ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Robert Antelme's conception of testimony, examining in particular its temporality, its relation to the self, and its dialectic of truth and artifice. It discusses the literary qualities of his narrative, looking m detail at the literary fabric of his text, and his meditations on the status of language during and after the experience of the camps. If his testimony fails, disappears, is dismissed or ignored, none of Antelme's thinking in relation to humanity or community will be of the slightest significance. If the ease is to be challenged, Antelme argues, the incommunicable will have to be communicated. But not just by insisting on its communicability; rather, by working it through the resources of communication, using the imagination to express the unimaginable. This is Antelme's negotiation of the problem of artifice in testimonial reconstruction: characteristically, he refuses to set artifice and truthfulness against each other, instead making artifice a condition of truthfulness.
