ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author decided to start with Lefeu rather than with At the Mind’s Limits, the most well-known of Jean Amery’s essays, because it is a significant expression of his autobiographical conception of literature. But such an assessment does not grasp entirely his style of thinking, that is, his writing which resulted from a symbiosis between life and history. The author suggests that Amery’s focus on torture instead of the gas chambers does not reveal any blindness or incomprehension: it was an epistemological choice. It resulted from a conception of historical knowledge as lived experience—the only source of authentic understanding—and corresponded with a vision and a practice of criticism as autobiographical writing. Written in the aftermath of the Algerian War, it reveals a tension between critical reason and despair, between the leftist public intellectual and the autobiographical writer, a tension which shaped the entire work of Améry.
