, it is because of the terror and anguish of their victims, just as (et de même) those who were shot suffered more at the sight of their loved ones’ death than their own. From this shocking analogy between victims and perpetrators, Aue explains the sadism of perpetrators as the natural consequence of their monstrous pity for the victims, a pity that erupts as impotent rage against the victims’ persistent humanity. He concludes that the paradoxical lesson of the massacres on the Eastern Front is “the awful, inalterable solidarity of humanity . . . the ner vous depressions, the suicides, my own sadness, all that demonstrated that the other exists, exists as an other, as a human, and that no will, no ideology, no amount of stupidity or alcohol can break this bond, tenuous but indestructible. This is a fact, not an opinion” (147). Although these passages have been read as evidence of the protagonist’s reliability as an ethical witness who ends up having moral insight into Nazi atrocities, I would argue instead that they demand a reading attuned to irony. When Aue evokes the indestructible unity of the human species, he is ventriloquizing Robert Antelme’s postwar reflection (discussed in the preceding chapter) on the failure of Nazi dehumanization. L’espèce humaine is evoked to explain the perpetrator’s sadism toward the victim as the “boomerang effect” of impotent compassion. Yet what does it mean for this analysis—with

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its intertextual echo of a Buchenwald survivor’s testimony—to issue from the pen of a Nazi perpetrator? Aue’s commentary indicates a reflexive distance from events that contributes to his status as what Suleiman terms a “partly reliable moral witness.” Yet we cannot forget that his analogy eliminates the irreducible distance between those who killed and those who perished while rationalizing sadism as the effect of perpetrators’ recognition of their victims’ humanity.35 Once again we find ourselves navigating the treacherous waters of ironic complicity. Aue’s argument is seductive, for it suggests that perpetrators could reflect on the acts they committed or witnessed, that—unlike Sartre’s analysis— they did not necessarily envision their victims as inhuman. This may signal the failure of Nazi anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik propaganda to fully interpellate and co-opt its agents, but it also suggests that one can grasp the humanity of another and still kill them. Although the allusions to perpetrator trauma invite a differentiated view of the Einzatzgruppe and seek to convey the troubling ordinariness of these killers, such moments of moral reflection are inevitably haunted by an awareness of their paradoxical site of enunciation. Further, in what constitutes a double transgression, our wily narrator voices the “fact” of human solidarity both as it is perceived by the perpetrators and articulated through the testimonial archive of their victims. This citation of L’espèce humaine is one of many metanarrative moments that remind us of the text’s dense mediation through the literature of genocide. Not only an active participant in the Third Reich’s trajectory, Aue is also involved in its representation. One might recall that his loving documentation of Babi Yar, which passes through the hands of a Jewish binder before reaching Paul Blobel, contributes to the Nazi archive of extermination. Like his hypocrite lecteur, Aue is immersed in Holocaust postmemory and has absorbed its archive. The refraction of perpetration through the archive of victims exemplifies the provocative tropological circulations of The Kindly Ones. The narrative machine recycles the vast archive of testimonial and historical materials on the Shoah through the perpetrator’s consciousness and memory: The gray zone is explicitly textualized as the circulations of victimhood and perpetration, leading to indifferentiation and indistinction, or what Liran Razinsky describes as a “general liquidation of boundaries.”36

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“The question of the perpetrator is the central issue raised by historians of the Shoah in the past fifteen years,” Littell declared in an interview. “The perpetrator’s motivation is the only question that remains. Upon reading the works of great scholars, it seems to me that they all hit a wall.”37 His own narrative monument does not dismantle this wall by offering a coherent psychological or historical account of the perpetrators’ motivations. Like Camus’s writings on Algerian violence fifty years earlier, Littell does not give a genealogy of Nazi ideology and practice that would set up a foundational causality. Instead, factors such as ideological conscription, situational and professional pressures, contingent military-political exigencies, and violent fantasies of aggression are juxtaposed in kaleidoscopic fashion to give us flashes of intelligibility that resist grand psychic or historical narrative. The ethical force of this conte moral resides less in its attempt to identify the motivations of the perpetrator than in its challenging treatment of identification itself. As a memorial, historical, and literary genre, Holocaust testimony is usually understood to be the account of a survivor and victim; its reception is theorized predominantly through models of intimacy and identification, such that readers or viewers are invited to become secondary witnesses or hosts to the representation of a victim’s traumatic experience. Yet such identifications can blind us to our complicity with the forces responsible for ongoing trauma and terror. With its ironic registers, the fictional testimony of perpetration in The Kindly Ones demands a far more vigilant approach. The victims who haunt Aue— such as the little pianist Yakov or the beautiful women who face their death— are images filtered through a gaze that is distinctly complicitous with their victimization. The novel’s greatest transgression may well be the wall that it erects between its readers and the victims of the Shoah. Our only access to this traumatic history is a testimony whose archive is colonized by a perpetrator-accomplice’s memory and voiced from within the roar of extermination.

Itineraries of Trauma and Tourism The challenge posed by The Kindly Ones to established codes for reading historical trauma is compounded by the hybridity of its genre. The jostling

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demands of historical fiction, testimony, Greek tragedy, bildungsroman, picaresque, kitsch, satire, archival documentation, and philosophical rêverie keep readerly expectations perpetually off-kilter.38 Littell has often evoked Blanchot and Bataille as his greatest literary influences, and several critics have teased out the novel’s thicket of intertextual reference. Of particular interest for the work’s meditation on history, however, is its evocation of Sentimental Education. Aue finds a copy of Flaubert’s novel at Von Üxküll’s estate and retreats into its progressively soaked and damaged pages during his journey from the corpse-strewn forests of northern Pomerania to Berlin as Soviet troops advance: “The long, steady flow of the prose soon carried me away, I didn’t hear the rattle of the treads or the rumble of engines, the absurd shouts in Russian, ‘Davaï! Davaï!’ or the explosions, a little farther away; only the curling, sticking pages got in the way of my reading” (929). Aue’s evasion into the pages of a novel that itself narrates a character’s rendez-vous manqué, or missed encounter with the history of 1848, is yet another illustration of the narrative’s corrosive irony. Yet even before this literary evasion from their ghastly Pomeranian journey, Sentimental Education serves as a key point of reference for the unpredictable turns of Aue’s itinerary. Just as his predecessor Frédéric Moreau circulates from one Parisian site of power to another, Aue owes his movements through Europe and the ranks of the SS to the contingencies of careerism, competition, and the inscrutable interventions of figures such as Thomas Hauser or the mysterious Dr. Mandelbrod.39 Despite his conscription into a linear trajectory of war and conquest, Aue’s peregrinations through the Third Reich echo the Flaubertian protagonist’s inability to steer a straight course (his défaut de ligne droite).40 Aue’s intellectualism prevents him from taking a committed ideological stance and perpetually robs the ground from under his feet, much like Frédéric’s dreamy prevarications fail to position him on the Parisian financial, social, or erotic map. Both harbor anachronistic ideals that do not translate into meaningful, unalienated action. In a comic scene, Aue falls prey to the classic nineteenth-century topos of the aborted duel (one that recurs in Sentimental Education). Accused of homosexual relations with Voss, Aue challenges Turek to a duel in a gesture inspired by his exalted recollections of Lermontov. When the duel is thwarted by the SS administration, Aue laments, “I felt as though I were being pursued by a curse: whatever I tried to do, any pure action would be denied me!” (287).

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Frédéric Moreau and Maximilien Aue are primarily positioned as observers of historical upheaval. “I observe and do nothing, that’s my favorite position” (252), claims Aue (disingenuously) of his role as information gatherer in the extermination campaigns, yet unlike his hapless predecessor, he is in a historical position to grasp the complicitous violence of such observation: “I consider that watching involves my responsibility as much as doing” (482). Despite the historical abyss that separates these literary figures, a troubling kinship emerges between Aue’s journey through the spectacle of genocide and Frédéric Moreau’s aimless consumption of the visual imagery of 1848. The latter’s fl ânerie through the oscillating revolutionary masses yields the thrill of disengaged spectatorship: “Frédéric, caught between two dense masses, did not budge; in any case, he was fascinated and enjoying himself tremendously. The wounded falling to the ground, and the dead lying stretched out, did not look as though they were really wounded or dead. He felt as if he were watching a spectacle.”41 His first encounter with the physical reality of violence occurs when he steps on something soft (quelque chose de mou), the hand of a dead soldier, yet remarkably, no response to this bodily contact registers in the character’s consciousness.42 This detached encounter with the spectacle of violence is woven into The Kindly Ones, for even the most graphic imagery of genocide passes through Aue’s derealizing perspective. Given the dense intertextual archive with which Littell imbues Aue, it is not surprising to fi nd an echo of Frédéric’s missed encounter with the bodily reality of history in the central, albeit repressed, Oresteian slaughter of The Kindly Ones, when Aue “stumble[s] against something soft [quelque chose de mou]” (529), the dead body of his stepfather, significantly named Moreau.43 Both protagonists in some sense miss their encounter with a violent personal and collective history in which they are nevertheless embedded and complicit. Thus, while Aue implausibly finds himself in all the key historical sites and events of the period and participates in his century’s greatest crimes, his lived experience of violence is displaced into erotic or somatic registers. Aue represses the evidence of his murder and matricide or the mysterious twins who are probably the outcome of his incestuous relations with his sister Una. The limits of his ability to witness the suffering or death of victims are underscored throughout the scenes of extermination. Instead, the impact of historical violence returns in the form of symptoms such as

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nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, or in hallucinations of Hitler wearing a rabbi’s shawl (an embodied fusion of victim and perpetrator that recalls Frantz von Gerlach’s delusions). Such echoes between Littell’s “monstrous” protagonist and recognizable nineteenth-century (and postwar) antiheroes might suggest a certain continuity in the structure of affect that emerges from what Walter Benjamin termed the “shock experience” of nineteenth-century urban modernity and that culminates in the traumas inflicted by the Nazi genocide. Yet although these failures of sight and insight may register through the symptomatology of perpetrator trauma in Littell’s characterization, as we have seen, the narrative irony complicates any attempts to position Aue as a victim of the atrocities to which he bears conscious or unconscious witness. More significant than the traumatic register of Aue’s encounter with violence, however, is his derealization of history into spectacle. Indeed, alongside passages on the atrocities of extermination, The Kindly Ones also maps the itinerary of a pleasurable fl ânerie through the Third Reich’s trajectory of conquest, occupation, and extermination. As J. Marina Davies notes, Littell’s novel consists of an alternation of war and touristic interludes.44 From the steppes of Ukraine and the lush landscapes of the Caucasus to the melancholy charms of Polish cities, the novel lingers on Aue’s touristic expeditions in the company of Thomas, Voss, and Partenau to sample the beaches, museums, monuments, and local cuisines of the occupied territories. As Aue explores the Caucasus with the linguist Voss, his impressions of war and displacement acquire the picturesque hue of nineteenth- century physiologies: “We would stroll through the noisy streets of Simferopol, enjoying the sun, in the midst of a motley crowd of German, Romanian, and Hungarian soldiers, of exhausted Hiwis, of tanned and turbaned Tatars, and of Ukrainian peasant women with rosy cheeks” (217). Aue appreciates the folkloric jostle of besieged populations, but the inhabitants left to survive in these ruins of war are filtered through the lens of colonial racism: “Filthy little Tatars in rags were playing among the ruins or guarding their goats. . . . We’d go to the beach, to Eupatoria” (218); “Haggard, filthy kids ran between the soldiers’ legs begging for bread” (226). These promenades through landscapes and decimated cities repeatedly juxtapose the rhetoric of tourism with the reality of extermination. In Piatigorsk, for instance, Aue passes up the opportunity to attend an Aktion and

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decides instead to visit the surrounding cities. That tourism is an alternative to genocide is conveyed with acid irony: “I didn’t actually have much to do in these other towns, but I was curious to visit them, and I wasn’t burning with desire to go see the Aktion” (239). Instead he samples the thermal waters of Kislovodsk, takes in the faux Indian architecture of its bathhouse, and wanders through the park. Later in the novel, he walks through Krakow’s historic Jewish quarter, now turned into a ghetto for “haggard, sickly, and unkempt Poles, displaced by the Germanization of the Incorporated Territories” (573). Aue coolly notes that although the Jewish population has been destroyed, their places of worship are left standing for the edification of Germany’s future generations. In the company of a young officer of the Gestapostelle who happens to be an expert on Polish Judaism, he visits one of these ancient synagogues. They pause before the tomb of a renowned rabbi to discuss the extermination of the European Jews and the preservation of their trace for cultural memory. The officer informs Aue that Poles, too, are destined for eventual eradication in the interests of the region’s future regeneration, for “without that, this region can never prosper and flourish” (574). Thus a casual exchange within the walls of a deserted synagogue exposes a biologistic conception of space, where a region’s regeneration is predicated on the extermination, not only of Jews, but also of the “subhuman” Poles that have taken their place. Alongside its portrayal of history as a derealized catastrophe that resists psychic integration, the novel also illuminates the touristic consumption of territories and cultures during the Nazi imperial conquest. As this last illustration suggests, the juxtaposition of tourism, imperialism, and genocide points to one of the most provocative historical dimensions of Littell’s epic: its placement of the Judeocide within a wider Nazi politics of extermination, and its return to the postwar inquiry into the imbrication of colonialism and extermination, empire and genocide.

Imperial Landscapes: Intersections of Colonialism and Genocide Everything intersected there [tout s’est croisé là], in Eu rope, and at that time in Western contemporary history. Jonathan Littell

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Aue’s profession in the manufacture of textiles provides a suggestive figure for collective memory. Within the long-standing symbolic association of textiles and textuality, the production of lace in Aue’s factory foreshadows the interlacing of memory, history, and fantasy in his testimony as well as the intertextual nature of this “history.” Most important, it announces the interwoven genealogies of historical violence, or noeuds de mémoire, that refract the Shoah. In a dizzying comparative calculation of the costs of war in the “Toccata,” for example, the narrator suddenly reaches out to touch the French reader with the Algerian War: “For instance, if you are French, consider your little Algerian adventure which so traumatized your citizens. You lost 25,000 men in 7 years. . . . I am obviously not including the Algerian dead; since you do not speak of them, in your books or T.V. programs, they must not count much for you. Yet you killed ten for every single one of your own dead, a fine effort, even compared to our own.”45 This analogy between the cost of the Nazi and French (or American) imperial “adventures” is a classic example of the dangers of relativization at the center of West Germany’s Historians’ Debate in the mid-1980s, when comparisons between the Final Solution and Stalinist crimes in the Soviet Union were deemed a perilous normalization of the Shoah.46 Although the passage’s irony puts its readership on guard as to the validity of such comparisons (“a fine effort, even compared to our own”), it nevertheless signals that we are entering into a realm of overlapping histories and memories, and that we will have to sift through the historical pertinence of such declared complicities while remaining on guard as to the site of their enunciation and their function in the narrative. In the course of Aue’s military-touristic itinerary, the Nazi Final Solution is repeatedly put into dialogue with other legacies of domination and mass murder, giving readers a wide-angle view of extermination. These gestures represent the Holocaust not as a singular event or a historical, epistemological, and ethical rupture with all existing frameworks, but instead as a process with intricate links to past and ongoing histories of imperialism, occupation, and genocide. The novel’s imaginative reconstruction of Nazi sites of genocide through the rhetoric of empire opens a path toward understanding the Shoah as embedded in existing ideological, military, and historical patterns. In a visual culture saturated with a dehistoricized iconography of Nazi atrocity, Littell’s narrator (like Resnais’s camera) reinvests now classic images of the genocide with a differentiated context and an ongoing

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relevance. This overture into other histories and ideologies of extermination is an attempt to restore a textured historicity to the Nazi programs of extermination. It is consistent with Littell’s aim to interrogate canonical ways in which the Shoah has been constructed as an object of study, which is frequently within the disciplinary walls of Holocaust studies and in growing isolation from the history of World War II, of imperialism, or of other genocides.47 Showing the imbrication of the Final Solution within these other dimensions reanimates the pertinence of the Shoah as an object of collective memory, historical investigation, and political awareness. As Littell puts it, “Perhaps this book acts as an echo chamber/sounding board [fait caisse de résonance] because it reinscribes the problematic from the perpetrator’s stance, and . . . by europeanizing this perpetrator, allows people to once again grab a hold of [trouver une prise avec] what happened to experience a moral implication by way of their potential for perpetration. This restores access [redonne une prise] to the trauma.”48 In this light it is significant that in the “Toccata” Aue should mention Raphael Lemkin (which he misspells “Lempkin”), the Polish Jewish founder of genocide studies. Although one might naturally assume that Lemkin coined the term in 1944 as a response to the Nazi extermination of Eu ropean Jewry, the historian Dirk Moses demonstrates that genocide was defined by him as an intrinsically colonial concept linked to global histories of occupation and empire.49 Despite his belief that racial hatred for Jews and Romas was a distinctive phenomenon, Lemkin nevertheless underscored the imperial structure of Nazism’s politics of extermination as well as the range of its actual and projected targets: The Nazi plan of genocide was related to many peoples, races. . . . As a matter of Fact, Hitler wanted to commit G. against the Slavic peoples, in order to colonize the East, and to extend the German empire up to the Ural mts. Nazi Germany embarked on a gigantic plan to colonize Eu rope, and since there were no free spaces local populations had to be removed in order to make room for Germans. . . . Hitler’s plan covered the Poles, the Serbs, the Russians, the Frenchmen.50

Lemkin’s colonial diagnosis runs through The Kindly Ones and its meticulous reconstructions of political motives and strategic ends for the campaigns of extermination on the Eastern Front. In one passage, Aue evokes

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the Nazi genocide in distinctively plural terms, as “our extermination policies/politics” (669) and reminds his readers of the “successful” extermination of all allegedly incurable disabled Germans and the majority of gypsies but also of millions of Russians and Poles, populations that were slated for a “natural diminution” to thirty million for the territorial ends of Lebensraum. A second objective of this slippery argument, which once again relativizes the atrocities on the Eastern Front and the force of German anti-Semitism by analogies with other European powers, is to point out the limits of approaching the Judeocide exclusively through the lens of Germany’s irrational and aberrant hatred of Jews (this strand of rabid anti-Semitism is figured through characters such as the sadistic Turek). Rather, Aue argues that Nazi programs of extermination issue from “a firm, well-reasoned acceptance of the recourse to violence to resolve the most varied social problems” (670). Such allusions to the internalized rationality and programmatic aspects of Nazi violence reframe the Shoah within other genocidal projects, which in turn are situated within a broader context of Western imperial modernity and instrumental reason. Here Aue rehearses the opposition between intentionalist accounts of the Final Solution, which emphasize Hitler’s aim to exterminate Eu ropean Jewry and underscore the role of irrational antiSemitism, and functionalist approaches that stress its technocratic, bureaucratic aspects and the radicalization of policies under the pressures of war. In The Kindly Ones, the intentionalist account is embodied by the grotesque, flatulent Mandelbrod, whose function is to reduce the space between the Führer’s anti-Semitic vision and the Final Solution’s implementation. Yet the dizzying stretches of narrative that document the bureaucratic, technical, and strategic considerations of the extermination campaigns situate Littell’s project within a functionalist approach. Perhaps one of the most disquieting “complicity effects” of the novel is the kind of numb fascination or ébahissement exerted by these vertiginous reconstructions of the logic, structure, and process of genocide (such as the pages detailing an argument between the SS and the army about the definition of Jews in the Caucasus).51 Aue articulates the logic by which “various social problems” are to be resolved through systemic recourse to violence: Nazism’s biologistic conception of space, whereby Lebensraum designates making room for Volk through the displacement and elimination of other populations. The novel gives a surreal illustration of this biopolitical fantasy. From the blood-soaked

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inferno of Ukraine, Himmler envisions an idyllic future in which this land would be transformed by the miracle of German colonization into fertile agricultural fields and rich industries, with Crimea as a site of leisure, and a tentacular network of luxurious trains connecting all the cities of the German Empire.52 Although Aue skeptically likens this utopia to the science fiction fantasies of Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs, he is relieved to know that somewhere within the airy summits of the Reich and within the war’s bloody chaos, a plan has been elaborated: “There really was, elaborated in rarified spheres far above our own, a plan, a final objective” (133), an italicized remark that rhetorically inscribes the Final Solution within a fi nal imperial plan. The novel consistently reminds readers that Hitler situated his movement within the tradition of European imperialism and cited British India as a model for Ukraine. For instance, Aue wonders, “Wasn’t it a British administrator, who in 1922 advocated administrative massacres to ensure the security of the colonies and bitterly regretted that the political situation in the Home Islands rendered these salutary measures impossible?” (669). North America is also invoked as a paradigm for settler colonialism. When Aue meditates on the brutality of Nazi colonization in the East in comparison to the ostensibly more civilized forms developed by France or England, he nevertheless evokes America’s extermination of the native population as a paradigm for the Nazi genocide: “The American policy, precursor and model of our own, of the creation of living space through murder and forced displacement. America, we tend to forget, was anything but a ‘virgin territory,’ but Americans succeeded where we failed, which makes all the difference” (590). Once again the analogy is deployed to mitigate responsibility in the narrative itself, but we are nevertheless invited to consider the American antecedents of a biopolitical space built on the displacement and elimination of indigenous populations. The novel gives a chilling image of colonialism’s convergence with genocide when Aue visits Belzec, a remote Polish village on the Lublin–Lvov railway line, where he discovers its scarcely concealed death camp “right next to a little town swarming with German settlers and their families” (587). A bustling population of German officers, soldiers, and their families conducts its daily business; they travel, walk around, write letters, joke and gossip in the midst of the stench and smoke of burning bodies.

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Such tableaux obviously recall Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” the proximity of atrocity and the everyday, the links between genocide and processes of modernization. But more significantly, they illustrate Arendt’s provocative linkage of imperialism and genocide. The Origins of Totalitarianism argues that the nineteenth-century colonial space served as a crucible for the elaboration of racial doctrines, administrative policies, and bureaucratic structures that would characterize European totalitarianism and its drive for total domination.53 Littell’s emphasis on the points of contact between Western imperialism and the Holocaust echoes Arendt’s analysis at numerous points. But the novel also draws inspiration from a pivotal historical juncture examined in this book, when intellectuals such as Sartre, Fanon, Césaire, and Albert Memmi reflected on the Nazi genocide through the lens of decolonization, and particularly in relation to the Algerian War, by identifying proximities, analogies, and even intersections between colonialism and Nazism. One might recall Fanon’s declaration that Nazism had turned Europe into a veritable colony, or refer once again to Césaire’s provocative formulation of Nazism as the “boomerang effect,” or choc en retour, of colonial practices come home to Europe.54 By illuminating Nazism’s colonial archive, as well as its links to the history of Eu ropean domination and its exploitation, immiserization, and extermination of peoples deemed inhuman or subhuman, Littell’s novel is a powerful illustration of what Rothberg terms “the colonial turn in Holocaust studies.”55 The multidirectional vectors of memory enabled by this colonial turn are reemerging in historical scholarship on the Nazi genocide, and Littell’s narrative is in dialogue with this phenomenon. We could further contextualize the historical project of The Kindly Ones within what has been called the “new school of genocide studies,” a constellation of approaches that investigate continuities between the Final Solution and processes of Western bureaucratic modernization, as well as military and historical patterns of imperialism, in an attempt to develop a postcolonial, global perspective on genocide.56 Jürgen Zimmerer, for example, examines the colonial roots of Nazi policy in order to understand how “ordinary men” could become “willing executioners.”57 Although careful to remind us of the complexity of these historical circuits, Zimmerer argues that Germany’s colonial past and the imbrication of race and space in West Africa are central to understanding the military campaign, occupation, and extermination

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in Eastern Eu rope. In particular, the military traditions of exterminatory wars such as those fought against the Herero and Nama in German SouthWest Africa served as a moral threshold (in their taboo violation) and a reservoir of beliefs and practices that flowed back into the industrial-scale killings of the Third Reich.58 Zimmerer demonstrates that the concept of Lebensraum for the preservation and expansion of a racially pure Volk, and its biologistic conception of social space, evolved in reference not only to German colonial history but also to the colonial histories of England, France, and the United States. The lines of transmission between the colonial administration and the Nazi military-industrial machinery are invoked in The Kindly Ones through such characters as Herr Leland, a director of IG Farben who occupies the palatial property expropriated from a Jew north of Brandenburg. After a day of hunting, Leland reflects on his past as colonial administrator in SouthWest Africa, where he collaborated with Cecil Rhodes and General Lothar von Trotha, who was responsible for the massacre and internment of Hereros in concentration camps. Significantly, Leland portrays Trotha as the worthy recipient of the British Cecil Rhodes’s legacy: “Trotha was a man who had understood Rhodes’s idea in all its strength. He said it openly: I wipe out rebel tribes with rivers of blood and rivers of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge” (708). The allusion to rivers of blood that will cleanse and prepare the soil for regeneration recalls the Gestapostelle officer’s remarks to Aue on the projected extermination of Poles for the land’s future blossom. Such passages situate the genocide within the continuum of Eu ropean colonialism and its exterminatory biopolitics, articulated through the rhetoric of sacrificial cleansing and regeneration. Herr Leland concludes that German expansion is now an irresistible force. With the defeat of the Soviet Union and the resources of the East at their disposal, the globe itself will serve as a vast stage for the display of Nazi imperial power: “Then the world could be remade as it should be” (708). The Kindly Ones represents the Nazi extermination through the colonial archive and the rhetoric of empire. Its textual lace weaves the readership into a distinctively French ideological as well as cultural terrain to illuminate the complicities between the Third Reich and the French Republic. As a fi nal illustration of these complicities, we might evoke the Reich’s governor-general Hans Frank’s proud display of an architectural plan dedicated to the Führer

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during an extravagant soirée in Krakow. Aue and other guests, including Himmler, are shown the mock-up of a future Menschengarten, or human zoo, that would contain specimens of all European populations destined for extinction so that their living trace might be preserved for pedagogical objectives, scientific research, commercial profit, and the glorious commemoration of the nation’s genocide. The compound would display such types as pious Galician Jews, Polish peasants, bolshevized workers of the kolkhoz, and Ukrainians. This motley assortment of human specimens cuts across race, ethnicities, and customs, inscribing them within an identical raciological paradigm of “bare life,” or human material available for strict biopolitical management. The survivors’ reproduction would be supervised and surplus subjects kept in reserve at a proximate camp to replace those who fell ill or died off. To finance this operation, Frank reminds a somewhat skeptical Himmler that France’s Jardin d’Acclimatation lost money until Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire organized ethnological displays of Nubians and Inuits. This allusion maps the future exhibition of European populations by Nazis along a continuum with France’s colonial imaginary and its tradition of ethnological displays. From nineteenth-century’s world’s fairs to the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931, a variety of so-called primitive populations were put on display in fake native habitats for public consumption in France, a historical phenomenon that has come to public attention in the past decade thanks to the work of historians such as Nicolas Bancel and Sandrine Lemaire.59 Among the many illustrations of the convergences between imperialism and genocide portrayed in The Kindly Ones, the human zoo and its obvious antecedents in the colonial phantasmagoria of France, Britain, and other Western nations encapsulate Césaire’s thesis of Nazism as the boomerang effect of colonialist dehumanization now perpetrated on European populations. That this spectacle would be envisioned by Hans Frank to display soon-to-be-exterminated European populations highlights the continuities between Western colonialism and Nazism as well as the global imbrication of imperialism and genocide. The overlapping frames of reference in The Kindly Ones never deliver a direct causal route linking one regime’s configuration of violence to another. The parallels, analogies, and complicities it draws between distinct legacies of racialized violence create what Littell himself described as a caisse de résonance, a narrative echo chamber or soundboard, whose vibrations defy

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reductive linear inscription.60 Like Sartre’s crabwalk and Camus’s noeuds de mémoire, Littell’s echo chamber produces reverberations between disparate temporalities and historical regimes of violence to illuminate the ongoing pertinence of the Holocaust for contemporary times. Yet the basic irony prompted throughout The Kindly Ones, the irony that it is through Maximilien Aue that we come to this vision of history, becomes one of its limits. Once again, the beguiling meditation on violence and historical time is troubled by its site of enunciation. Littell’s epic is reminiscent of a narrative factory that, like the lace manufactured by its protagonist, interweaves disparate vectors of collective memory. Its labyrinthine paths through the Third Reich and the protagonist’s psyche resist univocal explanations of the ideology, history, and psychic structure of Nazism. The novel is an extraordinarily documented but ultimately kaleidoscopic investigation, one that resonates across ideological formations and historical frames of reference. This chapter has sought to bring into relief some of the rich complexity of the novel’s deployment of complicity: its treacherous negotiations with readers who inhabit a potentially reified culture of Holocaust postmemory, its continuities with a canon of literary reflection on ironic complicity and historical trauma, and, fi nally, its contribution to a reemerging investigation of empire and genocide through postcolonial thought and postmodernist form. By contrast to contemporary theories of Auschwitz as “the nomos of the modern,” Littell’s account is alert to the knotted and dangerous intersections that constitute the legacy of the Shoah.61 His narrative does not propose either the Final Solution or colonialism to be the kernel of Nazism or the matrix of European modernity, but produces instead a field of resonance between them. By illuminating the colonial dimension of the Holocaust, The Kindly Ones opens a dialogue between state formations and legacies of racialized violence often opposed both in the academy and the public sphere. The Holocaust is addressed in its Jewish specificity and in connection to slavery, colonialism, and Stalinism, but its legacy is also diffracted toward the contemporary horizon. As we shall see in the next chapter on the French state of memory and the memory practices of the state, the histories of the Holocaust, colonialism, and slavery are often pitted against each other. Littell’s investigation of their mutual implication during World War II opens a passage between competing legacies of racialized violence without render-

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ing them equivalent or privileging one over the other. The figure of the soundboard with its variations of timbre, intensity, and duration captures the dynamism of these historical reverberations. The Kindly Ones cannot be assimilated to the kind of quietist nihilism imputed to the mode rétro of the 1970s. Its ironic complicity is embedded in political and ethical reflection. To return to Mark Sanders (discussed in the introduction), “Complicity, in this convergence of act and responsibility, is . . . at one with the basic folded-together-ness of being, of human-being, of self and other. Such foldedness . . . is the condition of possibility of all particular affiliations, loyalties and commitments.”62 By reminding readers of the folds that join together norm and extreme, rationality and madness, or disparate histories of past and ongoing violence, The Kindly Ones opens multiple points of access (or prises) through which we might touch on, rather than fully grasp, the legacy of the Nazi genocide. The entanglements of this narrative mode returns us to George Marcus’s anthropological model of complicity, which I adapted to literature in the introduction. Complicity is a form of involvement, an anxious awareness that the encounter on the ethnographic field or within the literary text is mediated by other sites and trajectories. It emerges from “having a sense of being here where major transformations are underway that are tied to things happening simultaneously elsewhere,” although the reader is “left to account for the connections . . . to read into his or her own narrative the locally felt agency and effects of great and little events happening elsewhere.” 63 The intertwinement of different sites and temporalities of terror in The Kindly Ones alerts readers to the traversal of the Nazi genocide by other histories, just as our unfolding “here and now” is mediated by the Holocaust’s legacy. Littell’s ironic complicity forces us to sense multiple “elsewheres” within its Eu ropean itinerary. This form of complicity is quite different from the pathological model of contamination evoked by Julia Kristeva, for whom The Kindly Ones “acts like a colossal virus which gradually contaminates the naive reader, this ‘kin,’ this brother, and holds him or her hostage.”64 As we noted in the discussion of Camus’s plague as a figure for figuration itself, literature and film are vectors of contagion that pull different subject positions and histories into contact. But this virality is also a virtuality. It positions readers, not as passive sites of infection, but as complicit in all senses of the word: aware of a subject’s multiple positions, involved in a work’s multiple histories, and attuned

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to the ethics of their circulation. If The Kindly Ones echoes The Plague in its diagnosis of each person’s capacity for violence (“we all carry the plague within us”), it does not merely infect readers with the virus of perpetration. Rather, it encourages us to reimagine Nazism in relation to ourselves without abdicating to the gray zone. Complicity is its disquieting gift.

Si x

Holocaust and Colonial Memory in the Age of Terror: Assia Djebar and Boualem Sansal Paris changes! but nothing in my melancholy Moves; new palaces and scaffolding, new blocks, Old suburbs, all become for me an allegory, And dearest memories grow heavier than rocks. Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie N’a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. — Charles Baudelaire, “The Swan”/“Le cygne”

In Charles Baudelaire’s classic meditation on memory, allegory, and urban space, the poetic subject transforms Paris of the Second Empire into a junkyard whose debris, like fossils, retains traces of multiple pasts. “The Swan”1 illustrates allegory’s power to destroy what is there in order to resurrect what has vanished: The poet erects precarious memorial building blocks against Paris’s towering monuments. The city’s smooth facades of forgetting become palimpsests that bear the imprint of those no longer there. From the opening address (“Andromaque, I think of you”) to the tubercular “Negress” from the colonies, to “the captives! the vanquished! . . . and many others still,” the apparitions summoned by Baudelaire’s poetic memory are all in exile. Refugees, migrants, orphans, escaped swans, shipwrecked sailors, casualties of the nineteenth century’s mythic modernity, they embody the cost of imperial cities founded and destroyed. The decentering of the capital (Paris by Guernsey, Troy by Buthrotum, France by the colonies and unmapped islands) opens a transhistorical and transcultural circuit of relations, creating 213

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the conditions for a community in and of exile. For allegory makes of home the site of perpetual exile, and as Baudelaire’s poetry reminds us, exile is constitutive of the modern subject: Thus in the forest where my soul lives in exile Old recollections clearly sound for me a trumpet call! I think of mariners forgotten on an isle, Of captives, of the vanquished! . . . Of many others still! (trans. modified) Ainsi dans la forêt où mon esprit s’exile Un vieux Souvenir sonne à plein souffle du cor! Je pense aux matelots oubliés dans une île, Aux captifs, aux vaincus! . . . à bien d’autres encor!

Baudelaire’s “The Swan” can be read as an exemplary precursor to our current memorial regime of testimony and its cultural poetics. The Paris it conjures is now a canonical, if implicit, model for thinking about urban sites of memory whose surfaces unfold into multilayered archives. This conception of the city as a palimpsest and of literature as an archive of history’s victims finds its fullest expression in the aftermath of World War II in works that wrestle with the devoir de mémoire toward the disappeared. In such works, the voices and bodies of history’s victims are “presenced,” however precariously, through the labyrinth of the modern city. Camus’s Amsterdam in The Fall, Sebald’s Prague in Austerlitz, Rymkiewicz’s Umschlagplatz in the Warsaw ghetto, and Modiano’s haunted Parisian topographies illustrate this postwar urban poetics of testimony. Throughout this book we have seen the dislocation of particular sites into layered archives of the past. Chapter 2 examined how Camus’s sites (Oran, Amsterdam, the unnamed camp near Tripoli) fan out into multilayered histories. Oran besieged by the plague is at once an emblem of cities under foreign occupation and of the tentacular fait concentrationnaire in France and North Africa, as well as the image of a ghostly community on the eve of decolonization. In chapter 3, the site-event of Auschwitz in Night and Fog becomes the allegory of the concentrationary plague afflicting France, Algeria, and beyond. More recently, Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire on the massacre of Algerian demonstrators on October 17, 1961, closes on north African workers who scrape posters off the walls of a Paris metro station and uncover the fragment of a German military warning against assistance to Jews under the occupation. This

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image of an urban surface that yields a palimpsest of violence toward Jews, Algerians, and immigrant workers, illustrates the process we observed in Camus’s oeuvre, namely how a singular site of memory, or lieu de mémoire, harbors the traces of multiple pasts (the Nazi occupation, colonialism, and its aftermath), forming a noeud de mémoire. If Baudelaire is my apparently anachronistic point of entry into this chapter on Holocaust memory in Francophone Algerian fiction, it is because he is central to a poetics of testimony in which literature functions as an archive of subjects and stories occluded by official history. “The Swan” gives us a poetics of witnessing in which allegory can recover the texture of a city’s memory. Since Walter Benjamin’s writings, Baudelaire has been a point of reference for conceptualizing the relations between urban sites, memory, and testimony in the context of historical trauma, and for considering aesthetic form as the conduit for a countermemory to state violence and official history. The literature of Holocaust postmemory illustrates the convergence of a melancholy Baudelairean poetics of testimony with a more recent cultural regime of trauma, victimhood, and recognition examined in the previous chapter. My opening evocation of “The Swan” suggests that there is a deeper genealogy to urban palimpsests, memorial regimes of victimhood, and transcultural memory than is generally assumed. These topoi and concepts are not exclusively bound to a postwar, postnational, or postmodern reflection on history and memory; they belong to an established literary preoccupation with testimony. Post-epic literature has long anticipated the shift in memorial regimes from the heroism of the “droit au souvenir” (illustrated in the Resistentialist phase of the occupation’s memory) to the “devoir de mémoire” that coalesced around the Shoah. Literature is an experimental site of representation that is not beholden to the claims of reference; its figurality can fragment, entangle, and otherwise complicate the identity of subjects and of site-events. From within this margin of aesthetic autonomy, the literary can function as an alternate stage for recognition and commemoration. In conveying the strata of a city’s memory, literature becomes an archive of disparate bodies and memories, one that reflects, remembers, or simply imagines their cohabitation or collision. In that sense, the textual space models or refracts what happens when a singular site of memory in a social space becomes the palimpsest of several converging memories of violence and loss. Yet most important, literature offers a site from which the very

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conditions of memorial representation (at the state level and in juridicopolitical processes) are made explicit and scrutinized, where a “distributional economy” of identification, recognition, and reparation—an economy to which justice remains beholden— can be elucidated, questioned, and complicated. As we have seen throughout this book, literature is a powerful vehicle for representing pluralized forms of collective memory, and as such harbors a testimonial, reparative, and even utopian force. But literature is also a medium for critical reflection on the very conditions of memory’s possibility, on what constitutes recognition, reparation, and commitment in the public sphere, along with its costs or lacunae. The preceding chapter situated the fictional work Les bienveillantes in light of historians’ anxieties about the reign of fiction; it focused on how ironic complicity disrupts collective identification with victimhood to probe instead the ambiguities of a historical subject’s position. This chapter considers how allegory is a mode of memory that actively engages contemporary juridico-political processes and puts pressure on current models of transcultural, transnational, and multidirectional memory. The cohabitation of disparate memories in spaces “occupied” by different histories is a particularly vexed issue in France today, where the memorial claims of populations issuing from the former colonies collide with the ideal of French secular universalism and its rhetoric of assimilation.2 France has been described as engaged in a guerre des mémoires, or a memory war fueled by a hypertrophy of memory and a proliferation of groups jostling in the memorial marketplace for recognition of historical injuries, such as slavery and colonialism. Dismissed by detractors as symptoms of a competitive “victimo-memorial regime,” these bids for recognition seek to integrate minoritized identities into the nation and incorporate alternate chronologies into its history. In the face of growing communitarian fractures, France passed a series of memorial laws from the 1990s onward that codified and “judiciarized” tasks that collective memory would normally accomplish by means of historians, educators, and cultural agents. These include the Loi Gayssot (1990) against the negation of crimes against humanity, the Loi Taubira (2001) declaring that slavery and the slave trade are crimes against humanity, and the controversial Loi Mekachara (2005) on the nation’s gratitude to its repatriated French citizens, which stipulated that school curricula rec-

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ognize the positive role of France’s presence overseas. This last law and its rehabilitation of French colonial history led to public outcry. If the offending clause was abrogated, as we shall see, the law’s ideological optic was retained through the Sarkozy administration and the tide of discourses against repentance for slavery and colonialism. In the aftermath of 9/11, dismissals of the pertinence and ongoing effects of colonial history have been put in ser vice of the rhetoric of a global clash of civilizations between secular democracy and radical Islam, thereby legitimating intolerance for cultural and religious difference in the name of secular democracy and security (witness the 2010 ban on the niqab, burqa, and other face coverings). The state’s intervention in public memory has provoked heated debates on the uses of history to manage the perceived crisis of national identity. In the wake of the Mekachara law and the Pétré-Grenouilleau affair, in which a historian was taken to court under the Taubira law for distinguishing between slavery and genocide, a group of historians including Pierre Nora, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Françoise Chandernagor formed Liberté pour l’histoire. This association decried the memorial laws as a perilous form of historical revisionism that seeks to “re-read and re-write the whole of history exclusively from the victims’ point of view and to project onto the past moral judgments belonging exclusively to the present without taking into account the change in times.”4 The memorial laws have repeatedly been portrayed by their critics as a Pandora’s box that, once opened, will lead to history’s perpetual revision according to particular political projects. Anxieties about a surfeit of memory leading to extreme normative measures are persistent ly expressed as a form of memorial dérive, of drift, deviation, and unmooring: Pierre Nora invokes the legislative drift, or dérive législative, of these memory laws, as do Olivier Wieviorka, Philippe Raxhon, and others.5 Once again, literary meditations on the infinite and impossible task of memory and recognition precede contemporary historical debates. If Baudelaire’s poem, which ends with a final invocation of “captives, of the vanquished! . . . Of many others still!” trails into an ellipse before the infi nite task of remembrance, the rhetoric of dérive in contemporary discourse expresses a similar anxiety about the proliferation of histories that jostle for recognition in a finite public space. The Shoah has been pivotal in establishing a memorial paradigm of recognition in France, providing a model for other minoritized histories and

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memory. The emergence of Holocaust memory marks the shift from a collective imaginary based on national unity— exemplified by Gaullist mythology or historiographic models such as Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire—to the multiplication of histories, memorial agents, and identity groups with their distinctive claims for recognition. Although the laws and decrees recognizing the Shoah opened the door to other histories of injury, its status as a universal paradigm of racial injustice is said to include and thus render superfluous claims by other minoritized groups. For Claude Lanzmann, the Gayssot Act prohibiting Holocaust denial “addresses the most paradigmatic antihuman disaster of the twentieth century” and therefore “also serves as a guarantee and a protection for all victims.” Similarly, Henry Rousso views the Gayssot law as one that ought to subsume other memorial claims (such as the Taubira law declaring slavery a crime against humanity).6 The Shoah thus remains a paradigm for victim-based claims for recognition and compensation, yet its very status as paradigm consigns these other claims to invisibility. If, as Michael Rothberg has shown, “far from blocking other historical memories from view in a competitive struggle for recognition, the emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale has contributed to the articulation of other histories,” the multidirectional force of this memory has recently been stalled in France, in part because discourses on the Shoah in relation to other histories have focused on incorporation rather than interarticulation.7 Paradoxically, the Shoah is constructed as both an irreducibly singular event and a universal paradigm of racialized violence in the public sphere, a phenomenon that might remind us of theoretical discourses surveyed in chapter 1, such as that of Giorgio Agamben, who postulates Auschwitz as a state of exception that illuminates the norm. We witness a version of this classificatory collapse in the contemporary French memory laws, where the Shoah, in its singular scope, is defended as a universal paradigm of racialized violence and thereby co-opts the specificities of other legacies of violence such as slavery or colonialism. The management of collective memory in the interests of a particular vision of national unity unfolds uneasily alongside what Olivier Wieviorka describes as a “balkanization of memory” worsened by the legislature’s incoherent course in pacifying competing lobbies. The Algerian War remains a particularly fraught zone of contest in France to this day, since its memory is claimed in confl icting ways by groups such as repatriated pieds- noirs,

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French soldiers, harkis, immigrants, beurs, refugees, and so forth. An official integration of these different legacies is not likely to occur anytime soon, as indicated by France’s refusal to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Algeria’s independence officially in 2012 because it also marks the exodus of French Algerians. France’s traditional disavowal of the war— as we saw in chapter  3, the “events” were not officially recognized as a war until 1999— confronts Algeria’s sacralization of the nation’s liberation.8 Furthermore, amnesty laws protecting veterans of the war on both sides consign war crimes to oblivion. The stark asymmetry of the memory of the Algerian War on either side of the Mediterranean has been an ongoing source of diplomatic strain that may be easing under the current administration. Since his inauguration, President François Hollande has embarked on a series of official recognitions of state violence, recognizing the massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters on October 17, 1961, the abandonment of the harkis (who fought alongside the French during the liberation struggle), and the sufferings inflicted by colonialism in Algeria, along with officially acknowledging France’s criminal involvement in the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup and the deleterious effects of colonialism in Senegal. Still, it remains to be seen if this series of recognitions will repair the fragmentation and antagonism that characterize the memory of the Algerian War. Republicanism/communitarianism: These are the poles currently structuring the discourse on identification and French national identity, and until recently there seemed a disheartening lack of alternatives to this opposition. The conflicts between different memory groups is conveyed in the rhetoric of fractures and wars both within the public arena and in scholarly discourse. Recent French scholarship on public memory reflects this agonistic rhetoric of competition, if not outright warfare, with titles such as Wars of Memories: France and Its History; The Competition of Victims: Genocide, Identity, Recognition; Postcolonial Ruptures: The New Faces of French Society; Memorial Competition, Divided Memory: French Recollections of World War II from Liberation to the Present; Governing Memory: Memorial Politics in France; and so forth.9 In response to such fractures, and as a corrective to them, models for pluralized memory have recently emerged both in the scholarly and cultural arena, as we have seen throughout this book: Paul Gilroy’s study of the “knotted intersections” of histories such as the Nazi genocide, the slave trade, and colonialism, concepts such as noeuds de mémoire that complicate

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the national boundaries of Pierre Nora’s lieu de mémoire, models such as interconnected/palimpsestic memory, mémoire partagée, traveling or cosmopolitan memory, and so forth. These theoretical strategies provide a much-needed corrective to the discourses of competition and conflict that characterize the debates on memory in France.10 Yet if the discourse of warfare we see at the turn of the millennium in France signals the need for a more diverse and inclusive conception of the republic and its memories, we also must consider the limits of such memorial cross-pollination. We need to bear in mind that the movements of cultural memory are activated at particular political junctures, and they are limited in their orientation by competing political interests. If the preceding chapters have traced both the political possibilities and ethical limits of pluralizing Holocaust memory in the interests of ongoing political struggles, this chapter turns to two Francophone Algerian writers who, from distinctive vantage points, engage with the memory wars in France and complicate the very concept of recognition within the public sphere. Both Assia Djebar and Boualem Sansal investigate the possibilities, but also the limits, of a creolized, multidirectional, and multicultural remembrance of historical violences such as the Holocaust and colonialism. They situate this kind of memory explicitly within France’s recent debates on public remembrance and probe the possible dialogues between memory and identity outside the confines of the nation-state. Their works are not only testimonial, that is to say, invested in the recovery of entangled pasts, but engagements with a future-oriented politics of remembrance. Both authors, intentionally or not, expose the limits of juridico-political legislations of memory that promise a democratic, nonhierarchical coexistence of disparate pasts through an additive model of recognition. As we shall see, in the case of Sansal, this reflection on the uses of memory is complicated by the ideological constraints of a post-9/11 landscape with its global pathways of terror. My initial case study of the interactions between literary memory and juridico-political representation will be a novel by the contemporary Algerian writer Assia Djebar, celebrated for her fiction (written in French) on the Algerian War and its aftermath, and whose first novel set in Europe, Les nuits de Strasbourg, offers a rich meditation on the state of public memory in France and beyond. Baudelaire’s poetics of urban testimony will be a counterpoint throughout my reading of Djebar’s Strasbourg as a reminder of lit-

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erature’s role as an archive of the disappeared in the face of official amnesia. If Djebar reimagines Strasbourg as a site of memorial crossings, that is to say, a site of traveling/cosmopolitan/transnational and multidirectional memory—her novel is also a meditation on the limits of memory’s representation, legislation, and pacification.11

Urban Palimpsests and the Claims of Memory in Assia Djebar’s Les nuits de Strasbourg “To reimagine Eu rope” for transitory foreign writers— exiles, émigrés, or simply those seeking refuge—, to “rewrite” Eu rope for its “dirty foreigners,” in the end is to evoke “these absents, or this absence that haunts us, that haunts you” . . . where you live . . . where we live! A simple intertwining of memories sometimes too heavy to bear. “Penser l’Eu rope” pour des écrivains étrangers de passage— en exil, en émigration ou simplement en position de refuge—, “écrire sur l’Eu rope” pour les métèques de l’Eu rope, c’est fi nalement évoquer, à notre tour, “ces absents, ou ce quelque chose d’absent, qui nous, qui vous tourmente” . . . chez vous . . . chez nous! Un simple entrecroisement de mémoires quelquefois trop lourdes. Assia Djebar on Les nuits de Strasbourg

The fragmentation and politicization of national memory sketched above is a backdrop for Assia Djebar’s Les nuits de Strasbourg (1997), a novel that reimagines the city of Strasbourg as a site of entangled pasts, bodies, and losses. An exploration of memorial contact and métissage in a city frequently described as the crucible of a new Europe, Djebar’s text stages a noncombative, pluralized commemoration of displacement and loss. Her literary-urban map gives us an alternate geopolitical site from which to imagine the cohabitation of disparate memories and identities. The setting for this exploration of memorial contact and métissage, Strasbourg (rather than Paris), the symbol of Franco-German reconciliation, challenges the Republic’s rhetoric of unified identity and the security of national borders. This displacement pries open a space for considering interlocking legacies of violence both within and beyond the hexagon to imagine new relationships between France and Algeria, Europe and Africa (a gesture that might remind us of Albert

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Camus). Djebar’s novel illustrates the transcultural span of a poem like “Le cygne” in which memory is awakened and unfurled across spatiotemporal horizons through the dialogic address of a “penser à,” or “thinking of.” Like Baudelaire’s allegorical rendering of Paris, Djebar’s urban palimpsest resurrects Strasbourg’s memories and gives them a multidirectional spin.12 Yet her narrative also reflects on the challenges of recognition and pacification within the space and collective imaginary of a new Europe if the ghosts of colonialism are not acknowledged and laid to rest. Historically, the border city of Strasbourg has endured multiple occupations. Declared a Free Imperial City in the fourteenth century, it became French after 1681 but was annexed by the Prussian army in 1870, when what Camus called persecuted-persecutors fled from Alsace and settled onto spoliated lands in Algeria. As chapter 2 notes, this journey from persecution in Alsace to occupation in Algeria is excavated in Le premier homme. Alsace was restored to France in 1918, but on the eve of the Second World War its population was evacuated by the French government for ten months (Djebar’s novel opens with this evacuation). Once again annexed to Germany after the armistice, Strasbourg was bombed by the Allies and liberated in 1944. Since the war, however, Strasbourg has emerged as an exemplary urban palimpsest in the sense that Andreas Huyssen gives the term: It holds the memory of what was there while imagining alternatives to what there is.13 As the seat of the Council of Europe and supranational bodies such as the European Parliament and International Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg and its monuments are symbols of reconciliation. For Djebar, this border city becomes a space of reparation for history’s wounds: In this novel, in my own way, I rethought (and perhaps—to pun in French— where to think [penser] is also to heal or attempt to relieve wounds [ panser], from the past’s wounds), yes, I rethought a city like Strasbourg: a border city, a city once called “free” . . . etymologically, a “city of roads.”14

Djebar’s urban palimpsest resurrects Strasbourg’s multiple memories and gives them a multidirectional inflection. At the same time, it reflects on the conditions and challenges of recognition and pacification.15 Les nuits de Strasbourg alternates between the description of nine nights of love between an Algerian art historian (Thelja) and her older French lover (François) in a series of Strasbourg hotels, and nine days during which a dozen

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diasporic figures cross paths in the city. In a “choreography of chance” that takes place in what is called “Europe’s navel,” these characters coalesce into an exemplary, if evanescent, community.16 Their lives entwine across historical lines of enmity and disparate legacies of displacement and loss. Strasbourg’s figural topography evokes the concentric circle of Camus’s Amsterdam, yet Djebar’s novel offers hope in the aftermath of historical catastrophe: Her city is a reparative counterpoint to Camus’s gray zones, where connection is experienced as solidarity rather than coerced complicity. The novel explores the possibilities of intertwining legacies of violence and exile without collapsing them into a quasi-metaphysical fall into culpability and collusion. It portrays diasporic subjects who are as heterogeneous in composition as Strasbourg itself. Their affections and attractions reflect the city’s interlocking canals and bridges; they cross over traditional lines of enmity and gesture toward a future that would be delivered from the conflicts of yesterday. Thelja’s father was killed by the French army in what she describes to her lover as “the war in my home between yours and mine” (78), yet she nevertheless shares her body and memory with “the absolute enemy” François, whose name she initially cannot utter because it contains the name of the nation that killed her father: “France, oh France, would that word contain all my suffering?” (223). Another central character, Eve, is the nomadic daughter of Andalusian and Berber Jews. Eve’s mother died of melancholy, banished to a Parisian banlieue after Algeria’s independence. Her daughter characterizes this forced removal from her native land as a deportation (“her voice hardened while saying ‘deported,’ she was deported”) and refuses to return to Algeria because of it.17 The vocabulary of deportation in the context of Algerian Jews and their forced exodus after independence evokes the prior deportation of European Jews during World War II, creating a resonance between these different exiles without flattening them into equivalence. Like Thelja, Eve has left behind a child in Algeria and now carries her German lover’s child (the mother who abandons her child is a recurrent figure of deracination in this work). Although Eve learned German while growing up, she stopped speaking the language after discovering the Holocaust through Anne Frank’s journal. She refuses to address her lover, Hans, in the language of the Nazis or to set foot in Germany, so he crosses the Rhine each time they meet. Yet in a moving ritual, the German Hans and Jewish

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Eve seek to consecrate their love and banish the enmities of the past by reenacting the Serments de Strasbourg (Strasbourg oath) of 842 c.e., when Louis the German pledged an alliance with his brother, Charles the Bald, each king pronouncing the oath in the vernacular of the other kingdom. This pledge of alliance, made in the language of the other, is rehearsed by the couple in order to extinguish the violence of their genealogy.18 Private attachments thus become microcosms for working through a conflicted past and forging a multicultural future in which origins and identities are fully dislocated. This cultural hybridization is not without its heartbreaks: Eve’s friend Irma was raised to believe that her Jewish parents were deported and had perished in the Holocaust, but later she discovers that she is the daughter of an Alsatian resistance heroine who refuses to recognize her, leaving Irma “without genealogy, without mooring, without roots” (287). Another character, Jacqueline (of Franco-German descent), left her wealthy husband and home to direct immigrant youths in a production of Sophocles’s Antigone. Jacqueline has a tragic liaison with Ali and is loved in secret by Djamila, an actress of Moroccan descent who plays the role of Antigone. Irma’s young lover, one of the few native Alsatians in this community, turns out to be of pied- noir ancestry: He is an “Algérien de souche” and a “pied noir de Strasbourg” (286), a formulation that captures the intertwining of Alsace and Algeria, Eu rope and Africa, in the novel. The heterogeneous community that emerges from these pages is bound not by ancestry, language, or custom but by reciprocal itineraries of exile and a shared commitment to the burdens of postmemory. As one character puts it, “The memory of parents, our own. All of it is made of the same clay, the same mud” (198). The narrative’s historical mosaic brings into proximity the Prussian siege of 1870, Strasbourg’s occupation during the war, the persecution of Alsatian autonomists, the Shoah, Algeria’s colonial occupation and its war of independence, the exodus of European Algerians and of Jews, and even the Cambodian genocide. These histories of exile and disappearance are the characters’ postmemorial legacies, legacies that meet in the space of a conversation, a sexual encounter, a language lesson, a theater performance, as limbs and tongues momentarily entwine in lovemaking. A palimpsest of occupations, Strasbourg mirrors the psyche of its inhabitants, who are themselves “occupied” by a “past that refuses to pass.”19 As they stumble through the city’s pathways, painful memories unpredictably

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flare up. Thus, when Thelja and François spontaneously cross the pont de l’Europe into Germany, the sight of a French flag (a marker of ongoing Allied occupation) startles Thelja into recalling her father’s death at the hands of the army. François is also plunged into anguishing memories of his father, the victim of several kinds of occupations: A militant for Alsatian independence before the war, François’s father disappeared, a possible victim of France’s repression of the autonomist movement. He was then conscripted by force into the German military as one of the hundred thousand Alsatian malgré nous and perished in the Soviet camp of Tambov. François is haunted by the memory of Christmas Eve 1939, when, as a five-year-old, he returned to evacuated Strasbourg with his mother to track down the missing father. Embittered by her loss, the mother never told François of his father’s fate, leaving him with “un trou . . . un gouffre de mémoire, plutôt [a hole, or rather, a memorial void]” (199), which he filled with a decade of patient historical research recovering his father’s trace. As François tells Thelja, Strasbourg is not only a border city but the site of a temporal contraction, where the past can surge up around any corner: “So you see . . . fifty years, it’s like yesterday. Especially on these shores of the Rhine, fifty years is today still! Of course, as you can see, everything has been reconstructed, the stones, the houses, and even the statues have been put back on their pedestals. . . . But living beings? They accumulate contradictory layers of the past, strata upon strata, and then they fall silent.”20 Strasbourg’s urban palimpsest reflects the psyche’s sedimentation, but whereas cities can be reconstructed into smooth surfaces of amnesia, the psyche retains the layers of the past. As Baudelaire’s “The Swan” reminds us, “The shape of a city changes, alas, more swiftly than the heart of a mortal.” If urban sites reflect the psyche’s sedimentation, Djebar’s textual site of memory by no means relegates this accretion of pasts to silence. Rather, memories are spontaneously shared or coaxed into expression by lovers, friends, and acquaintances in quasi-therapeutic scenes of “remembrance as deliverance,” where the weight of the past temporarily evaporates.21 Several central scenes of memorial transmission occur in Eve’s apartment located in Hautepierre, a low-income immigrant district at the city’s periphery. The circular disposition of Hautepierre’s housing on streets called mailles, or stitches, underscores Djebar’s theme of identitarian and memorial knitting into noeuds de mémoire. In reality a hotbed of social unrest and the site of

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multiple car burnings in 2005, these grim projects are reenvisioned by Djebar as an Eden for Strasbourg’s émigré community, with Eve as “Hautepierre’s memorialist” (282).22 At a dinner that assembles the main characters, Thelja entrusts these with the ebb and flow of her memory. François observes that if her remembrance within the community’s embrace is different from the memories shared in his arms, its expression remains a precious form of release. Thelja recounts how she was conceived, in the winter of 1959, while her father was in hiding (he was killed shortly before her birth). François observes, “This time she remembers in front of everyone, but otherwise. Otherwise than in my arms! Still, she speaks and she will fi nd relief” (175). Thelja gives a halting reconstruction of the circumstances of her conception and the meaning of her name (which in Arabic means “snow”). She was conceived during the Algerian War, while her father was in hiding, and named after the snow that burned her mother’s feet when she made her barefoot descent from the mountain caves after a clandestine meeting with the father. Later that night, after the dinner in Hautepierre, back in one of their hotels downtown, as Thelja caresses François she has a sudden vision of him as a child, and then, another vision of her own mother: She left her hand on his hair. He lifted his face toward her: she brushed her hand against his forehead, his eyebrows, as if it were the fi rst time. Suddenly, without warning, the image of a little five-year-old boy, trotting through Strasbourg’s snowy streets, surges up. . . . Then, superimposed on this image, the bare henna-reddened soles, a woman’s feet, the cracked, burned feet of a twenty-year-old woman hurrying down the mountain in the dark, against a vast backdrop of snow.23

The memory of her mother’s chapped bare feet hovers over the image of her five-year-old lover’s feet as he tried to keep up with his own mother twenty years earlier. Like the geography of lovemaking, evoked as two bodies turned into proximate landscapes, Thelja’s vision is a spatiotemporal palimpsest in which the snows of Alsace on the eve of the occupation meet the snows of wartime Algeria. Bodies, memories, and landscapes touch while retaining identifiable contours in a deterritorialization that brings into proximity— rather than fuses— distinct entities. Djebar’s embodied landscapes open up a “corporeality beyond incorporation.”24

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As they migrate from one hotel to another and occupy spaces of anonymity and transit, the couple’s lovemaking is also a form of deterritorialization; the ebb and flow of desire echoes the movement of memory. Their entangled limbs become conduits for a resurrection and transmission of multiple pasts and spaces. As Thelja looks at her lover “with the tips of her fi ngers,” she muses, “Loving him for this strange geography sketched with haphazard blindness. Our bodies, two landscapes that are so close, nothing more. Where am I?” (226). This confusion of borders and territories— psychic, corporeal, geographic, and cultural—is linked to the experience of the body and its sensations. Djebar’s attunement to the body as a site of historical mediation recalls Albert Camus’s attempt to touch history with “the eyes of the body.” As we have seen, the body functions as a repository for historical violence throughout the corpus examined by this book: Franz von Gerlach’s crablike scuttle is a physical recall of torture with its structure of victim and perpetrator, vermin and crab. Jean-Baptiste Clamence shivers with the return of a fever he contracted at the North African camp where he drank the water of a dying comrade, and his failure to dive into the Seine has also left him with strange aches.25 Maximilien Aue’s sexual and excretory convulsions respond to the atrocities his consciousness has not taken in. In each of these works, the body unknowingly incorporates the violence of history and exhibits the symptoms of its unbidden return. What is striking in Djebar’s narrative, in contrast to those of Sartre, Camus, and Littell, however, is that bodies become the site of multiple memories, not only of one’s own past, but also of another’s. Djebar’s bodies are vehicles of memory’s transmission, preservation, and transformation. These bodies do not fully incorporate histories but rather dislocate and deterritorialize them, creating relations of proximity, contact, and fleeting overlay between different memories of occupation and exile. This celebration of proximity, even entanglement, without fusion is conveyed linguistically in the leitmotif of Alsagérie, a neologism that reappears on various lovers’ lips as they come to grips with the connections between Alsace and Algeria: Alsace, Algeria: the two words suddenly rocked together. They had a common resonance, a music seemed to join them. Or was it an ancient wound instead? Subcutaneous scars that—if conjoined—risk reappearing. . . . Yes, it’s true, a

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latent ache linked them together: Alsace, Algeria . . . names of two countries, of dark earth, heavy with invasions, with ruptures or bitter returns. (374)

In Djebar’s scenes of (post)memorial relay, bodies, memories, and territories brush up against each other without merging. The past is confided tout contre (or right up against) friends, acquaintances, and lovers. Speaking tout contre, or up against the other, is central to Djebar’s ethics of testimony as an embodied contact. In the classic Women of Algiers in Their Apartment the Algerian author positions herself as a witness to the voices and histories she archives in the following terms: “Not ‘speak for,’ or worse ‘speak upon,’ but barely ‘speak close to’ and if possible ‘right up against’ [Ne pas prétendre ‘parler pour,’ ou pire, ‘parler sur,’ à peine ‘parler près de’ et si possible ‘tout contre’].”26 This ethos of proximity and contact, of speaking and listening right up against the other, is evident in all the interactions of Les nuits de Strasbourg. When François tells Thelja the story of his mother, he speaks “tout contre elle”; as he retells the story of his father’s death, she returns “contre lui.” When Eve and Hans fight in a physical reenactment of their hostile ancestries, they struggle “l’un contre l’autre,” yet their breath remains “tout contre” (163).27 Bodies and histories press up against each other, inflame one another, and momentarily entangle, yet they retain their contours and distinction. The text’s decentered tapestry reflects Strasbourg’s hybridity: “The navel of Europe” (350) is a “city of all memories” (356); it is a transnational, transpolitical, social formation whose postcolonial, multicultural inhabitants defy classification. Their contingent attachments and open-ended relationality convey what Jane Hiddleston describes as the “specific-plurality” of Djebar’s narrative practice, which reflects the “the continual interaction of a singular being with diverse influences and contacts,” and thereby complicates the polarization of identity and hybridity so frequently observed in postcolonial theory.28 Djebar’s text also resists what Michael Rothberg identifies as the logic of scarcity governing models of competitive memory. Histories are interwoven into visibility, and the memory of the dead is preserved in unexpected sites and by unpredictable agents: A radio left on in a Jewish home until it sputters into silence is recalled by a gentile as the symbol of those who never returned; a German receives the testimony of Algerian wartime atrocity; an old priest preserves the records of North African laborers at the

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local diocese. If the Algerian War looms large in the novel, its legacy does not coalesce into a singular trauma producing uniform identities but is embodied in contradictory ways by Jews, Berbers, pieds-noirs, or Alsatians. Similarly, although the Holocaust hovers throughout the pages of the narrative, it never becomes a center or paradigm; rather, it reverberates within and alongside other memories of violence. Despite their embedding in particular legacies and their resistance to cultural fusion, these hybrid subjects show no signs of memory’s “balkanization” (Wieviorka), nor do they embody the communitarian threat invoked by critics of memorial laws or opponents of multiculturalism in France. In Djebar’s diasporic community, identities are singularities in motion, orbiting around each other and making fleeting contact without integrating into the fiction of a nation such as the French Republic, or an Arabized, Islamist Algeria. The provisional swirl of affective and erotic arrangements—a chorégraphie du hasard— does not settle into classification. Djebar’s choreography of chance and its network of memorial encounters offers a compelling embodied alternative to the fi xity and closure of lieux de mémoire and their monuments to collective identity. Just as Baudelaire’s testimonial arc expands from the specificity of a proper name (“Andromaque, I think of you”) to “the captives, the vanquished . . . and others still!,” each agent participates in a memorial web that expands in its contact with others. The composite nature of identity and memory opens a utopian vision of kinship arrangements, solidarities, and commemorative practices loosened from genealogy or filiation. Toward the end of Les nuits de Strasbourg, however, an apparently senseless act of violence calls into question this ideal of memorial pacification and cultural métissage. The director of Hautepierre’s Théâtre de la Smala, Jacqueline, is raped and shot by her jilted Algerian lover, Ali. The potential violence harbored in the image of contact between different bodies and memories, of entities tout contre (up against) one another, is materialized as the penetration of a break-in, rape, and shooting. Jacqueline’s murder in Strasbourg’s pacified present initially reads like a random crime of passion, yet this peripheral act takes center stage in the text’s meditation on history, memory, and community. Early on in the novel, in Eve’s Hautepierre haven, Ali’s mother confides to Hans that during the Algerian War, she witnessed the public humiliation and robbing of a village notable who was then

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shot in the head by a lieutenant of the French army. The victim’s family, along with the entire community (and presumably her son, Ali), was forced to stand before the corpse under the threat of gunfire until sunset. If the narration does not give us the psychological, historical, or symbolic causality of Ali’s act, we are nevertheless invited to connect the two gunshots and to envisage the shooting’s reverberation through pacified Strasbourg as the allegorical return of the colonial violence witnessed by mother and son. Given the work’s attention to topography, it is significant that Jacqueline’s shooting occurs in front of the central police station of the rue du Fil, previously the site of a prison. Most famous for holding Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte after his failed coup d’état to restore empire in 1836, it is also where Algerian laborers suspected of ties with the FLN during the war were incarcerated and interrogated over a century later (293). As Djamila, the beur actress, grieves before Jacqueline’s body at the police station, she recalls that during the Algerian War, her Moroccan father hid suspects from roundups conducted by “policemen who, of course, were those of the rue du Fil” (332). These histories reappear in a xenophobic outburst outside the police station when an Alsatian kicks the handcuffed Ali, shouting, “Dog! Foreign dog!” and tries to excite the assembled crowd to share his rage. Like Camus’s Oran or Amsterdam, Djebar’s murder site/prison/police station becomes a composite noeud de mémoire where past violences converge to remind us that if Alsagérie is an embrace, it is also a wound that may reopen on contact (“à moins que ce ne fût plutôt une même blessure ancienne, des cicatrices en creux qui, conjuguées, risqueraient de réapparaître” [374]). The convergence of bodies and memories in Strasbourg produces a dangerous intersection where remnants of an unappeased past can unexpectedly erupt. This reading of Jacqueline’s murder as a ritualistic retaliation for a “past that refuses to pass” is suggested by Djamila when she takes the stage as Antigone and gives an incoherent but haunting hommage to the victim: “What strange law decreed that she would be the one to be sacrificed? Her . . . ‘we,’ of course that means all of us, and not just her actors, ‘my little ones’ she’d say: we first . . . we, émigrés forever— as if we’d delegated to her the menace, even hatred, that can hover around us at times, to lighten our load. . . . I know there isn’t just a fatal passion behind what others will call a ‘crime of passion’!” (357)

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In Djamila’s delirium, it is Jacqueline’s closeness to Strasbourg’s immigrants, her position tout contre them, that provoked her death. Djamila describes this proximity as “playing with fire” (356), as courting a threat that spilled beyond a theater stage on which identities may be enacted and discarded at will. Thus behind the strange historical law that leads to Jacqueline’s sacrifice (as a revisiting of the “wound” of Alsagérie), an anterior rite of exclusion, an archaic law, flickers into visibility. She is a scapegoat for their exclusion, and her sacrifice allows these “émigrés forever” to move from the city’s margins to its center. Although the aborted performance of Antigone by a beur troupe called the Théâtre de la Smala suggests a failed integration of immigrants—both into the classical Western canon and the borders of the hexagon—when Djamila takes the stage, she briefly assumes a centrality otherwise denied and declares to her audience, “I no longer feel that I am from Hautepierre or Neudorf; Jacqueline is dead; you have killed her; and I, I no longer stand at the periphery! No, whether you like it or not, I now stand at the heart of your Strasbourg! Listen to me, my Jacqueline, henceforth I stand still at the threshold of the august cathedral, with all of its histories . . . : Come now, I know your history well, I’ve studied it, and now that Jacqueline has been murdered, I interiorize your past.” (359)

As an Antigone de banlieue, or suburban Antigone (the chapter’s title), Djamila embodies the Sophoclean figure’s fate as the excluded other of the polis unveiled as constitutive of its heart. Her improvised embodiment of Antigone turns Hautepierre’s stage into a public space where the children of immigrants raised within the city’s palimpsestic histories might leave Strasbourg’s margins to stand at the center of a new Europe. Transformed onstage into “an ancient voice of Strasbourg” (359), DjamilaAntigone hallucinates attending the cathedral’s inauguration in the thirteenth century, when Strasbourg was neither German nor French but a “free city.” Yet Djebar’s text sabotages even this idealization of the past, for DjamilaAntigone recalls that the community coalesced around a ritual sacrifice: A poor, humble priest slated to play the part of the dev il would be locked in the cathedral overnight and banished when the doors opened. The origins of violence are thus thrown into perpetual anteriority; exclusion always

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already structures the community, leaving Djamila-Antigone suspended between the center of the polis and the abject “outside” that secures its boundaries. Her final lines before she is dragged offstage express this aporia: “Where am I? Who am I? The little priest slated to play the dev il so that the doors will open? And why, in this double alphabet, should it be us, the children of the suburbs, whose doubles are we? Yours? The venerable archbishop and his procession?” (362). The aborted performance of Sophocles’s Antigone in this narrative of cultural and memorial cross-pollination is significant on a number of levels. From G. W. F. Hegel to Judith Butler, there has been a long line of interpretations of Antigone as an “other” without which the polis could not be. For Butler, Antigone is “an allegory for the crisis of kinship: which social arrangements can be recognized as legitimate love, and which human losses can be explicitly grieved as real and consequential loss? . . . Antigone refuses to obey any law that refuses public recognition of her loss.”29 Djamila’s position echoes that of Butler’s Antigone: The stage on which she mourns the woman she has secretly loved yet to whom she can claim no kinship or attachment, as a woman of Arab descent, “one of those” responsible for Jacqueline’s death, reminds us of the social constraints that govern the legibility of human relations in the public sphere.30 As both a marginalized immigrant youth and Jacqueline’s would-be lover, who publicly grieves “ma Jacqueline” onstage in a confusion of space and time, she illustrates the queerness Butler associates with Antigone. It is significant that, while the audience receives Djamila’s monologue as the ravings of a girl gone mad with grief, her words continue to haunt Hautepierre’s diasporic community. Djamila’s soliloquy is an act of public mourning that performs her private and unavowed attachment before the collective through the possessive pronoun (“ma Jacqueline”). It also writes an alternate history of the city as free and inclusive, one in which the margins momentarily come to the center and the immigrant child incorporates Strasbourg’s multiplicity, even if at the end the utopia dissolves under the specter of prior violence and exclusion. Djamila’s delirium concludes with the figure of the little priest/pharmakos ejected at the cathedral’s inauguration. Exclusion is thus inscribed at the origins of community, just as Sophocles’s Antigone stages the constitutive violence of the polis. As Moira Fradinger suggests, Antigone is a drama of

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democracy’s foundational violence. Creon’s condemnations of Polynices to lie unmourned and of Antigone to living entombment politicize death in order to secure the boundaries of the polis. In the aftermath of the war with Argos, Fradinger argues, the Theban body politic is haunted by the fear of fragmentation and dissolution. The exclusion of Polynices, whose body is stripped of all legal protection and left exposed at the city’s limits, is a “binding violence” that restores the collectivity. As such, it recalls the generative violence of democracy itself, which is perpetually haunted by the ghost of civic dissolution since the politics of universal equivalence leads to a crisis of distinction and membership (if all are equal/equivalent, then what are the borders of democracy?). As a response to this anxiety of dissolution, Antigone stages a ritual “immunization” in which the friend becomes enemy and the inside is relegated to the outside, the human to the inhuman.31 This structure of exclusion is echoed in Djebar’s narrative as the ritual expulsion of the priest at the cathedral’s inauguration. Djamila-Antigone’s contradictory identification with the bishop and the excluded priest is also a meditation on the violence that lurks within modern-day Strasbourg: If the city is a site of reconciliation that represents the hope for a new Europe open to global migration, its segregated topography suggests that this site of crossings and refuge is not immune to the crisis of borders and the patterns of “binding violence” staged by Antigone. Despite Strasbourg’s status as a postcolonial, transnational urban space, the fault lines that continue to segregate it are exposed in Djamila-Antigone’s delirium as the distance between center and periphery or the cathedral and Hautepierre. The narrative topography also suggests unprocessed colonial memory. The eruption of violence and its trajectory from Ali’s home in Hautepierre to the police station of the rue du Fil, from the margins of the city to its ancient center, suggest that the colonial legacy remains a “past that refuses to pass” in both a memorial and a material sense. It is a history still awaiting collective recognition and whose effects continue to structure the city’s topography and the experience of its immigrants. If Antigone was an emblem of resistance during the Nazi occupation, with Creon as a figure of the Vichy regime’s tyranny, Djebar’s evocation of this figure and of her resistance in Strasbourg during the 1990s suggests that France remains in the shadow of past occupations, including that of colonial occupation and its long aftermath in the metropole.

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Antigone is not only a figure for the overlay of Nazi/colonial/domestic occupations, but the play is also a mise en abyme of debates on memory, recognition, and justice in France today. The unequal distribution of recognition in the French memorial field is captured in Eteocles’s and Polynices’s asymmetrical fates under Creon’s edict, the first buried with state honors, the second left to rot in the sun.32 Les nuits de Strasbourg is strewn with bodies that have been denied their proper funerary rites: Thelja’s father’s body was thrown into the Mediterranean; François’s father vanished in deportation; Eve’s mother, as an exiled and Jewish pied- noir, was refused her fi nal rest in Algeria. These are unburied bodies of the past in both a literal and figurative sense, traumatic postmemories that have yet to be put to rest. The absence of graves is not only symbolic of a devaluation of certain pasts or a forgetting. It can also be read, again through Antigone, as an effort to manage a crisis of borders at a time when the conception of the state itself has become fragmented, porous, and plural. The recognition of certain histories and not others in France’s recent memory laws has prevented the proper burial of pasts such as slavery, colonialism, and the Algerian War. Fradinger observes that in Antigone, burial is ultimately a question of membership in a community: The funeral rite humanizes dead matter by negotiating a unique place for it within the community, giving it a name that incorporates it as a dead member— “really dead,” in that it will not return to the living world but will remain irreplaceable for the community. The ritual’s working through these limits is thus public speech: it is made collectively at the same time that it makes the collective.33

As we have seen throughout these pages, the imperial past continues to haunt Djebar’s diasporic characters precisely because so many have been deprived of a burial that would declare them “really dead” and thereby establish them as irreplaceably singular by the living. Creon’s anxiety of dissolution is resolved by his refusal of burial rites in a politicization of death itself. This anxiety and its solution might also recall the anxiety expressed by the historians of Liberté pour l’histoire when it comes to proliferating bids for a “democracy” of memory in which minoritized pasts will be granted membership. The vocabulary of dérive or excess and drift in criticisms of such official recognitions suggests an anxiety about a limitlessly inclusive set of memories

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that would dissolve the very contours of the French Republic’s identity. As Sophocles reminds us, the denial of these rites is yet another face of the state’s constitutive violence; its refusal to turn minoritized histories of injury into “public speech” that is “made collectively at the same time that it makes the collective” yields a bounded, impoverished version of national identity predicated on the isolation and hierarchical management of its populations and the forms of alterity they represent. In Djebar’s novel, the aborted performance of Antigone by the Théâtre de la Smala suggests that the unburied memories of colonialism and war have yet to emerge from officially sanctioned forgetting. Antigone’s public resistance to official amnesia and her fidelity to her own forms of kinship and remembrance challenge the “gouffres de mémoire,” or abysses of memory, that one of Djebar’s characters (François) describes as the missing legacy left behind by his own unburied and unmourned father. These memorial abysses also structure the French state’s official imaginary. Not only does Djebar’s narrative draw attention to these lacunae in remembrance, but it also builds unexpected bridges between them, connecting the Malgré-nous (Alsatians conscripted by force into the German army and whose fate echoes that of French colonial conscripts), the Alsatian autonomists, and the Algerian freedom fighters. By evoking those at the historical margins and cultural crossroads, Djebar’s testimony, like Camus’s portrait of Algeria’s intersections, refuses the homogeneity of monumental memory, capturing instead the “precarious lives” of those who have fallen—and continue to fall—out of history’s frame, Baudelaire’s “captives, vanquished . . . and many others still!” The urban and textual palimpsest of Les nuits de Strasbourg is a powerful testimony to subjects and histories that have (been) disappeared; it exemplifies a long-standing legacy of literature as the site of a devoir de mémoire. Yet if Djebar cautions us against collective amnesia and offers a space of narrative restoration, her novel seems less sanguine about the public sphere’s capacity to legislate memory and repair past injuries. It is significant that the majority of the novel’s cultural and memorial crossings take place behind closed doors, in the private spaces of Hautepierre or downtown Strasbourg hotels. The sudden, unpredictable return of the colonial repressed as rape and murder, the aborted performance of Antigone, and the sacrificial law by which Jacqueline’s death grants momentary symbolic centrality to those otherwise marginalized on history’s stage are representational choices

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that put pressure on the assumption that public memory can be regulated or legislated with predictable results. Furthermore, its portrayal of subjects who are as composite as the city itself questions the received idea that legacies of violence construct a single position of victimization around which identity, memory, and political claims can be shored up. Official recognition of diverse identities and legacies depends on the pa rameters of a given ideological field and the roadblocks they set up to a memorial democracy, parameters that literature can scrutinize. Mireille Rosello’s concept of the reparative in narrative resonates with Djebar’s narrative acts of repair and draws a useful distinction between approaches to memory that are focused on visibility within a distributional economy of representation, and approaches that highlight the conditions framing the field of recognition itself. For Rosello, “an event of memory functions like a literary genre, enabling and constraining the range of what constitutes acceptable discourse about a historical event.” She further distinguishes between political and ethical events of memory: A political event of memory surfaces and makes visible an injured group and its past in a process of revelation and recognition. By contrast, an ethical act of memory is one that scrutinizes the very conditions that temporarily defi ne recognition, “the norms that the current moment of memory sanctions” and through which events, as well as memories and identities, are made legible.34 Rosello helps us distinguish between making visible hitherto invisible narratives and interrogating the very norms that grant visibility to these and other narratives. If the recognition of minoritized memories and identities remain an urgent task in contemporary France and its so-called “memory wars,” we must also scrutinize the frames that constrain these recognitions in the public space. Djebar’s oeuvre constantly puts pressure on the politics of identity that structure memorial lobbies in the public sphere in both France and Algeria, and challenges the “distributional” economy of identity-bound recognition. Her work raises the question of whether we might someday imagine a politics of memory whose capacity for recognition would meet the infinite particularities of identity and attachment under the conditions of global diaspora and migration. In the final chapter, titled “Neige, ou le poudroiement [Snow, or the powdering],” Thelja wanders like a ghost through Strasbourg’s deserted streets and either fantasizes or narrates leaping off the cathedral’s

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tower, or “Europe’s highest rooftop” (404), into the emptiness below. The novel closes on an ellipse: “a cry in the immersing blue . . . [un cri dans le bleu immergé . . .]” (405). The fi nal image of the protagonist’s anticipated scattering into a fi ne cloud over Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa may be celebrated as the ecstatic dissolution of a nomadic subject into a borderless geography. Yet the prospective leap is also a reenactment of her ancestral wound, since her father’s dead body was cast into the sea from the heights of a French helicopter during the Algerian War. If Baudelaire’s testimony trails off in an evocation of “many others still!” it is because those who are absent in our midst—and hence the task of memory—is endless. We leave Djebar’s nomad poised for flight or fall, suspended in an ellipse, as the image of a mode of memory, perhaps a burial, that is yet to come. Les nuits de Strasbourg suggests the need for a state and stage on which alternate forms of being, belonging, loving, and grieving may be performed so that more inclusive, differential forms of community may be imagined. The text invokes missing burial rites, that is to say, the need not only to collectively acknowledge the past and its legacies of violence but also to recognize the shadow these cast on the present. In Djebar’s novel, colonialism’s long aftermath segregates Strasbourg into center and periphery; its “menace, even hatred . . . hover[s] around” the children of the suburbs as it crystallizes into unpredictable vectors and scapegoats. If its history and long-term material consequences are not acknowledged, the tout contre of postcolonial proximity may lead to unpredictable eruptions of violence. Yet even as Djebar’s novel allegorizes the need for such memorial recognitions, she also probes the difficulty of recognizing the multiplicity of being and attachment under the conditions of global diaspora. In her account memory translates not into identity but rather into proximities and entanglements. As the image of Thelja’s snowy flight off the cathedral suggests, the complexity of identity can also be pulverized beyond recognition in a utopian politics of radical singularity whose domain is literature rather than the law. Djebar’s narrative practice exemplifies literature’s status as what Vilashini Cooppan calls “an excess to the discourse of law and politics, an excess that manages to at once look beyond them and inside them, to reveal their logics, and limn their poverties.”35 Les nuits de Strasbourg evokes the difficulty of not only representing but placing the particularities of the postcolonial, diasporic subject and its memories within the horizon of a “new Europe” whose borders

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nevertheless remain a source of anxiety and whose segregations cause the eruption of violence. Les nuits de Strasbourg was written while Djebar was immersed in two other books addressing the Algerian civil confl ict of the 1990s (Oran langue morte and Algerian White). The author declared, “After two books on death, my only reaction to a bloody present was to write even longer pages still on nine nights of love imagined in Strasbourg.”36 With this context in mind, we might read the “choreography of chance” that binds a porous, multicultural community in Strasbourg as a response to this bloodshed, which pitted the army against various Islamist rebel groups, but also led to the murder by fundamentalist terrorists of intellectuals (journalists, teachers, writers) associated with French culture and language.37 In Algerian White, Djebar has written moving pages on this “intellocide” and the assassination of cherished friends such as Tahar Djaout.38 Her text challenges the state and Islamist conception of a fully Arabized, monolingual nation and explores alternate, nonidentitarian grounds for imagining Algerian identity. Similarly, the textual choreography of identity, memory, and attachment in Les nuits de Strasbourg resists the hardening of national identity during this era along the lines of either state terror or Islamist terror. By way of Antigone and its politics of unburial, the novel is also a meditation on the scores of victims (estimates range from seven to eight thousand) gone missing, or “disappeared,” during the Algerian Civil War, but it also anticipates the amnesia facilitated by laws granting amnesty to both military/security forces and armed fighters by President Boutefl ika in 2005. Djebar’s portrait of Strasbourg as a site of historical and ethnocultural entanglement is thus also a meditation on the violence of Algeria in the 1990s. It rethinks (repenser) the Algerian nation by way of the city of roads in a reparative gesture (“où ‘penser’ peut être aussi ‘panser’ ”) toward the wounds of the past and of an unfolding present. The bodies and histories that entangle without fusion in Djebar’s Alsagérie return us to Albert Camus’s Algeria. As chapter 2 argued, Camus’s figures sought to write Algeria as “un carrefour de routes et de races,” an intersection of historical and ethnocultural traffic that defied the boundaries of national identity. Although Camus was attacked by his contemporaries for the exclusions of his representational practice, his figures have been reanimated by authors such as Djebar who seek to imagine Algeria otherwise. In Algerian White, the

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narrator places Camus at the head of her procession of the dead, recalling his failed attempt to prevent Algeria’s exsanguination during the War of Independence. Observing the repetition of fratricidal fractures and the “mechanics of violence and carnage” in the 1990s, she mourns the absence of the pied- noir’s perspective: “Today there is no one to stand up, as did the Camus of ‘56 in such a stirring way [during his call for a civil truce]; there is no one today able to pronounce once more, in the midst of struggle, those words of an impotence not quite powerless.”39 Djebar recalls how Camus experienced the Algerian War of Independence not as a struggle between enemies—victims and perpetrators, colonizer and colonized— but as an internal fracture, just like her own fictional inhabitants of Strasbourg retain the bruises of history in their embodied memory: “Perhaps, in this procession of writers it is Camus who first felt the strange fissure involved in living in the very heart of a colonial war, a civil war, as a rending of the breast.”40 These corporeal figures both here and elsewhere in Djebar’s work are reminiscent of the pied-noir’s call for an approach to history through the eyes of the body and a physical understanding of justice. The ghost of Camus haunts Algeria’s contemporary landscape as a symbol of longing for the cohabitation of diverse languages, traditions, and populations. Paradoxically, Djebar’s own encounter with this ghost could take place only in exile: In 1995, the writer launched a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, with a reflection on her estrangement from the author of The Stranger (“Moi, étrangère à L’Etranger”). She evoked the circuitous displacements that it took for her “belated Camusian curiosity” to awaken as “a sudden urge to go see from behind, over there, to approach from behind, the Algerian entity or identity, after a period of drift, at the end of a line of fl ight, as if my encounter with Camus could only happen as far way from Algeria as possible, even beyond the horizon!”41 From the halls of Berkeley, Djebar imagines an encounter with Albert Camus, in an Algiers that is reimagined as a spatiotemporal intersection: “A face-to-face, then, at an intersection, a marketplace, any public place in a neighborhood of Algiers— Algiers of both yesterday and today” (225). As Camus’s oeuvre suggests, kinship between disparate populations and their histories pivots on the recognition of embodied relations within a shared space. Algeria, like Strasbourg, is reimagined as a palimpsest, a space of temporal and cultural encounter.

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In Djebar’s Les nuits de Strasbourg (as in Camus’s La peste decades before), the archaeological excavation of the city’s strata presents a resolutely nonidentitarian vision of the postcolonial subject, just as it lingers on the entangled pasts of Alsace and Algeria, France and the Maghreb. The text’s immigrants, refugees, and travelers are traversed by shards of memory from Europe and Africa, from the Holocaust, the Algerian War, colonialism, and other histories of occupation and imperialism. Djebar’s ethics of embodied memory, in which pasts, bodies, and languages brush up against each other without fusion, serves as a model for recognizing and transmitting memories while maintaining their particularity and resistance to assimilation within national narratives. Yet her narrative also gestures toward the limits of such a model within the identity-based demands of the contemporary public sphere, both in France and Algeria.

Against Identifi cation: Bad Education, Trauma, and Citizenship In spring 2008 French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed that each French primary school student bear the memory of a Jewish child deported from France and killed in the camps. The Shoah was to be put in ser vice of awakening children to their own status as potential victims in order to produce responsible future citizens.42 Ten- and eleven-year-old students were to be interpellated by the state as witnesses to the lives of those who perished and educated in their name. An early identification with suffering, death, and victimhood was portrayed as a condition favorable to producing ethical citizenship. Sarkozy’s communiqué to the minister of national education casts this memorial transmission as a gift rather than a burden: The dead were entrusted to French schoolchildren, and as such, national memory was in their hands.43 When challenged about the psychological repercussions of this measure, the president retorted, “One does not traumatize a child by giving him or her the gift of a nation’s memory.” Children were envisioned as repositories of national memory, bound to the nation by their identification with the dead. This national binding and memorial adoption was conveyed through the macabre imagery of a parrainage, or kinship between the living and the dead, where the children were cast as doubles and guardians of those who had perished.

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Figure 10. Sarkozy wants to entrust each fifth grader with the memory of a child victim of the Shoah. “Are you okay?” the ghost asks the child. “I’m not too heavy?” (Dessin de Mix and Remix, http//:www.courrierinternational.com)

Predictably, the proposal provoked a wave of criticism from educators, politicians, and mental health professionals for its instrumentalization of Holocaust memory and its disregard for children’s psychological well-being. The state’s encroachment on the educational apparatus also met with vocal protest, as did the threat of turning the discipline of history into an affective response to the past. When Annette Wieviorka ridiculed the measure, asking, “Why not serve Auschwitz soup to children once a year at school,” her image—however dismissive— captured a dynamic central to this mobilization of the Shoah, insofar as children were cast as memory consumers, coerced into digesting and assimilating the identity and story of another’s life and death. This virtual incarnation of the victim, as the Auschwitz survivor and politician Simone Veil denounced it, was projected as a condition of their education into citizenship. (See Figure 10 for a caricature of this implicit request that the children bear the dead on their shoulders.) Another instance of this pedagogy of “identification” was Sarkozy’s (also aborted) proposal that classrooms across the country read the young résistant

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hero Guy Môquet’s final letter to his mother before his execution by the Nazis, as a heroic model of national sacrifice.44 Once again, identification with a victim of the war was perceived as a bridge to national belonging. Sarkozy’s measure never passed, but its formulation conveyed a dynamic that remains central to contemporary approaches to the Holocaust, and as such it is worth reexamining. The forms of identification it invited with la patrie and its victims, however contradictory, intended to contain the fragmentation of memory discussed at the start of this chapter in order to reignite a unified sense of national identity. Civic identity and responsibility were viewed as the product of an early identification with past victims of state violence, resulting in an inchoate sense of responsibility—an instance of “it could have been me” but also “I am implicated” (an apt if unforeseen consequence of using deportation to instill civic duty given the reality of French collaboration!). These pedagogies of identification were yet another example of the universalization of Auschwitz into historical paradigm, and of the gray zones of survivor’s guilt into ethical ground. They correspond to the dominance of “traumatic complicity” as a theoretical position and a cultural affect as diagnosed in chapter 1, where approaching the Shoah through categories of trauma, shame, and repentance serves as the basis of historical knowledge, responsibility, and ethics. Sarkozy’s pedagogies were symptomatic of the contradictions vexing the debate on memory and national identity in contemporary France. It is not a coincidence that they were proffered in the aftermath of the 2005 banlieue riots, perceived by some as an eruption of existing fault lines between communities that displayed the failed integration of immigrants into the nation. In Johann Michel’s formulation, the state’s memorial management responded to a perception, particularly on the political right, that the riots displayed the “communitarian excesses [dérives communautaristes]” of a mostly immigrant segment of French youth due to “a lack of national identification,” if not downright hatred, a disaffection fueled in particular by discourses of repentance for the abuses of the past, and notably the colonial past.45 In other words, the proliferation of memorial laws and state recognitions from the 1990s onward was seen to exacerbate communitarian fractures rather than appease them. As we have seen, approaches such as Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” resist the zero-sum logic of competitive memory—that is to say, the

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notion of memory as a closed economy in which the recognition of one history will necessarily diminish or displace that of another. Such frameworks consider collective memory as productive rather than privative, as an entanglement of commemorative legacies that reveals the “rhetorical and cultural intimacy that exists between seemingly opposed traditions of remembrance.” Multidirectional, connective, palimpsestic or intersectional models of remembrance also resist the collapse of memory into identity. They eschew the reductive identification solicited by measures such as Sarkozy’s, for they assume that memory and identity are composite, that we are positioned “between camps” and within “knotted intersections of histories.”46 Nevertheless, I have argued throughout this book that the phenomenon of memorial convergence, however powerful and inevitable, remains a dangerous intersection. There is an intractable tension between the demands of testimonial specificity—in the cases examined here, it is the specificity of Nazi genocide and its victims— and a utilitarian politics of memory in which a particular history is deployed toward other times, subjects, and bodies. If the discourse of competition we see at the turn of the millennium in France signals the need for a plural conception of both the republic and its memories, we also must consider the limits of memorial cross-pollination. We need to bear in mind that the movements of cultural memory are activated at particular political junctures, and limited in their orientation by competing political interests. What factors block the infinite network of memorial connections idealized in Baudelaire’s poem and precariously fictionalized in Djebar’s Les nuits de Strasbourg? As we saw, Djebar’s attempt to “think Europe” through a kind of memorial métissage nevertheless cautions against the notion that public memory can be legislated into collective identifications, or that histories of violence produce identical forms of victimhood. If, as a memorialist, Djebar is committed to the conservation of voices and stories on the brink of disappearance, her work nevertheless questions the rhetoric of representation used in bids for memorial integration into a unified national identity and narrative. This pressure on the politics of identity that structure memorial lobbies also challenges a distributive economy of recognition, raising the question of whether the infinite particularity of memory can fi nd representation in the public sphere:

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I think of mariners forgotten on an isle, Of captives, of the vanquished! . . . Of many others still! (emphasis mine)

In closing, I wish to address the possibilities and limits of pluralized Holocaust memory from another angle by situating it explicitly within our post-9/11 ideological landscape and circuits of global terror. What kinds of proximities and analogies circulate within this landscape? What are some of the factors that disrupt a multidirectional process of recognition and commemoration? What strategic choices make certain forms of violence visible— and certain political engagements legible—by way of Holocaust memory while consigning other forms to invisibility?

Holocaust Memory, Gray Zones, and the War on Terror: Boualem Sansal’s Le village de l’Allemand Le village de l’Allemand (2008), by the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, translated in the United States as The German Mujahid, and in the United Kingdom as Unfinished Business, is marketed in the United States as “the first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust,” and gives a provocative illustration of contemporary approaches to its memory both within the French public arena and within a transnational reflection on terror.47 Sansal is a controversial novelist and “memory activist,” a writer whose criticism of the Algerian state and its history has led to the censorship of his writings in Algeria and the loss of his position in the Ministry of Industry. He continues to live with his wife in Boumerdès, Algeria, despite threats to their safety (“It is there that we need to fight, not in France,” he declared in an interview).48 Like Jonathan Littell, he is published by the Gallimard press. And like his compatriot Assia Djebar, who won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2000, he was awarded the honor in 2011. Yet, although his latest work, Rue Darwin, received the Arab Novel prize in 2012, funding for the prize was withdrawn by the Arab ambassador’s council in Paris because he attended a writers’ festival in Jerusalem during the commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba. His decision to attend the workshop was denounced by Hamas as a betrayal of the Palestinians. Since then, Sansal has continued to express his solidarity with Israel and his hope for peace in the area. Alongside Is-

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raeli novelist David Grossman, Sansal launched a campaign that aims to create a network of intellectuals invested in peace in the Middle and Far East (L’Appel de Strasbourg). However, his statement that the Israel-Palestine conflict is “not a colonial situation” has alienated a number of Arab writers.49 Based on a true story, The German Mujahid seeks to bring the memory of the Holocaust to Algeria and more generally to the Arab world. The novel might be seen to respond to Mohammed Dib’s query back in 1962, in the aftermath of independence, “How to speak of Algeria after Auschwitz?”50 In fact, Sansal asks us what it might mean to read contemporary Algeria and France not after but through and in light of Auschwitz today. The German Mujahid dismantles the foundational myth of Algerian nationalism by making the war of independence pass through the Shoah. It tells the story of an SS officer who joins Algeria’s struggle for independence, thus suggesting a historical link between Nazism and Algerian independence.51 It also draws inflammatory ideological parallels between the Third Reich and the current Algerian state, and between Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism, thus echoing recent neologisms such as “Islamofascism” or “Islamonazism” that circulate in the current rhetoric of terror.52 Further, the novel puts Auschwitz in dialogue with a number of other sites and histories, such as the Algerian civil conflict of the 1990s, multinational corporate culture (which in Les bienveillantes is likened to a genocidal machine), the French memory wars with which this chapter opens, and in particular the debate on repentance, the rise of fundamentalism in the banlieue, and the global sweep of terrorist networks. The German Mujahid is thus a meditation on the uses of memory, and specifically the memory of the Holocaust, within a constellation of historical, political, and ethical projects. I consider the novel a laboratory for experimenting with different approaches to collective remembrance, including juridico-political treatments in France today, and in relation to the recent theorizations of transcultural memory (cross-traumatic, multidirectional, palimpsestic, and so forth) that promise a cohabitation and hybridization of pasts and identities. Sansal’s novel illustrates the possibilities and limits of these sorts of historical and memorial crossings. As we have seen throughout this book, although the convergence of distinct traumas and their memories can produce recognitions of solidarity across different subject positions, histories, and memory groups, such pathways can also lead to collisions and

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conflations of different regimes and legacies of violence. My point is not to attack or defend Sansal’s par tic u lar uses of Holocaust memory, although I fi nd his analogies disquieting. I argue that in contrast to the bad pedagogies of traumatic identification discussed earlier, the literary format of Sansal’s inquiry schools us in a critical reading of memory and its figures as these move across multiple pasts and geopolitical sites. Yet I also trace how the politics of Sansal’s uses of Holocaust memory function within the horizon of a global “war on terror” to suggest that The German Mujahid reveals the dangers of memorial intersections when these fail to be sufficiently multidirectional.

The Gray Zone as Inheritance Set during the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s, The German Mujahid tells the story of two brothers born of an Algerian mother and German father in a remote village near Sétif. The boys are sent to be educated in France, where the elder son climbs the ladder of a multinational corporation, while the younger one drops out of high school and roams the street of his cité, located in a zone urbaine sensible at the capital’s periphery. After their parents are slaughtered in their village by the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), the elder son, Rachel, discovers that his father—a hero of the Algerian War who fought as a mujahid, a convert to Islam after independence, and the village chief—was, prior to this history, an officer of the German SS. In addition, Rachel surmises from his father’s itinerary through the Nazi death camps that he was also one of the chemical engineers of extermination. The trauma and guilt of this discovery eventually drive Rachel to commit suicide, and his journal is read by his younger brother, Malrich, who inserts his own quest within its pages before submitting it for publication as the work that we read. The novel’s form is a mosaic of alternating journal entries by each brother as they grapple with their deadly genealogy and its points of contact with other histories. The younger and less educated Malrich initially struggles to decipher his dead brother’s learned prose and gets lost in the labyrinth of the French dictionary: “It was hard for me to read Rachel’s diary. His French isn’t mine. The dictionary wasn’t much help; every time I looked something up it just referred me to something else. French is a real minefield. Every

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word is a whole history linked to every other [Un vrai piège, chaque mot est une histoire en soi imbriquée dans une autre]. How is anyone supposed to remember it all?” (16).53 This observation is a mise en abyme of the encounter with the past in Sansal’s postcolonial and postmemorial bildungsroman, where each history is an enigma imbricated in other histories of violence. Yet despite this proliferation of histories, the Schiller brothers’ journey into their father’s past is haunted by one foundational trauma from which all others appear to spin out, the Shoah. Primo Levi’s poem “If This Is a Man,” also the title of his testimony of Auschwitz, is woven into the narrative of both journals. Rachel goes so far as to add a stanza to the conclusion of Levi’s poem in which he laments his father’s silence as he confronts his bewildering entanglement in the history of the Judaeocide. To Levi’s injunction that readers engrave the demolition of humanity at Auschwitz in their hearts and memories, “Or may your house fall apart / May illness impede you / May your children turn their faces from you,” Rachel’s coda reads, “My house has crumbled / Grief has made me powerless; And I do not know why. / My father never told me.” Through the alternating voices of the journal, Sansal investigates two cultural responses to the Shoah’s legacy, a legacy from which both brothers issue and through which they face the competing claims of memory, testimony, and agency. These responses can be cast in terms of Tzvetan Todorov’s poles of “sacralization” and “banalization”: On the one hand is the sacralization of the Shoah’s radical singularity, its transformation into a matrix for all historical evil, and on the other its banalization through instrumental uses of its memory, where the Shoah functions as one term in a potentially endless series of analogies.54 As we shall see, both approaches pivot upon problematic forms of identification, whether between self and other, victim and perpetrator, or past and present. The pole of sacralization is modeled by the older brother, whose paternal quest confronts him with the crucial epistemological and ethical dilemmas of Holocaust memory: how to understand an event whose magnitude defies understanding and how to occupy one’s place— one’s historical position, even one’s body— as a belated, postmemorial, yet implicated witness. These demands are all the more contradictory in that his father was at once a Nazi perpetrator and a victim of Islamic fundamentalism, a man whose

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German name was erased by the Algerian government’s record of the massacre in order to preserve the sanctity of the national liberation narrative. In his itinerary of repentance and sacrifice, Rachel virtually embodies the gray zone described by Primo Levi and examined in chapter 1, that is to say, the “traumatic complicity” produced by the circulation of innocence and guilt both within the Nazi camps and in their moral aftermath. Rachel retraces his father’s footsteps from Germany through the camps of Eastern Europe into Turkey and Egypt, taking the burden of his father’s past on his shoulders by trying alternately, and even simultaneously, to understand and even embody the extermination from the stances of victim and perpetrator. Rachel’s encounter with the archive of extermination—testimonies by survivors such as Robert Antelme, Charlotte Delbo, and Jorge Semprún but also Mein Kampf and Nazi technical documents—provokes a traumatic unraveling of his selfhood. At times he begins to perceive himself as a metaphorical survivor, a belated proxy-victim who has symbolically passed through death to come out as a sort of living dead: When he arrives in Istanbul he notes that his “cadaverous appearance and . . . hollow eyes [mon regard halluciné]” inspired fear and disgust: “I was a walking corpse, a dead man who had seen too much” (176, 200). His self-portrait echoes the opening of Jorge Semprún’s L’écriture ou la vie, which opens with the Buchenwald survivor’s devastated, hallucinated gaze as it is reflected back to him in the eyes of the British soldiers at the camp’s liberation. Rachel’s disquieting substitution for the victim, mediated as it is by circulating representations of annihilation and survival, illustrates the conflation of literal and metaphorical victimhood discussed in chapter 1, for as he contemplates the testimony of survivors, he reflects, “In my own way, I am a survivor, but I cannot find the words” (210). At other times, in his aim to “slip into papa’s thoughts, retrace his footsteps” (187), he affiliates himself with perpetration. In a dream sequence that mimes the structure of a recovered memory, for instance, his native Algerian village merges with the image of a German camp and he becomes a camp commander’s son who harasses Jews as smoke rises from the crematoria. Perhaps the most striking illustration of his expiatory projection into his father’s position is when he has his photo taken at the pyramids of Giza to replicate a photo of his father, “a perfect copy of the original—if one overlooks my appearance, that of a camp detainee” (188). Once again, perpetrator and victim, SS and detainee, are circulating positions that Rachel attempts to inhabit

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simultaneously. This fantasy of identification and knowledge through the archive is doomed to be a misprision, as we see in his visit to Auschwitz, where he observes an old lady whom he assumes to have survived the camp: “She had stepped into another world, this world I know so well on paper; I could guide her, predict her every reaction in advance” (213). However, Rachel discovers that the old woman was a survivor of Buchenwald and not Auschwitz. Unable to confess that he is a perpetrator’s son, he claims instead that his father was a victim and leaves Auschwitz with the sentiment of having soiled this site of memory. Even the greatest familiarity with the archive of extermination and the most intense identification with victims (but also perpetrators) leads to no certain knowledge. As virtual victim and perpetrator, as well as unwitting accomplice by heredity, Rachel is trapped in the reenactment of a catastrophic event that will always miss its mark since he was never there. His epistemological quest turns into an insatiable ontological hunger. Rachel’s attempt to occupy the place of the other in order to expiate his father’s crime is an attempt to embody history as a gray zone of complicity, to identify simultaneously with victim and perpetrator: “I was in the skin and the skeletal everyday of a deportee who is waiting for the end and I was in my father’s skin, the one who delivers the end. Both extremes were joined within me for the worst” (147). In this sense, Rachel is an heir to figures such as Albert Camus’s postwar protagonist in La chute, who exclaims in despair, “What can one do to become another?” It is an identical despair at his own belated appearance on the scene of history, at his inability to occupy the place of absent others in what he sees as the “primal scene” of the Holocaust, that drives Rachel to suicide: I cannot become a detainee, I cannot become a laboratory guinea pig or a Sonderkommando, I cannot become an executioner or a kapo, I cannot do anything save enter into father’s thoughts, put my footsteps in his, and attempt to follow him in his horrifying path; I can no nothing but mime the detainee and attempt to feel his agony as the most mysterious, the most abject of deaths befalls him. I can no nothing, but I am here, I had to be, and I must go to the end. (236)

He embodies this wrenching identification with victim and perpetrator to the tragic end, when, shorn like a detainee and clad in striped pajamas, he

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gasses himself in his garage in a figural, expiatory “drowning” that seeks to save both his father and himself. Through the figure of Rachel Schiller, Sansal investigates several contemporary uses of Holocaust memory: the older brother illustrates the conflation of event and representation, of literal and metaphorical victimhood and survival made by the theorists examined in chapter 1. His encounter with the genocide’s archive suggests that representations not only bear witness to violence but contaminate their receiver as well. For Agamben, Caruth, and Felman, the transmission of trauma weaves us into a historical wound even as it unravels our psychic cohesion. In Sansal this ethical entanglement and psychic undoing is repeatedly figured as a desire to tear away one’s own skin. This model of identification with historical violence dominates in our current “era of the witness” (Wieviorka), which as we saw in the last chapter, is also an era under the “empire of trauma” (Fassin) and in the shadow of the gray zone (Agamben). Rachel’s melancholy expiation not only illustrates the impasses of a traumatic identification with the past, but it also engages with France’s management of collective memory. His itinerary of expiation seems an explicit gesture to Sarkozy’s objections in 2007 to repentance (with its moral/religious connotations) for the historical sins of Vichy, slavery, and colonialism. Sarkozy had denounced these forms of repentance as an “execrable fashion” that tarnished national pride: “I will not accept that we ask sons to expiate for the sins of their fathers,” the president announced, which is precisely what Sansal’s protagonist does when he commits suicide in his father’s name. That Sarkozy’s objections specifically targeted discourses of repentance for colonialism and slavery was obvious in his address to “all the people of the Mediterranean, who spend their time mulling over the past and its old hatreds” when they ought to “look toward the future.”56 As Rosello has pointed out, such dismissals betrayed a hierarchical and normative conception of memory. Repentance is “not a concept but a rhetorical trap. . . . Repentance is the name that I give to the kind of memory I do not value. And the type of memorialization I do not value, I call repentance.”57 This dismissal of repentance and its devalorization of the legacies of slavery and colonialism were echoed by public intellectuals such as Pascal Bruckner, whose La tyrannie de la pénitence (The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism) was published the same year as Sarkozy’s controversial speech

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and developed the argument of an earlier book, tellingly titled Le sanglot de l’homme blanc (The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt). Bruckner denounces the Eu ropean cult of contrition: The product of Enlightenment’s legacy of self-interrogation and auto- critique, it has indulged retrospective culpability instead of spurring forward-looking responsibility. For Bruckner, the liberal preoccupation with the colonial past and its aftereffects is part and parcel of the West’s “pathologies of debt” and “vanities of self-hatred.” It participates in the failure to “spread democracy and contain barbarism,” and thereby colludes with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. For Bruckner, Jacques Derrida is a symptom of this masochistic selfcritique and political abdication. For in the aftermath of 9/11, in an attempt to nuance the rhetoric of the “war on terror,” Derrida had argued that “terror” was not only wielded by “foreign” terrorists but could designate the effects of any institutional structure of power and its operations: We are perhaps wrong to assume so quickly that all terrorism is voluntary, conscious, organized, deliberate, intentionally calculated: there are historical or political situations in which terror operates, so to speak, by itself, through the simple effect of an apparatus, through established power relationships, without anyone, any conscious subject, any person, being consciously aware of it or taking responsibility for it. All situations of structural social or national oppression produce a terror that is never natural (and which is therefore organized, institutional) and on which they depend without those who benefit from them ever having to organize terrorist acts or be called terrorists.58

This consideration of systemic forms of violence was summarily dismissed by Bruckner as self-mortifying abdication: “Behind the appearance of complex analysis, we find here the typical evangelical posture symptomatic of our era of guilt: self-accusation, public castigation. . . . In this respect the intellectual caste, in our world, is the penitential class par excellence.”59 Bruckner’s dismissal of Derrida’s account of the institutional operations of violence is a dangerous position that fuels the polarizing discourse of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. It also also sets up a competitive economy of memory in which attending to the colonial legacy and its aftermath in France and abroad distracts from a robust engagement with terror. Not only does this perspective fail to consider the role of colonial

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histories and imperial itineraries in the formation of circuits of terror, but it also assumes that one history has to be eclipsed in order for another one to be illuminated, an issue to which I return at the chapter’s conclusion.60 For the moment I wish to point out that what is intriguing about Sansal’s inscription of the French debate on the politics of guilt is that if his protagonist does seek to expiate his father’s sins, the field of repentance in The German Mujahid is strictly limited to the Holocaust. Rachel’s suicide is a selfimmolation for the sins of the Holocaust alone. Despite the circulation of repentance specifically in debates on the memory and legacy of French colonialism, in Sansal’s novel, the term is never invoked in relation to colonialism, the Algerian War, or the aftermath of these histories on both sides of the Mediterranean. As we shall see, France’s colonial occupation and Algeria’s independence hold an ambiguous place in Sansal’s work, and this is one of the most provocative dimensions of his engagement with the French “memory wars.”

The Poverty of Analogy An obsession with analogies is just as deplorable as a blind adherence to literal facts. Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Whereas Sansal’s older protagonist drowns in the singularity of the Nazi extermination— a singularity that is paradoxically generalized as the matrix of all evil and as an eternal present of culpability and expiation—the younger brother, Malrich, instrumentalizes this history in order to make sense of his own lived experience. A high school dropout who had barely heard of the Holocaust before encountering his brother’s journal, Malrich starts off as a literal reader who is unable to decipher the connection between his brother’s shaved head, striped pajamas, and death by gassing and the Nazi genocide. As Rosello observes, he is initially unable to read the “dangerous parallels” that will later form the crux of his testimony: “At this stage, there is no parallel, but rather a complete absence of historical rapprochements. The scene forms a tableau that Malrich describes as ‘bizarre’ and not obvious or allegorical. Sansal stages a bad reader of the archive, a witness who is un-

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able to decode, one who sees but is unable to make connections.” Malrich grows into a better reader as he comes to historical consciousness through his brother’s journal, but his conclusions are quite different from Rachel’s. His is not a commemorative quest but an attempt to mobilize the Nazi past in ser vice of the present. Unlike his brother, who plunged into the irrevocable unicum of the Holocaust, Malrich transforms the genocide into a template for grasping his experience in the suburban projects under the shadow of fundamentalism. He draws one-to-one correspondences between the past and the present, viewing the configurations of power under Nazism as identical to those structuring his present-day experience in France. The resulting analogies are startling: His housing project is cast as a concentration camp, and young Nadia, burned to death by extremists for her Western look and behavior, is the victim of an extermination. Malrich’s response to his brother’s question— are we answerable for the crimes of our fathers?—is to plan a “counter-jihad” and assassinate the local imam. The revenge fantasy is also an attempt to atone for his past seduction by fundamentalism and to avenge his father’s slaughter while answering for his father’s collaboration with the Führer by refusing any complicity with the new rule of terror in his French projects. So despite the crude analogies by which Malrich collapses the past into the present, their logic of substitution nevertheless open up a complex reflection on memory and politics. Throughout the pages of his education, then, Malrich becomes an analogical reader of history, one who makes points of connection—if not substitution—between the Holocaust and the present-day rise of Islamic fundamentalism in France. The equivalences he draws between these distinct historical phenomena make him “telescope” and lock them into one unwavering paradigm wherein the configurations of the past are mirrored in those of the present. His apprenticeship in figures leads him to take on the mantle of a pedagogue: In an improvised history lesson to his multiethnic ghetto crew, Malrich describes Hitler as “sort of like an all-powerful imam in a peaked cap and a black uniform” (113) whose elimination of undesirables prefigure what will happen to his buddies under the imam’s rule if they continue to act like “kapos” and submit to the cité’s reign of terror. In his eagerness to convert his buddies to his counter-jihad plot, Malrich conceals the reasons for Rachel’s suicide (that is to say, their father’s presumed collusion with extermination) and claims instead that Rachel’s suicide was caused by the

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analogy between Nazism and Islamism: “He figured that fundamentalist Islam and Nazism were kif-kif—same old same old. He wanted to find out what would happen if people did nothing, the way people did nothing in Germany back in the day, what would happen if nobody did anything in Kabul and Algeria where they’ve got I don’t know how many mass graves, or here in France where we’ve got all these Islamist Gestapo. In the end, the whole idea scared him so much he killed himself” (115). This exercise of revisionist history compromises his narrative authority for readers; his lesson illustrates the authoritarian pedagogue’s manipulation of the past. It collapses distinctive ideologies and histories into “kif-kif— same old same old,” into history as an endless cycle of the same events. This is also the underlying assumption we fi nd today in neologisms such as Islamofascism or Nazislamism.62 If in his interviews Sansal defends this conflation of Nazism and Islamism, or of the French suburban projects and the concentration camps, these clunky analogies acquire a caricatural quality in the novel that incite an ironic reading.63 As I will suggest, the narrative structure as well as the work of literary figures complicates the collapse of these ideologies into a seamless continuum of terror. At the novel’s conclusion, Malrich retreats from the field of violent action to become a figure of the author as witness: He pieces together the journal entries into a manuscript in the hopes of disseminating its historical truths and confides the manuscript to his and Rachel’s schoolteacher, who rewrites the text “in good French. So good I hardly recognized it as my own work” (7). His fi nal act of transmission thus passes through the standardized French of the republican educational system, assimilating the journal’s intertwined histories into the archive of French secular universalism. As we have seen, the Schiller brothers model two approaches to contemporary “uses of memory.” On the one hand, we are schooled in a commemoration of the Shoah’s traumatic singularity, and, on the other, in its instrumentalization toward a politics of memory (however crude) that works through analogy between past and present. Rachel, as the “the best pupil” that the schoolteacher/editor ever had, attempts to take on the burden of Jewish victims while atoning for a past he never experienced; he can be seen to illustrate the consequences of a pedagogical project such as Sarkozy’s, in which schoolchildren were summoned to take on the identity of a deported

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Jewish child. Yet Rachel’s gradual submersion into the Holocaust’s singularity— one that, as we have seen throughout this book, is the paradoxical basis for its exemplarity—is a sterile form of repentance that leads to suicide. His self-infl icted gassing illustrates the melancholy abdications of a subject who confronts history as irreparable trauma and inexpiable gray zone. Street-smart Malrich learns his history lesson by applying his brother’s reading of the extermination’s archive to his immediate surroundings. If the schoolteacher warns against the “dangerous parallels that could get me into trouble” and has removed a number of them along with portions of Rachel’s diary, Malrich stands by these conflations of Nazism and Islamism, Hitler and imam, camp and suburban project. His analogies instrumentalize the past for the purposes of the present, and if they are crude, they nevertheless reflect an intellectual current today invested in uncovering the Nazi roots of radical Islam, and a political one that mobilizes the symbolic legacy of the Holocaust in the “war on terror” according to very particular political agendas. Despite their apparent opposition, what binds of the uses of history in The German Mujahid and reveals their limitations is their reliance on identification, whether it is identification with the past’s victims, perpetrators, and accomplices or identification of the past as present. Yet as the narrative suggests, neither the intimate forms of identification that conflate oneself with another, nor the temporal collapse of yesterday into today, allow one to fully grasp the complexity of these pasts or negotiate the demands of an unfolding present. If Sansal himself subscribes to the analogy between Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism in a number of interviews, his literary portrayal of these analogies in Malrich’s journal entries underscores their comic erasure of historical and ideological specificity. Similarly, while Rachel’s immersion into Holocaust memory is conveyed with haunting eloquence and Agambenian melancholy in the novel, the rhetorical effect of his prose is punctured by his brother’s interventions (e.g., “I’ve cut out a lot of stuff and kept the best bits; the rest is the sort of bullshit you hear in the mosque”; 35). We are reminded more than once that the journals have gone through a number of edits, and even censorship, by Malrich and the French schoolteacher. The shifts in voices and perspective along with allusions to the editorial mediation of the text we are reading keep us on guard and create an ironic distance vis-à-vis these uses of

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Holocaust memory. The novel’s multiple archives and stories brush up against each other, creating interferences and resonances that repel identification and transposition. Does the novel give us a legible model for collective memory, or a path that mediates between national unity and communitarian fragmentation? For Rosello, Sansal suggests singularity as the paradoxical basis for identity, memory, and history, since Rachel and Malrich are the only ones in the diegetic world with a Berber mother and a Nazi father: “It is because their history is unique that it can serve as a paradigm for the uniqueness of all memory, even in the midst of a discursive space that privileges the idea that belonging to community goes hand in hand with the inheritance of one particular history.”64 This may remind us of Djebar, whose Nuits de Strasbourg gestures toward the endless task of recognition when confronted with the infinite particularity of identities and stories. And yet what interests me here is the pedagogical structure of Sansal’s narrative. If his protagonists do not offer themselves up as paradigms of memory or identity because of the singularity of their history or identity, they nevertheless rehearse familiar collective approaches toward the traumas of the past: bearing witness to the singularity of the Shoah, as a heart of darkness from which all other violences unfurl or manipulating it as an analogue for other political struggles. As Agamben’s theory and Sansal’s narrative reveal, however, the two may not be so different after all, insofar as seeing the Shoah as a paradigm also means that other histories are repetitions of the same terror. Yet both the form and figures of The German Mujahid caution against the espousal of these models. Although we are not invited to identify fully with either Rachel’s melancholy sacralization of the Shoah or Malrich’s crude instrumentalization, what is powerful in Sansal’s experimentation with these approaches is the narrative’s map of its alternating voices, temporalities, and histories. It is a map that traces convergences and even intersections— however dangerous—between distinct legacies and regimes of terror without yielding an unproblematic identity between them. Reading these alternating voices and unpredictable itineraries may remind us of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, when Paul D says to Sethe that “he want to put his story next to hers.”65 This image of proximity rather than identification, adjacence rather than convergence, strikes me as a powerful image for the ongoing

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work of Holocaust memory, and more generally for multidirectional memory, cosmopolitan memory, mémoire partagée, and other models of plural memory in an age of globalization. The alternating voices and imbricated histories of The German Mujahid are a rich illustration of this memorial turn that illuminates what literary form and figure bring to a reflection on memory and its public uses. If Sansal’s novel stages the impasses of affective identification and analogical understanding through the protagonists’ stalled itineraries, I hope to have shown that the density of its structure, the alternation of its voices, and the movement of its figures make it a timely case study for collective memory work today. My point here is to suggest that the literary work can refract and reflect on juridico-political processes to illuminate their limits. This is, I would argue, the ethical work enabled by literary form and figuration, the force of allegory and irony in contrast to the poverty of analogy. Yet lest we move too hastily into a celebration of literature as the site of boundless memorial métissage, I will conclude with one conspicuous absence from Sansal’s palimpsestic history, and that is the history of French colonialism. This absence is particularly striking since, in the aftermath of World War II and before the Shoah’s construction as a singular event, the logic of analogy and the kinds of figures we see in Sansal belonged to the rhetorical arsenal of anticolonial struggle on both sides of the Mediterranean. As shown in the preceding chapters, Césaire, Fanon, Sartre, and others denounced the repressive practices of late- colonial France precisely by analogizing them with those of Nazism, conveying the complicity between the two regimes through figures and temporalities of repetition that reappear in Sansal’s novel more than fifty years later. But Sansal does not subscribe to Aimé Césaire’s analysis of the choc en retour, that is to say, of Nazism as the boomerang effect of Eu ropean colonialism come home. In fact, in The German Mujahid the familiar postwar analogy of Nazism and colonialism falls out of the picture altogether. Nowhere is it suggested that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism might be something like the “boomerang effect” of colonial history, or indeed that there might be any links between those historical phenomena. Furthermore, the role of colonialism in constructing the derelict immigrant urban zones in France or in shaping the bloody landscape of independent Algeria is never evoked.

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In fact, the word “colonialism” appears only once toward the end of The German Mujahid, where it undergoes a startling resignification. In a scathing letter to the French Ministry of the Interior, Malrich rails against the government’s failure to restore republican order in its sensitive urban zone and uses colonialism to designate the cité’s occupation by fundamentalists: “The Islamists have colonized our estate and are making our lives hell. It’s not an extermination camp yet, but it’s pretty much ein Konzentrationslager, as they said during the Third Reich” (199). His use of German here signals the culmination of his linguistic education into entangled histories and memories, begun when he opened his brother’s journal and saw that “every word is a whole history linked to every other.” In this letter of protest, Malrich warns the minister: Gradually, people are forgetting that they live in France, half an hour from Paris, and we’re fi nding out that the principles France talks about on the world stage are really just political bullshit. Even so, and in spite of our flaws, they are principles that we believe in more than ever. Everything that we as men, as French citizens, refuse to contemplate the Islamists are more than happy to do. . . . At the rate things are going . . . the estate H24 will soon be a fullblown Islamic republic [A ce train, la cité sera bientôt une république islamique parfaitement constituée]. At that point you’ll have to declare war just to keep it within its current borders. We won’t fight with you in that war, we’ll emigrate and fight for our own independence. (199–200)66

Colonization (“Islamists have colonized our estate”) thus designates the occupation of France’s peripheral zones by religious extremists from the former colony and their global terrorist networks (the novel invokes zealots who have trained in Kabul, London, and Algiers). Malrich’s peculiar use of “colonization” and “occupation” has several intriguing consequences: The rhetoric of domestic colonial occupation by Islamists is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi rhetoric of Germany’s internal colonization by dangerous, parasitic Jews as illustrated in the anti-Semitic propaganda film Der ewige Jude (see chapter 2 on the migrations of the plague as a figure for Nazism and colonialism). This rhetoric of internal colonization by Jews cast Nazism as a national liberation movement ridding the nation of its foreign occupants.67 For Malrich, who writes to the ministry as “a furious citizen notionally under [French] jurisdiction but forced to live under Islamic law,” a barbaric Is-

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lamic regime has colonized France from within its own borders. By denouncing the nation’s failure to implement its secular republicanism, Malrich paradoxically invokes the principles of the mission civilisatrice, or France’s “civilizing mission” in the colonies, to defend the immigrant population within its borders from internal colonization. The rhetoric of borders is suggestive here (“you’ll have to declare war, just to keep it within its current borders”) in that, unlike other colonies, Algeria was considered an extension of the hexagon’s national borders. Now, what looks like its most alien and unassimilable face in the form of fundamentalist Islam threatens the Republic’s very center from its suburban margins. We are left with the disquieting question of whether French republican universalism and its colonial inheritance is the only possible response to Islamic fundamentalism or if alternate forms of sovereignty and modernity are imaginable. In the tapestry of historical influence woven by Sansal, must one “forget” colonial violence in order to contest Islamic fundamentalism? Does one form of terror have to be occluded for another to be resisted? We might use this passage to further situate Sansal’s work in relation to the debates on memory with which I opened. Malrich’s portrait of the cité’s Islamicization and his appeal for state intervention to end this colonial occupation are in sharp contrast with other resignifications of the term “colonialism” in contemporary political rhetoric. For example, the Manifeste des indigènes de la République blames the precarious conditions of the quartiers and banlieues on the Republic’s ongoing colonial pursuits within its own borders and calls for the republic’s decolonization from within. For the Parti des indigènes (PIR), the contemporary French state operates according to the principles of a colonial continuum: Its management of Islam, of immigrants, and of their descendants within its borders reenacts the forms of imperial domination once exercised in the colonies. The comparison with the PIR is pertinent here because it represents the antithesis of Malrich’s vision. Whereas Sansal’s protagonist calls on the state to intervene and “decolonize” the cité, the PIR finds that it is this very state’s repression that has turned the banlieue into a colony requiring a kind of colonial reconquest by the state: “The suburban projects are called ‘zones of lawlessness’ that the Republic is summoned to ‘reconquer.’ ”68 As we saw in Les nuits de Strasbourg, France’s suppression of the colonial legacy symbolically causes it to return in the form of a random act of terror that disrupts the pacified multicultural

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web of the city’s inhabitants. Djamila-Antigone’s performance of the excluded inclusion of immigrant children echoes the Indigènes de la République and its manifesto, which argues that the French Republic still remains to be fully decolonized from within its own borders, that “independently of their origins, the populations in the ghettos [les quartiers] is ‘nativized’ [indigénisés], relegated to the margins of society . . . that the treatment of populations issuing from colonization prolongs a colonial politics.” Thus, if Djebar’s narrative demonstrated the need for ongoing decolonization within the city, its topography as well as its memory, in Sansal’s narrative it is the state’s recolonization of its internal dissidents that will ensure the security and integration of the descendants of immigrants. Unlike Djebar’s Nuits de Strasbourg, then, The German Mujahid does not engage in a critique of the French Republic or its colonial legacy. Along with French colonialism, also missing from this otherwise dense constellation of historical violence are the imperial itineraries of occupation that continue to fuel the polarization between Western secular democracy and Islamic fundamentalism, so often dehistoricized as a “clash of civilization.” These omissions, although problematic, shouldn’t come as a surprise. In a polarized ideological landscape, with what seems to be a restricted economy of memory and analogies, it makes sense that Sansal would not link Islamist terror to colonial history. To address Islamist terror as something like a Césairean choc en retour, or boomerang return of colonial violence, would potentially legitimate a movement that he sees as yet another iteration of Nazism and its genocidal ideology. Rather than a moment of ideological blindness, then, the glaring absence of such histories is a strategic political choice for the author. In The German Mujahid, the resurrection of Nazism through its analogy with contemporary forms of radical Islam, or the concentration camp through its analogy with the cité, speaks to the strategic pressures of a political field of representation in which the wellknown history of French colonialism is muted, it would seem, for fear that acknowledging its violence, its long-term effects, and its neoimperial itineraries in the Maghreb might be seen to compromise the critique of Islamic fundamentalism.69 Another motivation for this erasure of colonial violence and its longterm effects in the postcolony and the hexagon is Sansal’s project of rethinking the colonial moment altogether in the interests of a multicultural

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vision of Algeria. In an essay titled Petit éloge de la mémoire: Quatre mille et une année de nostalgie (2007), Sansal celebrates the multimillennial hybridity of the Maghreb, where waves of imperial conquest have grafted their histories and memories onto Algeria’s terrain.70 Like his precursor and stated influence Albert Camus, who envisioned Algeria at the crossroads of histories and races, Sansal envisions the Mediterranean basin as an exemplary noeud de mémoire, an ethnohistorical knot whose strands are woven in each and every direction (ces liens tissés dans tous les sens)71 and whose actualization as a pluralist entity has yet to come. Sansal’s memorial project seeks to relativize the colonial moment as one among many that constitute the Maghreb’s palimpsestic memory and identity, a hybridity or métissage that is denied by the FLN and Islamists in both Algeria and France. In The German Mujahid, the muting of French colonialism in Algeria opposes the hijacking of postcolonial Algerian national identity by Islam, Arabization, and the military state. Whereas Sansal celebrates the recovery of a historical tapestry made of strands woven in every direction, his narrative of the Shoah’s legacy strategically leaves out the central weave of colonialism. If he appears to work within the tradition of analogies examined in the fi rst chapters of this book, in which Nazism was linked to different forms and deployments of colonialism, his erasure of colonialism in The German Mujahid signals a new phase in the uses of Holocaust memory, where fundamentalist Islam is demonized as an avatar of Nazism to mobilize public opinion with reference to the global “war on terror.” We might regret that Sansal’s spotlight on multiple forms of terror in The German Mujahid leads to dimming the role of colonial history and neocolonial itineraries in Algeria and elsewhere. As Carine Bourget notes, this is a common maneuver in recent work by Maghrebin writers seeking to indict Islamic fundamentalism, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11: In many of these works, diverse movements are gathered under the rubric of fundamentalism, demonized through their analogy to Nazism (see, for instance, Boudjedra’s Le FIS de la haine) and the “peaceful” cohabitation of Algeria’s diverse populations prior to independence is contrasted to the repression and bloodshed that followed. For Bourget, “in the current political climate, such texts, with their downplaying of the legacy of colonialism and neocolonialism, and emphasis on Islam as a fundamentalist religion opposed to

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the democratic West as the source of all problems, participate, even if unwillingly, in manufacturing consent . . . to justify military intervention against other nations.”72 If The German Mujahid can be put in this category of writings, what is perhaps more frustrating than its particular strategic choices is that these are a function of an ideological field so polarized by the discourse of a “clash of civilizations” that the only values invoked in the face of terrorism appear to be those of the West’s civilizing/democratizing mission, regardless of the material interests they can mask and the forms of terror they may harbor. The blockage we witness in the novel’s otherwise dense network of analogies reminds us that memories are activated in par tic u lar junctures by groups with competing political interests and within a fi nite range of affi liations and antagonisms. If Sansal’s project to bring Holocaust memory to the Arab world is an admirable cause whose ethics are above reproach, the politics of his novel’s comparative gestures and its strategic omissions compromise the legibility and audibility of his message. For as Assia Djebar’s Les nuits de Strasbourg suggests, forms of pacification that forget or disavow the colonial legacy and its long aftermath are bound to confront resurgences or “boomerang effects” of terror, and the risk is that these eruptions might be dismissed as illegible and illegitimate without further inquiry. Boualem Sansal’s (and David Grossman’s) call for peace in the Middle East, the Appel de Strasbourg, is issued from a city that, as Djebar suggests, is a veritable palimpsest of occupations. Yet its message of world peace will fall on deaf ears if only certain itineraries of violence are evoked and not others.73 The erasure of colonialism from Sansal’s mosaic of violence in The German Mujahid risks playing into a hierarchical economy of memory in which certain histories are valorized at the expense of others for specific ideological uses. In this restricted marketplace of memory, the power of allegory yields to the poverty of analogy, and the layering of palimpsest is frozen into matrix and paradigm. That The German Mujahid conjures up a character such as Malrich, whose historical and political consciousness emerges through the prism of analogy, illustrates both the potential of such comparisons for illuminating connections and their troubling inadequacy in the attempt to “remember it all,” or, as Malrich puts it, “comment se souvenir de tout.” In this sense, although

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Sansal’s work can be understood within the framework of contemporary memory studies, as an illustration of multidirectional, cosmopolitan, or traveling memory, it is also a rather extraordinary staging of what inevitably haunts any metaphorics of memory as movement: the question, to cite Robert Frost, of the road not taken.

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Afterword

The texts and films discussed in this book illustrate the ethical work enabled by cultural representations, the force of allegory in contrast to the poverty of analogy. In the works that I have considered, aesthetic form becomes a laboratory for experimenting with practices of memory and representation. Rhetorical devices disrupt given patterns of remembrance and belonging while illuminating the forces that govern a field of representation. The artifice of aesthetic expression, its polyphony and irony, beckons partial and suspended identifications, teaching us to read in multiple directions and to identify proximities between different formations (psychic, cultural, historical) without turning them into so many iterations of the same catastrophe. To the extent that cultural memory inevitably takes form in literary and rhetorical figures, the movement of such figures across space and time carries within it the potential to reactivate the past within the present. Tropes such as the concentrationary plague spark unpredictable affinities between disparate histories and identities and may forge solidarities between diverse 265

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memory groups. Still, as viewers and readers, we must remain attentive both to the connections mapped by figural itineraries and to the links that they conceal. The recognition of marginalized histories of injury and loss remains an urgent task; yet the pathways of memory are powered by tangible historical forces and conflicting political interests. The “memory wars” we witness today in France, Algeria, and elsewhere require us to envisage more inclusive identities and trajectories of remembrance. But to do so with care, we need to be aware of the terrain in which recognitions are negotiated, the range of causes they serve, the solidarities they open but also those they foreclose. The imaginative realms of literature and cinema often provide alternate arenas for “small acts of repair,”1 for acknowledging and commemorating forgotten, marginalized, or disavowed histories of violence. They are fertile ground for exploring the myriad configurations of memory and identity that make up an increasingly globalized world. Yet as sites of critical self-reflection, literature and cinema also create a discursive space in which the very conditions of visibility, recognition, and reparation can be identified, questioned, and perhaps even reimagined. As my readings in the preceding chapters suggest, allegory, palimpsest, and irony are powerful vectors of memory’s movement across time and space, but they are also conduits for an ethical reflection on this movement. These figures are volatile; their meanings and valences shift according to their use and reception. They can reify the past or lead to invidious comparisons, just as they can honor remembrance or animate solidarities. The critical energies of such figures and their capacity for mutation call for vigilance on our part, lest we find ourselves complicit in discourses that highlight certain frames of reference to the detriment of others. A recurrent theme in this book has been Camus’s condemnation of Vichy collaborators for their lack of imagination. Creatures of bureaucracy who lived in a world of murderous abstraction, these accomplices of torture, deportation, and annihilation failed to see the embodied reality of the laws that they endorsed: “For such people, it’s always the same abstraction and in our eyes, perhaps their greatest crime is that they never approached a tormented body . . . with the eyes of the body and what I would call a physical notion of justice [avec les yeux du corps, et la notion que j’appellerai physique de la justice].”2 In what we have seen to be a leitmotif of the postwar era, Camus

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diagnosed perpetration and complicity as an ethical failure of embodied imagination. “I lacked imagination, back there,” the protagonist of Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona confesses about his acts of torture. Over a decade later, as Adolf Eichmann faced trial for crimes against humanity, Hannah Arendt similarly diagnosed the bureaucrat’s criminality as a failure of imagination: “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that Eichmann’s inability to speak was closely connected with the inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”3 For Arendt, Eichmann’s capacity for perpetration was linked to his incapacity to think from the place of another, to depart from abstraction and confront suffering in its lived reality. When Arendt declares that Eichmann’s inability to think from another’s perspective is the source of his criminality, she is not suggesting that empathy, or the ability to put oneself in the place of another, is the foundation of moral imagination. It is not a matter of identifying with the other, in an affective substitution that characterizes traumatic and prosthetic memory alike, but of thinking and imagining from another’s point of view, of “making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent . . . this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where I actually am not.”4 Arendt describes such practices of dislocation as training “one’s imagination to go visiting.”5 Such reflections on the itineraries of imagination resonate with the movements of memory-in-complicity traced in this book. The literary engagements I have examined prompt us to take our bearings from multiple sites and times, to “bridge certain abysses of remoteness”6 so that we may recognize our entanglement with distant others and ongoing histories of violence and loss. This interplay of identification and distance, of complicity and solidarity, is an essential feature of the moral imagination. If, as we have seen, in the context of an ethnographic encounter complicity arises from “having a sense of being here where major transformations are underway that are tied to things happening simultaneously elsewhere,”7 in the realm of cultural production, complicity spurs a self-reflexive encounter with the aesthetic object and an awareness of its various mediations. The dislocation of figures, as they travel from one site to another and gather disparate times and places, does not invite simple relocations of self as other, here as there, or then as

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now. Such circulation, with its unpredictable paths and dangerous intersections, remains on the move. “What can one do to become another?” Camus’s protagonist exclaims at the end of The Fall from his home built on the remains of Amsterdam’s Jewish ghetto. Recent cultural and theoretical discourses, alongside political and pedagogical processes, are haunted by the desire to occupy the place of the other. Our attempts to constitute an ethical relation to the past, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust, continue to be vexed by residual and contradictory forms of identification. Yet as Primo Levi’s voice reminds us throughout the pages of The Drowned and the Saved, “One is never in another’s place.”8 The uses of Holocaust memory examined in this book attest to the ongoing challenge of rethinking how, as teachers, critics, and readers, we can strive to make another(’s) past proximate rather than intimate. At stake in the distinction I make between proximity and intimacy is the possibility of turning away from the violence of reading another’s history through paradigms that are invested in mastering experience through modes of identification and capture. In order to envisage an ethical relationship to another’s past, we would need to relinquish the violent comforts of identification and open ourselves up to the genuinely disquieting proximities of not one but several unmasterable pasts, not one but several unfathomable others.

Notes

Introduction: Pathways of Memory, Dangerous Intersections

1. Nathalie Sarraute adapting Katherine Mansfield in L’ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 33. 2. Wulf Kansteiner, “From Exception to Exemplum: The New Approach to Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’ ” History and Theory 33, no. 2 (1994): 145–71. 3. Susan Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2. 4. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 195; Jeffrey C. Alexander, Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 5. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 14. 6. Richard Crownshaw, Introduction to the special issue on transcultural memory, Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 1. Memory’s unprecedented transcultural movement seems to be a new phase in what Richard Terdiman identified in relation to France’s postrevolutionary aftermath as modernity’s “massive disruption of traditional forms of memory.” See Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 5. 7. Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1925). 8. Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2011), 163. For a critical assessment of Pierre Nora’s sites of memory, see Michael Rothberg, “Between Memory and Memory,” in Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture, Yale French Studies, no. 118/119 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 3–12; Anne Whitehead, Memory (Oxon, Eng.: Routledge, 2009), 141–47; and Ann Stoler in “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 269

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Notes to pages 4–5

121–56. See in particular 146–49. For recent work on transnational sites of memory, see Indra Sengupta, ed., Memory, History, and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts (London: German Historical Institute, 2009). 9. Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 7. Erll proposes “transcultural memory studies” as an umbrella term “for what in other academic contexts might be described with concepts of the transnational, diasporic, hybrid, syncretistic, postcolonial, translocal, creolized, global, or cosmopolitan” (9). For a concise and up-to-date overview of memory studies, see Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). For new approaches to cultural memory in light of globalization, see Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices, and Trajectories (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 10. Levy and Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, 2. The concept of “cosmopolitan memory” developed by Levy and Sznaider addresses transcultural forms of remembrance forged by global media representations of the Holocaust. Jan and Aleida Assmann’s concept of cultural memory has also been instrumental to an account of memory’s transcultural flows. As Jan Assmann puts it, “The concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image.” “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 132. Since cultural memory designates reusable material and includes representations of all kinds, from writing to images, practices, places, and monuments, it is able to traverse social groups, sites, and temporalities, enabling a centripetal movement beyond the national or ethnocultural container. 11. Erll, Memory in Culture, 173; Erll, “Travelling Memory,” 14. Kendall R. Phillips and G. Mitchell Reyes adapt the work of Arjun Appadurai on the global cultural landscape to propose the global memoryscape as “a complex landscape upon which memories and memory practices move, come into contact, are contested by, and contest other forms of remembrance, older ways of conceptualizing the past—largely framed in terms of national and local perspectives— are unsettled by the dynamic movements of globalization and new memories and new practices of remembrance emerge.” Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 13–14. 12. See for instance Françoise Vergès, who identifies cartographies and itineraries of memory circulating between the colonies in “Mémoires fragmentées, Histoires croisées: Esclavage colonial et processus de décolonisation,” NAQD 1, no. 30 (2013): 117–36. For an account of slavery as a point of memorial contact or what Vergès terms a “contact des mémoires” in hexagonal

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France, Réunion, and Togo, see her “Wandering Souls and Returning Ghosts: Writing the History of the Dispossessed,” in Noeuds de mémoir, 136–54. For an overview of intersectional history (“histoire croisée”) and its methodological implications, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, “Penser l’histoire croisée: Entre empirie et réflexivité” (Paris: Editions de l’E.H.E.S.S, 2003, no. 1), 7–36. 13. Andrew Hoskins, “7/7 and Connective Memory: Interactional Trajectories of Remembering in Post-scarcity Culture,” Memory Studies 4, no. 3 (2011): 269–80. See Richard Terdiman for a reflection on how the Internet’s logic of association reverberates with the operations of memory itself as a simultaneous process of conservation and transformation. Terdiman suggests that the leaps across space and time enabled by postmodern information technologies have always belonged to “the mysterious territory of recollection.” “Given Memory: On Mnemonic Coercion, Reproduction and Invention,” in Regimes of Memory, ed. Susannah Radstone and Katherine Hodgkin (London: Routledge, 2003), 187. 14. Alison Landsberg’s concept of “prosthetic memory” posits that technology allows us to suture ourselves to events we did not experience and take on memories like an artificial limb. “Prosthetic memories circulate publicly, and although they are not organically based, they are nevertheless experienced with a person’s body as a result of an engagement with a wide range of cultural technologies. Prosthetic memories thus become part of one’s personal archive of experience, informing one’s subjectivity as well as one’s relationship to the present and future tenses.” Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 25–26. For Landsberg, the transference enabled by connective forms like cinema or museums can spur cross- cultural coalition and social transformation. By contrast, in this book I question such transferential identifications and their incorporation of difference. This book also challenges the assumption that ethics is rooted in our ability to “put ourselves in another’s shoes” (see the section “Against Identification” in chapter 6). 15. Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 10. See Geoffrey Hartman’s concept of “witness by adoption” in The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 9. 16. Marianne Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 24, 206. 17. Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 3. Also see Brett Ashley Kaplan’s evocative use of the palimpsest to consider the

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Notes to pages 6–8

imprint of Nazism on the landscape of postapartheid South Africa in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction: Kaplan, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory (New York: Routledge, 2011), 141–97. 18. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 211. 19. In a similar vein, Silverman proposes, “Palimpsestic memory brings to the politics of memory the challenging idea that memory does not function according to the linear trajectory of a par ticular ethnocultural group and lead inexorably to the distinction (and often competition) between different groups; it functions, instead, according to a complex process of interconnection, interaction, substitution and displacement of memory traces in which the particular and the universal, and memory and history, are inextricably held in an anxious relationship.” Palimpsestic Memory, 28. 20. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5. 21. Ibid., 302. Recent theories of memory’s multidirectional movement have energized the relations between Holocaust studies and postcolonial reflection. See, for example, Stef Craps’s Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), a probing critique of trauma theory’s Eurocentric bias and its unfulfilled promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement. Craps develops the concept of postcolonial “cross-traumatic affiliation” to consider points of contact between the Holocaust and the disparate traumas of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and partition. From a more psychoanalytic perspective, Gabriele Schwab proposes a model of “intercultural transference” between histories of trauma, identifying forms of “transgenerational haunting” in representations of the Holocaust with reference to colonialism and slavery. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 22. I borrow the term from Nancy Wood, whose concept of “vectors of memory” in postwar Europe emphasizes the movement of memory’s forms through historiography, testimony, trials, and cultural production. 23. Annette Wieviorka expresses unease at the “compassional pact” of testimony and its privilege of affect over rationality: “Testimony appeals to the heart and not to the mind. It elicits compassion, pity, indignation, even rebellion.” in The Era of the Witness. trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 144. Anne Rothe identifies the Eichmann trial as the “birthday of popular trauma culture” in Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 2. On the radio’s role in transforming the Eichmann trial into a collective trauma, see Amit Pinchevski and Tamar Liebes, “Severed Voices: Radio and the Mediation of Trauma in the Eichmann Trial,” Public Culture 22, no.2 (2010): 265–91.

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24. Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 3. 25. Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 20. Weissman mounts a critique of the tendency to approach the Holocaust through the category of “horror” in Elie Wiesel, Lawrence Langer, Steven Spielberg, and Claude Lanzmann. 26. Richard Crownshaw, The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 246. 27. As Eva Hoffman has noted, the secular sacralization of the Holocaust makes it an occasion for “facile positioning” in relation to traumas that are not our own. Hoffman cautions against “collective memory turning into a kind of hypermemory, which itself can function as a secondary amnesia— the kind of amnesia in which the Shoah is in danger not so much of vanishing into forgetfulness as expanding into an increasingly empty referent, a symbol of historical horror, an allegory of the Real.” Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 157, 177. 28. Richard Crownshaw, “Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 75. 29. In States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), Wendy Brown argues that our “wounded attachments” to experiences of trauma and subordination are intimately linked to identity politics, whereby the recognition of suffering is seen as the solution, thus substituting “I” for “I want,” that is to say, therapeutic forms of recognition for more robust political change. 30. Susannah Radstone, “Social Bonds and Psychical Order: Testimonies,” Cultural Values 5, no. 1 (2001): 65, 61, 65. 31. Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris under the Occupation, trans. Lisa Lieberman (Now and Then Reader, 2011). Decades later Serge Daney contrasted France’s complicitous gaze on the camps, exemplified by Resnais’s Night and Fog, with the innocent gaze of American directors in 1945: “What I understand today is that the beauty of Stevens’ movie is due less to the justness of the distance than to the innocence of the gaze. Justness is the burden of the one who comes ‘after’; innocence is the terrible grace granted to the fi rst arrived, to the first one who simply makes the gestures of cinema. . . . In 1945, it was perhaps enough to be American and to witness, like George Stevens or Corporal Samuel Fuller at Falkenau, the opening of the real gates of the night while holding a camera. You had to be American—i.e. to believe in the fundamental innocence of the show—to make the German population walk by the open tombs, to show them what they were living next to, so well and so badly.” Serge Daney, “The Tracking Shot in Kapo,” in Postcards from the Cinema, trans. Paul Grant (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 23–34.

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Notes to pages 11–14

32. Roger Silverstone addresses complicity as a potential source of responsibility in our everyday relationship to the media. Complicity is “a kind of substrate in the relationship we have both to the other and to our media, and to the other through our media,” but as audiences, our increasing interaction with social and cultural media makes us co-responsible for its governing rules of representation and complicit if we fail to challenge their authority and scrutinize their frameworks for truth and reality.” Roger Silverstone, “Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life,” New Literary History 33, no. 4 (2002): 776. 33. Translation modified. “As we approach the bimillenium, we begin to look upon the Modern Age as a period in which monstrous things are achieved by human perpetrators— entrepreneurs, technicians, artists and consumers. . . . The Modern Age is the era of the man-made monstrous.” Peter Sloterdijk, “The Time of the Crime of the Monstrous: On the Philosophical Justification of the Artificial,” trans. Wieland Hoban, in Sloterdijk Now, ed. Stuart Elden (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 165. 34. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 38. 35. Emile Zola, “J’Accuse!,” letter to the president of the Republic, Aurore, January 13, 1898. 36. Cited in Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 81. 37. Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 9, 8. 38. Ibid., 15. 39. “The memory of the past will serve no purpose if it is used to build an impassable wall between evil and us, identifying exclusively with irreproachable heroes or innocent victims and driving the agents of evil outside the confi nes of humankind.” Tzvetan Todorov, Memory as a Remedy for Evil, trans. Gila Walker (London: Seagull Books, 2010), 80. Like Sanders, Todorov evokes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a neglected model for reparative rather than punitive justice. 40. Sanders, Complicities, 11. 41. Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2. 42. Ibid., 122, 186. Kutz’s theory examines various forms of complicity that emerge either in structured collective projects such as the bombing of Dresden, where a shared participatory intent (to bomb) established the complicity of each pi lot regardless of whether their bombs hit targets, or in unstructured collective harms such as global climate change. In a similar vein, albeit from a different disciplinary perspective, Bruce Robbins alludes to connections between “here” and “elsewhere” in what Kutz calls our “mediated relations to harms” through the concept of “distant belongings,” ad-

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dressing thus “the problem of how to negotiate between obligations that fall to us because of where we live and those that come to us from afar through a kind of belonging at a distance.” Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 28. 43. Ibid., 2. 44. Naomi Mandel, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 218, 24. Building on Chris Kutz’s definition of complicity, Mandel proposes, “Thinking of complicity as a domain helps dissociate it from judgment and opens up the possibility of thinking about what it might mean to occupy that domain and how to function in it. To do so, we must turn our critical gaze from the violence and its evil . . . to the terrain on which we stand” (215). The philosopher Gillian Rose makes a similar case in her critique of “Holocaust piety,” that is to say, sanctimonious representations that either sentimentalize the Holocaust (like Schindler’s List) or quarantine it to the realm of the incomparable and ineffable. Rose calls for an approach to the Holocaust that, like Mandel’s (and mine) is grounded in continuities and complicities, so that “instead of emerging with sentimental tears, which leave us emotionally and politically intact, we emerge with the dry eyes of a deep grief, which belongs to the recognition of our ineluctable grounding in the norms of the emotional and political culture represented, and which leaves us with the uncertainty of the remains of the day.” Mourning Becomes the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 54. 45. George E. Marcus, “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-enScène of Anthropological Fieldwork,” Representations 59 (Summer 1997): 96. Marcus elaborates, “The connotation of mutual complicity in one another’s projects, which entails contingent trust and complex feelings around similarly identified purposes that both converge and diverge, provides a more appropriate frame for thinking about fieldwork relations that move across multi-sited and frequently contested spaces of research.” “From Rapport under Erasure to Theaters of Complicit Reflexivity,” Qualitative Inquiry 7, no. 4 (2001): 519. Also see Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). 46. “Complicity here rests in the acknowledged fascination between anthropologist and informant regarding the outside ‘world’ that the anthropologist is specifically materialising through the travels and trajectory of her multi-sited agenda. . . . The shared imagination between anthropologist and informant that creates a space beyond the immediate confi nes of the local is also what projects the transitional site-specific mise-en-scène of fieldwork outward toward other sites.” Marcus, “Uses of Complicity,” 100–101. 47. Yasmin Gunaratnam, Researching “Race” and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge, and Power (London: Sage, 2003), 193, 184.

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Notes to pages 17–24

48. Richard J. Golsan, French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and the 1990s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 163, 167, 164. Golsan shows how the memory of World War II served as an “interpretive magnet” during the Balkans crisis, driving intellectuals to questionable commitments, such as Alain Finkielkraut’s equation of Serbs with Nazis and his subsequent embrace of Croatian nationalism in  its racism and xenophobia, or Régis Debray’s support of Milošević’s Serbia. 49. Richard J. Golsan, Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 177, 161. 50. Terdiman, Present Past, 8. 51. The legacy of the Resistance was simultaneously claimed by Governor Soustelle in a justification of France’s ongoing presence in Algeria and by opponents such as the Comité contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique. 52. As Michael Rothberg puts it, “If, as I argue, public memory is structurally multidirectional—that is, always marked by transcultural borrowing, exchange, and adaptation—that does not mean that the politics of multidirectional memory come with any guarantees. . . . In response to the high stakes of proliferating memory discourses, it becomes imperative to develop an ethics of comparison that can distinguish politically productive forms of memory from those that lead to competition, appropriation, or trivialization.” “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 524–25. 53. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 14. 54. Johanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 69. 1. A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Trauma in Holocaust Studies

1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 55. 2. Ibid., 54. 3. See Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. M. Kandel (New York: Penguin, 1976), 30, and Elie Wiesel, La nuit (Paris: Minuit, 1958), 88, who describes his anger at his father—the victim of the kapo’s blows—for not having known how to avoid enraging the latter. 4. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 55. 5. In her reading of this scene, Inga Clendinnen views the soccer match as a rare example of the “comfortable symbiosis” that occasionally arose between the SS and the SK, affording a momentary recognition of one another’s humanity. Although such a moment may have been experienced as a brief respite from the relentless horror of the camps, the notion of a “comfortable symbio-

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sis” too readily assumes that either squad forgot the grim reality of the eventual execution of the SK. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. See Gideon Greif, “Everyday Life in the Sonderkommando,” in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 37–60. 7. “A infernal order such as National Socialism exercises a frightful power of corruption, against which it is difficult to guard oneself. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities.” Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 68. 8. Ibid., 45. Yehuda Bacon also recalls that “prisoners, block seniors, and the SS used to play football and ping-pong together in the Gypsy Camp, when they were off duty on Sundays.” Cited in Greif, “Everyday Life in the Sonderkommando,” 52. 9. Tadeusz Borowski, “The People Who Walked On,” in This Way for the  Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, trans. Barbara Wedder (New York: Penguin, 1967), 84. 10. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personifi cation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 127–50; Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); Susannah Radstone, “Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory,” History Workshop Journal, 59, no. 1 (2005): 134–50. For a partly convergent critique of trauma theory’s universalization, see Richard Crownshaw’s The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Memory and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Crownshaw’s discussion of gray zones of memory in the German context is of particular relevance (117– 81). For a critique of trauma theory from the perspective of intellectual history, see Wulf Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor,” Rethinking History 8, no. 2 (2004): 193–221. For a critique of trauma theory’s eurocentrism, see Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Craps points out that the founding theorists of trauma “marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures[;]they tend to take for granted the universal validity of defi nitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of Western modernity, they often favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma, and they generally disregard the connections between metropolitan and non-Western or minority traumas,” 2.

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Notes to pages 29–35

11. For a thoughtful critique of the assumptions that crystallize around the “unspeakable” nature of traumas such as the Holocaust, slavery, and Hiroshima, see Naomi Mandel’s Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust and Slavery in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). 12. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 101. 13. Ibid., 21. 14. Ibid., 26. 15. Jan Kott, introduction to Borowski, This Way for the Gas, 25. 16. It is also unclear whether the ambiguous metaphor of the soccer match designates our distraction from or instead our participation in the massacres repeated “not far away from us.” Although we might read the passage as a reflection on the soccer match as a respite from horror, the match itself is an integral part of the horror in Levi’s report of Nyiszli’s account. 17. Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 256–57. 18. For a partly convergent critique of Agamben’s dehistoricization of the gray zone and shame, see Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 124–58, which exposes shame’s conversion into a universal structure of language in Agamben’s work and restores the nuances of Levi’s meditation on its ethics. Agamben’s universalization of shame is perplexing in light of his critique of collective appropriations of survivor’s guilt by way of Bruno Bettelheim’s notion that the survivor is innocent yet obliged to feel guilty and to don the “prestigious mask of innocent guilt” (Remnants of Auschwitz, 93). Agamben also notes that the collective appropriation of survivor’s guilt by individuals who were not involved in the event (such as the postwar German youths evoked by Hannah Arendt) is but a means of eschewing individual responsibilities: “To assume guilt of this kind, which inheres in the survivor’s condition, as such and not in what he or she as an individual did or failed to do, recalls the common tendency to assume a generic collective guilt whenever an ethical problem cannot be mastered” (ibid., 94–95; emphasis mine). Agamben is not entirely consistent in his argument here, for the nameless, ongoing violence and shame invoked in the gloss on Levi’s soccer match runs the risk of becoming just such a “generic collective guilt.” 19. Agamben, Remants of Auschwitz, 49 (emphasis mine). 20. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 85. 21. Let me clarify here that I do not consign Levi’s experience to the realm of the unspeakable. In her discussion of an early version of this chapter, Naomi Mandel argues that my critique of Agamben’s appropriation of Levi’s shame “elicits an urgent demarcation of order of experience” by “essentially, if not explicitly, evoking the unspeakable,” although she too be-

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lieves in “maintaining the incommensurability of two orders of experience” (64) in this context. But to distinguish as I do between an experience that is lived and one that is mediated, and to evoke the difficulty of its communication is not the same as claiming that the experience is beyond representation. 22. “Choiceless choice” is Lawrence Langer’s influential term, developed in Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). See the testimony of the former SK of Chelmno, Michaïl Podchlebnik, in Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (Gallimard: Paris, 2001), 30–31. 23. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 54. 24. Another schematization of Levi’s reflections occurs in Agamben’s description of the Muselmann, those who suffered most acutely from starvation and disease. In a reflection on the impossibility of bearing witness to the fate of those who drowned, Levi interrogates his ability to put himself in the place of the other: “We the survivors are not the true witnessess. . . . We are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims,’ the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception” (ibid., 84). This passage is central to Agamben’s elaboration of a highly problematic opposition between the survivor as “pseudo-witness” and the Muselmann as “complete witness”: “Testimony appears here as a process that involves at least two subjects: the first, the survivor, who can speak but who has nothing interesting to say, and the second, who ‘has seen the Gorgon,’ who ‘has touched bottom,’ and therefore has much to say but cannot speak” (Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 120). 25. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 17. 26. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 50. 27. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 13. 28. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8. For a thorough critique of Caruth’s concept of the traumatic event’s “literal imprint” and inaccessibility, in its implications for listening to survivor testimony, see Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing, 40–62. 29. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24. 30. Ibid., 18. When Caruth speaks of trauma as a structure of entanglement with the other, she does not mean an intersubjective encounter between two self-identical subjects, since traumatic experience signals the breakdown of the psyche’s integrity. Rather, she suggests that we are all fractured by an alterity that can never be fully subsumed. Nor does she make sanguine pronouncements about trauma as a basis for community built on identificatory structures of shared or commensurate traumas, but rather, she proposes that

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Notes to pages 38–44

otherness is constitutive of the self, and it is this common predicament that trauma reveals. Caruth’s point that the psychic split occurring in the wake of trauma captures a condition that is constitutive of the human psyche makes an interesting and significant parallel to Agamben’s presentation of the Muselmann— the concentration camp inmate on the brink of extinction— as a figure for a subjectivity that emerges from a process of radical desubjectification. In both instances an extreme condition that questions the very basis of identity (traumatic neurosis, radical dehumanization) is revealed to constitute a hidden yet shared condition. For an excellent critique of entanglement’s failure to engage in cross- cultural ethical engagement, see Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–19. 31. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 39. 32. Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1991), 201. 33. Ibid., 123; emphasis mine. 34. Ibid. 35. Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, ed. Norman K. Kleeblatt (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), vii. 36. Tom Sachs’s commentary on his work evacuates ethicopolitical considerations from Holocaust representation altogether: “My agenda isn’t about making a point about the Holocaust. I don’t think any of the artists in the show are trying to make a point about the Holocaust. We’re mostly in our 30s and 40s, and we have a certain distance from those events. I am interested in the hardware of horror and death. The death camps are examples of amazing German engineering and design. And there are strong links between military products and consumer products.” Deborah Solomon, “The Way We Live Now: 3-10-02: Questions for Tom Sachs; Designer Death Camp,” at www .nytimes.com/2002/03/10/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-3-10-02-questionsfor-tom-sachs-designer-death-camp.html. A more recent exploitation of the Holocaust and/as fashion was Easy Jet magazine’s fashion shoot set at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin in November 2009 (www.newstatesman.com /2009/11/holocaust-memorial-easyjet-magazine). 37. Dider Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 21. 38. Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 7. 39. See Philippe Mesnard and Claudine Kahan, Giorgio Agamben à l’épreuve d’Auschwitz (Paris: Kimé, 2001); Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 170. 40. If Agamben comes close to shame theory, it is when discussing Robert Antelme’s account of a young student from Bologna who responds to his arbi-

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trary selection for execution with a blush. Agamben’s gloss on this scene (reported by Primo Levi) reveals an anti-intentionalist conception of shame that is not related to immersion or identification with the perpetrator, but to exposure or being seen. 41. To put it into Leys’s terminology, the gray zone in these theorists’ work illustrates the immersive mimetic trauma of the “guilt paradigm,” but at the same time it reveals an ontological conception of a shame that, in its splitting from intention or agency, belongs to a new “antimimetic” and “nonimmersive” shame paradigm. 42. Richard Crownshaw, The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Memory and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 31. 43. While Leys’s discussion of Agamben, Caruth, and Felman concurs with much of the argument I made in an early version of this chapter, she notes, “Deberati Saynal [sic] . . . seek[s] to resolve the mimetic-anti-mimetic oscillation that, as I have argued, from the late-nineteenth century has structured the modern theory of trauma, by favoring the anti-mimetic or non-immersive pole of that oscillation” (From Guilt to Shame, 162). It is worth clarifying that my objective is not to favor one pole or another in the experience or theorization of trauma itself but rather to scrutinize how the reception of a trauma’s representation replicates—problematically— an immersive or identificatory relationship to the trauma itself. My focus is explicitly on the experience of reading in relation to these categories, not as a victim but as a proxy-victim who receives another’s traumatic testimony. 44. Tzvetan Todorov, “Ni banalisation, ni sacralisation: Du bon et du mauvais usage de la mémoire,” Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2001 (www.monde - diplomatique.fr/2001/04/TODOROV/15047). 45. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 21. 46. Ibid. 47. As Yannis Thanassekos puts it, “The extension of the concept of extreme situations—Nazi concentration camps—to normal situations—today’s large-scale industrial establishments—. . . ends up dilating its field of comprehension and endowing it with the status of a phenomenological and/or quasi-metaphysical concept.” / “Cette extension du concept des situations extrêmes—les camps de concentration nazis— aux situations normales—les grands établissements industriels d’aujourd’hui . . . finit par dilater son champ de compréhension en lui conferant pour ainsi dire le statut d’un concept phénoménologique et/ou quasi-métaphysique.” La zone grise: Entre accommodement et collaboration, ed. Philippe Mesnard and Yannis Thanassekos (Paris: Kimé, 2010), 17. 48. Giorgio Agamben, The Signatures of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 9. 49. Ibid., 18; emphasis mine.

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Notes to pages 48–51

50. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 49. 51. See, for example, de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 244. 52. Agamben, Signatures of All Things, 32. 53. See Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone: How a Secret Pentagon Program Came to Abu Ghraib,” New Yorker, May 24, 2004; and Human Rights Watch / Africa et al., Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and Its Aftermath (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996) on women’s participation in the Rwandan genocide. For further applications of the gray zone in contexts as divergent as hostage crises and Chinese mothers’ footbinding, see Claudia Card, “Gray Zones: Diabolical Evil Revisited,” in The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 54. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum International, 2005), 312. Among the many commentaries on Adorno’s dictum and its fate, two of the most illuminating (albeit from very different optics) are Robert Kaufman, “Poetry after ‘Poetry after Auschwitz,’ ” Art and Aesthetics after Adorno, Townsend Papers in the Humanities, no. 3, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Berkeley: Townsend Humanities Center/University of California Press, 2010), 116–181, and Thomas Trezise, “Art after Auschwitz, Again,” in Witnessing Witnessing, 63–121. 55. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “After Such Knowledge, What Laughter?,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 289–90. 56. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “ ‘To What Shall I Compare You?’: Jerusalem as Ground Zero of the Hebrew Imagination,” PMLA 122, no. 1 (2007): 223, 225, 229, 228. Another astute commentator of allegory’s potentially imperial structure is R. Clifton Spargo: “Most figurative reference depends on the transpositional properties of metaphoric exchange, but allegory exacerbates the condition of transposition, threatening by way of its rudimentary bifurcation of first- and second-order levels of reference to allow the transposition to amount to a supplanting imposition.” “The Holocaust and the Economy of Memory,” in After Representation? The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 154. 57. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 207; Walter Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 183. 58. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. E. T. Shedd (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), 1:437. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). 59. Spargo, After Representation?, 153.

Notes to pages 52–58

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60. Ibid., 154. 61. As Philip Watts cautions, allegory is “a figure of speech that consistently retreats from action. . . . On the one hand, it arises in times of violent confl ict and can serve specific political ends, such as thwarting censorship and disseminating a specific political message. On the other hand, in its avoidance of specific references, in its constant displacement of meaning, allegory is the very antithesis of history. . . . If allegory has a didactic function, it can also lose that function through its constant references to itself as allegory.” Philip Watts, Allegories of the Purge: How Literature Responded to the Postwar Trials of Writers and Intellectuals in France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 10. 62. Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1979), 139. For a useful discussion of Lifton’s contribution to theories of survivor guilt, see Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 48–55. 63. Lifton, Broken Connection, 139. 64. Ibid., 140, 142. 2. Concentrationary Migrations in and around Albert Camus

1. Upon reading Rousset’s testimony, Camus wrote, “What shuts my mouth is that I was never deported. But I know what a cry I’m stifling as I say this.” Albert Camus, Carnets II, in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard/ Pléiade, 2006), 1107. 2. Grégoire Leménager and Baptiste Touverey, “Camus, le nouveau philosophe,” http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/essais/20091120.BIB4462/camus-le -nouveau-philosophe.html. 3. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 210, 175. 4. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa (New York: Viking, 1970), 56. On rereading Camus’s La mort heureuse in 1982, Boudjedra decries the absence of Algerians in the following terms: “They don’t even figure in the décor . . . nullified by the writer’s colonial consciousness, exterminated by the magic of words and fiction. What a terrible political lapse!” Cited in Christiane Chaulet Achour, “Albert Camus l’Algérien: Tensions citoyennes, fraternités littéraires,” in Albert Camus et les écritures algériennes: Quelles traces? (Paris: Edisud, 2003), 26. 5. In a speech at University of Uppsala shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize, Camus responded to an Algerian student, saying, “I have always condemned terror. I must also condemn a terrorism that is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers, for example, and which one day could strike my mother or my daughter. I believe in justice, but I would defend my mother before

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justice.” This statement continues to shape the author’s reception. In 2010 a Caravane Camus was to commemorate the centenary of his death with cultural events at various Algerian sites but was canceled: a petition titled “Alerte aux consciences anticolonialistes” denounced the caravane for its neocolonial ist rehabilitation of a writer who had failed to join the struggle for independence. 6. Aziz Chouaki, “Le tag et le royaume,” in Albert Camus et les écritures algériennes, 40. 7. Bernard Henri-Lévy, “Pourquoi l’on a, tout de même, raison d’avoir tort avec Sartre plutôt que raison avec Camus,” in Le siècle de Sartre (Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1999), 415; James Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 143; “Le triomphe de Camus: Son seul tort est d’avoir eu raison avant tout le monde,” Le Nouvel Observateur issue on Albert Camus ( June 9–15, 1994), 8. Michel Onfray’s recent deification of Camus and demonization of Sartre in L’ordre libertaire: La vie philosophique d’Albert Camus (Paris: Flammarion, 2012) leads to a similar conclusion, which is that “today, History has proved him right.” Cited in http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com /essais/20091119.BIB4460/michel- onfray- albert- camus- est- un- libertaire -irrecuperable.html. 8. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 78. As Michael Rothberg puts it, noeuds de mémoire suggest that “knotted in all places and acts of memory are rhizomatic networks of temporality and cultural reference that exceed attempts at territorialization . . . and identitarian reduction.” See “Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire,” in Noeuds de mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture, ed. Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal, and Max Silverman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 8. 9. We saw evidence of the pied- noir’s ongoing mobilization on the battleground of French memory at the 2013 Exposition Albert Camus held in Aixen-Provence: the exhibit was withdrawn from the stewardship of the Algerian historian Benjamin Stora due to pressure from parties notalgic for French Algeria, and handed over to Michel Onfray, who also withdrew. For an account of this incident and the ongoing attempt to recuperate Camus for confl icting ideological agendas, see Benjamin Stora and Jean Baptiste Pérétié, Camus brûlant (Paris: Stock, 2013). 10. Camus borrows not from Journal of the Plague Year, as one might expect, but from the preface to third volume of Robinson Crusoe. 11. “For without history’s often narrow, prosaic, nonironic, nonfigurative foundation, visible emblematically in its more rudimentary genre, the muchmaligned ‘facts’ of simple chronicle—who and how many did what to whom

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and how many when—Holocaust writing and its genres, individually and collectively, would have been, and would be, merely imagined. And at this point, that possibility is and certainly ought to be unimaginable. Literally.” Berel Lang, Post-Holocaust Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), xi; Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 34. For a rigorous critique of Lang’s dichotomy between the literal and the figural in Holocaust representation, see Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 64–103. 12. “I wanted The Plague to be read at several levels, but of course its most obvious content is Europe’s resistance to Nazism. The proof is that although the enemy is not named, everyone recognized it, and in every nation in Eu rope. . . . In a sense, The Plague is more than a chronicle of resistance. But it is certainly not less than that.” Albert Camus, “Lettre à Roland Barthes.” in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 2006), 2:286. The “excess” of this allegorical transposition is the subject of my reading. 13. Benjamin Stora, Algeria, 1830–2000: A Short History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 21–22. 14. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 2:619. The translation is mine. 15. “Le fait est là, clair et hideux come la vérité: Nous faisons, dans ces caslà, ce que nous avons reproché aux Allemands de faire.” Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 2:430. 16. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 12. Most subsequent references to this English-language translation of the novel appear in parentheses in the body of the text. 17. Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1991), 108. 18. Azzedine Haddour, Colonial Myths: History and Narrative (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 78, 81. For Haddour, the exchange between Rambert and Rieux echoes Camus’s journalistic ventures for Combat: “In effect, Rieux, no less than Camus, ignores the problem of the colonized Arabs and the fact that the ‘rats of colonialism’ survive on their poverty.” Throughout his otherwise suggestive readings of the colonialist resonances of Camus’s oeuvre, Haddour conflates author with character (Rieux/Clamence) while arguing for the function of nature, World War II, and universalisms as screen memories for the Algerian crisis. 19. There have been a number of defenses of Camus’s decision not to include Arab characters in The Plague. A notable one is that of David Carroll, who argues that Camus was being faithful to the composition of Oran’s population, for, according to a contemporary study, the Arab presence was practically invisible (although Camus was aware of Oran’s Arab population and

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Notes to pages 66–71

mentions its “village nègre” in “Le minotaure dans le labyrinthe”). See “Colonial Borders,” in Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 39–62. For Seth Graebner, Camus’s erasures are an ironic gesture that mirrors the erasure of the Arabs in colonial historiography in an attempt to “end the hypocrisy by clearly stating the conditions of historical representation in the colony.” See History’s Place: Nostalgia and the City in French Algerian Literature (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007), 225. 20. See Colin Davis, “Camus’s The Plague: Sanitation, Rats, and Messy Ethics,” Modern Language Review 102, no. 3 (2007): 1014. Davis reads the novel as a textual eradication of the unwanted other, with the rats figuring a residue that challenges the novel’s drive for order (represented by Rieux’s all- encompassing narration): “The Plague begins with things (events, rats) which are not in their place. From its opening pages it is driven by the desire to put things back into order, to explain and clear away the enigma of the rats’ emergence into a tidy world. But the mess returns with a vengeance” (1017). 21. Camus, Plague, 7; La peste, in Oeuvres complètes, 2:38. 22. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 4:360. 23. See Roger Quilliot, “Camus’s Algeria,” in Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962), 37–38. For a contrasting account of the rats as figures of fascism/evil rather than as victims, see Haddour, Colonial Myths, 113–23. Haddour argues instead that Camus’s conversion of Algeria’s typhus epidemic into a symbolic and universal condition masks the “real” plague of colonial rule. 24. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 3:1052. 25. “L’Algérie . . . est cette terre ignorée, perdue au loin, avec ses indigènes incompréhensibles, ses soldats gênants et ses Français exotiques, dans un brouillard de sang.” Ibid., 4:356–57. 26. The novel probably alludes to Oran’s Village Nègre (Médina-Jdida), which became the principal neighborhood for the city’s Arab Muslim population. 27. Ibid., 4:375. 28. “The first step for a mind seized by strangeness is to recognize that this strangeness is shared by all and that the entirety of human reality suffers from this distance in relation to oneself and the world. The evil/illness borne by one person becomes a collective plague. . . . I rebel—therefore we are.” Ibid., 3:79; emphasis mine. 29. For an ecological approach to the question of cohabitation in Camus’s Algeria, see Debarati Sanyal, “Ecologies de l’appartenance chez Camus,” in Albert Camus au quotidien, ed. André Benhaïm and Aymeric Glacet (Paris: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013), 121–40.

Notes to pages 72–76

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30. This scrutiny of reason and its imperialism in Algeria resurfaces in a fragment of Le premier homme when the Algerian nationalist Saddok (whose feverish eyes recall the bound Arab’s gaze in “L’Hôte”) faces Jacques Cormery and declares, “The French have reason/are right [ont raison], but their reason oppresses us. And this is why I choose the madness of Arabs, the madness of the oppressed.” 31. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963), 159. Fanon speaks here of postcolonial visions of African unity that are divested of collective growth and popular spontaneity. 32. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 4:302. 33. Its streets and monuments were portrayed, with some mockery, as dusty colonial structures that crumble into irrelevance under the harsh elements: “Oran is certainly not lacking in monuments. The city has its share of imperial marshals, ministers, and local benefactors. We meet them on dusty little squares, resigned to the rain as to the sun, like them, converted to stone and ennui.” Ibid., 3:578. “The portrayal of Oran’s decrepitude echoes Camus’s earlier assessment of the city as a dusty urban Sahara (in “L’été”). 34. For images and commentary on the historical circumstances of Dalou’s Sidi-Brahim monument, see http://lamblard.typepad.com/weblog/marianne _et_ses_amants/ and www.villedoran.com/p11.2.html. 35. My thanks to Soraya Tlatli for the translation. 36. “L’im mense cohue des conquérants maintenant évincés.” Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 4:861. Ibid., 4:860. 37. Emily Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 63. 38. David Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice, 161–63. See Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory (Oxford: Berg, 1999) for a perceptive reading of the emergence of pied- noir memory in Le Premier Homme through the interplay of triumphalist myth and colonial guilt. 39. Daniel Just, “Literature and Ethics: History, Memory and Cultural Identity in Albert Camus’s Le Premier Homme,” Modern Language Review 105, no. 1 (2010): 80. In Albert Camus, le souci des autres (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), Ève Morisi gives a nuanced account of what she designates as Camus’s “ethics of care” from the early writings on Kabylie to the representation of the unrepresented in Le premier homme. 40. For an account of the convergences in the political thinking of Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt, especially on alternatives to the nationstate, see Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Swimming against the Tide,” in Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 177–226. 41. Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (New York: Seagull Books, 2007), 33.

288

Notes to pages 78–82

42. John Frow, “Repetition and Forgetting,” in Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 152. 43. Ibid., 225–26. Frow’s argument thus dismantles Pierre Nora’s nostalgic claim that modern memory has “fallen” from its organic agrarian life cycles into the alienation of the archive by showing the extent to which the model of memory as writing predates modernity. 44. It would be interesting to reconstruct the dialogue between these French figures of the Resistance and young Algerian writers. Dib describes these encounters in the following terms: “They achieved the most fruitful union between thought and meaningful friendship. It so happens that this attempt worked toward the creation of new bonds between Metropolitans and Algerians. They also made possible a new understanding of the concerns with which we wrestled on both sides.” Cited in Jean-Claude Xuereb, “Albert Camus et les Rencontres de Sidi-Madani,” Société des Etudes Camusiennes 57 (2001): 5. 45. For different interpretations of the intertextual dialogue between Mohammed Dib and Albert Camus, see Haddour, Colonial Myths, 113–25, and Ena C. Vulor, Colonial and Anticolonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria (An Intertextual Dialogue with Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohammed Dib) (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000). 46. Mohammed Dib, Le métier à tisser (Paris: Editions Seuil, 1957), 18. All translations are my own. Subsequent references to this work appear in parentheses in the body of the text. 47. Mohammed Dib, Qui se souvient de la mer (1962; Paris: Minos-Editions de la différence, 2007), 218. 48. See, for instance, Todd Shepard’s The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 169–70. 49. Cited in Robert Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands (New York: Perseus Books, 2006), 106. Satloff argues that the revocation of Crémieux sought to bolster Arab support for Vichy in the face of eroding French influence and rising German power. 50. Jean Cayrol, Oeuvres lazaréennes (Paris: Seuil, 2007), 805. For an excellent account of Cayrol’s Lazarean aesthetics and its impact on postwar cinema, see Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 39–68. 51. Jean Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard, Dossier DVD Arte Vidéo and Argos Films (2003). All further citations of the screenplay refer to this edition; future reference to materials in the dossier will list the author, followed by Dossier DVD. All translations of the dossier are mine.

Notes to pages 82–87

289

52. Alain Resnais, cited in Charles Krantz, “Resnais’s Night and Fog: A Historical and Cultural Analysis,” in Literature, the Arts, and the Holocaust, ed. Sanford Pinsker and Jack Fischel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987), 112. 53. Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1991), 69. All subsequent references to this work appear in parentheses in the body of the text. 54. Haddour, Colonial Myths, 83. Haddour also argues for a historical connection between the scene of drowning in The Fall and the drowning of Algerian protesters in Paris, which took place on October 17, 1961 (71). 55. Dominick LaCapra, “Rereading Camus’s The Fall after Auschwitz and with Algeria,” in History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 89. For LaCapra, then, the Holocaust is a screen memory that illustrates the belated temporality of traumatic memory while concealing the question of Algeria: “Still, it should be observed that Camus’s turn to the Holocaust in The Fall, as well as one’s own tendency to follow his lead, may function to obscure or displace interest in a more recent series of events: the Algerian war and its troubled aftermath in Franco-Algerian relations. This may be an instance of a more general phenomenon, to wit, the tendency of an earlier traumatic series of historical events to be remarked upon belatedly after the occurrence of a more recent series of events. The movement of historical notice and knowledge may thus repeat in its own way the disconcertingly belated (nachträglich) temporality of trauma itself” (73–74). LaCapra rightly points toward the Algerian frame for Camus’s novel, yet his reconstruction of this frame relies primarily on biographical essays and articles rather than an analysis of the text itself. I will suggest that these histories are inscribed within the literariness of Camus’s narrative. 56. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 16. 57. Clamence never fi nds out what happens to his friend after her arrest (“Je ne sais ce qu’elle devint”), just as he never fi nds out what happened to the woman on the bridge, suggesting yet a further connection between these two falls. 58. “Les camps de concentration algériens,” France Observateur, June 16, 1955. The press and its treatment of these camps will be discussed in chapter 3. 59. For the Vichy labor camps, see Robert Satloff, “In Search of ‘Righteous Arabs.’ ” Commentary 118, no. 1 ( July 2004). For the North African concentrationary network under the French Republic, see Fabian Klose, “ ‘Source of Embarrassment’: Human Rights, State of Emergency, and the Wars of Decolonization,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

290

Notes to pages 88–93

60. Michael Mann notes, “During 1928–1932 the pacification of Libya killed almost a quarter of the 225,000 people of Cyrenaica.” The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 61. On Mussolini’s camps of Giado and Gharian, which interned Italian and Libyan Jews as of 1942, see Maurice M. Roumani, The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 29, 34. Roumani describes Mussolini’s sfollamento, or “removal” of Libya’s Jews, whose citizenship determined their destination. Jews with French citizenship and Tunisians under French protection were deported to camps in Tunis and Algeria; British citizens were deported to Innsbruck and Bergen-Belsen; and Jews with Libyan citizenship were interned in Tripolitania. 62. Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 128. 63. Camus intervened behind the scenes in more than 150 cases brought against condemned Algerian freedom fighters. See Alice Kaplan’s introduction to Albert Camus, Algerian Chronicles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 17; also see Morisi, Albert Camus et le souci des autres, 84. 64. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 3:79. 65. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 78. 66. In his chapter on shame, Primo Levi recalls an incident that resonates with Camus’s fictional scenario: during the summer of 1944, in Auschwitz, Levi fi nds a water pipe in a cellar and shares half of its contents with his friend Alberto, but not with his other companion, Daniele. This leads to a meditation on survivor shame (“Are you ashamed because you are alive in the place of another?”) but also on the notion that “each man is his brother’s Cain” (81). See Daniel Just for a suggestive reading of Camus’s later work with respect to shame and guilt. Just contrasts the self- engagement of guilt displayed in The Fall with an intersubjective ethics of shame, which he traces in “l’Hôte.” Daniel Just, “From Guilt to Shame: Albert Camus and Literature’s Ethical Response to Politics,” Modern Language Notes 125, no. 4 (2010): 895–912. 67. Felman, Testimony, 193. 68. “Nous sommes dans un noeud de l’histoire où la complicité est totale.” Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 2: 464. “La question est de savoir si . . . toute révolte . . . sans prétention à une impossible innocence . . . peut découvrir le principle d’une culpabilité raisonnable.” Ibid., 3:70. 69. Levi, Drowned and the Saved, 55. 70. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 3:218. 71. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 4:302–3; emphasis mine. 72. Jean Daniel echoed this diagnosis of the European settler’s sacrifice in his critique of Sartre and Jeanson at the time: “There is now an orthodox anticolonialism just as there is an orthodox communism. The dogma of this ortho-

Notes to pages 93–96

291

doxy is not the well-being of the colonised but the mortification of the colonisers.” Cited in Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 52. 73. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 4:856. 74. Ibid., 4:857. Peter Dunwoodie analyzes the intertextual influence of the Calvaire des colons de 48 (1930) and Histoire de la colonisation de l’Algérie (1860) in these passages of Le premier homme as part of an archive of colonial chronotopes that govern what is ultimately less a personal project of memorial recovery than an ethnography anchoring a political project: “Le Premier Homme invokes a highly selective past, of European suffering, sacrifice and poverty (all too often ignored by the metropole), interpreted as ground for an idealized future, of intercommunity solidarity and fraternity.” Peter Dunwoodie, “Camus, Memory, and the Colonial Chronotope,” in Albert Camus in the 21st Century: A Reassessment of His Thinking at the Dawn of the New Millennium, ed. Christine Margerrison, Mark Orme, and Lissa Lincoln (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 49. 75. “Les vrais artistes . . . . sont les témoins de la chair, non de la loi” (“true artists are witness to the flesh and not the law”). Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 2:494. 76. Francis Jeanson, “Pour tout vous dire,” Les Temps Modernes, no. 82 (1952): 396. 77. Cited in Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 95. During the war, Feraoun continued to correspond with Camus. A journal entry of 1957 on the pied- noir’s inability to accept Algerian independence expresses his frustration in poignant terms that were, ironically, foreshadowed in The Fall as the inability to put oneself in the place another: “Camus refuses to admit that Algeria could become independent and that he would be forced to show a foreign passport each time he returned. . . . I would like them [Camus and Roblès] to understand me as well. I would like them to understand those of us who are so close to them and so different at the same time. I would like them to put themselves in our place” (emphasis mine). In Mouloud Feraoun, Journal, 1955–1962: Reflections on the Algerian War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 185. 78. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 4:858. 79. We see a similar transformation of the gray zone into an immutable condition in Le premier homme, which expels the colonial origins of violence from Algeria’s history. See, for instance, the dialogue between two pieds noirs about the 1851 insurrectionary wars in Mondovi, when a pregnant colon was killed and mutilated by the insurgency. These acts are explained by way of the longue durée of colonial struggle, only to conclude on the archetypal fratricide of Cain and Abel: “It was war, said Veillard. Let’s be fair, the old doctor added, we had trapped them in caves with their whole family, yes we did, we did, and they had cut off the balls of the first Berbers, who themselves . . . and so we go back to the first criminal, you know, his name was Cain, and since then it’s been

292

Notes to pages 96–101

war, men are horrid, especially under this ferocious sun.” Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 4:858; emphasis mine. 80. Camus, Plague, 216. 81. Ibid., 39. The translation of the original, “un bon rire . . . qui remettait les choses en place,” is modified. 82. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 4:241. 83. If space permitted, my readings would include Driss Chraïbi’s contemporaneous Les Boucs, which revisits the figure of the witness, vermin, and bare life (with explicit gestures to Camus) and traces contamination between the Nazi concentrationary and the French to denounce the living conditions and psychic trauma of postwar immigrant workers from the Maghreb. 3. Auschwitz as Allegory: From Night and Fog to Guantánamo Bay

1. Serge Daney, “Le Travelling de Kapo,” Traffi c (Fall 1992), no. 4, http:// sensesofcinema.com/2004/feature-articles/kapo_daney/. 2. Robert Michael, “A Second Look: Night and Fog,” reprinted in Richard Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais: On the Making, Reception and Functions of a Major Documentary Film (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1987), 159–60. 3. Lanzmann describes Night and Fog as “a very beautiful but idealist commentary on the inhumanity of man.” Radio interview with Claude Lanzmann conducted by André Heinrich, reproduced in Nuit et brouillard, DVD Editions Arte, 2003 4. “In a sense these were atrocious images, but they were images that closed off the imagination, . . . images without imagination. . . . In this sense I consider that Resnais’s Night and Fog kills the imagination.” Radio interview with Claude Lanzmann conducted by André Heinrich, reproduced in Nuit et brouillard, DVD Editions Arte, 2003. 5. According to Claude Lanzmann, “Hier ist kein Warum [Here There Is No Why]”: “Primo Levi recounts that Auschwitz’s rule was taught to him by an SS guard upon his arrival at the camps: ‘There is no why’: this law is also valid for those who take on the responsibility of such a transmission. For only the act of transmission matters, and no intelligibility, that is no say, no true knowledge, preexists this transmission. The transmission is itself the knowledge.” Au sujet de Shoah: Le fi lm de Claude Lanzmann (Paris: Belin, 1990), 279. 6. As we saw earlier, Berel Lang argues that the only forms morally adequate to the Shoah are those that perform the least amount of mediation, such as the chronicle or the archival documentary. For a rigorous critique of this purism and the related contradictions claiming the unspeakable nature

Notes to pages 101–4

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of the Holocaust, see Thomas Trezise, “Unspeakable,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 39–66. For a much-needed recontextualization of Adorno’s aphorism, see Robert Kaufman, “Poetry after ‘Poetry after Auschwitz,’ ” in Art and Aesthetics after Adorno, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Berkeley: Townsend Humanities Center/University of California Press, 2010), 116–81, and Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 63–121. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum International, 2005). 8. In Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resis tance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (New York: Berghahn, 2011), Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman offer a genealogy of “the concentrationary” as a historical and conceptual tool that emerges in the French postwar context by way of Rousset and Cayrol and is shaped into a political reflection by Hannah Arendt. In their account, Night and Fog emerges as an exemplary response to the concentrationary universe, “a political resistance to that universe through aesthetic affectivity and poetic formulation” (28) opening up political strategies of resistance that can be unleashed in other contexts. It is in the spirit of this project that my reading traces Resnais and Cayrol’s contribution to a politics of concentrationary memory and representation in different sites and temporalities (Auschwitz, Algeria, Thiaroye, and Guantánamo Bay). The chapter is also in dialogue with Sylvie Lindeperg’s important account of the film’s production, reception, and reverberations across time and space in Nuit et brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007). Lindeperg aptly describes Nuit et brouillard as a mobile site of memory, a “lieu de mémoire portatif traversé par de multipes enjeux” (201). Her meticulously documented microhistory invokes the fi lm’s mobilization of the camps in a variety of contexts: postwar France and Germany, Israel, the cold war, and Stalinism. My chapter brings into relief the Algerian War within this transnational history of its reception. 9. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Minuit, 2003), 157–67. 10. See, for example, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 181–88; Jay Cantor, “Death and the Image,” TriQuarterly 79 (1990): 173– 98, observes that “the viewer might play every role in the film: executioner, spectator, victim, and the artist whose violence forms the image of this kingdom of death” (174); and Andrew Hebard, “Disruptive Histories: Toward a Radical Politics of Remembrance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog,” New German Critique 71 (1997): 87–113, discusses the “moral corruption of the camera” (97). Also see Libby Saxton’s perceptive analysis of the fi lm in light of its

294

Notes to pages 104–6

production of a surveillant concentrationary gaze that implicates the viewer in “Night and Fog and the Concentrationary Gaze,” in Concentrationary Cinema, 14. 11. For a partly convergent reading of this figure as a temporal meditation on the instability of “stepping into the past,” and on Resnais’s systematic implication of cinema in the historical horror it documents, see John Mowitt, “Cinema as Slaughterbench of History: Nuit et brouillard,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1985): 62–75, with a new version in Concentrationary Cinema. 12. See Christophe Wall-Romana’s close reading of the documentary’s script, which illuminates how Jean Cayrol’s emphasis on a voice that speaks within the camps along with the complex pronominal shifts throughout the screenplay (the interplay of “on” and “nous” in par tic u lar) mobilize an ethical imagination rather than convey a crisis of representation. Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 218–21. For a perceptive discussion of the uses of Nazi photographs and redeployments of the “Nazi gaze” in contemporary art, see Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 127–52. 13. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Peter Woolf (New York: Collier, 1961), 45. The geometric madness of Nazi terror is frequently evoked by Jean Cayrol, who recalls of his days in Mauthausen “the impressive and invariable formalism of morning call . . . the bloody and public rites of execution.” Jean Cayrol, Oeuvres Lazaréennes (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 774. See Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, for Night and Fog as an illustration of Cayrol’s Lazarean sensorium. For a discussion of Cayrol’s Lazarean aesthetic as an antifascist politics of representation that constitutes a neglected alternative to dominant postwar discourses on the Holocaust, see Max Silverman, “Horror and the Everyday in Post-Holocaust France: Nuit et brouillard and Concentrationary Art,” French Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2006): 5–16, and Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 39–49. 14. Nuit et brouillard exemplifies Lynn Higgins’s notion of a “politics of style,” that is to say, the postwar avant-garde’s investment in form as the vehicle for an exploration of historical formations and historiographic concerns. See New Novel, New Wave, New Politics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). 15. Nuit et brouillard, typed manuscript, Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine: Fond Cayrol, A1.1.5. On the status of the Final Solution in earlier versions and its subsequent attenuation in Cayrol’s text, see Sylvie Lindeperg’s invaluable study of the film and its legacy, Nuit et brouillard: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), 76–80.

Notes to pages 106–7

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16. Nuit et brouillard, typed manuscript, Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine: Fond Cayrol, A1.1.5 The annihilation of detainees by work thus early on situates Nuit et brouillard within a reflection on genocide as well as deportation. 17. Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman seek to detach Night and Fog from its canonical associations with extermination in order to focus on its status as a fi lm on the concentrationary universe and as a political-aesthetic resistance to it. They point out that Resnais’s archive is made up of camps photographed and fi lmed by Allies in Germany and not “the actual sites of extermination— the genocidal face of the Holocaust” (Concentrationary Cinema, 10), that is to say, the four camps dedicated solely to extermination— Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec—which are “the real sites in the East of the massacre of Eu ropean Jewry and Romanies” (13). Although I agree that Night and Fog is not specifically a “Holocaust fi lm” because the Holocaust’s specificity only emerged in the aftermath of the Eichmann trial, I part ways with their separation of the concentrationary from extermination. They themselves observe that by fi lming in Auschwitz and Majdanek, Resnais engaged “hybrid sites of both concentrationary and exterminatory terror” (32). The scenes that I analyze show both the politics of the concentrationary system and the machinery of extermination (e.g., the fi nal images of the ruins of Birkenau’s crematoria). I suggest instead that the fi lm’s meditation on a politics of (concentrationary) memory takes place alongside, but also in productive tension with, an ethical reflection on how to adequately bear witness to the Nazi genocide, including the Judeocide. This meditation on testimony is central to the fi lm’s focus on representation, just as it is to discourses on the ethics and aesthetics of representing the Holocaust. For a classic account of the concentrationary system as fully entwined with extermination, see Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System behind Them (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). For a recent study of the distinction between the concentrationary and genocide, see Sylvie Lindeperg and Annette Wieviorka, Univers concentrationnaire et génocide: Voir, savoir, comprendre (Paris: Mille et une nuit, 2008), in par tic u lar 56–66 on Nuit et brouillard. 18. As Lawrence Douglas explains, at the Nuremberg trials, artifacts such as the shrunken head or the flayed skin of Buchenwald represented Nazi crimes as atavistic aberrations in civilization, as “hiccups of barbarism” within occidental modernity. Lawrence Douglas, “The Shrunken Head of Buchenwald: Icons of Atrocity at Nuremberg,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 275–99. The opposition between Nazism’s regressive barbarism and the disciplining practices of modernity has been contested, notably by Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).

296

Notes to pages 108–11

19. For the controversy on whether soap was made from human bodies (and the role of such controversy in Holocaust denial), see Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 113–17. Raul Hillberg expresses doubt as to whether human soap was made, while Shermer and Grobman conclude that if it was never manufactured on an industrial scale, it may have been done experimentally (117). In 1992, the allusion to soap, along with the tattooed skin, specifically in Nuit et brouillard, was attacked by the negationist Robert Faurisson in another attempt to discredit the reality of the Nazi genocide. 20. On the source of this sequence, see Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 105. 21. Les camps de la mort, Actualités françaises, June 10, 1945. The fi lm can be accessed at www.ina.fr/archivespourtous/index.php?vue=notice&id_notice =AFE00000275. For a contextualization of the Buchenwald tattoos in light of the trials of Ilse Koch and the representation of gender, see Alexandra Przyrembel, “Transfi xed by an Image: Ilse Koch, the ‘Kommandeuse of Buchenwald,’ ” German History 19, no. 3 (2001): 369–99. 22. Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007). 23. Charlotte Delbo, Aucun de nous ne reviendra (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1970), 84. On Delbo’s injunction to the reader of testimony, see Ross Chambers, Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 209–31. 24. The scene’s ongoing ability to shock was made clear to me at a workshop in which I presented a version of this chapter, and a member of the audience accused Resnais of “concentrationary pornography.” The sequence of Buchenwald’s tattoo would doubtless come under Lanzmann’s critique of Resnais’s use of archival footage and his aestheticizing shots. 25. Jean Cayrol, Il était une fois Jean Cayrol (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 110. “Tel était notre projet, redonner vie, afi n qu’un soulier perdu dans une poubelle fasse partie de notre patrimoine. . . . L’homme est vivant dans ses restes” (110). 26. Joshua Hirsch, “Night and Fog and Posttraumatic Cinema,” in Concentrationary Cinema, 183–98. 27. Emma Wilson, “Material Remains: Night and Fog,” October 112 (Spring 2005): 102. Also see Wilson’s “Resnais and the Dead,” in Concentrationary Cinema, 126–39, which returns to the first analysis in light of Resnais’s evocation of affective/ethical states of love and grief. For another approach to the status of “remains” in the film, see Sara Guyer, Romanticism after Auschwitz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 187–215. Guyer’s reading focuses on how Resnais “turns what remains of Auschwitz into the image of a failure to see it” (207). There is some resonance between our readings, particularly in the

Notes to pages 111–20

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emergence of Auschwitz as a figure (which Guyer argues succinctly by way of Derrida’s interrogation of metonymic usages of the proper name), although I am less concerned with the epistemological question of seeing (which Guyer pursues through a de Manian reading of figure as the “literal” or excess of representation) than with the performative operations of complicity that provoke an ethical reflection. 28. These nail marks reappear in the scene of drowning that initiates the quest in Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance, a text explicitly about allegorical displacements that erase testimonial traces: “Her [Cécile Winckelman’s] nails had left deep marks in the oak door.” Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975), 81. Leah Hewitt notes the repetition of the scratches on the wall in Hiroshima mon amour as a sign of the Holocaust’s haunting absence in the fi lm and of the reverberations between the cataclysms of Hiroshima and the Holocaust. See her Remembering the Occupation in French Film: National Identity in Postwar Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 43. 29. In this sense I entirely agree with Libby Saxton’s observation that “Night and Fog might be viewed as a ‘specular text,’ insofar as the positions from which we survey the concentrationary universe emerge in the film as a locus of political inquiry” (Saxton, “Night and Fog and the Concentrationary Gaze,” 145). 30. Alain Resnais, Nuit et brouillard, Dossier DVD, 27. 31. On transference, historiography, and the Holocaust, see Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 32. Raskin, Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais, 58. 33. Adorno, “Commitment,” 312. 34. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 112; Berel Lang, “The Representation of Limits,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 300–317. 35. Cayrol, in Alain Resnais, Nuit et brouillard, Dossier DVD. 36. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2009), 177–78. 37. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 368–69. The imagery of Birkenau’s ruins is reminiscent of the discarded commodity fetishes of nineteenth-century urban modernity catalogued in The Arcades Projects, suggesting extermination to be the most literal incarnation of the capitalist phantasmagoria. 38. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 166. 39. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 8.

298

Notes to pages 120–25

40. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 206. 41. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 233. 42. Ibid., 135. 43. Cayrol, Il était une fois Jean Cayrol (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 101; Albert Camus’s acceptance speech for the Nobel prize, among many other references. 44. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 45. “In Blanqui’s view of the world, petrified unrest becomes the status of the cosmos itself. The course of the world appears, accordingly, as one great allegory” (Benjamin, Arcades Project, 329). For a compelling examination of allegory as a figure for the disruptive force of history in Benjamin’s thought, see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 46. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 24. 47. Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance, 13. 48. I refer to Henry Rousso’s defi nition of memory as “une organisation de l’oubli” in Le Syndrome de Vichy, de 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 12. Resnais expressed this anxiety in the following terms: “I had all the more reason to be anxious about the whole ‘monument to the dead,’ and ‘we all agree about this horrible past and that it must not repeat itself.’ Well, as a matter of fact, I thought it could start over again.” Cayrol, in Alain Resnais, Nuit et brouillard, Dossier DVD, 23. 49. Cayrol, in Resnais, Nuit et brouillard, Dossier DVD, 18. 50. Claude Lanzmann, “Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth,” Guardian Weekly, April 3, 1994. 51. Cayrol, in Resnais, Nuit et brouillard, Dossier DVD, 9. 52. Cited in Raskin, Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais, 19. 53. Cayrol, Oeuvres Lazaréennes, 764. 54. Sylvie Thénault, “Interner en République: Le cas de la France en guerre d’Algérie,” @mnis 3 (2003): 213–28. Thénault shows that while torture was seen as a gangrene infecting the republican state’s army, various methods of internment were established by laws and ordinances within the Republic’s institutions. 55. Charles Krantz, “Resnais’s Night and Fog: A Historical and Cultural Analysis,” in Literature, the Arts, and the Holocaust, ed. Sanford Pinsker and Jack Fischel (Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1987), 112–13. This important essay, one of the first to trace the Algerian context for Resnais’s documentary, gives a persuasive critique of Night and Fog for its universalization of complicity and subsequent blurring of historical responsibility. Krantz’s critique pinpoints the reification of history into a zone of ethical undecidability in the film. My read-

Notes to pages 125–28

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ings seek to focus on the contestatory valences of complicity and its call to historical responsibility both in the immediate reception of the film and its subsequent appropriations by other political struggles. 56. Robert Michael, cited in Raskin, Nuit et Brouillard by Alain Resnais, 159. 57. On this last point, see Annette Wievorka, L’ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998), and Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). 58. The ministre de l’Information d’outre mer contacted his homologue in France so that the film wouldn’t be shown at the Cannes festival, evoking what Sylvie Lindeperg glosses as “a necessary ban given its denigration of France’s oeuvre in black Africa” (Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 146). 59. Resnais, Nuit et brouillard, Dossier DVD, 24 (emphasis mine). On the censorship imposed by the SCA as a response to Resnais’s reputation as an anticolonial film maker, see Christian Delage and Chris Darke, “Nuit et Brouillard: A Turning Point in the History and Memory of the Holocaust,” in The Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933, ed. Toby Haggith, Joanna Newman, and David Cesarani (London: Wallflower, 2005), 130; and Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 60. 60. Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 112 (emphasis mine). For an analysis of Vichy as a screen memory for the Algerian War, see Anne Donadey, “ ‘Une certaine idée de la France’: The Algeria Syndrome and Struggles over ‘French’ Identity,” in Identity Papers: Contested Nationhood in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Steven Ungar and Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 215–33. 61. Resnais, Nuit et brouillard, Dossier DVD, 23. In 1948, three years after the Sétif massacre, Jean Cayrol participated in a Franco-Algerian cultural encounter at Sidi-Madani, Algeria (which also included Albert Camus and Francis Ponge), and met young Algerian nationalist writers such as Mohammed Dib and Kateb Yacine. The painful irony of a massacre resulting from the Algerian bid for independence just as France was celebrating its own liberation from Germany would not have been lost on Cayrol, and his participation in this encounter strengthens the pertinence of the Algerian frame for Night and Fog. 62. See Michel Rocard, Rapport sur les camps de regroupement et autres textes sur la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2003), 13, 17, 126; Tassadit Yacine, Le Monde diplomatique (Paris: Actualités, February 2004), 29. The Commission internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire (CICRC) had published a report on the Algerian camps as early as May 15, 1957, in Le Monde. David Rousset, who had been deported to Buchenwald and

300

Notes to pages 128–29

famously denounced the Soviet gulag was then vice-president of the commission. On this point, see Thénault, “Interner en République,” 3. By 1959 Algeria had 936 centers, and, according to Pierre Bourdieu’s study, 2,157,000 Algerians—that is to say, about one-fourth of the population—were interned by the following year (Rocard, Rapport sur les camps de regroupement, 17). In his study of France’s concentration camps during the Algerian War, the sociologist Michel Cornaton argues that, in spite of their differences, “we must have the courage to recognize that the margin between the Nazi concentration camps and some of the centre provisoires seemed infi nitesmal.” Les camps de regroupement de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Harmattan, 1998), 81 (translation mine). 63. See Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 63. 64. See, for instance, the tradition of postcards depicting Algerian girls wearing headscarves, reproduced in Leïla Sebbar, Christelle Taraud, and Jean-Michel Belorgey, Femmes d’Afrique du Nord: Cartes postales (1885–1930) (Paris: Bleu autour, 2010), or Pierre Bourdieu’s photographic fieldwork from the 1950s. 65. The committee’s letter declares that this concentrationary order of terror was by 1955 a systemic reality in Algeria: 1. There are concentration camps in Algeria for nondelinquent civilians. 2. After a momentary decline and suspension, police torture has resumed in Algeria. 3. The military and civilians are guilty of collectively murdering civilian populations in Algeria. We can also affirm that these are not isolated phenomena but systematic acts. The Committee Against the Pursuit of War in Africa (Comité d’action contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique), Letter to Jacques Soustelle, Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, 3. The exchange of letters with Governor Soustelle illustrates how central the Nazi legacy was for thinking about contemporary political violence across the political spectrum. Soustelle also turns to the Nazi legacy, but this time to indict the CRUA (an earlier version of the FLN) and its “medieval totalitarianism.” Characterizing Ahmed Ben Bella and his following as regressive, bloodthristy terrorists and religious fanatics, he argues that it is their violence that echoes the Nazi genocide: “I remember a time when French intellectuals rose up against the ferocity of Hitlerian obscurantism, which, of all contemporary movements most closely resembles the CRUA [Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action] in its exclusions, its disdain for human life, and its totalitarian absolutism. The various letters and documents that have fallen into our hands . . . leave no doubt as to the goals of the triumvirate led by Ben Bella: total destruction (the Nazis had a word for this) of all that is European in the Maghreb, massacre of all native French people and resistant muslims”

Notes to pages 129–33

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(Lettre du Gouverneur Général de l’Algérie, November 14, 1955, 5–6; emphasis mine, accessed at Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine). Soustelle also protests the comparison of French soldiers to the SS and argues for the legitimacy of ongoing French occupation in terms that will sound all too familiar to contemporary American ears: to leave would mean “abandoning an entire people to the dictatorship of terror. . . . If anyone of the signatories were in my shoes, they would recoil from the tide of blood that our capitulation would unleash on Algeria” (9). For a history of the Comité d’action, see James D. LeSueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 32–61. 66. Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 4:360. 67. Martin Evans, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War, 1954–1962 (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 58. 68. Cited in Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 226. 69. Lindeperg, Nuit et brouillard, 227. 70. In Emitaï, the French commander declares to the troops that have been forcibly conscripted in the war that they are all volunteers (“Vous êtes tous des engagés volontaires”). As Brian Goldfarb puts it, “The oxymoronic notion of ‘being volunteered’ underscores the hysterical illogic of French rule.” “A Pedagogical Cinema: Development Theory, Colonialism and Post-Liberation African Film,” Iris 18 (Spring 1995): 14. For further discussion of the forced conscription of tirailleurs into the colonial army and the representation of this figure in Sembène’s work, see David Murphy, “Fighting for the Homeland? The Second World War in the Films of Ousmane Sembène,” L’Esprit Créateur 47, no. 1 (2007): 56–67. 71. Sembène’s friend Maurice Fall recalls, “I don’t know what happened during the war, but I no longer recognized Ousmane; he had nothing in common with the childhood friend who went off to do his military ser vice; he harboured such anticolonial hatred!” Sembène will later declare,“The war taught me everything.” Samba Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène: Une Conscience Africaine (Paris: Présence Africaine, 2007), 114, 25. Gadjigo also remarks on the converging memories of Thiaroye and Sétif: “Algeria’s co-production of the film was hardly a matter of chance: virtually image by image, the massacre in Thiaroye recalls the one in Sétif. For all these reasons, Sembène’s bonds with progressive Algerian artists haven’t aged a bit.” Ibid., 186. 72. For the MRAP’s origins, see Erik Bleich, Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 191. Sembène’s connections with the Jewish community include Odette Arouh, who became his oldest son’s godmother and to whom Le docker noir is dedicated, and Michel Lieberman, a former Resistance fighter and a founding member of the MRAP, whose wife had lost her family in deportations

302

Notes to pages 133–37

and whom Sembène introduced to Marseille’s African milieu. See Gadjigo, Ousmane Sembène, 188–90. 73. Kif-kif is from Arabic, meaning “the same.” 74. Banania is a chocolate drink that for decades was advertised by the face of a grinning Senegalese infantryman wearing his red chéchia, or fez. 75. “Only recently, Nazism transformed the totality of Europe into a colony.” Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: Maspero, 2002), 98. 76. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36. 77. Ibid. For a discussion of Césaire’s choc en retour in light of its multidirectional, dialectical movement between colonialism and fascism which informs my reading, see “Un Choc en retour,” in Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 73–107. 78. Sembène states this explicitly: “So for us it’s all the same, whether it’s de Gaulle, Mitterrand, or Pétain. The division that existed between black soldiers and white officers stems from a colonial system that lasted about a hundred years.” In Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers, ed. Samba Gadjigo, Ralph H. Falukingham, Thomas Cassirer, and Reinhard Sander (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 81. 79. This is mistranslated in the subtitled edition as “warm land” (terre chaude), but it echoes Captain Labrousse’s welcome to the troops: “We are happy to fi nd you safe and sound [sains et saufs] on African land.” For a historical overview of the POW experience that Pays represents, see Martin C. Thomas, “The Vichy Government and French Colonial Prisoners of War, 1940–1944,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 4 (2002): 657–92. 80. The still of the victim hanging from the electrified fence is identified in Night and Fog’s screenplay as “corpse of a deportee holding on to barbed wire” (Raskin, Nuit et brouillard by Alain Resnais, 98). In an essay on the ethical ambiguities of Resnais’s use of archival photography and footage, Griselda Pollock shows that this still from Mauthausen has a highly unstable referential status: Though it could be a suicide, it was identified as an execution (of a detainee), but it has been controversially reidentified as “Dead German Kapo on Electrified Fence,” in which case the victim would have been a structural agent of the camps thrown onto the wires by the SS. Although further historical research may determine what this still actually shows us, according to Pollock, “Current opinion disowns this titling and suggests that the image is indeed an image of a prisoner having been thrown onto the wires by the SS, then photographed by the Photographic Ser vice and (mis)labelled as representing a prisoner who has committed suicide or attempted to escape.” “Death and the Image: The Responsibility of Aesthetics in Night and Fog (1955) and Kapò (1959),” in Concentrationary Cinema, 279. In keeping with this chapter’s map of figures for concentrationary terror, my own reading of the image in Camp de

Notes to pages 137–41

303

Thiaroye preserves the ambiguity of whether it shows a suicide or an execution, but my coda will reengage Resnais’s montage of this photographic still as an iconic image of suicide, an iconicity visually established by Kapò, as Pollock demonstrates in her critique of Pontecorvo’s tracking shot by way of Serge Daney. 81. Of pertinence to this sequence of Camp de Thiaroye is Marianne Hirsch’s analysis of the photographic gaze and the viewer’s subsequent implication in the violence of the documented event. Hirsch examines the iconic status of par tic u lar images in cultural postmemory, images that serve as both screens and points of entry into historical trauma such as the Arbeit macht frei on the gates of Auschwitz, or, in our case, the images of barbed wire and watchtowers that superimpose Buchenwald and Thiaroye. See “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37. Hirsch also discusses Lorie Novak’s “Night and Fog,” which quotes Resnais and Margaret Bourke-White’s famous picture of the Buchenwald survivors behind the barbed-wire fence, and argues for the productive possibilities of such palimpsestic projections in “disconnecting the camera from the weapon of mass destruction and thus in refocusing our look” (33). According to Christian Metz, “Not by chance, the photographic act (or acting, who knows?) has been frequently compared with shooting, and the camera with a gun. . . . Photography . . . by virtue of the objective suggestions of its signifier (stillness, again) maintains the memory of the dead as being dead.” “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 84. 82. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1991), 247 (emphasis mine). 83. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 8. Deleuze’s commentary on Night and Fog and its concurrent temporalities conveys Ousmane’s cinematic evocation of “the coexistence of sheets of past here.” Cinema 1:The Time- image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 122. For pertinent examples of such palimpsestic montage of traumatic histories, see Max Silverman’s excellent discussion of Godard’s Histoires du cinéma in Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and  Film (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 124–32, and Marianne Hirsch’s evocative readings of the the palimpsest in visual art by Lorie Novak and Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 84. Similarly, footage from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen of bulldozers pushing bodies into mass graves does not show the Allied soldiers who drove them. Joshua Hirsch recounts how his childhood memory of this footage from

304

Notes to pages 141–51

Night and Fog was of the bulldozer as a Nazi-driven weapon (“Night and Fog and Posttraumatic Cinema,”183). 85. For a compelling reading of the colonial soldier in relation to an economy of infi nite debt and sacrifice, see Karl Britto’s “L’Esprit de Corps: French Civilization and the Death of the Colonized Soldier,” in Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi ( Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 145–62. Britto argues that the two world wars exacerbated a set of anxieties about the value of a colonized subject’s body when in ser vice of France: “The gift of civilization . . . functions as the sign of a debt whose limitless claims consume his body, marking it as lost, rendering it disposable” (149). The figure of Pays in Camp de Thiaroye both rehearses this logic (of infi nite debt) and dismantles its premise: The “gift” of civilization for which Pays endures first psychic and bodily annihilation is reduced to the helmet of a German SS. 86. http://news.bbc.co.uk /2/hi/7984436.stm. 87. Gadjigo et al., eds., Ousmane Sembène, 84. 88. Ibid., 83–84. 89. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 16. 90. Cayrol, Oeuvres Lazaréennes, 801, 776. 91. David Rousset, L’univers concentrationnaire (Paris: Editions du Pavois, 1946), 187. 92. In The Road to Guantánamo the prisoner is dragged off to his position near the barbed-wire fence as guards shout, “Don’t let him look,” “Get off the fence,” and “Stay off the fence.” 93. Examples of self-infl icted death by electrocution on the barbed wire abound in cultural representations of the camps, including Charlotte Delbo’s play Qui rapportera ces paroles and the traveling shot in Pontecorvo’s Kapò, condemned by Serge Daney. 4. Crabwalk History: Torture, Allegory, and Memory in Sartre

1. I  am using Elaine Scarry’s classic formulations in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 2. Ross Chambers, “The Long Howl: Serial Torture,” Yale French Studies, no. 118/119 (2010): 40. 3. As we saw in the last chapter, World War II was a point of reference in mobilizing public opinion during the Algerian War and decolonization, from Claude Bourdet’s reference to France’s Algerian Gestapo (“votre Gestapo d’Algérie”) to Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s declaration that his struggle against torture stemmed from his “obsessive memory . . . of the Nazi crimes of torture and extermination.” Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Assassins of Memory: Essays on

Notes to pages 151–55

305

the Denial of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 127. Despite this saturation, Raphaëlle Branche notes, “Comparisons with the Nazi period were highly sensitive in 1957: These are even more painful for erupting in a society that would prefer to forget this past and its compromises.” Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 166. For a thorough account of the analogies drawn between World War II and Algeria from 1948 to 1968, see Catherine Brun, “Algérie Roman: ‘Rejeux’ et ‘inguérissable,’ ” in Vichy et après: L’écriture occupée, ed. Richard Golsan and Marc Dambre (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2013). 4. Günter Grass, Crabwalk, trans. Krishna Winston (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 13. 5. Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 6. 6. Albert Camus, Oeuvres complètes, 2:922. 7. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 30. 8. Ross Chambers offers a probing reflection on the connective tissue that binds the modern practice of torture from Algeria to South Africa to Guantánamo, and its construction of a “non-linear history” through archaic structures such as the “ordeal.” Chambers, “Long Howl,” 45. 9. For the authoritative text on torture during this period, see Pierre VidalNaquet’s La Torture dans la République (1954–1962) (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1998). More recently, Branche’s La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie is an indispensable and exhaustive account of torture in the military, its structure, and its developments but also its phenomenology. Benjamin Stora demonstrates the various mechanisms of censorship at the time and argues that torture was neither exotic nor exceptional but a veritable institution, first in the police, and then in the military. Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 25–73. 10. For a beautifully illustrated volume that restores the range and complexity of French intellectuals’ engagement with the Algerian War, see Catherine Brun and Olivier Penot-Lacassagne, Engagements et déchirements: Les intellectuels et la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). 11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Theater, trans. F. Jellinek (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 257, 254 (translation modified). “I don’t go so far as to say that my play would have been a flop or that its performance would have been banned, but the self-censorship would have come into play before it came to that, and I wouldn’t have been able to fi nd anyone to stage it; there wouldn’t have even been any commotion, it would simply have been stifled” (255). 12. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Condemned of Altona, trans. Sylvia Leeson and George Leeson (New York: Knopf, 1961), 32–33 (translation modified).

306

Notes to pages 156–63

13. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Collier Books 1993), 26. 14. Sartre, Sartre on Theater, 292–93. 15. Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler (Evanston, Ill.: Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 1992), 76. 16. Ibid., 244. For a summary of recent debates on the status of Antelme’s category of “the human” as pure internal difference (Blanchot, Levinas) or as irreducible, residual humanity, see Colin Davis, “Antelme, Renoir, Levinas, and the Shock of the Other,” French Cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 41–44. 17. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 219. The translation is mine. 18. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Republic of Silence,” in Republic of Silence, ed. A. J. Liebling (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 499. For a critique of the peculiar role of gender in Sartre’s nonfictional accounts of torture, see John Ireland, who observes that “for Sartre, a torture is attempted rape, successfully resisted only through the silence in which ‘l’homme’— both humanity and manhood—is triumphantly reborn.” John Ireland, “Sartre and Scarry: Bodies and Phantom Pain,” Revue internationale de philosophie 231 ( January 2005): 95. 19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Three Plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Lionel Abel (New York: Knopf, 1949), 146–47. 20. Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001), 85. 21. Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 72; Louisette Ighilahriz, “The price of our freedom has been more than a million dead, extraordinary sacrifices, and a terrible enterprise: the psychological demolition of the human being [une terrible enterprise de démolition psychologique de la personne humaine].” Louisette Ighilahriz, Algerienne (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 258. 22. Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 64 (translation mine), and “L’Enfance d’un chef,” in Le Mur (Paris: Gallimard/ Folio, 2003). 23. Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 53; Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, 61. 24. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). 25. Scarry, Body in Pain, 27–59. Scarry calls this conversion in the act of torture itself an “analogical substantiation” by which pain is not addressed as pain but read as evidence of the regime’s power (48). 26. Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 36. 27. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (New York: Penguin, 2010), 79. 28. Marnia Lazreg observes the imperial impulse of torture in the context of Abu Ghraib: “Abysmal as they were, the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib

Notes to pages 163–64

307

depict the core of torture: absolute domination of the victim whose body and mind become a surface on which to imprint the torturer’s fancy” (Torture and the Twilight of Empire, 268). As Sartre reminds us, however, this “fancy” is embedded within an ideological system. Lazreg, however, takes issue with this systemic account and contends that Sartre’s imagery of magnetic fields and pathological contamination does not take into sufficient consideration the willed character of the act nor the militarization of the colonial state and the specific role of the army in torture (271). 29. Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, 81. 30. Simone de Beauvoir, cited in Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 68. Raphaëlle Branche’s study of the army confirms this systemic analysis of torture: “The way that the war was conceptualized and led expanded torture’s conditions of possibility, not as an excess [un dérapage] but as a system. Political power and military authority preceded the material structures and ideological justifications, with a particularly strong convergence between 1957 and  1960, which reinforced the context that incited violence, produced by a certain vision of the world, of Algerians, and of war.” Branche, La torture et l’armée, 424. 31. Simone de Beauvoir refused this imposed complicity: “I wanted to stop being an accomplice in this war, but how? I could talk in meetings or write articles; but I would only have been saying the same things as Sartre.” Cited in Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Repre sentation, 1830 to the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 81. At Gisèle Halimi’s request, Beauvoir chose to steer a committee in support of Djamila Boupacha, a young Algerian political prisoner tortured by French officers in Algiers. For illuminating discussions of Boupacha’s trial, see Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 160–67; and Khanna, Algeria Cuts, 68–99. 32. General Bollardière, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, “Torture in the Algerian War,” South Central Review 24, no. 1 (2007): 21. 33. Le Monde, November 11, 2000. 34. See the testimony of former brigadier general Janis Karpinski at www .fidh.org/IMG/pdf/doc_20_-_Karpinski_Testimony.pdf. 35. Le Monde, November 11, 2000. Army general Stanley McChrystal recalls his punishment of troops who had mistreated prisoners in the same rhetoric of the slippery slope:” “If you allow mistreatment, it’s a slippery slope, you can’t climb back up. And at the end it destroys you.” See “McChrystal: Torture’s a ‘Slippery Slope, You Can’t Climb Back Up,’ ” www.usnews.com/opinion /blogs/robert-schlesinger/2013/02/08/mcchrystal-enhanced-interrogation-tec hniques-didnt-work.

308

Notes to pages 165–73

36. Mark Danner, “Bodies under Stress,” www.markdanner.com/articles California/show/106. For a more extended reflection on torture and its prohibition by President Obama, see Mark Danner, Torture and the Forever War (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013). 37. Sartre, Sartre on Theater, 261. 38. The image of unwanted national memory as a cluttered attic is echoed a few years later in Resnais’s Muriel (1963), where torture is figured as the untellable narrative of an Algerian victim (“Muriel, ça ne se raconte pas”), whose traces haunt a soldier’s memory and the museum-like clutter of his bourgeois apartment in Boulogne-sur-Mer. 39. “Algeria, far from constituting the ‘other’ of France in this period, is better seen as its monstrous and distorted double.” Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 108. 40. “Ah! C’est rien, une petite séance de téléphone, c’est bon pour les rhumatismes! La gégène. C’est autre chose mais c’est un peu fort pour les femmes.” H. G. Esmeralda, Un été en enfer: Barbarie à la française (Paris: Exils Editeur, 2004), 21. For a suggestive reading of Muriel ou le temps d’un retour in light of such recyclings of household objects from the domestic interior to the scene of torture and “associational mobility” in the cinematic image, see Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 54–60. 41. “J.—, smiling all the time, dangled the clasps at the end of the electrodes before my eyes. These were little shining steel clips, elongated and toothed, what telephone engineers called ‘crocodile’ clips.” Henri Alleg, The Question (New York: George Braziller, 1958), 44. For a reading of Alleg’s testimony of torture in light of the structure of masculine ordeal, see Ross Chambers, “Ordeals of Pain,” in Entre Hommes: French and Francophone Masculinities in Culture and Theory, ed. Todd W. Reeser and Lewis C. Seifert (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 206–23. 42. Alleg, Question, 79. 43. Edouard Roditi, “In Praise of Macaronics,” in Modern Arts Criticism (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1991), 1:394. 44. Ibid. 45. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 41. 46. Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 32. 47. Sartre touches on a nascent interest in the phenomenon of perpetrator trauma that dominated in la mode rétro of the 1970s and that seems to be resurfacing in France, with the prize-winning novel by Jonathan Littel on the trau-

Notes to pages 173–77

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matic testimony of Nazi officer Maximilien Aue, Les Bienveillantes, a novel addressed in my next chapter. 48. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Knopf, 1995), 78. For a discussion of the “spectralization” of Jewishness in Sartre’s postwar thought, see Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009, 145. 49. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004), 721. 50. Cited in Jonathan Judaken, “Sartre on Racism: From Existential Phenomenology to Globalization and the New Racism,” in Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism, ed. Jonathan Judaken (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 29. 51. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952). 52. Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, 76. 53. Ibid. (translation modified). 54. Fredric Jameson, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 305. 55. Elizabeth Hardwick, “We Are All Murderers,” New York Review of Books, March 3, 1966. David Schalk clarifies the significance of this confusion between Altona and Altoona: “For many Americans of the Vietnam generation at least, Altoona symbolizes the middle American spirit which arguably, if it did not lead my country into the Vietnam disaster, kept us there.” David Schalk, “Are Intellectuals a Dying Species? War and the Ivory Tower in the Postmodern Age,” in Intellectuals and Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie, ed. Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch (London: Routledge, 1997), 276. 56. R. G. Davis and Peter Berg, “Sartre through Brecht,” Drama Review (1967–1968) 12, no. 1 (1967): 132–33. For an important account of the systemic nature of U.S. atrocities against noncombatants in Vietnam, see Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolital Books, 2013). 57. “For fourteen years you have been a prey to suffering that you created but that you don’t feel [Tu es possédé depuis 14 ans par une souffrance que tu as fait naître et que tu ne ressens pas]” (Sartre, Condemned of Altona,169). 58. Simone de Beauvoir was describing the French public’s incapacity to grapple with the phenomenon of torture during the Algerian War. Cited in Rita Maran, Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French-Algerian War (New York: Praeger, 1989), 143. 59. Jean-François Louette, “Les Séquestrés d’Altona et l’Allemagne,” Recherches et Travaux 56 (1999): 170. Louette gives an illuminating contextualization of the play in light of this German framework. Also pertinent is his

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analysis of how the play is influenced by Jean Cayrol’s conception of Lazarean aesthetics (173–77). 60. Grass, Crabwalk, 3. Crabwalk was the last novel written by Grass before his revelation in 2006 regarding his conscription as a youth into the WaffenSS, which might shed some light on the circulation of subject-positions and temporalities in the novel. 5. Reading Nazi Memory in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

1. Annette Wieviorka, L’ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998). 2. Ibid., 126. 3. Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 1. 4. This is Bernhard Giesen’s formulation: “In modern western nations, the triumphalist founding myth is increasingly being replaced by reference to a traumatic past, to the collective memory of victims and perpetrators. New national memorials and museums rarely commemorate triumphant victories, but recall the victims of the past.” “Constitutional Practice or Community of Memory? Some Remarks on the Collective Identity of Eu rope,” in Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese, and Other Interpretations, ed. Dominic Sachsenmaier, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, and Jens Riedel (Cologne: Brill, 2002), 208. 5. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 275. 6. Henry Rousso and Eric Conan, Vichy, un passé qui ne passé pas (Paris: Fayard, 1994). For a nuanced overview of the discourses of memory after World War II in France and in relation to Rousso, see Richard J. Golsan, “The Legacy of World War II in France: Mapping the Discourses of Memory,” in The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 73–100. 7. See Serge Barcellini, “L’état républicain, acteur de mémoire: Des morts pour la France aux morts à cause de la France,” in Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, Les guerres de mémoires: La France et son histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 209–19. 8. The term “devoir de mémoire” is inextricably linked to the Shoah since it was first used as the title of an interview with Primo Levi. See Primo Levi, Le devoir de mémoire (entretien avec Anna Bravo et Fedérico Cereja), trans. Joël Gayraud (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 1995). 9. Henri Rousso recapitulates the trajectory of testimony and victimization as follows: “The history of the twentieth century has seen the rise of a new

Notes to pages 184–85

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figure of the witness and a new kind of testimony linked to catastrophes. . . . The victim and victimization are central to the present’s relationship to the past, not only because recent history has been permanently marked by suffering, because it is the traumatic century par excellence, but also because our society responded to this with a politics of recognition and reparations, notably material reparations, investing different categories of victims with actual political, juridical and social status.” La dernière catastrophe: L’histoire, le présent, le contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 253. Rousso is skeptical of the witness’s sacralization in academic circles, calling it “a veritable ideology of testimony that magnifies the witness and victim, sacralizes their speech, puts on a false humility that masks . . . the desire to . . . speak—loudly—in their name” (254). 10. Carolyn Dean challenges the diagnosis, prevalent among critics of trauma, that we live in a wound or trauma culture in which a surfeit of memory confers undue privilege to victims. She argues instead that since the war and the emergence of the Holocaust, victims are approached through complex forms of aversion, erasure, and delegitimization to which such critiques may, in fact, contribute. See Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010). 11. Jonathan Littell, Les Bienveilllantes (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), translated as The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 12. Matthew Boswell, Holocaust Impiety in Literature, Popular Music, and Film (Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). In an approach that is consonant with the one taken here, Boswell investigates how aesthetic shock and irreverent representations can lead to ethical engagement. With reference to a corpus that includes Sylvia Plath, punk rock, and Quentin Tarantino, Boswell argues that “the force that drives these diverse, inventive, provocative forms of representation is not the desire to transmit direct knowledge of the event itself or to illuminate history as experienced by the victims. Rather, following [Gillian] Rose, it is knowledge and revelation in respect of our own lives and societies, and this frequently involves orientating a response to the Holocaust around the dynamics of perpetration and the moral passivity of bystanders” (4). 13. Robert Merle, Imre Kertész, Jorge Luis Borges, Romain Gary, Michel Tournier, and several others have experimented with the perpetrator’s perspective. 14. Pierre Nora, “Histoire ou roman: où passent les frontières?” Le Débat, no. 165, “L’histoire saisie par la fiction” (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 10–11. This issue revolved around The Kindly Ones as representative of a new wave of novels inspired by World War II that blurs the boundary between fiction and history. Titles include Fabrice Humbert’s L’origine de la violence (2009),

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Notes to pages 185–87

Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski (2009), and Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010). These novelists have also been designated as part of the “Jonathan Littell generation.” Grégoire Leménager, “Génération Littell,” Nouvel Observateur, May 5, 2010. 15. For a similar critique of history’s displacement by literature, and of the particular understanding of history in The Kindly Ones (e.g., the parallels between Stalinism and Nazism), see Richard J. Golsan, “Les Bienveillantes et sa réception critique: Littérature, morale, histoire,” in L’exception et la France contemporaine: Histoire, imaginaire, littérature, ed. Marc Dambre and Richard J. Golsan (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010), 45–56. By contrast, Jorge Semprún celebrates The Kindly Ones as proof of literature’s dominance over history in its capacity to “transmit and renew memory”: “In fifty years, collective memory will refer to Littell and not to Hilberg. The Kindly Ones is the book that will mark perceptions, not historians.” Cited in Wolfgang Asholt, “A German Reading of the German Reception of The Kindly Ones,” in Writing the Holocaust Today: Critical Perspectives on Jonathan Littell’s “The Kindly Ones,” ed. Liran Razinsky and Aurélie Barjonet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 234. 16. Charlotte Lacoste, Séductions du bourreau: Négation des victimes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), 46. Lacoste reduces this cultural predicament to the following syllogism: “All perpetrators are ordinary people / Ordinary people are us all / Therefore we are all perpetrators” (7). For a critique of Lacoste’s rather reductive account, see Luc Rasson’s review, “De la critique littéraire considérée comme un exercice de mépris: Charlotte Lacoste, Séductions du bourreau,” in L’aire du témoin, Acta Fabula 14, no. 5 (2013), http://www .fabula.org/acta/document6275.php. 17. Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2006), 76. I am alluding to Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 18. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 279, 22. 19. Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time is intertextually woven through Littell’s novel. 20. Richard Golsan suggests that if The Kindly Ones appears to signal the return of “la mode rétro,” it actually belongs to a new kind of historical consciousness that opens “a new imaginary of History and a largely unexplored evil,” that is to say, Europe’s “generalized, morbid, masochistic, and ultimately paralyzing obsession with the crimes and abuses of the past.” “Le retour de la mode rétro?,” in La Portée de l’Histoire: Etudes sur le roman français moderne et contemporain: Mélanges offerts à Marc Dambre, ed. Alain Schaffner and Jeanyves Guérin (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2011), 167.

Notes to pages 188–92

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21. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989),180. 22. Richard Crownshaw, “Perpetrator Fictions and Transcultural Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 75. 23. Littell, “I am from a generation that was very marked by Vietnam. I was a very small boy but it was in the living room every goddamned day—much more than the Holocaust and Israel or anything else. We saw it on TV every day for my entire childhood. My childhood terror was that I would be drafted and sent to Vietnam and made to kill women and children who hadn’t done anything to me. As a child there was always the possibility of being a potential perpetrator.” “The Executioner’s Song,” interview with Assaf Uni, Haaretz, May 29, 2008. Littell has most recently published notebooks recording his experience in Homs, Syria, where the opposition was brutally repressed by Bachar al-Assad’s army. Littell, Carnets de Homs: 16 janvier–2 février 2012 (Paris: Gallimard, 2012). 24. Claude Lanzmann, “Lanzmann juge Les Bienveillantes,” Le Nouvel Observateur, September 21–27, 2006. 25. “Irony is the reversed mirror-image of this form [allegory]. . . . Irony is a synchronic structure, while allegory appears as a successive mode capable of engendering duration as the illusion of a continuity that it knows to be illusory. Yet the two modes, for all their profound distinction in mood and structure, are the two faces of the same fundamental experience of time.” Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 225–26. For a critique of de Manian irony and its relation to the aporias of trauma theory, see Debarati Sanyal, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). I propose a defi nition of irony as counterviolence rather than as abyssal self-reflexivity, as an ethical alternation between the perspectives of victim and perpetrator, an analysis that is developed here in terms of complicity. 26. Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2009), 3. Subsequent references to pages in this novel appear in parentheses in the text. 27. Camus, Fall, 123–24. 28. Édouard Husson and Michel Terestchenko, Les complaisantes: Jonathan Littell et l’écriture du mal (Paris: François-Xavier de Guibert, 2007), 38. As Luc Rasson points out, Lacoste sees Littell as Max Aue’s “accomplice” (183),”enabler” (183), “advocate” (215) because he “allows Aue to speak at length and with no interruptions.” The conclusion is inevitable: “Jonathan Littell makes his narrator’s arguments his own” (221), Rasson, “De la critique littéraire comme exercice de mépris.”

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Notes to pages 192–97

29. Bruno Viard, “Les silences des Bienveillantes,” in “Les bienveillantes” de Jonathan Littell: Études réunies par Murielle Lucie Clément (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010), 82. 30. Susan Suleiman, “When the Perpetrator Becomes a Reliable Witness of the Holocaust: On Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes,” New German Critique 36, no. 1 (2009): 1–20. 31. Liran Razinsky, “History, Excess and Testimony in Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes,” French Forum 33, no. 3 (2008): 82. 32. Jenni Adams analyzes the ethics of Littell’s “immersive approach” to perpetration and makes the astute observation that the motifs of incest and twinning (like these passages on extermination and spectatorship) also play a role in the novel’s critique of reading as narcissistic consumption/identification. See “Reading (as) Violence in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones,” in Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Fiction and Film, ed. Jenni Adams and Sue Vice (Portland, Ore.: Valentine Mitchell, 2013), 25–46. 33. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 41. 34. For Dominick LaCapra, the narration of The Kindly Ones is “insufficiently framed” and “excessively participatory”; it “engages the reader . . . in a manipulative, pseudo-dialogic relation aimed at generating complicity and even subordination rather than critical exchange.” LaCapra, History, Literature, Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013), 96. I suggest instead that the text’s ironic complicity interrupts such participatory subordinations. Unlike LaCapra, Luc Rasson suggests that “Max Aue’s apparently monological discourse is in fact contested by other voices that have the power to transform the novel into a vast polyphonic space. Within the text and however fragile they may be, these counter-discourses represent the critical voice of the implied author as well as the reader’s who, contrary to what some critics fear, never truly runs the risk of being coerced into revisionist stances.” “How Nazis Undermine Their Own Point of View,” in Writing the Holocaust Today: Critical Perspectives on Jonathan Littell’s “The Kindly Ones,” ed. Liran Razinsky and Aurélie Barjonet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 106. For a reading of literary montage and bricolage in the novel that also attends to its ironic registers, see Catherine Coquio, “ ‘Oh my human brothers,’ let me tell you how it happened. (Who is the Perpetrator Talking To?),” ibid., 75–96. 35. Suleiman, “When the Perpetrator Becomes a Reliable Witness of the Holocaust,” 15. 36. Liran Razinsky, “The Similarity of Perpetrators,” in Writing the Holocaust Today, 50. Razinsky notes this indistinction in the various motifs of twinning and doubling, both in the family drama (e.g., Aue’s incestuous relations with his twin, Una) and in history (e.g., the anachronistic equation of Stalinism and Nazism as “Katyn = Auschwitz” in the novel). These doublings

Notes to pages 197–200

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do not portray history as a repetition of equivalent horrors, Razinsky suggests, but rather, they give a differential layering of the past: “Instead, every repetition evokes the memory of that which was repressed in the past and continues to be inextricably linked to that past, dragging its history along with it as something charging it with meaning” (51). Also see Razinsky for a detailed account of the modalities of testimony in the narrative that addresses the significance of the body and sexuality in witnessing. “Not the Witness We Wished For: Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones,” Modern Language Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2010): 175–96. 37. Also see: “In general I am much less interested in victims than I am in perpetrators. That’s because they are the ones who are doing something and changing the reality. It’s very easy to understand the victim: Something terrible happens to him and he reacts accordingly. But in terms of trying to understand something, there is nothing to examine. The perpetrator is more complicated to understand, along with the apparatus that activates him. By means of the attempt to give a voice to the perpetrator, lessons can be learned that will affect the way we look at the world today.” “The Executioner’s Song,” interview with Assaf Uni, Haaretz, May 29, 2008. This statement has generated much controversy. See, for instance, Dominick LaCapra, who declares, “What happened to the victims, including their at times significantly different responses, is not an uninteresting story that poses no challenging problems for understanding.” History, Literature, Critical Theory, 119. Although Littell’s declaration that perpetrators have more agency and complexity than victims is disquieting, it may well be a defensive response to dominant assumptions about the ineffable nature of the victim’s suffering and the moral betrayal of seeking to understand perpetration. 38. Philip Watts puts this stylistic heterogeneity well, “Tragedy in Littell’s novel coexists with an aesthetic junkyard composed of fragments of comedy, pulp fiction, kitsch, slasher films, 1970s pornography, zoo animals, statistic, mode rétro movies, slapstick, and Tintin.” “Remnants of Tragedy,” in Literature and History: Around “Suite Française” and “Les Bienveillantes,” ed. Richard J. Golsan and Philip Watts, Yale French Studies 121 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012), 164. 39. He is always a step behind the crafty Thomas, who intervenes in his career and life with the implacable regularity of providence. As the character who catalyzes Aue’s fall and enables his survival and ascensions in the bureaucratic machine, Thomas could figure as the euménides of the title. 40. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education (London: Penguin, 1964), 418. 41. Ibid., 286–87, trans. modified. 42. Flaubert, L’education sentimentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 389. 43. Littell, Les bienveillantes, “Dans la pénombre, je butai sur quelque chose de mou, couché sur le tapis. Ce contact me glaça” (488, emphasis mine).

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Notes to pages 201–5

44. J. Marina Davies, “La Shoah en flânant?” in “Les bienveillantes” de Jonathan Littell, 178–91. 45. Littell, Bienveillantes (23). In the English translation that was supervised by Littell, Algeria is replaced by Vietnam: “For instance, if you are an American, consider your little Vietnam adventure, which so traumatized your fellow citizens. . . . I am obviously not including the Viet namese dead; since you do not speak of them, in your books or t.v. programs, they must not count much for you.” Kindly Ones, 16. 46. On the Historians’ Debate, see Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 54–85. 47. Littell offers a narrative response to Valerie Hartouni’s call for approaches to the Final Solution that bring to bear “larger historical frames and continuities . . . to explain the lethal conjunction of processes and practices that together allow genocide to emerge as more than an abstract possibility” and in relation to “the colonial projects of European states in Africa and Asia and the racial imperial hierarchies that developed through them, so that as we look at Nazi images of atrocity, we might think ‘this is what the building of an empire entails; this is what imperialism looks like.’ ” Valerie Hartouni, Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 13–14. 48. See Jonathan Littell and Pierre Nora, “Conversation sur l’histoire et le roman,” in Le débat 144 (March/April 2007): 43–44. Philip Watts also notes the contemporary resonance of Littell’s comparative approach to historical trauma: “At the same time, however, there is a kind of temporal scrambling that contaminates Littell’s narrative and asks his contemporary readers to think about The Kindly Ones in relation to our own world. When Aue speaks of the ‘bombing of Kabul’ (KO, 590), or the ‘exterminations in the Congo’ (KO, 590) or an ‘uprising in Chechnya’ (KO, 274), or of invading ‘the oil regions in the Persian Gulf’ (KO, 273) or even when he says that Eichmann ‘would have been the pride of any European firm’ (KO, 570), it is impossible not to hear contemporary resonances.” “Remnants of Tragedy,” 167. 49. A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 8. 50. Cited in “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” 20. 51. Robert Eagleston observes that the detail in The Kindly Ones delivers the radicality of Arendt’s “banality of evil”: “When looking for the evil in The Kindly Ones, we should not be looking for some core moment or essence . . . but in precisely the huge mass detail about the genocide, in the production of the day-to-day of genocide.” “Avoiding Evil in Perpetrator Fiction,” in Representing

Notes to pages 205–10

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Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film, ed. Jenni Adams and Sue Vice (Portland, Ore.: Vallentine Mitchell, 2013), 23. 52. For citations of Himmler’s utopian rhetoric of empire in Poland and Ukraine, see David Furber and Wendy Lower, “Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-Occupied Poland and Ukraine,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide, 371–75, 387. Furber and Lower’s account of the convergences and divergences between the program of Jewish extermination and those targeting indigenous Poles and Ukrainians provides a helpful historical contextualization of The Kindly Ones. 53. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 185–220. 54. Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 99. 55. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 101–7. 56. Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski have coined this term, citing Enzo Traverso, Sven Lindquist, Dirk Moses, Mark Levene, and Dan Stone as some of its key figures in “Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz,” Central European History 42 (2009): 279–300. See in particular Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2003) on Nazism in relation to the colonial continuum and patterns of capitalist modernization, a genealogy that “europeanizes” extermination in a manner consonant with Littell’s approach. In a recent lecture, Traverso characterizes postwar approaches to the Holocaust and colonialism as a “natural mutation [transcroissance] of the Shoah’s memory against the Algerian War” and contrasts this approach to the subsequent isolation of the Shoah in relation to other genocides, criticizing neocolonial uses of its memory in the context of the war in Iraq. Traverso, “Pour une lecture décoloniale de la Shoah,” in Indigènes-TV, February 29, 2012, indigenesrepublique.fr/article.php3?id_article=1607. 57. I  am alluding to Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men and Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996), two works that evidently inform Littell’s project. 58. Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 197–219. 59. Nicholas Bancel et  al., eds., Zoos humains: De la Vénus hottentote aux reality shows (Paris: La Découverte, 2002). 60. Rothberg’s commentary on Césaire’s choc en retour captures the temporality of a novel such as The Kindly Ones: “The rhetoric of turning and returning embodied in notions of boomerang effects and the choc en retour points to the need to go beyond linear models relating the Holocaust and colonialism. It suggests that the time of historical influence consists not only of mechanical, transitive causality but also of repetitions, reverse shocks, and returns of the

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Notes to pages 210–18

repressed. But ‘turns’ also take place in space and suggest the need to consider the spatial complication of colonialism, racism, and genocide.” Multidirectional Memory, 107. 61. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 166. 62. Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 10. 63. George E. Marcus, “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-enScène of Anthropological Fieldwork,” Representations 59 (Summer 1997): 96. 64. “Le volume agit comme un colossal virus propre à contaminer peu à peu le naïf lecteur ce “semblable, [ce] frère”, pour en faire un otage.” Julia Kristeva, “De l’abjection à la banalité du mal,” http://www.kristeva.fr/abjection.html. 6. Holocaust and Colonial Memory in the Age of Terror: Assia Djebar and Boualem Sansal

1. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen, trans. William H. Crosby (Brockport, N.Y.: Boa Editions, 1991), 162–65. 2. Achille Mbembe diagnoses French secular universalism in its resistance to multiculturalism as an “indifference to difference” which perversely leads to “indifference to discrimination.” “Provincializing France?” trans. Janet Rotman, Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 93. 3. Pierre Nora, “History, Memory and the Law in France (1990–2010),” www.lph-asso.fr. A law was passed in 2001 recognizing the Armenian genocide, but a bill criminalizing its contestation was struck down for infringement of freedom of speech in February 2012. It appears to be back on the table under the administration of President François Hollande. 4. Ibid. 5. See “Intervention de Pierre Nora à l’assemblé générale de Liberté pour l’histoire, 2 juin 2012: Une lourde année pour les lois mémorielles,” www.lph asso.fr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=181%3Aune -lour de-annee-pour-les-lois-memorielles&catid=53%3Aactualites&Itemid=170&la ng=fr. Olivier Wieviorka, La mémoire désunie: Le souvenir politique des années sombres, de la Libération à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2010), 269; Philippe Raxhon, “Pour mémoire: Une mise en perspective historiographique” in La concurrence mémorielle, ed. Geoffroy Grandjean and Jérôme Janin (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), 57. 6. Claude Lanzmann, “Universalité des victimes,” Libération, January 10, 2006. As Henri Rousso puts it, “In reality, most of these initiatives participate in political one-upmanship. They are the consequence of the place accorded by most democratic nations to the memory of the Shoah, which is a universal symbol of the struggle against all forms of racism. It would seem that many don’t grasp this universality. The memory of the Shoah is thus a model that is

Notes to pages 218–19

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envied, at once rejected and imitated: hence the urgency to resort to anachronistic notions of crimes against humanity for facts that are three to four hundred years old.” In “Mémoires abusives,” www.aidh.org/hist-mem/debat13 .htm. 7. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 6. Rothberg observes that historians such as Nora and Rousso, who have been instrumental in isolating the category of memory have “lately begun to recoil in front of the social force of their object of analysis” (298). Although our corpus and focus is different, there are a number of convergences in our approaches to contemporary literature’s meditation on pluralized memory. Rothberg addresses the return of the massacre of October 17, 1961, as multidirectional memory in Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge, Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire, and Michael Haneke’s Caché to argue that if the state should not be in the position of writing history (as Liberté pour l’histoire argues), “The forms of memory and countermemory produced by groups in civil society as well as texts that circulate publicly play an essential role in opposing the homogenization and moralization of memory produced by the instrumentalization of the state” (270). I agree with this approach to cultural production as an interrogation of official memory. Yet my focus is on the limits as well as the productivity of such multidirectionality. Hence this chapter probes the limits of such ideal coexistence or “multidirectional confluence of disparate historical imaginaries” (271) to suggest that both Djebar and Sansal complicate this ideal of memorial métissage and indeed point to the ideological/political constraints that block the multidirectional movement of cultural memory. 8. For an analysis of Franco-Algerian political relations in the 2000s, see Benjamin Stora, “Entre la France et l’Algérie: Le traumatisme (post)colonial des années 2000,” in Ruptures postcoloniales: Les nouveaux visages de la société française, ed. Nicolas Bancel, Florence Bernault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubeker, Achille Mbembe, and Françoise Vergès (Paris: La Découverte, 2010). The memory wars between France and Algeria were exacerbated by the 2005 law on the positive effects of France’s colonial presence, which President Boutefl ika denounced as an instance of revisionism equivalent to Holocaust denial. Accusing France of committing a genocide in Algeria under the colonial regime, at the sixtieth anniversary of the Sétif and Guelma massacres, Boutefl ika also denounced the “fours de la honte,” or ovens of shame, in which the French military had incinerated the bodies of those killed in 1945, declaring, “These ovens of shame were identical to the Nazi crematoria.” That he used this rhetoric suggests the extent to which the Shoah remains the norm by which other violences are measured, and that it is exploited as such (note the rhetoric of sameness to characterize what are irreducibly distinct forms of violence).

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Notes to pages 219–22

9. Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, Les guerres des mémoires: La France et son histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 2008); Jean-Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes: Génocide, identité, reconaissance (Paris: La Découverte, 2010); Bancel et  al., eds., Ruptures postcoloniales; Geoffrey Grandjean and Jérôme Jamin: La concurrence mémorielle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011); Wieviorka, La mémoire désunie; Johann Michel, Gouverner les mémoires: Les politiques mémorielles en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010). 10. For a concise yet rich contextualization of contemporary memory studies in France, see Jean-Louis Jeannelle, “Au delà des guerres des mémoires,” Critique 762 (2010/11): 939–54. 11. For example, Thelja embraces François as he remembers his father’s death, “as if she wished, not to insinuate herself in his past, but rather to help it evaporate.” Assia Djebar, Les nuits de Strasbourg (Paris: Actes Sud/Babel, 1997), 131. In other words, remembrance is not a matter of reliving a trauma so much as expressing it before witnesses and obtaining a temporary sense of relief. 12. For a complementary reading of palimpsest which focuses on the interplay of orientalism, Algerian patriarchy, and colonial torture in Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, see Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 80–85. For a study of palimpsests more generally in Assia Djebar’s works, notably in L’Amour, la fantasia, see Anne Donadey, “ ‘Elle a rallumé le vif du passé’: L’écriture-palimpseste d’Assia Djebar,” in Postcolonialisme et autobiographie: Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Daniel Maximin, ed. Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 101– 15. Also see her “The Multilingual Strategies of Postcolonial Literature: Assia Djebar’s Algerian Palimpsest,” World Literature Today 74, no. 1 (2000): 27–36. 13. In fact, Djebar’s Strasbourg resembles Andreas Huyssen’s evocative portrayal of Berlin “as a palimpsest of many different times and histories. . . . Berlin as a palimpsest implies voids, illegibilities, and erasures, but it also offers a richness of traces and memories, restorations and new constructions that will mark the city as a lived space.” Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 84. 14. “Dans ce roman, je crois que j’ai, a ma manière, repensé (et peut-être, pour faire un jeu de mots français facile où ‘penser’ peut être aussi ‘panser,’ tenter d’adoucir les blessures), oui, j’ai repensé, à partir des blessures du passé, une ville comme Strasbourg: ville-frontière, ville autrefois dite ‘libre . . . la ville des routes,’ d’après son étymologie.” Assia Djebar, Ces voix qui m’assiègent: En marge de ma francophonie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), 234. Unfortunately,

Notes to pages 222–24

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these works by Djebar have yet to become available in English translation. All translations are mine. 15. Esther Benbassa echoes Djebar’s linkage of “penser” and “panser,” or recognition and healing, in strikingly similar terms in the context of France’s recognition of the Armenian genocide. Benbassa articulates the paradoxes of official recognition as follows: “A genocide’s official recognition is a remedy that heals [panse] if possible the wounds of those who suffered, and even more so, their descendants. It draws attention to the injustices and the crimes of history and induces a legitimate recognition in the public.” Yet Benbassa warns that such recognitions are inevitably enmeshed in political struggles: “The multiplication of memorial laws is bound to harm social cohesion. It encourages the crystallization of memory communities that are in competition. And we know that in our Republic, which aspires to universalism, there isn’t and will never be enough room for all these memories, so this competition can only have deleterious effects. Such measures occult our urgent need for a common history and serve instead to flatter and instrumentalize memories for political ends.” Benbassa, “Lois mémorielles et clientélisme électoral,” Libération, January 17, 2012. 16. “Depuis que je vis dans cette ville, nombril de l’Europe, pour la dizaine de personnes autour desquelles je gravite,— choréographie de hasard.” Djebar, Nuits de Strasbourg, 350. 17. “ ‘Transplantée,’c’est le mot que tu écrivais, mais au téléphone, ta voix se durcit en disant ‘déportée,’ elle a été déportée non dans le vrac de l’exode de 1962, mais dix ans plus tard, dans un arrachement mélancolique, dont elle ne put se guérir!” (Ibid., 63). 18. “O my love . . . all war between us is over. Before the child arrives, we have snuffed out all memory of genealogy!” (ibid., 238). As Michael Riley has argued, the Strasbourg oath is a contradictory symbol of pacification, translation, and cultural transformation, since the oath was taken to forge an alliance against the third brother, Emperor Lothaire I, and as such it consecrates exclusionary fraternal bonds, war, and imperialism. For O’Riley, then, the rehearsal of Strasbourg’s oath is one of several moments in which the text complicates an uncritical celebration of hybridity. Michael O’Riley, Postcolonial Haunting and Victimization (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 108–10. Similarly, in a perceptive reading of the novel, Jane Hiddleston observes that “hybridity is not celebrated as an uncomplicated fusion but instead continues to bear the traces of separation and confl ict imposed by imperialism, and fails to offer an alternative, identifiable position.” Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 152. As we shall see, the imperial past returns to fracture Djebar’s initial portrait of a pacified, democratic, multicultural present. 19. “Un passé qui ne passe pas” is Henry Rousso’s famous characterization of France’s memory of the Vichy/occupation years.

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Notes to pages 225–28

20. “Mais les êtres? Ils accumulent, strate sur strate, des couches de passé contradictoires, après quoi, ils se taisent” (Djebar, Nuits de Strasbourg, 200). 21. Ottmare Ette describes Djebar’s literary-urban map as redefining Europe and its cities, not as territory but as movement: “The long history of urbanity and literature leaves no doubt that the history of the city should no longer be conceptualized in terms of space, but in terms of movements. The literary text has become a living, mobile cartography of the city.” “Urbanity and Literature: Cities as Transareal Spaces of Movement in Assia Djebar, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Cécile Wajsbrot,” European Review 19, no. 3 (2011): 373. 22. For a compelling study of Strasbourg and its suburbs through interviews of its diverse inhabitants, see John Western, Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait (Surrey: Ashgate Press, 2012). 23. “D’un coup, inopinément, lui revient l’image du garconnet de 5 ans trottant dans les rues enneigées de Strasbourg . . . . En surimpression, ensuite, des pieds nus, à la plante rougie de henné, des pieds de femme, tout craquelés sur les bords, les pieds brûlés d’une femme de vingt ans se hâtant en pleine montagne, dans le noir, avec au fond un panorama de neige” (Djebar, Nuits de Strasbourg, 185). For an suggestive counterpoint to Djebar’s passage, see Silverman’s reading of Hélène Cixous’s “Pieds nus” in light of memory traces that overlay Jewishness, gender and colonial domination. Silverman, Palimpsestic Histories, 148–52. 24. I thank Bruce Rosenstock for this formulation in his response to an earlier version of my chapter. Although I focus on the figures of the palimpsest, embodiment, and proximity in my reading, there are other figures that capture the multidirectional spin of Djebar’s narrative itinerary. For instance, in her evocative reading of the novel, Kathryn Lachman turns to the musical form of counterpoint to illuminate Djebar’s nonhierarchical approach to the past: “While never equating the diverse historical trauma that she addresses in the novel . . . Djebar insists on bringing them into contrapuntal relation with one another and exploring the potential for reciprocal recognition and healing. The delicate balance the novel attempts to walk is precisely how to bring into relation these different historical experiences while nonetheless preserving their difference and singularity.” “The Allure of Counterpoint: History and Reconciliation in the Writing of Edward Said and Assia Djebar,” Research in African Literatures 41, no. 4 (2010): 179. 25. “Suppose, after all, that someone should jump in the water. One of two things— either you do likewise to fish him out and, in cold weather, you run a great risk! Or you forsake him there, and suppressed dives sometimes leave one strangely aching.” Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 8. 26. Assia Djebar, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Paris: Des Femmes, 1980), 8.

Notes to pages 228–36

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27. “Ils luttent une longue minute, l’un contre l’autre. . . . Ils luttent encore, sans ardeur et sans haine, poussés par un obscur entêtement qui entend aller à épuisement. Une autre minute si longue: leurs souffles, tout contre” (Djebar, Nuits de Strasbourg, 163). 28. Hiddleston, Assia Djebar, 79. Hiddleston offers a rigorous, illuminating reading of Djebar’s work in relation to key issues in postcolonial theory and captures the dynamics of identity at work in a text such as Strasbourg Nights: “She exposes the limits of any fi xed or specific position while also refusing to celebrate transculturation to such an extent that it connotes fusion, becoming a value in itself. The search for identity is coupled with reflections both on contingent singularity and a form of plurality that resists totalization” (ibid.). 29. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 24. 30. “She was killed by one of yours!” Jacqueline’s husband’s eyes “say” to Thelja when she comes to visit Jacqueline’s body (Djebar, Nuits de Strasbourg, 335). 31. Moira Fradinger, Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). If Fradinger’s corpus of Sade and Vargas Llosa harbors figures such as “the plague, the Haitian, the Beast” as figures for this inhumanity, our own corpus of figures for the abject, dehumanized other against which the subject of human rights is constructed would include the rat or vermin, the crab, the colonial conscript, the camp detainee, the Jew, the Algerian, the Slav. 32. Two years later, Leïla Sebbar’s novel La Seine était rouge (Paris: Thierry Magnier, 2003) would again invoke Antigone as a figure that contests the state’s selective historical memory in terms strikingly similar to Djebar’s deployment. Rothberg argues in the context of Sebbar’s novel and its concluding gesture to Antigone, “As Sophocles and Sebbar clarify, it is the state that produces the dynamics of terror by refusing to recognize all of the dead. When the state instrumentalizes the law of mourning, claims of justice must emerge from ‘outlaw’ agents of memory and postmemory.” Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 308. This observation holds for Djebar’s novel as well, insofar as the interruption of Strasbourg’s multicultural idyll by the gunshot illustrates the “outlaw agents” by whom the repressed legacy of colonialism is resuscitated. 33. Fradinger, Binding Violence, 53. 34. Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 106, 109. To illustrate the distinction between political and ethical events of memory, Rosello contrasts Rachid Bouchareb’s Indigènes (2006), a cinematic counternarrative to the state’s amnesia regarding the role of colonial conscripts in World War II,

324

Notes to pages 236–38

to Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005). Whereas Bouchareb’s fi lm was about representing colonial conscripts and was instrumental in triggering President Chirac’s decision to rectify the amount paid to these veterans so that it would match the pension of French veterans, Caché does not aim to “represent” the events of October 17, 1961, which it assumes we know, but rather, “puts us in a better position to identify our moment of memory and interrogate its limits” (108). Rosello elaborates in terms that resonate with the approach taken here. Although processes of recognition may continue to alert us to the entanglement of multiple pasts in noeuds de mémoire, such recognitions remain constrained by the norms of a past’s legibility: “The past is a story that we weave with the type of material that contemporary norms authorize us to use. The episode that focuses on the unresolved issues of situations that no longer need to be disclosed reveals the limits and borders of that memory. The contours of what France is today are enabled and limited by the possible pasts that are recognizable and addressed. The complex mechanism that brings the colonial past to the fore is not a simple linear and temporal process that replaces one layer of memory with a more recent one. Several pasts are now entangled” (202). 35. Vilashini Cooppan, Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 210. 36. Djebar, Ces voix qui m’assiègent, 237. 37. The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won the first round of parliamentary elections in December 1991, which were canceled by the Front de libération nationale for fear of an Islamist take-over. The army took control of the government and dissolved the FIS, and President Mohamed Boudiaf was assassinated by a member of his guard. In the bloody confrontation that ensued, state military terror fought Islamist guerrilla terrorism in a war that continues to provoke heated debates: about what kinds of connections exist between the war of independence and the civil war, about the level of state complicity with Islamists in the civilian massacres, about the relations between different Islamist groups during the conflict, and indeed about the death toll itself, which is estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 killed, with 7,000 to 8,000 persons who were missing/disappeared. Complementary historical works on this murky period include Benjamin Stora, La guerre invisible: Algerie, années 90 (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po., 2001); Abderrahmane Moussaoui, De la violence en Algérie: Les lois du chaos (Arles: Actes Sud/MMSH, 2006); and Saïd Zahraoui, Entre l’horreur et l’espoir, 1990–1999: Chronique de la nouvelle guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Laffont, 2000). 38. For Djebar and the Algerian “intellocide,” see Julija Šukys, “Language, the Enemy: Assia Djebar’s Response to the Algerian Intellocide,”Journal of Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2004): 115–31.

Notes to pages 239–44

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39. Assia Djebar, Algerian White: A Narrative (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 115, 114. 40. Ibid. Djebar alludes to Camus’s “mal à l’Algérie.” 41. “Etrangère à l’étranger . . . ma surprise donc de ma curiosité camusienne tard éveillée, élan soudain d’aller voir par-derrière, là-bas, d’approcher par-derrière l’entité, ou identité Algérie, au terme d’un éloignement, au bout d’une ligne de fuite comme si la possibilité de ma rencontre avec Camus ne pouvait se faire que le plus loin possible de l’Algérie, au-delà même de l’horizon.” Djebar, Ces voix qui m’assiègent, 225. 42. This identificatory approach to violence, the cultivation of trauma and terror as a mode of citizenship, was in evidence again during the Toulouse killing in March  2012, when a terrorist opened fi re in a Jewish school. In a speech to Paris schoolchildren shortly afterward, President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that although the killing took place in Toulouse, it could have just as easily happened in a Pa risian school and targeted children “just like them”: “Il aurait pu y avoir le même assassin, ces enfants sont exactement comme vous.” “Les propos ‘angoissants’ de Sarkozy à des collégiens,” Libération, March 20, 2012. 43. Sarkozy wanted to “make sure that each child in CM2 was entrusted with the memory of a French child who was victim of the Shoah” (emphasis mine). See www.cndp.fr/crdp reims/memoire/enseigner/memoire_vichy/14shoah_cm2 .htm. Note that many of the eleven thousand deported children were not French citizens. 44. Sarkozy’s attempt to use Guy Môquet in order to commemorate the Resistance was particularly inept and ironic since the adolescent was arrested by Vichy authorities for being a communist militant and not a Resistance fighter. 45. Michel, Gouverner les mémoires, 105, emphasis mine. 46. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5, 7. Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (2001; London: Routledge, 2004), 78. Max Silverman reminds us that such palimpsests are the condition of Eu ropean late-modernity: “We are the generation of postmemory, cut off from a past which continues to leave its indelible traces in the present. In one sense, we are all children of the Holocaust, slavery and European colonialism because we come in their wake and grapple with their effects.” “Interconnected histories: Holocaust and Empire in the Cultural Imaginary” French Studies 62, no. 4 (2008), 428. 47. Boualem Sansal, Le village de l’Allemand, ou le journal des frères Schiller (Paris: Gallimard, 2008); The German Mujahid, trans. Frank Wynne (New York: Europa Editions, 2009). All English citations will refer to this edition. The claim that Boualem Sansal is the fi rst Arab writer to address the Holocaust is a misleading hyperbole. As we saw in chapter 2, writers such Mohammed Dib

326

Notes to pages 244–45

address the reverberations of the Holocaust in the Maghreb and in France. More recently, Waciny Laredj’s Les Balcons de la mer du Nord (Paris: Actes Sud, 2003) probes the relations between the Holocaust and the Algerian Civil War. For an excellent reading of the novel’s exploration of “the blood ties of memory” rather than of identity, see Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, “Anne Frank Goes East: The Algerian Civil War and the Nausea of Postcoloniality in Waciny Laredj’s Balconies of the North Sea,” College Literature 37, no. 1 (2010): 61–80. Zayzafoon contextualizes this novel in terms of other historical and literary works that engage with the Holocaust and its scholarship, thus dismantling the cliché that the Holocaust is invisible in the Arab world. 48. www.franceinter.fr/emission-l-invite-boualem-sansal. 49. “Is this a colonial situation? No. The case between Israelis and Palestinians is unique in the world. They claim the same land. . . . But it’s a different problem. They both claim this land as their own since the beginning of time” (interview at http://forum.setif.info/index.php?topic=11660.0). For a critique of this position by Salah Guemriche, see “Lettre ouverte à Boualem Sansal,” in Le quotidien d’Oran, www.lequotidien- oran.com/index.php?news=5169586. Guemriche refused to participate in Sansal and Grossman’s Appel de Strasbourg because its formulations expressed a “double standard in favor of Israel” (www.socialgerie.net/spip.php?article949). 50. Mohammed Dib, Qui se souvient de la mer (1962; Paris: Minos-Editions de la différence, 2007), 218. For a discussion of Dib’s text in light of multidirectional memory, see Silverman, Palimpsestic Histories, 77–80. 51. When asked “Do you know how many ex-Nazis sought refuge in independent Algeria?,” Sansal responded, “I don’t have any precise figures; I believe they were isolated cases. What I do want to emphasise, however, is that in 1945, not all German war criminals fled to South America. Many of them found refuge in the Arab world, in Egypt, Syria and other countries.” See http://en .qa nt a r a.de / T here -A re -Pa r a l lels - bet ween-I sla m ism- a nd-Nat iona l -Socialism/9075c172/index.html. 52. Although the novel offers a more supple account of these connections, Sansal’s interviews argue for tight ideological parallels between the Third Reich and the contemporary Algerian state, and Sansal has no trouble enumerating them: “The ingredients are the same in both cases: single party, the nation’s militarization, brainwashing, falsification of history, exaltation of race, a Manichean vision of the world, a tendency toward victimization, the constant claim of a world plot against the nation. . .xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism turned into dogma, a cult of heroes and martyrs, glorification of the supreme Guide, omnipresence of the police.” “La Frontière entre islamisme et nazisme est mince,” Le Nouvel Observateur, January 9, 2008. Also see Boualem Sansal, Gouverner au nom d’Allah: Islamisation et soif de pouvoir dans le monde arabe (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).

Notes to pages 247–52

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53. Sansal, Le village de l’Allemand. 54. Tzvetan Todorov, Mémoire du mal, Tentation du bien: Enquête sur le siècle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000), 233. 55. For a reading of these passages through Freudian melancholia, haunting, and narcissistic identification, see Lucy Brisely, “Melancholy and Victimhood in Boualem Sansal,” Research in African Literatures 44, no. 1 (2013), in particular 62–68. Brisely observes that in our current critical climate, melancholy and haunting, like trauma, risk erasing particular differences between historically singular forms of suffering and victimhood, becoming instead “overused paradigms that are applied to a whole host of losses irrespective of the context, thus overlooking the turn to the local and the particular that inspired them in the first place. As categories of victimhood become increasingly conflated, this encourages a kind of universal or existential victimhood that prevents more nuanced analyses of loss and trauma that would take account of the singularity of a given socio-historical milieu” (58). 56. “To all the people of the Mediterrannean who spend their time mulling over the past and its old hatreds, I want to say that the time has come to turn toward the future.” in Le Point.fr, 8/02/2007, http://www.lepoint.fr/actual ites/2007-02-08/nicolas- sarkozy-propose-une-union-mediterraneenne/1037 /0/110656. For Sarkozy, “Repentance is an execrable fashion. I don’t accept that sons be asked to expiate for their fathers’ sins, especially if they did not commit them. I don’t accept that we can judge the past according to present prejudice. I don’t accept this moralizing good conscience that rewrites history solely to accuse the nation,” in discours à Caen, 9 mars 2007, sites.univprovence.fr/~veronis/ Discours2007/transcript.php?n=Sarkozy&p=2007-03-09. 57. Rosello, Reparative in Narratives, 6. 58. Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 108. 59. Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 22. 60. There are remarkable parallels between this iteration of the debate on terror and the debate on colonialism in the 1950s analyzed in chapters  2 through 4. If Camus accused the anticolonial leftist intelligentsia of sacrificing innocent European settlers to expiate the sins of colonialism, for Sartre such innocence did not exist since colonialism was a ruthless system that produced victims and perpetrators, natives and settlers, by virtue of their function and interests. Sartre anticipates Derrida’s analysis of the complex web of relations in situations of “terror.” It is not surprising that in the opening epigraph of Tyranny of Guilt, Bruckner cites Albert Camus’s indictment of “mediocre, ferocious ideologies” that cause people to be “ashamed of everything, ashamed of themselves, ashamed to be happy, to love and to create. . . . We are being

328

Notes to pages 252–58

dragged before the secular confessional, the worst of all.” Bruckner seems to self-identify as Camus denouncing the judge-penitents of his time: “Repentance creates people who apologize for ancient crimes in order to exonerate themselves for present crimes.” Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt, vii, 98. 61. Mireille Rosello, “Guerre des mémoires ou ‘parallèles dangereux’ dans Le Village de L’Allemand de Boualem Sansal,” Modern and Contemporary France 18, no. 2 (2010): 202. 62. For images of this conflation (of Islamic fundamentalism and occasionally of Islam itself with Nazism), see Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West (2005), a propaganda documentary by Raphael Shore. 63. “Malrich’s diagnosis is not an exaggeration. It’s the sad truth. In our countries, slums abandoned by the states to banditism and islamism are already concentration camps.” Boualem Sansal, “La frontière entre islamisme et nazisme est mince,” http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/romans/20080109.BIB0588 /la-frontiere-entre-islamisme-et-nazisme-est-mince.html. 64. Rosello, “Guerre des mémoires ou ‘parallèles dangereux,’ ” 17. 65. I’m grateful to Marianne Hirsch for bringing this connection to my attention. See her “Maternity and Rememory: Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Representations of Motherhood, ed. Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994). 66. Malrich’s letter to the minister of the interior in France reveals the “noman’s land” he inhabits as a subject of the state: Formed within the crucible of French republican values, in which he believes more than ever, yet betrayed by the state that is supposed to embody them, he will not fight alongside this state for their restoration but will either emigrate or fight for his own independence. His last words in the narrative capture this aporia: Should he and his buddies “get the fuck out, to go die somewhere else” or consider “hanging in there and fighting”? How can he emigrate when there is no place for him to go live, but only die? How can he fight for independence in the name of values that France itself does not uphold? Despite the faith in pedagogy and transmission conveyed by the publication of the journal, the impasses faced by both protagonists— suicide, doomed struggle for a nameless cause, or exile— convey despair about the possibilities of individual agency and political transformation. Indeed, these impasses reflect Sansal’s own position as an intellectual who chooses to remain in Algeria, despite threats to his life, in the name of a struggle whose values are defi ned in opposition to both the Algerian state (headed by the FLN) and fundamentalist Islam, and attests to the difficulty of envisioning a political alternative. If for Malrich as a fictional character France is under colonial occupation by “Islamofascists,” for Sansal, Algeria remains under colonial occupation by both the FLN and the Islamists in what he calls a “National-Islamist” regime: “If we look at our situation, we remain colonized, spoliated of our goods and history; independence is yet to come, the real libera-

Notes to pages 258–61

329

tion war has not begun, the National Liberation Front is yet to be created.” “Boualem Sansal ou la tragédie camusienne de ‘L’étranger,’ ” Le Matin, July 1, 2012. 67. See chapter 5 on Les bienveillantes for a discussion of the theory of “subaltern genocide.” If Der ewige Jude famously shows a map of the globe tracing the spread of “parasitic Jews” and their colonization of the world, we see an identical image in Raphael Shore’s film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West (2005), which shows a map of Islamism’s “plague-like” spread around the globe. 68. As Houria Bouteldja, the PIR’s figurehead, puts it: “Independently of their actual origins, inhabitants of the ‘hood’ are nativized [les populations des ‘quartiers’ sont ‘indigénisées’], relegated to the margins of society. The suburban projects are called ‘zones of lawlessness’ that the Republic is summoned to ‘reconquer.’ Race-based checks, diverse provocations, and persecutions of all kinds proliferate while police brutality is rarely punished by law. . . . The colonial mechanisms of Islam’s management have been updated by the constitution of the ‘Conseil français du Culte Musulman’ under the Ministry of Interior. Discriminatory, racist and sexist, the ban on the veil is an exceptional law that reeks of colonialism. . . . The treatment of populations issuing from colonization prolongs a colonial politics without being reducible to it.” “Manifeste du Parti des Indigènes de la republique,” http://lmsi.net /Nous-sommes-les-indigenes-de-la. 69. Thus, while Sansal’s omission might seem symptomatic of what Ann Laura Stoler identifies as France’s “colonial aphasia,” it is too deliberate and strategic to fall within the category of a cognitive impairment. In Stoler’s formulation, the term aphasia refers to an incapacity— embedded in French historiography, politics, and culture—to see the history and reverberations of the colonial relations. Aphasia “highlights—far more than ‘forgetting’—important features of the relationship among French historical production, the ‘immigrant question,’ and the absence/presence of colonial relations. At issue is the irretrievability of a vocabulary, a limited access to it, a simultaneous presence of a thing and its absence, a presence and the misrecognition of it.” Stoler makes an eloquent argument for the necessity of overcoming such aphasia about the past in the interests of a pluralist future: “History in an active voice is only partly about the past. More important, it is about differential futures. It requires assessing the resilient forms in which the material and psychic structure of colonial relations remain both vividly tactile to some in the present and to others, events relegated to the passé composé.” “Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled History in France” Public Culture 23, no. 1 (2011), 145, 154–55. 70. “I couldn’t quite hold a grudge against the invaders and those they had installed on our lands and in our history. After all, the country had received so many in the past that they were already somewhere in our genes and memories,

330

Notes to pages 261–67

as we were in theirs.” Boualem Sansal, Petit éloge de la mémoire: Quatre mille et une années de nostalgie (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 127–29. 71. Sansal, Petite eloge, 134. 72. Carine Bourget, The Star, the Cross, and the Crescent: Religions and Conflicts in Francophone Literature from the Arab World (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2010), 168–69. 73. www.liberation.fr/culture/2012/10/07/nous-exhortons-tous-les-ecrivains -dans-le-monde-a-nous-rejoindre_851510. Afterword

1. I borrow this term from Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “Small Acts of Repair: The Unclaimed Legacy of the Romanian Holocaust,” a paper circulated at a workshop titled Recollection, Retribution, Reconciliation: Postmemory and Justice in a Transnational Age at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, October 4–5, 2012. 2. Camus refers to Pierre Pucheu, the Vichy minister of interior responsible for the execution of French Communist prisoners. The full quotation is as follows: “And these laws he signed in a quotidian setting, from his comfortable, anonymous office, he never had the imagination to really see that they would turn into dawns of agony for innocent French people who would be led to death. For this kind of man, it’s always the same abstraction that continues, and I suppose that their greatest crime in our eyes is that they never approached a body, even one as tortured as Politzer’s, with the eyes of the body, and what I would call a physical/embodied notion of justice.” Camus, Oeuvres Complètes, 1:922. 3. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1994), 49 (emphasis mine). These remarks are indebted to Valerie Hartouni’s compelling analysis of the Eichmann trial, Arendt’s report, and the philosopher’s skepticism regarding empathy as the cornerstone of moral development and political imagination. Valerie Hartouni, Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness (New York: New York University Press, 2012). See in particular “Thoughtlessness and Evil,” 64–91. 4. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996), 241. 5. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 43. 6. “Imagination alone enables us to see things in their proper perspective, to be strong enough to put that which is too close at a certain distance so that we can see and understand it without bias and prejudice, to be generous enough to bridge certain abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand everything that is too far away from us as though it were our own affair.” Hannah Arendt,

Notes to pages 267–68

331

Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, 1994), 323. 7. George E. Marcus, “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-enScène of Anthropological Fieldwork,” Representations 59 (Summer 1997): 96. 8. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 60.

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Index

9/11, 29, 42, 58, 145–46, 217, 251, 261 Abu Ghraib, 149–50, 164–65 Adorno, Theodor: figure and form, 101–2; poetry after Auschwitz, 49, 101–2, 113–14 Agamben, Giorgio: analogy versus synecdoche, 48; bare life, 30–31, 155; fi xed paradigms, 29; gray zone, 30–37, 278n18; Homo sacer, 30; Muselmann, 279n24; paradigm, 52; Remnants of Auschwitz, 30–36 47–48; shame, 44; The Signatures of All Things: On Method, 47; survivor’s guilt, 278n18 Algeria: Algerian trilogy (Dib), 79–80; Battle of Algiers, torture and, 153–54; Committee Against the Pursuit of War in Africa, 300n65; the concentrationary, 300n65; Hollande, François, 219; nationalism in The German Mujahid, 245; perpetrator testimonies, 164; Vichy and, 81–82 Algerian camps, 126–28 Algerian Jews, 81–82 Algerian War, 129–30; The Condemned of Altona, 151 Algerian White (Djebar), 238–39 Alleg, Henri, La question, 154 allegory: allegorist and chiffonier, 119; ambivalence in, 118; animation of memory, 121–22; Auschwitz as, 53, 117–18; baroque allegory, 120–21;

Baudelaire’s Le cygne, 213–15; Benjamin, Walter, on, 118–20; compartmentalizing of history, 85; of complicity, 53; complicity within violence of history, 122; displacements, 15–16, 150–51; The Fall, 94–8; as form of travel, 55; ghosting effect, 120; history and, 52–53; Holocaust and, 51–52; irony and, 313n25; plasticity in Camus, 59–60; reference versus capture, 120; repetition, 121; as rhetorical figure, 122; ruins and, 118–19; specificity and, 126–27; torture and, 149–50; truth and, 167–68; Watts on, 283n61 Améry, Jean, 152, 162 analogy: in The German Mujahid, 252–63; versus synecdoche in Agamben, 48 Antelme, Robert, 156–57, 196 Antigone in Les nuits de Strasbourg, 232–36 Anti-Semite and Jew (Sartre), 161 apartheid, 13 archives: figure as, 83–88; memory as, 78 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 207; Eichmann in Jerusalem, 266 Audin, Maurice, 154 Auschwitz: as allegory, 53, 117–18; The Fall and, 83–88; gray zone in, 23–26; Himmler’s visit, 106–7; history as sequence of Auschwitzes, 32; poetry after, 49, 101; ruins, 116–17

333

334

Index

balkanization of memory, 218–19 bare life, 30–31, 155 Baudelaire, Charles, 191, 213–15 Beauvoir, Simone de, 12–13; committee supporting Djamila Boupacha, 307n31; on torture, 163–64 Benjamin, Walter: on allegory, 11–22, 51; on historical consciousness, 140 Berman, Paul, Terror and Liberalism, 58 bodies: Muselmänner, 31; as repository for historical violence, 227; state and, 31 boomerang effect, Nazism, 171–72, 207 Borowski, Tadeusz, “The People Who Walked On,” 25–26 Boupacha, Djamila, 169–71; support from Simone de Beauvior, 307n31 Bruckner, Pascal, 250–52 Buchenwald, human remains and, 108–11 Camp de Thiaroye, 132–43 Camus, Albert: Albert Camus the Algerian (Carroll), 58; Algerian student and, 283n5; Camus effect, 59; colonial violence, 58; colonialism and the Holocaust, 61; complicity, 91; concentrationary realms and, 87–88; Djebar on, 239; The Fall, 40, 82–83, 89–96; The First Man, 74–76, 93, 95; and Mouloud Feraoun, 291n77; noeuds de mémoire, 60–61; on Pierre Pucheu, 330n2; The Plague, 61–76; plasticity of allegories, 59–60; The Rebel, 57, 91–92; the Resistance, 57; terrorism and, 58; Vichy collaborators, condemnation of, 266–67; as witness, 57–58 capitalism, genocide links, 106–7 Carroll, David, 58, 75–76, 285n19 Caruth, Cathy, 38–39 Cayrol, Jean, 79–82, 103–4, 110–11, 123, 144 censorship, 165, 121, 126, 150, 154, 244 Césaire, Aimé: Discourse on Colonialism, 135–36; Nazism as boomerang effect, 171–72 Chambers, Ross, 150

Childhood of a Leader (Sartre), 161 civic identity and pedagogy of identification, 241–43 Coetzee, J. M., Waiting for the Barbarians, 162 colonialism: colonial plague, 80; dehumanization, 171; genocide intersection in The Kindly Ones, 202–12; the Holocaust and, 61, 80–83; Nazism and, 64, 134–37; torture and, 152, 162, 163 communitarianism, republicanism and, 219–20 compassion fatigue, victims and, 186 complicity: aesthetics of, 103–14; allegories of complicity, 53; Camus and, 91; as cognitive model, 15; complicity effect in The Kindly Ones, 191–98; cultural memory and, 14; as a domain, 275n44; etymology, 1; fetishism, 42–43, 44; figure and context, 16; as form of commitment, 12–13; historical, 114; imagination and, 267–68; ironic, 54, 107–8, 189–91, 210–11; meaning, 10; Night and Fog (Resnais and Cayrol), 100, 102–3; opposition and, 13; political, 16–17; recognition, 1–2; reemergence as political gesture, 187–88; return to, 187; Sloterdijk, Peter, 11; as structure of engagement, 17–18; traumatic complicity, 12, 37–46, 104–5 concentration camp world, 46; artistic representation, 106; as paradigm, 47–48 concentration camps: economic advantages, 106–7; geometric madness, 25–26; power within, 36; sovereign power and, 30–31; Vichy, 87–88 the concentrationary, 6; Algeria, 300n65; figure of, 87–88; French postwar, 293n8; Night and Fog, 295n17; soccer match, 24 concentrationary experience, 56; Camus as pioneer, 87; colonial experience

Index and, 61; gray zone and, 83; human versus inhumanity, 156–57 concentrationary image, 24 concentrationary memory, transcultural politics, 123–32 concentrationary regimes, 82–83; Camp de Thiaroye and, 133–34 The Condemned of Altona (Sartre), 149–78; American productions, 175–76; conclusion, 174–75; crabwalk history, 151; crustacean motif, 177–78; direct strategies, 168; domestic space, 165–66; flashbacks, 166–67; Grass and, 178–80; human versus inhuman, 154–56; imperial structure of torture, 162–63; martyrdom, 158; relationality of victims, 157; setting, 153; stage opening, 153–54; state’s imposition of gray zone, 158; victims’ stage representation, 172–73 cosmopolitan memory, 6, 60, 220, 257, 270n10 countermemories, Camp de Thiaroye, 142 Crabwalk (Grass), 151, 178–81 crabwalk history, 20, 151, 176–78, 180 Craps, Stef, 28, 272n21, 277n10, 280n30 Crownshaw, Richard, 4, 9, 44, 188 de Man, Paul, 41–42, 51, 120, 190 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 251–52 devoir de mémoire, 184–85 Dib, Mohammed, 79–81 Djebar, Assia, 220; Algerian White, 238–39; Camus and, 239; intellocide, 238; Les nuits de Strasbourg, 220–40; literary memory and juridico-political representation, 220–21; Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, 228 The Drowned and the Saved (Levi), 23; concentration camp world, 46 economy: advantages of camps, 106–7; productive annihilation, 106–7 Eichmann trial, 8, 125, 182–83, 266

335

era of the witness (Wieviorka), 8, 182, 187, 250 exile, 214 experience of trauma, versus representation, 44–45 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 49–50 The Fall (Camus), 40, 82–83; Algeria and, 83–88; allegory in, 94–98; as allegory of the Shoah, 84; Auschwitz and, 83–88; crisis of witnessing, 83–88; the cry, 94–98; gray zone and, 84, 89–94 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of Earth, 72, 134–35, 161 Fassin, Didier, 43; The Empire of Trauma, 183–84 Faurisson, Robert, 296n19 Felman, Shoshana: on de Man, 41–42; on Camus, 65–66, 84 Feraoun, Mouloud, 94, 291n77 figuration, 49–50; ambiguity, 50; Dib, Mohammed, 80; Ezrahi, 50–51; paradigms and, 52 figure: Adorno and, 101–2; as archive, 83–88 FIS (Islamic Salvation Front), 324n37 Flaubert, Gustave, 199–201 form, Adorno and, 101–2 Foucault, Michel, 47, 187–88 France: colonial aphasia, 329n70; Loi Gayssot, 216, 218; Loi Mekachara, 216–17; Loi Taubira, 216; memorial laws, 216–17; memory wars, 62, 216; national identity, memory and, 242–43; public memory, scholarship, 219–20; Sarkozy’s proposal for students, 240–42; state’s intervention in public memory, 217; trauma’s institutionalization, 183–84 French experience of Nazi occupation, 10 French Republic, Nazi Germany and postwar, 82–83 French Writers and the Politics of Complicity (Golsan), 16 From Guilt to Shame (Leys), 43–44

336

Index

genocide: capitalism links, 106–7; colonialism intersection in The Kindly Ones, 202–12; postcolonial perspective, 207–8 geometric madness of camps, 25–26, 294n13 The German Mujahid (Sansal), 244–63; Algerian nationalism, 245; analogy, 252–63; collective remembrance, 245–46; colonialism, 258–62; French colonialism lack, 257, 260–61; gray zone as inheritance, 246–52; identification in, 255–56; “If This Is a Man” (Levi), 247; Nazism and Islamism analogy, 254–55; proximity versus identification, 256–57 Golsan, Richard J., 16–17, 151 Grass, Günter, Crabwalk, 151, 178–81 gray zone, 11–12; Agamben, 30–37; as allegory, 46–55; allegory versus paradigm, 29; concentrationary experience and, 83; current deployment, 46–47; The Fall and, 84, 89–94; Felman on, 41–42; as figure, 49; guilt and innocence exchanged, 26; as inheritance, 246–52; in Le premier homme, 291n79; modern civilian life and, 31; Night and Fog, 102–3; secondary witnesses and, 27; as site of culpability, 36–37; soccer game, 23–24; state’s imposition, 158; traumatic complicity, 28–29, 45 Guantánamo Bay: detainees, 31; Miller, Geoffrey, 14; postwar France and, 144–48 Guernica (Picasso), 169, 170 guilt: animating, 54; dialectical operations of, 54–55; paradigm, 281n41; secondary witnesses, 27; static, 54; traumatic complicity and, 45 Himmler, Heinrich, Auschwitz visit, 106–7 Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais), 112 Hirsch, Marianne, 5, 27, 303n81, 330n1

Historians’ Debate, 189 history: allegory and, 52–53, 85; conflation through universalization of trauma, 28; as contamination, 40; as continuous process, 143–44; displacement, 38–39; entanglement, 38–39; versus literature, The Kindly Ones and, 185; memory’s privilege over, 184; as repetition, 38–39, 40; Sartre, 152; as sequence of Auschwitzes, 32; subjects of traumatic complicity, 45; as trauma, 37–40 Hollande, François, 219 Holocaust: banalization, 247; colonialism and, 61, 80–83; contemporary uses of memory, 250; decentering, 3; dehistoricization risk, 28; The Fall as allegory, 84; figural representation argument, 63; historical narration, 40; memory misuses, 46; as metaphor, 3; as paradigm for memory, 3; pleasure from representations, 110; postcolonial studies and, 66; postShoah literary ethics, 40; reconceptualization, 2–3; as recurrent condition, 27–28; as referent of allegory, 51–52; retraumatization, 28; sacralization of its singularity, 247–48; symbolic legacy in “war on terror,” 255; theorization through trauma lens, 28; as universal paradigm of racial injustice, 218; unrepresentability, 101; victim memory and, 3; victim-based claims for recognition, 218 Homo sacer (Agamben), 30 human remains, recycling, 108 human versus inhuman, 152–59 Huyssen, Andreas, 3–4, 18, 222 identification versus proximity, 256–57 imagination, perpetration and, 267–68 implication, witnesses and, 39 inheritance, gray zone as, 246–52 intellocide, 238

Index irony: allegory and, 122, 313n25; in The Kindly Ones, 190–92 Islamofascism, 245, 254 Islamonazism, 245 Jeanson, Francis, 57 The Kindly Ones (Littell), 182–212; colonialism and genocide intersection, 202–12; compassion fatigue and, 186; contemporary climate and, 189; detachment from violence, 200; hybridity, 198–200; imperial strategies’ costs, 188–89; irony, 190, 192; perpetrator and complicity effect, 191–98, 314–15n32–37; perpetrators’ perspective, 185–86; perpetrator’s voice, 189–90; as revisionist narrative, 186; testimony of Nazi, 185; trauma and tourism, 198–202 Klaus Barbie trial, 189 Kutz, Christopher, 13–14 la mode rétro, 187–88 La question (Alleg), 154 La question ou le supplice de Djamila (Matta), 169–71 La tyrannie de la pénitence (Bruckner), 250 LaCapra, Dominick, 28, 84–85, 195, 289n55, 314n34 Lacombe, Lucien (Malle), 187 Lanzmann, Claude, 27, 101, 124, 183, 185, 218 Lazarean art, 81–82 Le cygne (Baudelaire), 213–15 Le métier à tisser (Dib), 79–80 Les camps de la mort documentary, 110 Les nuits de Strasbourg (Djebar), 220–40; Alsagérie, 227–28; Antigone in, 232–36; bodies as repository for historical violence, 227; colonial memory, unprocessed, 233; colonialism and Strasbourg, 237; community, 224; connection as solidarity, 223; deportation, 223–24; diasporic

337

subjects, 223; identities in diasporic community, 229; Malgré-nous, 235; remembrance as deliverance, 225; Strasbourg’s hybridity, 228–29; urban palimpsests, 221–40 L’espèce humaine (Antelme), 156 Levi, Primo, 11–12; The Drowned and the Saved, 23–36; geometric madness of camps, 25; “If This Is a Man” in The German Mujahid, 247; on The Night Porter, 188; sharing water, 290n66; Survival in Auschwitz, 25 Leys, Ruth, From Guilt to Shame, 43–44 limit-experiences, 46 Lindeperg, Sylvie, 128, 293n8, 294n15, 299n58 literary memory, juridico-political representation and, 220–21 literature: commemoration and, 215; critical reflection and, 216; versus history, The Kindly Ones and, 185; memorial representation, 216; post-Shoah literary ethics, 40; recognition and, 215; small acts of repair, 266 Littell, Jonathan, The Kindly Ones, 182–212 Loi Gayssot, 216, 218 Loi Mekachara, 216–17 Loi Taubira, 216 Malle, Lacombe, Lucien, 187 Mandel, Naomi, 14, 275n44, 278n11, 279n21 Marcus, George, 14–16, 211 martyrdom in The Condemned of Altona, 158 Matta, Roberto, La question ou le supplice Djamila, 169–71 Mbembe, Achille, 140, 143–44 media, complicity and, 274n32 memorial laws in France, 216–17 memory: animation by allegory, 121–22; as archive, 78; balkanization, 218–19; Camus effect, 59; collective, 4, 60, 243;

338

Index

memory (cont.) concentrationary, and transcultural politics, 123–32; cosmopolitan, 6, 60, 220, 257, 270n10; cultural, 6–7, 220, 270n10; cultural postmemory and, 45; devoir de mémoire, 184–85; events of, 236; French national identity, 242–43; global memoryscape, 270n11; Holocaust as paradigm, 3; homogenization through universalization of trauma, 28; Internet association and, 271n13; intersectional, 5; manufacture, 191–8; migration and, 69–78; misuses of Holocaust memory, 46; movement, 4; multidirectional, 7, 15, 52, 126, 272n21, 276n52; nation-state and, 4–5; palimpsestic, 272n19; politics of remembrance, 102–3, 115–16; postmemory, 5; present past, 17; privilege over history, 184; prosthetic, 271n14; public, state and, 217; sites of, 214–15; spatial-cognitive maps and, 77–78; technology and, 5; transcultural, 18, 269n6, 270n9; vectors of memory, 272n22; victim memory, 3 memory wars, 266, 319n8; France, 62 migration, memory and, 69–78 mimesis, traumatic complicity and, 45 minority traumas, 277n10 Mirroring Evil art exhibit, 42–43 Muselmänner, 31 National Socialism, 277n7 nation-state, memory and, 4–5 Nazi gaze, Antelme’s portrayal, 156 Nazi Germany: France and, 126–27; postwar French Republic and, 82–83 Nazislamism, 254 Nazism: boomerang effect, 171–72, 207; Césaire, 135–36; colonialism and, 64; colonialism and in Camp de Thiaroye, 134–37; imperialism and, 61; Islamism analogy, 254–55

negationism, 186; Faurisson, Robert, 296n19 negative sublime, 28 Night and Fog (Resnais and Cayrol), 33, 79, 100; Algeria, 124–27; Algerian camps and, 126–28; audience as accomplice, 115; audience as witness, 103, 104; baroque allegory, 120–21; bulldozer use, 303n84; Cannes festival, 299n58; capitalism and genocide links, 106–7; complicity, self-reflexivity and, 111; complicity in, 102–3; crisis of representation, 108–9; decontextualization in, 109–10; France, Nazi past and, 126–27; gas chamber, 112; gray zone, 102–3; Himmler’s visit to Auschwitz, 106–7; historical violence and, 102; human remains, 108–9; Jewish specificity, 125; justness, 100; legacy, 100–1; materiality versus abstraction, 118; multidirectional memory and, 126; multiple histories at stake, 124; opening, 104; perpetrator’s gaze, 105; perspectives, 104–5; poetry of narration, 107; politics of remembrance, 102–3, 115–16; ruins, 116–17; school curricula and, 130–31; self-reflexivity and complicity, 111; separation of concentrationary from extermination, 295n17; still photographs in Camp de Thiaroye, 138–39; as stylization, 101; tattoos, 108–9, 110, 112–13; testimony versus figurality, 118; transmission of trauma, 111–12; victim on electrified fence, 302n80 Nora, Pierre, 4, 60, 217–20 Nuit et brouillard (Resnais and Cayrol), 81–82. See also Night and Fog (Resnais and Cayrol) Nyiszli, Miklós, 33; soccer game, 23–24 Ousmane, Sembène, 20, 132–43

Index paradigm: Agamben, 52; figure versus, 49, 52; guilt paradigm, 281n41; Shoah and racial injustice, 218 pedagogy of identification, 241–42 “The People Who Walked On” (Borowski), 25–26 perpetrators: circumstances for becoming, 187; complicity effect in The Kindly Ones, 191–98, 314–15n32–37; effects on, 160; empathy, 188; as everyman, 186; identification shift from victim, 186–87; imagination and, 267–68; The Kindly Ones and, 185–86; perpetrator’s gaze in Night and Fog, 105; Sartre, 308n47; testimonies in Algeria, 164; as victims, 36–37 Petit éloge de la mémoire: Quatre mille et une année de nostalgie (Sansal), 261 petrification in Sartre, 161–62 photographs: Night and Fog, 138–40; Night and Fog and The Road to Guantánamo, 145–48 Picasso, Pablo, Guernica, 169, 170 The Plague (Camus), 61; Arab characters, lack of, 285n19; belonging, 70–71, 74–76; chronicle versus allegory, 63; Defoe quote, 62; figural contagion, 62–69; irony of French repression, 64; migration and memory, 69–78; Nazism and colonialism, 64; rats, 66–69; setting, 63–64; total condemnation, 64–65 politics: cultural memory and, 220; transcultural, concentrationary memory and, 123–32 politics of remembrance, 115, 236–37; Night and Fog and, 102–3 popular trauma culture, 272n23 post-Holocaust art, 101–2 postmemory, 5, 27, 197, 210, 215, 224 post-Shoah literary ethics, 40 posttraumatic cinema, 111 postwar France, Guantánamo Bay and, 144–48

339

productive annihilation, 106–7; recycling human remains, 108 prosthetic memory, 271n14 proximity versus identification, 256–57 The Rebel (Camus), 57, 91–92 Rechtman, Richard, The Empire of Trauma, 183–84 recycling of human remains, 108 Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben), 30–36, 47–48 repetition, trauma and, 38–39 representation: figural representation of Holocaust, 63; irreverent, 311n12; memorial, literature and, 216; poetry and, 50; reference and, 215; of trauma versus experience, 44–45 republicanism, communitarianism and, 219–20 Resnais, Alain: Algeria as point of Night and Fog, 124–27; Hiroshima mon amour, 112; Nuit et brouillard, 81–82. See also Night and Fog (Resnais and Cayrol) The Road to Guantánamo (Winterbottom and Whitecross), 145–48 Rosello, Mireille, 236, 250, 252, 256, 307n31, 323n34 Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory, 6–7, 15, 52, 62, 85, 126, 162, 187, 207, 218, 228, 242, 272n21, 276n52 Rousset, David, 6, 56, 145 Rue Darwin (Sansal), 244 ruins: allegory and, 118–19; of Auschwitz, 116–17 sacralization of the Shoah’s radical singularity, 247–48 Sanders, Mark, 13, 211 Sansal, Boualem, 220; bildungsroman, 247; contemporary uses of Holocaust memory, 250; The German Mujahid, 244–63; Le village de l’Allemand, 21, 244; Petit éloge de la mémoire: Quatre mille et une année de nostalgie, 261; Rue Darwin, 244; Unfi nished Business, 244

340

Index

Sarkozy, Nicolas, 97, 217, 240–42, 250 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 57; Anti-Semite and Jew, 161; Childhood of a Leader, 161; The Condemned of Altona, 149–76; historical violence, 152; “Paris sous l’Occupation,” 10; perpetrator trauma, 308n47; petrification figures, 161–62; specificity in dialectical thought, 173–74; torture accounts, 306n18; torture as limit-situation, 159; The Victors, 159–60 secondary witnesses, 26 Sénac, Jean, 88 sexualized violence, Djamila Boupacha, 171 shame: in being human, 44; guilt versus, 43–45; history and, 27; Levi and sharing water, 290n66; memory and, 27; ontological treatment by Agamben, 44; survivors, 34–35; versus traumatic complicity, 45; traumatic complicity and, 45; violence and, 27; vogue of, 43; witnesses, 34–35 Shoah. See Holocaust Shoah (Lanzmann), 101, 183 Shoah Foundation, 183 The Signatures of All Things: On Method (Agamben), 47 silence, representation of historical reality, 41–42 Silverman, Max, 6, 187, 272n19, 288n50, 293n8, 295n17, 303n83, 308n40, 320n12, 322n23, 325n46 sites of memory, 214–15. See also Nora, Pierre SK (Sonderkommando), soccer game and, 23–24 slippery slope of torture, 164–65, 307n35 Sloterdijk, Peter, 11 small acts of repair in literature, 266 soccer game, 23–26, 276n5 sovereign power: bodies of citizens, 30–31; camps and, 30–31; ontological, torture and, 158–59, 160; subjects’ vulnerability, 30. See also state

space and collective memory, 60 Spargo, R. Clifton, 51–52, 165 spatial conception of memory, 77–78 Special Powers of 1955, 153, 154 SS (Schutzstaffel), soccer game and, 23–24 state: bare life and, 30–31; intervention in public memory, 217. See also sovereign power Strasbourg: hybridity, 228–29; occupations, 222 Survival in Auschwitz (Levi), 25 survivor guilt, 34–35, 43–44, 278n18 symbol, Coleridge on, 51 tattoos, 108–9, 110, 112–13, 296n19, 296n21 technology, memory and, 5 Terror and Liberalism (Berman), 58 terrorism, Camus and, 58 testimony: compassional pact, 272n23; privileging, 184; victims and, 310n9 Todorov, Tzvetan, 247; on analogy, 252 torture: absolute power and, 162; abstract representation and, 149–50; allegory and, 149–50; Battle of Algiers, 153–54; carnivalesque banality, 168; colonialism, 152, 162, 163; dehumanization of victims, 158–59, 160; effects on perpetrator, 160; genocidal principle, 152–53; human versus inhuman, 152–53; as institution, 305n9; as limit-situation, 159; linking of victims, 172; occupation of another’s body, 162; as ontological battle for sovereignty, 158–59, 160; as petrifying machine, 168–69; relations, 151–52, 168; relations and, 163–64; slippery slope, 164–65, 307n35; in structured environment, 152; survivor alienation, 159; techniques, 153–54, 168 transcultural memory, 18, 269n6, 270n9 transcultural politics, concentrationary memory and, 123–32

Index trauma: 9/11 and, 42; cultural memory and, 8; experience versus representation, 44–45; fetishism, 42–43; French institutionalization, 183–84; history and, 27; history as, 37–40; memory and, 27; minority cultures, 277n10; political claims and, 184; popular trauma culture, 272n23; repetition and, 39; as structure of entanglement, 279n30; theorization of Holocaust through, 28; tourism and, in The Kindly Ones, 198–202; understanding history and, 37–38; universalization, 28; violence and, 27; “war on terror” and, 42 trauma theory, origins, 38 traumatic complicity, 12, 37–46, 104–5; gray zone and, 28–29; guilt and, 45; mimesis and, 45; versus shame, 45; shame and, 45; subject of history, 45 Trezise, Thomas, 8, 183, 278n18 truth: allegory and, 167–68 vectors of memory, 272n22 vermin: humans as, 158, 160, 164; Le métier à tisser (Dib), 79–80; portrayals in Camus, 66–69 Vichy: 10, 17, 136; Algeria and, 80–82, 127, 130; Camus’s condemnation, 266–67; labor camps, 87–88 The Vichy Syndrome (Rousso), 10–11, 183 Vichy’s Afterlife (Golsan), 17 victim memory, Holocaust and, 3 victims: compassion fatigue and, 186; dehumanization in torture, 158–59, 160; delegitimization, 311n10; as ethical point of reference, 184; heroes and, 183; historical knowledge and,

341

183; as historical point of reference, 184; identification shift to perpetrator, 186–87; linking through torture, 172; mirroring executioner, 24; perpetrators as, 36–37; relationality, 157; rights, 184; stage representation in The Condemned of Altona, 172–73; surrogate victimhood, 28; testimony and, 310n9; trauma theory and, 28 Vietnam War, 54, 175–76, 189 violence: mask of contemporary culture, 32; regulated, 31; Sartre, 152; sexualized, 171; unregulated, 31 visual art, complicit aesthetics, 18 Waiting for the Barbarians (Coetzee), 162 “war on terror”: symbolic legacy of Holocaust, 255; trauma and, 42 Whitecross, Mat, The Road to Guantánamo, 145–48 Wieviorka, Annette, 8, 182, 241, 272n23 Wieviorka, Olivier, 218 Winterbottom, Michael, The Road to Guantánamo, 145–48 witnesses, 8–9; Agamben, 35; audiences as, 103, 104, 105; contaminated witnessing, 112; era of the witness, 182; The Fall, 83–88; historical crisis in witnessing, 40; implication and, 39; language of testimony, 40; secondary, 26–27; shame and, 34–35; Shoah Foundation, 183; traumatization, 39 Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (Djebar), 228 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 72, 134–35, 161 Zola, Emile, 12