The paper explores the widely circulated idea that algorithms will soon be able to know people “b... more The paper explores the widely circulated idea that algorithms will soon be able to know people “better than they know themselves.” I address this idea from two perspectives. First I argue for the particular subjective qualities of experience and self-understanding issuing from our engagement with the world and the constitutive role of our reflexive relation to ourselves. These are not “known” by the algorithms. I then address our fundamental opacity to ourselves and the biased, partial, and limited nature of human self-understanding. Our failure to know ourselves is however essential to our subjectivity and therefore, to know a subject in a perfect way that bypasses these limitations is actually not to know them. Taken together, both direc- tions show that while algorithmic knowledge of humans can be vast, and can outperform their own knowledge, it remains foreign to their subjectivity and cannot be said to be better than self-understanding.
Psychoanalysis and autobiography are both projects of self understanding. In both, the attempt to... more Psychoanalysis and autobiography are both projects of self understanding. In both, the attempt to understand oneself reaches a limit. What is the nature of the limit to self-knowledge? The first chapter, "Mors" of Michel Leiris's Scraps (Fourbis), the second volume of his The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), richly explores the limits encountered in the attempt to understand oneself, and the circumstances in which it runs into opacity. There are two kinds of obstacles to self-knowledge, and both can be read in Freud's famous metaphor of the navel of the dream. We could either think of a well-hidden, inaccessible nucleus of meaning or of a network that spreads infinitely, its edges impossible to trace. These two images of obstacles each support a certain structure of meaning and inquiry. Leiris's text oscillates between the two models.
Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. Special issue Politics of Literature, Politics of the Archive, edited by Tom Chadwick and Pieter Vermeulen, 2020
Total Recall (Bell and Gemmell, 2009) is a non-fiction book proposing a vision of a complete digi... more Total Recall (Bell and Gemmell, 2009) is a non-fiction book proposing a vision of a complete digital archive of everything we do, see or hear. Cameras and devices would constantly record out experience, creating a digital copy of one’s memory. I read this vision as a contemporary form of autobiography, expressing fantasies of self-representation, mostly the will for erasing the gap between one’s representation and oneself. The vision attempts to create a representation of oneself that would be identical to oneself and capture one’s past experience. Yet this dreamt-of faithful self-representation – direct, ongoing, automatic, objective – merely constitutes further proof of the difficulty inherent in autobiography. The outcome of the attempt to create the most exact representation, would be a dataset from which precisely the subject is absent. The perspective of literary autobiography thus helps shed light on new and evolving contemporary practices.
Jorge Semprun’s life (1923-2011) spans the twentieth century; he had the strange and difficult op... more Jorge Semprun’s life (1923-2011) spans the twentieth century; he had the strange and difficult opportunity of living through several of its key moments, mostly its dark sides. He fled Spain during the civil war, was a member of the resistance in France, was tortured by the Gestapo and prisoned in Buchenwald, then, after the war, a clandestine organizer of the Communist party of resistance to Franco in Spain for years, then a harsh critic of communism. He became one of the most important voices in the literature of the camps, with texts such as Le grand Voyage (The Long Voyage) (1963) and L’écriture ou la vie (Literature or Life) (1994).
The new volume of Yale French Studies constitutes an overall assessment of Semprun’s work. Including both new perspectives and pieces by authors who have written widely on Semprun, this volume is a refreshing and dynamic look at one of the twentieth-century’s most interesting literary voices. Although Semprun is probably best known for his testimonial writing on Buchenwald, his oeuvre is diverse and polymorphous. The current volume deals with all the genres of his writing, some of them—the screen plays, the novels and the essays—only rarely studied, thus hopefully allowing the fuller scope and plurality of his work to emerge. Contributions to the volume also deal with texts ranging from Semprun’s earliest work—Le Grand Voyage (1963)—to his posthumous writings and study both his texts written in French and those written in Spanish. The introduction to the volume serves as a general introduction to Semprun’s work. The volume will be of interest to anyone interested in Semprun’s work.
Was 'death' a lacuna at the heart of Sigmund Freud's work? Liran Razinsky argues that the questio... more Was 'death' a lacuna at the heart of Sigmund Freud's work? Liran Razinsky argues that the question of death is repressed, rejected and avoided by Freud, therefore resulting in an impairment of the entire theoretical structure of psychoanalysis. Razinsky supports his claim through a series of close readings of psychoanalytic texts (including not just Freud, but Klein, Kohut, Jung and Lacan among others) that explore psychoanalysis' inattention to this fundamental human concern. The readings are combined to form an overall critique of psychoanalysis – one that remains sympathetic but calls for a rethinking of the issue of death. In presenting a fresh and persuasive interpretation of the Freudian corpus, this book will be of interest to scholars of Freud's thought and psychoanalysis, literary scholars, analysts, clinicians and to all those curious about death's psychic life.
Originally written in French, The Kindly Ones (2006) is the first major work of the Jewish-Americ... more Originally written in French, The Kindly Ones (2006) is the first major work of the Jewish-American author Jonathan Littell. Its extraordinary critical and commercial success, spawning a series of heated debates, has made this publication one of the most significant literary phenomena of recent years.
Taking the Holocaust as its central topic, The Kindly Ones is a disturbing novel: disturbing in its use of explicit sexual descriptions, in its construction of a perverted psychic world, in its combination of accurate historical descriptions and myths, and in its repeated suggestion that Nazism does not, in fact, lie outside the spectrum of humanness. Due to its striking monumental proportions and the author’s provocative choice to recount historical events from the perpetrator’s perspective, this opus marks a significant shift within Holocaust literature.
In this volume, fourteen leading literary scholars and historians from eight different countries closely study this unsettling work. They examine the disconcerting aspects of the novel including the use of the Nazi viewpoint, analyze the aesthetics of the novel and its contradictions, and explore its relations with several literary traditions. They outline Littell’s use of historical details and materials and study the novel’s reception. This compilation of essays is essential to anyone intrigued by The Kindly Ones or by the Holocaust and who wishes to gain a better understanding of them.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Book’s Provocation
Georges Nivat: Adelphic Incest in Musil, Nabokov, and Littell
Peter Kuon: From ‘Kitsch’ to ‘Splatter’: The Aesthetics of Violence in The Kindly Ones
Liran Razinsky: The Similarity of Perpetrators
Cyril Aslanov: Visibility and Iconicity of the German Language in The Kindly Ones
The Perpetrator’s Point of View
Catherine Coquio: ‘Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.’ (Who is the Perpetrator Talking To?)
Luc Rasson: How Nazis Undermine their Own Point of View
Aurélie Barjonet: Manufacturing Memories: Textual and Mnemonic Weaving in The Kindly Ones
Memory & Intertexts
Martin von Koppenfels: The infamous ‘I’: Notes on Littell and Céline
Leona Toker: The Kindly Ones and the ‘Scorched-Earth’ Principle
Sandra Janßen: The Perpetrator as a Totalitarian Subject: Allegiance and Guilt in The Kindly Ones
Historical Perspectives
Jeremy Popkin: A Historian’s View of The Kindly Ones
Hans-Joachim Hahn: ‘Morality’ and ‘Humanness’: Reading Littell with Speer, Fest, Syberberg and Others
The Reception of the Novel
Wolfgang Asholt: A German Reading of the German Reception of The Kindly Ones
Helena Duffy: La bienveillance de la critique polonaise. An Analysis of the Polish Reception of Les Bienveillantes
Index
This paper explores the autobiographical desire for a complete, comprehensive representation of o... more This paper explores the autobiographical desire for a complete, comprehensive representation of oneself, a recording of a life that includes everything about oneself. It does so through a brief look at some such examples from French literature, but mostly through an in-depth analysis of a recent book, Total Recall (Bell and Gemmell, 2009), representative of many similar technological endeavors today, which puts forth a vision of a complete digital recording of one’s experiences to create a sort of digital archive of one’s memories. My paper questions this aspiration for totality, ranging from its more abstract aspects to the actual technicalities of the vision.
What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphe... more What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphere? Examining this question in the case of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, read here as an autobiographical text, this paper explores the intricate nexus of ambition, death and writing. Freud is possessed by the possibility of becoming famous, a public persona, immortal. His route to achieving this is the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. He aspires to greatness, and yet the very project that is supposed to secure it is fragile and insecure; the very project entails a risk. The same text that could secure one’s immortality becomes the locus of one’s absence. Publishing renders the most intimate text public and at a distance from oneself. The wish for glory cannot be assuaged through a published text, which is a public affair. One cannot make a name for oneself.
This paper serves as the introduction to a special issue of Yale French Studies on Semprun. It is... more This paper serves as the introduction to a special issue of Yale French Studies on Semprun. It is intended as a general introduction to Semprun's work (and could be assigned reading to courses on him). After briefly describing Semprun's biography, struggles and commitments (Spanish civil war, torture and imprisonment by the Gestapo, being a prisoner in Buchenwald, undercover work for the Spanish communist party in the time of Franco etc), it moves on to discuss his work, highlighting several of its most significant characteristics: The preference for chronological labyrinths; the use of repetition; the games Semprun plays with identity; the heavy use of intertextuality; and the remarkable playfulness, reflexivity and self-referentiality of his texts. The paper then examines the central question in his writing, namely that of fiction and reality. It ends with a few comments on Semprun’s literary legacy
This paper is a reading of Jorge Semprun’s Le mort qu’il faut as a double story. In this text Sem... more This paper is a reading of Jorge Semprun’s Le mort qu’il faut as a double story. In this text Semprun recounts the previously untold episode of how he switched identities with a dying inmate in Buchenwald. The text allows Semprun to dramatize and give narrative expression to two themes central to his work. First, it allows Semprun to express the idea, common to many survivors, of having already died in the camps. Second, it allows him to articulate the theme, running through his work, of the ethical necessity to speak in the name of the dead, to bear witness to another’s death. I show how Semprun’s text is built as a version of a Doppelgänger story using common themes of that literary topos. The double, who is both me and other, allows Semprun to “die” and remain alive, and to testify to his own death as well as that of an other. Semprun can thus treat the other’s death as fundamentally his own. On a more theoretical level, the double figure in Le mort qu’il faut allows Semprun to formulate his response to the Agamben-Levi paradox of witnessing, namely that those who have survived, because they have survived, are not the real witnesses. Semprun disrupts the dichotomy of having either touched bottom or become a witness. What allows him to take such a position is the idea of virtuality. One testifies not only to what happened but also to what could have happened, and did happen to the other. The other can embody the virtual fate of the survivor. Semprun articulates in Le mort qu’il faut a sense of shared experience. Lastly, the notion of virtuality paves the way for for the possibility that fiction could convey the experience of the camps.
The current paper focuses on an important topos of autobiographical writing on childhood in the 2... more The current paper focuses on an important topos of autobiographical writing on childhood in the 20th century: the experience of encountering the concept of death for the first time. In analyzing a series of examples from Benjamin, Freud, de Beauvoir and mostly Michel Leiris, I examine the way the scene of becoming aware to human transience is shaped and the way it functions within the autobiographical endeavor. I claim such scenes are one possible textual representation of emerging subjectivity and of taking leave from childhood. I stress ,for example the dynamic of truth and lie in these scenes. The center of the paper is the role of such scenes play in autobiographies. Given that the author’s future death remains the never-written horizon of every autobiography and under one perspective, its unattainable condition of success, a constant menace of never being able to capture the essence of oneself, I suggest to see the description of a childhood scene where death as a possibility was first encountered as a possible replacement for the absent place of death in autobiography. The retrospective description of a childhood scene of encountering death is uniting the present narrator and the past narrated self.
Paper appeared in a special issue of the Journal Dapim (Haifa University Press on Children and Literature, Edited by Vered Lev Kenaan and Dennis Sobolev. A version of this paper will soon be available in French.
This paper offers a reading of Maupassant's Le Horla by focusing on the questions of human body a... more This paper offers a reading of Maupassant's Le Horla by focusing on the questions of human body and bodily existence. After pointing to several aspects of the narrator's narcissism at the beginning of the novella, the text will follow the dissolution of that narcissistic position. If to begin with the narrator, despising the body, is detached from any bodily dimension and is seemingly a pure mind and gaze, with the help of his double, the Horla, he gradually discovers bodily existence. This breaking up from the fascination of the image constitutes an advance towards experiencing himself. The full passage is therefore from the narcissism of the image, of the exterior, from empty representation, to a true feeling of oneself, of one's existence, through one's vital bodily essence: from the emptiness of the image and the privileging of sight to the fullness of dynamic experience. Through the transparent presence of the other the narrator finds himself.
Yale French Studies: Literature and History: Around Suite française and Les Bienveillantes (special issue), Edited by Richard J. Golsan and Philip Watts, , 2012
This paper argues that psychoanalysis should open itself more to dialogue with the humanities. It... more This paper argues that psychoanalysis should open itself more to dialogue with the humanities. It shows why this is the case and analyzes the forces that go against such openness. It explores the affinities of psychoanalysis and the humanities and their common interests. It begins by addressing the direct contributions of specific research in the humanities on psychoanalysis. It then looks at the more general benefits possible were there improved dialogue with the humanities and, finally, at psychoanalysis' affinity with a specific part of the humanities, namely, its critical ethos.
In November 1915 Freud wrote one of his most beautiful, albeit extremely short, texts: ‘On Trans... more In November 1915 Freud wrote one of his most beautiful, albeit extremely short, texts: ‘On Transience’. This text, consisting of a dialogue between Freud and a poet whom we now know was Rilke, is a rumination on the meaning and implications of transience in our life: does transience rob life of its value and meaning, or does it add to that value? In this article I explore the reflection on the passing of time that ‘On Transience’ suggests: how the passing of time interacts with our attribution of meaningfulness and shapes our approach to life. The article also deals with the tension between repetitiveness and the uniqueness or specificity of objects within time, and explores the question of the persistence of value, especially literary value, in the face of time and transience, and the link between death and literary creation. Finally, the article refers to the immediate historical context of this reflection on the ephemeral, namely the destruction brought about by war.
This is the sixth chapter of Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2013). ... more This is the sixth chapter of Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2013). I this chapter I try to elucidate some of the complexities and problematics of Freud’s thinking about death, by dealing with his most important text on the subject, a paper written in 1915 called “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” While on the whole, as I argue in previous chapters, Freud’s writings show little theoretical interest in the issue of death or are reductionistic, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” is often taken to express a different position, a more “existential” concern with death. Through a close reading of this text, we see however how self-contradictory it is, with reductionist and existentialist views of death locked in a struggle. Freud’s text contains, I show, two different attitudes toward death, each one seeking expression: one that finds in death a meaningful and important coordinate for human life, and another that disregards the importance of death per se in our mental life. The two attitudes come into constant confrontation and which incessantly undermine both each other’s claims and the logic of the article as a whole.
The paper explores the widely circulated idea that algorithms will soon be able to know people “b... more The paper explores the widely circulated idea that algorithms will soon be able to know people “better than they know themselves.” I address this idea from two perspectives. First I argue for the particular subjective qualities of experience and self-understanding issuing from our engagement with the world and the constitutive role of our reflexive relation to ourselves. These are not “known” by the algorithms. I then address our fundamental opacity to ourselves and the biased, partial, and limited nature of human self-understanding. Our failure to know ourselves is however essential to our subjectivity and therefore, to know a subject in a perfect way that bypasses these limitations is actually not to know them. Taken together, both direc- tions show that while algorithmic knowledge of humans can be vast, and can outperform their own knowledge, it remains foreign to their subjectivity and cannot be said to be better than self-understanding.
Psychoanalysis and autobiography are both projects of self understanding. In both, the attempt to... more Psychoanalysis and autobiography are both projects of self understanding. In both, the attempt to understand oneself reaches a limit. What is the nature of the limit to self-knowledge? The first chapter, "Mors" of Michel Leiris's Scraps (Fourbis), the second volume of his The Rules of the Game (La règle du jeu), richly explores the limits encountered in the attempt to understand oneself, and the circumstances in which it runs into opacity. There are two kinds of obstacles to self-knowledge, and both can be read in Freud's famous metaphor of the navel of the dream. We could either think of a well-hidden, inaccessible nucleus of meaning or of a network that spreads infinitely, its edges impossible to trace. These two images of obstacles each support a certain structure of meaning and inquiry. Leiris's text oscillates between the two models.
Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. Special issue Politics of Literature, Politics of the Archive, edited by Tom Chadwick and Pieter Vermeulen, 2020
Total Recall (Bell and Gemmell, 2009) is a non-fiction book proposing a vision of a complete digi... more Total Recall (Bell and Gemmell, 2009) is a non-fiction book proposing a vision of a complete digital archive of everything we do, see or hear. Cameras and devices would constantly record out experience, creating a digital copy of one’s memory. I read this vision as a contemporary form of autobiography, expressing fantasies of self-representation, mostly the will for erasing the gap between one’s representation and oneself. The vision attempts to create a representation of oneself that would be identical to oneself and capture one’s past experience. Yet this dreamt-of faithful self-representation – direct, ongoing, automatic, objective – merely constitutes further proof of the difficulty inherent in autobiography. The outcome of the attempt to create the most exact representation, would be a dataset from which precisely the subject is absent. The perspective of literary autobiography thus helps shed light on new and evolving contemporary practices.
Jorge Semprun’s life (1923-2011) spans the twentieth century; he had the strange and difficult op... more Jorge Semprun’s life (1923-2011) spans the twentieth century; he had the strange and difficult opportunity of living through several of its key moments, mostly its dark sides. He fled Spain during the civil war, was a member of the resistance in France, was tortured by the Gestapo and prisoned in Buchenwald, then, after the war, a clandestine organizer of the Communist party of resistance to Franco in Spain for years, then a harsh critic of communism. He became one of the most important voices in the literature of the camps, with texts such as Le grand Voyage (The Long Voyage) (1963) and L’écriture ou la vie (Literature or Life) (1994).
The new volume of Yale French Studies constitutes an overall assessment of Semprun’s work. Including both new perspectives and pieces by authors who have written widely on Semprun, this volume is a refreshing and dynamic look at one of the twentieth-century’s most interesting literary voices. Although Semprun is probably best known for his testimonial writing on Buchenwald, his oeuvre is diverse and polymorphous. The current volume deals with all the genres of his writing, some of them—the screen plays, the novels and the essays—only rarely studied, thus hopefully allowing the fuller scope and plurality of his work to emerge. Contributions to the volume also deal with texts ranging from Semprun’s earliest work—Le Grand Voyage (1963)—to his posthumous writings and study both his texts written in French and those written in Spanish. The introduction to the volume serves as a general introduction to Semprun’s work. The volume will be of interest to anyone interested in Semprun’s work.
Was 'death' a lacuna at the heart of Sigmund Freud's work? Liran Razinsky argues that the questio... more Was 'death' a lacuna at the heart of Sigmund Freud's work? Liran Razinsky argues that the question of death is repressed, rejected and avoided by Freud, therefore resulting in an impairment of the entire theoretical structure of psychoanalysis. Razinsky supports his claim through a series of close readings of psychoanalytic texts (including not just Freud, but Klein, Kohut, Jung and Lacan among others) that explore psychoanalysis' inattention to this fundamental human concern. The readings are combined to form an overall critique of psychoanalysis – one that remains sympathetic but calls for a rethinking of the issue of death. In presenting a fresh and persuasive interpretation of the Freudian corpus, this book will be of interest to scholars of Freud's thought and psychoanalysis, literary scholars, analysts, clinicians and to all those curious about death's psychic life.
Originally written in French, The Kindly Ones (2006) is the first major work of the Jewish-Americ... more Originally written in French, The Kindly Ones (2006) is the first major work of the Jewish-American author Jonathan Littell. Its extraordinary critical and commercial success, spawning a series of heated debates, has made this publication one of the most significant literary phenomena of recent years.
Taking the Holocaust as its central topic, The Kindly Ones is a disturbing novel: disturbing in its use of explicit sexual descriptions, in its construction of a perverted psychic world, in its combination of accurate historical descriptions and myths, and in its repeated suggestion that Nazism does not, in fact, lie outside the spectrum of humanness. Due to its striking monumental proportions and the author’s provocative choice to recount historical events from the perpetrator’s perspective, this opus marks a significant shift within Holocaust literature.
In this volume, fourteen leading literary scholars and historians from eight different countries closely study this unsettling work. They examine the disconcerting aspects of the novel including the use of the Nazi viewpoint, analyze the aesthetics of the novel and its contradictions, and explore its relations with several literary traditions. They outline Littell’s use of historical details and materials and study the novel’s reception. This compilation of essays is essential to anyone intrigued by The Kindly Ones or by the Holocaust and who wishes to gain a better understanding of them.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Book’s Provocation
Georges Nivat: Adelphic Incest in Musil, Nabokov, and Littell
Peter Kuon: From ‘Kitsch’ to ‘Splatter’: The Aesthetics of Violence in The Kindly Ones
Liran Razinsky: The Similarity of Perpetrators
Cyril Aslanov: Visibility and Iconicity of the German Language in The Kindly Ones
The Perpetrator’s Point of View
Catherine Coquio: ‘Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.’ (Who is the Perpetrator Talking To?)
Luc Rasson: How Nazis Undermine their Own Point of View
Aurélie Barjonet: Manufacturing Memories: Textual and Mnemonic Weaving in The Kindly Ones
Memory & Intertexts
Martin von Koppenfels: The infamous ‘I’: Notes on Littell and Céline
Leona Toker: The Kindly Ones and the ‘Scorched-Earth’ Principle
Sandra Janßen: The Perpetrator as a Totalitarian Subject: Allegiance and Guilt in The Kindly Ones
Historical Perspectives
Jeremy Popkin: A Historian’s View of The Kindly Ones
Hans-Joachim Hahn: ‘Morality’ and ‘Humanness’: Reading Littell with Speer, Fest, Syberberg and Others
The Reception of the Novel
Wolfgang Asholt: A German Reading of the German Reception of The Kindly Ones
Helena Duffy: La bienveillance de la critique polonaise. An Analysis of the Polish Reception of Les Bienveillantes
Index
This paper explores the autobiographical desire for a complete, comprehensive representation of o... more This paper explores the autobiographical desire for a complete, comprehensive representation of oneself, a recording of a life that includes everything about oneself. It does so through a brief look at some such examples from French literature, but mostly through an in-depth analysis of a recent book, Total Recall (Bell and Gemmell, 2009), representative of many similar technological endeavors today, which puts forth a vision of a complete digital recording of one’s experiences to create a sort of digital archive of one’s memories. My paper questions this aspiration for totality, ranging from its more abstract aspects to the actual technicalities of the vision.
What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphe... more What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphere? Examining this question in the case of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, read here as an autobiographical text, this paper explores the intricate nexus of ambition, death and writing. Freud is possessed by the possibility of becoming famous, a public persona, immortal. His route to achieving this is the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. He aspires to greatness, and yet the very project that is supposed to secure it is fragile and insecure; the very project entails a risk. The same text that could secure one’s immortality becomes the locus of one’s absence. Publishing renders the most intimate text public and at a distance from oneself. The wish for glory cannot be assuaged through a published text, which is a public affair. One cannot make a name for oneself.
This paper serves as the introduction to a special issue of Yale French Studies on Semprun. It is... more This paper serves as the introduction to a special issue of Yale French Studies on Semprun. It is intended as a general introduction to Semprun's work (and could be assigned reading to courses on him). After briefly describing Semprun's biography, struggles and commitments (Spanish civil war, torture and imprisonment by the Gestapo, being a prisoner in Buchenwald, undercover work for the Spanish communist party in the time of Franco etc), it moves on to discuss his work, highlighting several of its most significant characteristics: The preference for chronological labyrinths; the use of repetition; the games Semprun plays with identity; the heavy use of intertextuality; and the remarkable playfulness, reflexivity and self-referentiality of his texts. The paper then examines the central question in his writing, namely that of fiction and reality. It ends with a few comments on Semprun’s literary legacy
This paper is a reading of Jorge Semprun’s Le mort qu’il faut as a double story. In this text Sem... more This paper is a reading of Jorge Semprun’s Le mort qu’il faut as a double story. In this text Semprun recounts the previously untold episode of how he switched identities with a dying inmate in Buchenwald. The text allows Semprun to dramatize and give narrative expression to two themes central to his work. First, it allows Semprun to express the idea, common to many survivors, of having already died in the camps. Second, it allows him to articulate the theme, running through his work, of the ethical necessity to speak in the name of the dead, to bear witness to another’s death. I show how Semprun’s text is built as a version of a Doppelgänger story using common themes of that literary topos. The double, who is both me and other, allows Semprun to “die” and remain alive, and to testify to his own death as well as that of an other. Semprun can thus treat the other’s death as fundamentally his own. On a more theoretical level, the double figure in Le mort qu’il faut allows Semprun to formulate his response to the Agamben-Levi paradox of witnessing, namely that those who have survived, because they have survived, are not the real witnesses. Semprun disrupts the dichotomy of having either touched bottom or become a witness. What allows him to take such a position is the idea of virtuality. One testifies not only to what happened but also to what could have happened, and did happen to the other. The other can embody the virtual fate of the survivor. Semprun articulates in Le mort qu’il faut a sense of shared experience. Lastly, the notion of virtuality paves the way for for the possibility that fiction could convey the experience of the camps.
The current paper focuses on an important topos of autobiographical writing on childhood in the 2... more The current paper focuses on an important topos of autobiographical writing on childhood in the 20th century: the experience of encountering the concept of death for the first time. In analyzing a series of examples from Benjamin, Freud, de Beauvoir and mostly Michel Leiris, I examine the way the scene of becoming aware to human transience is shaped and the way it functions within the autobiographical endeavor. I claim such scenes are one possible textual representation of emerging subjectivity and of taking leave from childhood. I stress ,for example the dynamic of truth and lie in these scenes. The center of the paper is the role of such scenes play in autobiographies. Given that the author’s future death remains the never-written horizon of every autobiography and under one perspective, its unattainable condition of success, a constant menace of never being able to capture the essence of oneself, I suggest to see the description of a childhood scene where death as a possibility was first encountered as a possible replacement for the absent place of death in autobiography. The retrospective description of a childhood scene of encountering death is uniting the present narrator and the past narrated self.
Paper appeared in a special issue of the Journal Dapim (Haifa University Press on Children and Literature, Edited by Vered Lev Kenaan and Dennis Sobolev. A version of this paper will soon be available in French.
This paper offers a reading of Maupassant's Le Horla by focusing on the questions of human body a... more This paper offers a reading of Maupassant's Le Horla by focusing on the questions of human body and bodily existence. After pointing to several aspects of the narrator's narcissism at the beginning of the novella, the text will follow the dissolution of that narcissistic position. If to begin with the narrator, despising the body, is detached from any bodily dimension and is seemingly a pure mind and gaze, with the help of his double, the Horla, he gradually discovers bodily existence. This breaking up from the fascination of the image constitutes an advance towards experiencing himself. The full passage is therefore from the narcissism of the image, of the exterior, from empty representation, to a true feeling of oneself, of one's existence, through one's vital bodily essence: from the emptiness of the image and the privileging of sight to the fullness of dynamic experience. Through the transparent presence of the other the narrator finds himself.
Yale French Studies: Literature and History: Around Suite française and Les Bienveillantes (special issue), Edited by Richard J. Golsan and Philip Watts, , 2012
This paper argues that psychoanalysis should open itself more to dialogue with the humanities. It... more This paper argues that psychoanalysis should open itself more to dialogue with the humanities. It shows why this is the case and analyzes the forces that go against such openness. It explores the affinities of psychoanalysis and the humanities and their common interests. It begins by addressing the direct contributions of specific research in the humanities on psychoanalysis. It then looks at the more general benefits possible were there improved dialogue with the humanities and, finally, at psychoanalysis' affinity with a specific part of the humanities, namely, its critical ethos.
In November 1915 Freud wrote one of his most beautiful, albeit extremely short, texts: ‘On Trans... more In November 1915 Freud wrote one of his most beautiful, albeit extremely short, texts: ‘On Transience’. This text, consisting of a dialogue between Freud and a poet whom we now know was Rilke, is a rumination on the meaning and implications of transience in our life: does transience rob life of its value and meaning, or does it add to that value? In this article I explore the reflection on the passing of time that ‘On Transience’ suggests: how the passing of time interacts with our attribution of meaningfulness and shapes our approach to life. The article also deals with the tension between repetitiveness and the uniqueness or specificity of objects within time, and explores the question of the persistence of value, especially literary value, in the face of time and transience, and the link between death and literary creation. Finally, the article refers to the immediate historical context of this reflection on the ephemeral, namely the destruction brought about by war.
This is the sixth chapter of Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2013). ... more This is the sixth chapter of Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2013). I this chapter I try to elucidate some of the complexities and problematics of Freud’s thinking about death, by dealing with his most important text on the subject, a paper written in 1915 called “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” While on the whole, as I argue in previous chapters, Freud’s writings show little theoretical interest in the issue of death or are reductionistic, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” is often taken to express a different position, a more “existential” concern with death. Through a close reading of this text, we see however how self-contradictory it is, with reductionist and existentialist views of death locked in a struggle. Freud’s text contains, I show, two different attitudes toward death, each one seeking expression: one that finds in death a meaningful and important coordinate for human life, and another that disregards the importance of death per se in our mental life. The two attitudes come into constant confrontation and which incessantly undermine both each other’s claims and the logic of the article as a whole.
Writing the Holocaust Today: Critical Perspectives on The Kindly Ones. Edited by Aurélie Barjonet and Liran Razinsky, 2012
In his role as interpreter of the Nazi system, Max Aue’s most consistent ideological “message” se... more In his role as interpreter of the Nazi system, Max Aue’s most consistent ideological “message” seems to be his constant equation of Nazi crimes with other atrocities. Aue primarily draws ties between Nazi and Stalinist crimes, as well as those of colonialism. By focusing on two key images in the text where Soviet and German atrocities are evoked as symmetrical, this paper examines how the notion of similarity amongst perpetrators functions. By closely examining the textual treatment of this notion, the paper underlines the complexity through which the question is raised, problematized, contextualized, and explored within Littell’s text, in contrast to Aue’s wholehearted evocation of this idea.
Psychoanalysis and postmodernism: A response to Dr. Jon Mills’ “A Critique of the Postmodern Turn... more Psychoanalysis and postmodernism: A response to Dr. Jon Mills’ “A Critique of the Postmodern Turn in Relational Psychoanalysis” - Lecture. Begin time: 27:45
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly
Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death is a scholarly, well-thought-out,... more The Psychoanalytic Quarterly
Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death is a scholarly, well-thought-out, care- fully reasoned work. It very much deserves our attention. We can only be grateful to Liran Razinsky for having written it. I recommend it highly.
Review of Freud, Pscyhoanalysis and Death (CUP, 2013) by Martin Schmidt, Journal of Analytical Ps... more Review of Freud, Pscyhoanalysis and Death (CUP, 2013) by Martin Schmidt, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2016, 61, 2, 244–248.
This is perhaps not the first review to read if you want a comprehensive understanding of the book (try Silverman, above for that), but it's nice and offers some comments on it.
Review of my book, Freud, Pyschoanalysis and Death, by Ronald C. Naso, appeared in the Psychoanal... more Review of my book, Freud, Pyschoanalysis and Death, by Ronald C. Naso, appeared in the Psychoanalytic Review, 2015
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tions show that while algorithmic knowledge of humans can be vast, and can outperform their own knowledge, it remains foreign to their subjectivity and cannot be said to be better than self-understanding.
The new volume of Yale French Studies constitutes an overall assessment of Semprun’s work. Including both new perspectives and pieces by authors who have written widely on Semprun, this volume is a refreshing and dynamic look at one of the twentieth-century’s most interesting literary voices.
Although Semprun is probably best known for his testimonial writing on Buchenwald, his oeuvre is diverse and polymorphous. The current volume deals with all the genres of his writing, some of them—the screen plays, the novels and the essays—only rarely studied, thus hopefully allowing the fuller scope and plurality of his work to emerge. Contributions to the volume also deal with texts ranging from Semprun’s earliest work—Le Grand Voyage (1963)—to his posthumous writings and study both his texts written in French and those written in Spanish. The introduction to the volume serves as a general introduction to Semprun’s work. The volume will be of interest to anyone interested in Semprun’s work.
Taking the Holocaust as its central topic, The Kindly Ones is a disturbing novel: disturbing in its use of explicit sexual descriptions, in its construction of a perverted psychic world, in its combination of accurate historical descriptions and myths, and in its repeated suggestion that Nazism does not, in fact, lie outside the spectrum of humanness. Due to its striking monumental proportions and the author’s provocative choice to recount historical events from the perpetrator’s perspective, this opus marks a significant shift within Holocaust literature.
In this volume, fourteen leading literary scholars and historians from eight different countries closely study this unsettling work. They examine the disconcerting aspects of the novel including the use of the Nazi viewpoint, analyze the aesthetics of the novel and its contradictions, and explore its relations with several literary traditions. They outline Littell’s use of historical details and materials and study the novel’s reception. This compilation of essays is essential to anyone intrigued by The Kindly Ones or by the Holocaust and who wishes to gain a better understanding of them.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Book’s Provocation
Georges Nivat: Adelphic Incest in Musil, Nabokov, and Littell
Peter Kuon: From ‘Kitsch’ to ‘Splatter’: The Aesthetics of Violence in The Kindly Ones
Liran Razinsky: The Similarity of Perpetrators
Cyril Aslanov: Visibility and Iconicity of the German Language in The Kindly Ones
The Perpetrator’s Point of View
Catherine Coquio: ‘Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.’ (Who is the Perpetrator Talking To?)
Luc Rasson: How Nazis Undermine their Own Point of View
Aurélie Barjonet: Manufacturing Memories: Textual and Mnemonic Weaving in The Kindly Ones
Memory & Intertexts
Martin von Koppenfels: The infamous ‘I’: Notes on Littell and Céline
Leona Toker: The Kindly Ones and the ‘Scorched-Earth’ Principle
Sandra Janßen: The Perpetrator as a Totalitarian Subject: Allegiance and Guilt in The Kindly Ones
Historical Perspectives
Jeremy Popkin: A Historian’s View of The Kindly Ones
Hans-Joachim Hahn: ‘Morality’ and ‘Humanness’: Reading Littell with Speer, Fest, Syberberg and Others
The Reception of the Novel
Wolfgang Asholt: A German Reading of the German Reception of The Kindly Ones
Helena Duffy: La bienveillance de la critique polonaise. An Analysis of the Polish Reception of Les Bienveillantes
Index
The preference for chronological labyrinths; the use of repetition; the games Semprun plays with identity; the heavy use of intertextuality; and the remarkable playfulness, reflexivity and self-referentiality of his texts.
The paper then examines the central question in his writing, namely that of fiction and reality. It ends with a few comments on Semprun’s literary legacy
I show how Semprun’s text is built as a version of a Doppelgänger story using common themes of that literary topos. The double, who is both me and other, allows Semprun to “die” and remain alive, and to testify to his own death as well as that of an other. Semprun can thus treat the other’s death as fundamentally his own. On a more theoretical level, the double figure in Le mort qu’il faut allows Semprun to formulate his response to the Agamben-Levi paradox of witnessing, namely that those who have survived, because they have survived, are not the real witnesses. Semprun disrupts the dichotomy of having either touched bottom or become a witness. What allows him to take such a position is the idea of virtuality. One testifies not only to what happened but also to what could have happened, and did happen to the other. The other can embody the virtual fate of the survivor. Semprun articulates in Le mort qu’il faut a sense of shared experience. Lastly, the notion of virtuality paves the way for for the possibility that fiction could convey the experience of the camps.
The center of the paper is the role of such scenes play in autobiographies. Given that the author’s future death remains the never-written horizon of every autobiography and under one perspective, its unattainable condition of success, a constant menace of never being able to capture the essence of oneself, I suggest to see the description of a childhood scene where death as a possibility was first encountered as a possible replacement for the absent place of death in autobiography. The retrospective description of a childhood scene of encountering death is uniting the present narrator and the past narrated self.
Paper appeared in a special issue of the Journal Dapim (Haifa University Press on Children and Literature, Edited by Vered Lev Kenaan and Dennis Sobolev.
A version of this paper will soon be available in French.
While on the whole, as I argue in previous chapters, Freud’s writings show little theoretical interest in the issue of death or are reductionistic, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” is often taken to express a different position, a more “existential” concern with death. Through a close reading of this text, we see however how self-contradictory it is, with reductionist and existentialist views of death locked in a struggle.
Freud’s text contains, I show, two different attitudes toward death, each one seeking expression: one that finds in death a meaningful and important coordinate for human life, and another that disregards the importance of death per se in our mental life. The two attitudes come into constant confrontation and which incessantly undermine both each other’s claims and the logic of the article as a whole.
tions show that while algorithmic knowledge of humans can be vast, and can outperform their own knowledge, it remains foreign to their subjectivity and cannot be said to be better than self-understanding.
The new volume of Yale French Studies constitutes an overall assessment of Semprun’s work. Including both new perspectives and pieces by authors who have written widely on Semprun, this volume is a refreshing and dynamic look at one of the twentieth-century’s most interesting literary voices.
Although Semprun is probably best known for his testimonial writing on Buchenwald, his oeuvre is diverse and polymorphous. The current volume deals with all the genres of his writing, some of them—the screen plays, the novels and the essays—only rarely studied, thus hopefully allowing the fuller scope and plurality of his work to emerge. Contributions to the volume also deal with texts ranging from Semprun’s earliest work—Le Grand Voyage (1963)—to his posthumous writings and study both his texts written in French and those written in Spanish. The introduction to the volume serves as a general introduction to Semprun’s work. The volume will be of interest to anyone interested in Semprun’s work.
Taking the Holocaust as its central topic, The Kindly Ones is a disturbing novel: disturbing in its use of explicit sexual descriptions, in its construction of a perverted psychic world, in its combination of accurate historical descriptions and myths, and in its repeated suggestion that Nazism does not, in fact, lie outside the spectrum of humanness. Due to its striking monumental proportions and the author’s provocative choice to recount historical events from the perpetrator’s perspective, this opus marks a significant shift within Holocaust literature.
In this volume, fourteen leading literary scholars and historians from eight different countries closely study this unsettling work. They examine the disconcerting aspects of the novel including the use of the Nazi viewpoint, analyze the aesthetics of the novel and its contradictions, and explore its relations with several literary traditions. They outline Littell’s use of historical details and materials and study the novel’s reception. This compilation of essays is essential to anyone intrigued by The Kindly Ones or by the Holocaust and who wishes to gain a better understanding of them.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Book’s Provocation
Georges Nivat: Adelphic Incest in Musil, Nabokov, and Littell
Peter Kuon: From ‘Kitsch’ to ‘Splatter’: The Aesthetics of Violence in The Kindly Ones
Liran Razinsky: The Similarity of Perpetrators
Cyril Aslanov: Visibility and Iconicity of the German Language in The Kindly Ones
The Perpetrator’s Point of View
Catherine Coquio: ‘Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened.’ (Who is the Perpetrator Talking To?)
Luc Rasson: How Nazis Undermine their Own Point of View
Aurélie Barjonet: Manufacturing Memories: Textual and Mnemonic Weaving in The Kindly Ones
Memory & Intertexts
Martin von Koppenfels: The infamous ‘I’: Notes on Littell and Céline
Leona Toker: The Kindly Ones and the ‘Scorched-Earth’ Principle
Sandra Janßen: The Perpetrator as a Totalitarian Subject: Allegiance and Guilt in The Kindly Ones
Historical Perspectives
Jeremy Popkin: A Historian’s View of The Kindly Ones
Hans-Joachim Hahn: ‘Morality’ and ‘Humanness’: Reading Littell with Speer, Fest, Syberberg and Others
The Reception of the Novel
Wolfgang Asholt: A German Reading of the German Reception of The Kindly Ones
Helena Duffy: La bienveillance de la critique polonaise. An Analysis of the Polish Reception of Les Bienveillantes
Index
The preference for chronological labyrinths; the use of repetition; the games Semprun plays with identity; the heavy use of intertextuality; and the remarkable playfulness, reflexivity and self-referentiality of his texts.
The paper then examines the central question in his writing, namely that of fiction and reality. It ends with a few comments on Semprun’s literary legacy
I show how Semprun’s text is built as a version of a Doppelgänger story using common themes of that literary topos. The double, who is both me and other, allows Semprun to “die” and remain alive, and to testify to his own death as well as that of an other. Semprun can thus treat the other’s death as fundamentally his own. On a more theoretical level, the double figure in Le mort qu’il faut allows Semprun to formulate his response to the Agamben-Levi paradox of witnessing, namely that those who have survived, because they have survived, are not the real witnesses. Semprun disrupts the dichotomy of having either touched bottom or become a witness. What allows him to take such a position is the idea of virtuality. One testifies not only to what happened but also to what could have happened, and did happen to the other. The other can embody the virtual fate of the survivor. Semprun articulates in Le mort qu’il faut a sense of shared experience. Lastly, the notion of virtuality paves the way for for the possibility that fiction could convey the experience of the camps.
The center of the paper is the role of such scenes play in autobiographies. Given that the author’s future death remains the never-written horizon of every autobiography and under one perspective, its unattainable condition of success, a constant menace of never being able to capture the essence of oneself, I suggest to see the description of a childhood scene where death as a possibility was first encountered as a possible replacement for the absent place of death in autobiography. The retrospective description of a childhood scene of encountering death is uniting the present narrator and the past narrated self.
Paper appeared in a special issue of the Journal Dapim (Haifa University Press on Children and Literature, Edited by Vered Lev Kenaan and Dennis Sobolev.
A version of this paper will soon be available in French.
While on the whole, as I argue in previous chapters, Freud’s writings show little theoretical interest in the issue of death or are reductionistic, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” is often taken to express a different position, a more “existential” concern with death. Through a close reading of this text, we see however how self-contradictory it is, with reductionist and existentialist views of death locked in a struggle.
Freud’s text contains, I show, two different attitudes toward death, each one seeking expression: one that finds in death a meaningful and important coordinate for human life, and another that disregards the importance of death per se in our mental life. The two attitudes come into constant confrontation and which incessantly undermine both each other’s claims and the logic of the article as a whole.
Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death is a scholarly, well-thought-out, care- fully reasoned work. It very much deserves our attention. We can only be grateful to Liran Razinsky for having written it. I recommend it highly.
This is perhaps not the first review to read if you want a comprehensive understanding of the book (try Silverman, above for that), but it's nice and offers some comments on it.