ABSTRACT
Robert Antelme, a member of a French Resistance group headed by Francois Mitterrand, was arrested by the Gestapo in June 1944, sent to Buchenwald, then to a work camp in Germany where he almost died. Its close observation of language's most subtle nuances, in an uncompromising effort to represent the event in terms of the event rather than in those of the observer, makes its reading uncommonly demanding. This demand constitutes itself the gravest and most exposed self-testimony, one in which Antelme constantly warns against slipping into "comfortable" categories and against a possible escape into the saturated state of the "gratified" conscience. In the traumatized domain of language, the symbolic gradually collapses into the excess of real suffering. Language is the stage for Antelme's most relentless struggle for vividness, now radically tested by the stagnation of the traumatic reality.
