Bruno Chaouat
Two years after the war, in 1947, a significant number of literary, testimonial, and philosophical works appeared in France and in other European countries. This chapter examines how these works, offering different responses to the war, share one feature: each, in its own genre and style, engages, directly or obliquely, explicitly or not, with the question of evil.
Unsurprisingly, a period of latency, albeit a relatively short one, was needed before these works could appear.1 Before turning to this corpus of texts published two years after the war, therefore, it is relevant to recall that in the early to mid-1940s, diaries, fictional works, and testimonies from survivors, résistants, or French Jews in hiding were published by prominent or minor presses. In 1944, for example, the Albin Michel publishing house brought out Le camp de la mort lente, a memoir written in 1943 by the playwright Jean-Jacques Bernard. Bernard was detained in Compiègne for several months from 1941 to 1942 along with other French Jewish intellectuals, including René Blum, brother of the Popular Front leader Léon Blum. This book was a poignant account of the first time he had ever been discriminated against, or practically even noticed, as a Jew. Bernard’s memoir reflects the kind of Jewish self-effacement demanded by the French Third Republic in the name of universalism—a demand that could easily segue into strident anti-Judaism, if not anti-Semitism. To be sure, the author at the time did not know the fate of those sent east from Vichy internment camps; perhaps otherwise he would have shown more compassion toward his coreligionists.
We can also cite the example of the former pacifist Jean Bruller, son of a Jewish father, who joined the Resistance under the assumed name Vercors, and cofounded the underground publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit. In 1943, the same year Bernard penned his account, Vercors wrote and published both the short story La marche à l’étoile2 and the book that would become a best seller, Le silence de la mer.3 The latter is a robust defense, pace Jacques Derrida, of unconditional inhospitality as résistance.4 Indeed, the main message of the novella, arguably a classic of Résistance propaganda, was that it was wrong to host even the most civilized enemy, that under German occupation there should be no exception to the laws of inhospitality.
The year 1945 saw the appearance of Guy Kohen’s Retour d’Auschwitz,5 a straightforward testimony by a twenty-year-old survivor who had been deported to Auschwitz via Drancy. In the following year, 1946, Grasset published a lengthy diary by Léon Werth, to whom Saint-Exupéry had dedicated his 1943 Le Petit Prince.6 Werth scrupulously records everyday life in hiding between 1940 and 1944. His response to Vichy’s anti-Jewish legislation was radically opposed to that shown by Jean-Jacques Bernard. While the latter deemed that accepting the forced identification of certain French citizens as Jews played into the hands of the enemy, Werth considered that reclaiming one’s belonging to a “Jewish nation” was a matter of honor and dignity. As Hannah Arendt put it: “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world-citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man.”7 Likewise, Werth wrote: “Thus they tried to impose upon me another nationality, another identity. How cowardly it would be to quibble as to whether or not I feel Jewish. If you insult me because I can be called a Jew, then I am a Jew, wildly Jewish, Jewish from the tips of my fingers down to the deepest recesses of my guts. Once that’s over, then one may ask oneself how Jewish one really is.”8 For Bernard, the rejection of Judaism as a collective ethnic identity (though not necessarily as an individual religious choice) was the only honorable response to legal anti-Semitism. In Werth’s eyes, proudly acknowledging one’s identity as a Jew was the sole tolerable reaction to anti-Semitic stigmatization.
In the same year, 1946, Suzanne Birnbaum, a humble Jewish tradeswoman, published Une française juive est revenue.9 We can note that in conformity with French Republican assimilationism, “Jewish” is here employed as an adjective rather than as a noun: A Jewish Frenchwoman Has Returned, rather than A French Jewess Has Returned. The year 1946 also saw the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive and David Rousset’s L’univers concentrationnaire,10 the latter representing one of the most famous dissections of Nazi terror. It is also in 1946 that Vercors published Les armes de la nuit,11 a harrowing account of Nazi dehumanization. Les armes de la nuit tells the story of a French résistant who claims to have lost his “human quality” in the camps. The reader, along with the narrator, learns that this loss of “human quality” is due to the survivor Pierre Canges’s having served in a Sonderkommando where he was forced to fling a fellow worker alive—as well as numerous other anonymous inmates, both dead and alive—into a crematorium. The last section of the novella is entitled “Orphée.” The myth of Orpheus, the poet who descends to the underworld, gazes back toward his beloved, and kills her anew, functions here as an allegory for the loss of humanity. It also uncannily heralds Maurice Blanchot’s use, less than a decade later, of Orpheus to characterize the “fruitless” exercise of writing, and his topos of “the other night.”12
Then came diaries and memoirs of those who did not survive the war, some of which would be published long after their authors’ deaths. One example is Raymond-Raoul Lambert’s Carnets d’un témoin 1940–43, published by Fayard in 1985. Lambert, who served as the director of the Union générale des israélites de France, was deported to Drancy and murdered along with his wife and four children in Auschwitz in 1943. Likewise, we shall have to wait until 2008, sixty-four years after her death at Bergen-Belsen, for Hélène Berr’s Journal 42–44 to be published, with a moving foreword by the novelist Patrick Modiano.13 Many of these accounts bear witness to the existential conflict of French Jews, some of them veterans of World War I, who felt cruelly betrayed by their homeland.
Coming in the wake of these earlier texts, 1947 proved to be an eventful year for literary, testimonial, and philosophical engagement with the question of evil. I shall first propose a brief survey of works published that year in France and beyond. There can be no doubt that their authors drew inspiration from recently published diaries, memoirs, written or oral testimonies, and fiction that had circulated clandestinely during the occupation. The vast literary, testimonial, and philosophical production is precisely what leads me to focus my contribution on 1947.
Just one year after his Univers concentrationnaire, Rousset published Les jours de notre mort,14 a book that combines several literary genres—memoir, testimony, and novel. The same year, Georges Bataille wrote an intriguing commentary of Rousset’s book in his journal Critique.15 There, Bataille harnessed Rousset’s book to a mode of thinking that would a decade later underlie his major theoretical work on the relationship among literature, excess, and evil, namely, La littérature et le mal.16 More significantly, Bataille, in his original essay, quoted the conclusion of Rousset’s book: “Victim and perpetrator alike were ignoble; the lesson to be learned from the camps is that of brotherhood in abjection.” With this move, Bataille, besides displaying a certain perverse enjoyment of abjection and injecting a hearty dose of Sade into his reading of Nazi evil, launches the motif of the interchangeability between victim and perpetrator—a tendentious motif that will know a long posterity and that arguably pertains to the de-judaization of the Holocaust. The year 1947 also saw the publication of Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine by Éditions de la Cité Universelle, a press founded in 1945 by Marguerite Duras and Antelme himself. Antelme’s testimony, in contradistinction to Bataille’s gloss on Rousset, can be read as an attempt to restore the ethical boundaries between victims and perpetrators and to rebuild humanism on the basis of a solid line between good and evil, resistance and collaboration. I shall not dwell on the novel published by Gallimard, Jean Genet’s Pompes funèbres. Eric Marty has written on Genet’s “anxiety of the Good,” his metaphysical anti-Semitism, and the fascination exerted on the playwright by the figure of Hitler from the 1940s up to his enamorment with terrorists in works that deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1970s and 1980s.17 It was also in 1947 that the same house, Gallimard, published Albert Camus’s La peste, arguably an allegory of the war, wherein the epidemic suggests an analogy between the “cataclysm of the war and the concentration camps.”18
Let us now consider Vladimir Jankélévitch, known for the literary tenor of his philosophical writings and his postwar rejection of German philosophy in favor of the ancient Greeks, the Church Fathers, Leibniz, and Pascal. His book Le mal, which also came out in 1947,19 is a somewhat abstract and at times casuistic speculation on evil. Examined closely, it reveals the author’s experience in the Résistance. The book is not devoid of references to recent history, though they are necessarily scarce in such a theoretical work. While Jankélévitch’s Le mal cannot be reduced to a philosophical allegory of the war that had just torn France as well as the world apart, it is nonetheless deeply influenced by a past all too fresh. Consider direct references to the sacrifice of the résistants, to the “défaite” and to the “capitulards” or “defeatists,” to the “surhomme” or Nietzschean superman, the “fascist toad” (crapaud fasciste), and, last but not least, to the “blond dolichocephal.”20 Jankélévitch’s lexical imagination knew no limits. Note, far more troublingly, the omission of any explicit reference to the persecution of the Jews.
It is significant now to mention four major works published in the same year, but outside France. The first is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, whose core argument may be that the “dialectic of reason” is the condition of possibility of fascism. The second is Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. The third is Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, a novel on German anti-Nazi resistance that illustrates what George Orwell once called “common decency,” a rather extraordinary quality in times of totalitarian terror. Last but not least, there is the first publication of Primo Levi’s If This Be a Man, whose first translation into French would appear in 1961.
I shall now turn to a less-known literary work, published that very same year, by a writer who had long been associated with literary regionalism, although he arguably belongs to the great Western canon. Jean Giono, because of the association of his writing with the Vichy government’s campaign for a return to the land, was imprisoned for five months, blacklisted by the Comité national des écrivains, and unable to publish until 1947. Giono was a staunch pacifist. His unconditional rejection of war in the wake of the trauma of World War I, rather than anti-Semitic or fascist leanings, led him to embrace the Vichy regime. Giono, to be sure, was less a “crapaud fascist” than a “capitulard.” His first postwar novel was entitled Un roi sans divertissement, after Pascal’s aphorism, “A king without diversion is a man full of miseries.” The novel was first published by La Table Ronde, then banned due to the author’s blacklisting, and republished one year later by Gallimard after charges of collaboration had been dismissed. The novel also inaugurates what Giono’s critics have called his “seconde manière,” to be sure a significant turning point in his poetics.
As Baudelaire had it, “ennui,” this “delicate monster,” can be seen as the motor of evil and cosmic destruction: “[Ennui] would willingly make of the earth a shambles/And, in a yawn, swallow the world.”21 Writing on Giono, Monica Kelley has argued that Un roi sans divertissement was an oblique response to the war and to the rapid and not always fair purging of collaborators thereafter. Giono’s perspective on evil echoes Bataille’s gloss on Rousset, as attested to by a letter to André Cayatte in which Giono wrote, “We are all murderers,” soon to become the title of a film by Cayatte. And again, in a 1948 entry in his diary, referring to the “French atrocities” that followed the Libération and were perpetrated by ordinary neighbors: “Hitlerian or not, this is not the question. What we gained [from the war] is to have seen the bottom of our turpitude. I no longer have faith in the hairdresser, in the electrician, in the bartender. . . . I don’t even have faith in myself. (Hence: Un Roi sans divertissement).”22 It is not by chance that Giono set his plot in the first half of the 1840s, as if to confirm that one is reading an allegory of World War II. The novel opens with a mysterious serial killer, referred to by the initials M.V., who hides his victims in a large beech tree. The gendarmerie captain, Langlois, inquires about the murders, and ends up killing M.V. after a manhunt in the snow. Months later, Langlois, having let himself be distracted (diverti) and fascinated by the arabesques drawn by the blood of a freshly killed wild goose on the snow, smokes, instead of a cigar, a stick of dynamite and “assumes the dimensions of the universe.”
This metaphysical thriller presents at least one original trait: its main protagonist happens to be a beech tree (hêtre) in which the serial killer, M.V., diligently hides his corpses. At this juncture and for the sake of my argument, it is necessary to understand that the beech, le hêtre, is both a fascinating, hypnotic presence and a metonymy of beauty as well as murder, a trope of the fatefulness of pagan beauty. “Pagan” must be heard here in its original sense of “pagus”: landscape. The beech, le hêtre, is endowed with a sacred life and marked as the site of human sacrifices. The beech tree is less a tree than a “king,” a pantheistic deity or a Shiva, that Giono refers to as the “Apollon citharède des hêtres”: “ “It was not quite a tree . . . ; it sizzled like embers; it danced as only supernatural beings can, multiplying its body around its inertia. . . . Such virtuosity of beauty was hypnotic as the eye of the snake or the blood of wild geese on the snow.”23 The beech tree embodies the sacred as such, le hêtre or its near homonym, l’Être, Being, as sacred. And the beauty of le hêtre, or of l’Être, triggers a deadly fascination, the fascination for evil and cruelty. Thus, in his prewar, neopagan period, Giono arguably sang a siren’s song adumbrating Vichy propaganda, advocating a return to the land. Then, in the postwar period, this dreamlike cult of the household deities turned into a nightmare.
I have yet to find any evidence that Emmanuel Levinas read Un roi sans divertissement or anything else by Giono. However, we know that Heidegger read and admired Giono enough to visit him in Manosque in 1957 on the occasion of an Aix-en-Provence lecture, and dedicated to him a copy of the French translation of The Essence of Truth. Jill Robbins, in her book on Levinas and literature,24 does not mention Giono. But then again, she also leaves out Céline, although Levinas had read and praised him, be it allusively, in the early 1930s shortly after the publication of Voyage au bout de la nuit.
Levinas spent most of the war in several camps in France and Germany. Thanks to Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier, we now have access to the diary that the philosopher kept in captivity.25 That Levinas had to work as a lumberjack during his detention may not be so trivial a fact, given the centrality of the figure of the tree in his philosophy.26 Remember this line, from a famous 1961 lecture: “Man, after all, is not a tree.”27 Levinas contrasted the tree with the astronaut Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin was most definitely not rooted like a tree; he was man uprooted, the human who had the audacity to leave his humus, his home or Heimat. He was the patriarch Abraham for the age of space travels. As we have just seen with Giono, trees—with the exception, perhaps, of Abraham’s tamarind tree, to which I shall return—have ties with the sacred.
Levinas wrote De l’existence à l’existant, his first major work to appear after the war, in detention, in complete intellectual and social isolation: “The camp is mentioned here neither as a guarantee of depth, nor as an excuse, but merely to explain the lack of engagement with the philosophical works published, with such splendor, between 1940 and 1945.”28 In the foreword to the 1977 edition of De l’existence, Levinas noted, “The notion of the ‘il y a’ developed in this thirty-year-old book appears to be its pièce de résistance.”29 I suggest that the notion of the “il y a,” that terrifying white noise from which a singular being, un existant, must surface, can be seen as an allegory of the war. There is, in other words, a relation between the notion of “il y a,” as philosophically abstract as it may sound, and the very concrete evil of that historical era—the defeat of France, Nazi atrocities, and the camp experience.
Indeed, in two essays written shortly after Heidegger had joined the Nazi Party, in 1934 and 1935,30 Levinas, revealing his disillusionment with Heidegger, had already indicated the moral bankruptcy of existential ontology, a morally blind philosophy privileging Being over the Good. The Levinassian scholar is familiar with the hierarchy between ontology and ethics, between Logos as truth or aletheia and the good: “That which stands above the question of Being is not a truth, it is the Good” (EE, 28).
In the prewar period and immediately after Hitler’s rise to power, Levinas defined evil, and not just any evil, but the evil of what he called the “philosophy of Hitlerism,” as the “being-riveted” to existence. He described the escape from the irremissibility of Being as a movement of “excendance” or “évasion.” As a result of “évasion,” l’existant is hypostasized and can ultimately face the other, that is, enter into an ethical relation. This relation is predicated upon the entry of a particular being into subjectivity and diachronicity. Such is the meaning of the hypostasis, or the emergence of a singular, nameable being against the anonymous background of the “il y a”: “on the backdrop of the ‘il y a’ rises a being” (EE, 141).
The phenomenological speculation on the notion of “il y a,” I would argue, stands as an allegory of the situation of being deprived of one’s basic freedom and detained in several camps. The notion of “il y a” thus appears more and more as an allegory of Levinas’s war, a philosophical and intimate war that began in the early 1930s with his struggle with Heidegger’s political commitment.
“Il y a” is the notion whose outlines Levinas traced in detention and sharpened in 1947 to convey the terror of night, night as anonymous terror: “Night is the very experience of the ‘il y a.’ ” We find such association between night and “il y a” in De l’existence, as well as in the Carnets de captivité. Being, instead of suggesting an opening—Heidegger’s “clearing of Being”—pertains here to the experience of fear of the dark. In the preface to the second edition, Levinas will write: “The notion of the ‘il y a,’ that I described while I was detained and that I presented in this book published shortly after the Libération, must be traced to one of those strange childhood obsessions that resurface in insomnia, when silence resonates and emptiness remains full.” Levinas stands Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929) on its head: “The ‘il y a’ does not amount to the pure nothing of Heidegger’s anxiety. Horror of being as opposed to anxiety triggered by nothingness; fear of being and not fear for being” (EE, 102). While for Heidegger, anxiety was provoked by the possibility that there could be nothing rather than beings, Levinas’s dread is provoked by the il y a, by the very fact of existence underlying any particular being, in other words, Being without beings (EE, 93). The opening of the chapter aptly entitled “Existence sans existant” echoes Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?”: “Let us imagine a return of all beings, things and people alike, to nothingness. It is impossible to imagine this return without an event. But what of this nothingness itself? Something occurs, be it the night and the silence of nothingness” (EE, 93). In this noisy silence of nothingness that I have called, in a tribute to Don DeLillo, “white noise,” the self is submerged by night and depersonalized (EE, 95). There is no longer a this or a that: there is the pure “there is.” The subject becomes an exposed, vulnerable on; the singular being returns to the horrifying anonymity of Being: “It is impossible, when confronted with this obscure invasion, to recoil in oneself or to recede into one’s shell. ONE is exposed. . . . Instead of giving us access to existence, night hands us over to Being” (EE, 96). A voracious reader of modern French literature, Levinas mentions, among a plethora of poets and novelists, Huysmans, Zola, and Maupassant. Those authors, he writes, “present things through a kind of night, as though a monotonous presence were suffocating us in insomnia” (EE, 97). While it is difficult to identify works by Zola or Huysmans that would evoke Levinas’s “il y a,” how not to think of Maupassant’s Horla?
It is worth noting that the word nightmare comes from “mare,” an evil female spirit that afflicts sleepers with a feeling of suffocation. This feeling of suffocation can be found in Levinas’s image of a fateful embrace: “One is subjected to the embrace of Being as if to the grip of night” (EE, 28).
The night of the “il y a” pertains to what Levinas calls “the broken world,” a recurring phrase in the writings of this period. Indeed, the time of war and captivity triggered in Levinas the recurrent image of a “broken world” or a “world upside down,” notions that echo the theme of tikkun olam, mending or restoring the world, in Jewish mysticism (EE, 25–26): “When one must eat, drink and warm oneself to cheat death, when food becomes mere fuel as it does in hard physical labor, the world seems to near its end, it appears to be upside down, absurd, in need of repair” (EE, 68). The image of the “broken world” that ought to be mended was associated, earlier, in the Carnets, with the defeat of France, a defeat that was itself considered the end of everything “official,” the collapse of the “drapery” of the official, the official as drapery, as witness this strange and laconic note from Carnets de captivité: “The drapery falls. The world appears in its naked outlines. The world is always adorned with the official. Such is the fatherland: the fall of the drapery—the defeat.”31
A world—cosmos or mundus—requires an official drapery, a “drapeau” or flag, what one could call the symbolic. To be sure, Levinas’s “patrie” should not be confused with the neopagan Heimat. Indeed, it reveals more affinities with the “patrie” of Charles Péguy, Bernard-Lazare, or Jean Améry than with that of Maurice Barrès or Charles Maurras. Levinas’s patriotism was perfectly attuned with that of Raymond-Raoul Lambert and of the French Jews whom Pierre Birnbaum called the “Jews of the Republic”: it privileged the “pays légal” over Maurras’s “pays réel.”
The war and the defeat of the homeland will have unveiled an upside-down world, a world as impersonal as the anonymous il y a, an antiworld, “immonde.” This anomic and asymbolic world resembles that of Baudelaire’s “Le squelette laboureur,” a poem mentioned in Levinas’s De l’existence (EE, 49). One should read this poem as an allegory of the absolute exposure of the camp inmate to the elements. Baudelaire’s poem is henceforth uncannily close, through Levinas’s evocation in 1947, to Primo Levi’s famous opening poem in Se questo è un uomo, published that same year:
Do you wish (clear, frightful symbol
To show that even in the grave
None is sure of the promised sleep;
That Annihilation betrays us;
That all, even Death, lies to us.32
To conclude, I want to suggest in this chapter that what Levinas saw as having led the world to a universe skinned alive was the return of the pagan sacred to Europe, that is, Nazism as a return of an idolatry long repressed by the West. This idolatry manifests itself through a numbing of consciousness and individual subjectivity, a form of contagion or “participation”: “The horror is . . . a movement that will strip consciousness of its own subjectivity . . . by precipitating it into a form of impersonal vigilance, into a participation, in the sense that Levy-Bruhl gave to this word” (EE, 98). Il y a is thus another phrase for impersonal, mystic participation, the sacred as pure presence of Being that we have encountered in Giono’s beech tree. This pure presence of Being is construed by Levinas as the evil of a time “before the light of Revelation.” Further, I suggest that Levinas sees this as the Nazi perversion of the monotheistic tradition and of the eradication of the Jews as bearers of, and heirs to, the Name: “While for Durkheim the impersonality of the sacred in primitive religions is still the impersonal God whence will emerge the God of developed religions, for us it signifies, instead, a world in which nothing heralds the coming of a God” (EE, 99). This notion of “participation,” borrowed from Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s anthropology of “primitive mentality,”33 stands, I argue, as an allegory of the Nazi Mit-sein. Instead of preserving the “drapery of the official” as a principle of separation, the Nazi Mit-sein establishes the fusion of stage and audience. Nazism denies the world as representation, and replaces it with the nonworld as participation. Ethics, for Levinas, is indeed a departure from a “participation” that pertains to esthetic existence. In a penetrating essay published in 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe used Levy-Bruhl’s concept of participation to define the “Nazi myth,” “fusion or mystical participation . . . methexis, of which the best example is the Dionysian experience, as described by Nietzsche.”34
One should not be misled by the fact that Giono called his beech tree “Apollon citharède.” To be sure, Giono’s tree was a figure, if not of fascism, then of the Dionysian experience and of the fascination for evil that is part of the esthetic experience. This esthetic experience numbs moral consciousness and results in sacrifice.
Finally, to the experience of God’s absence conveyed by the notion of the “il y a” as the horror of pure Being and of the sacred, Levinas’s ethics, inspired by his conversation with Talmudic tradition, will respond with the holy and messianic figure of Eliyahu, the fierce enemy of the worshipers of Baal, “Ilya” in its Slavic avatar.
I will end on a lyrical excerpt from the 1961 lecture on Heidegger and Gagarin, which one can read as an echo of Giono’s Un roi sans divertissement, and as Levinas’s ultimate warning against Heidegger’s sacrifice of beings to Being, of humans to the Heimat: “Oh! Tamarind planted by Abraham in Beersheba! One of the only ‘individual’ trees of the Bible that rises . . . to enchant the imagination of so many wanderings amid so many deserts. But beware! The Talmud fears lest lulled by southern breezes we be seduced by the tree’s song and that we seek within it the meaning of Being. . . . Tamarind is an acronym; the three letters required to write its name in Hebrew are the initials of Food, Drink and Shelter, three things necessary to man and that man offers to man.”35
1. Special thanks to Alan Astro for his suggestions and for his feedback on original translations.
2. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1943.
3. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1942.
4. See Jacques Derrida, De l’hospitalité (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1997).
5. Paris: G. Kohen, 1945.
6. Léon Werth, Déposition (Paris: Grasset, 1946). I am using a more recent edition: Déposition: Journal 1940–44 (Paris: Points, 2007).
7. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954 (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 12.
8. Werth, Déposition, 130.
9. Paris: Éditions du Livre français, 1946.
10. Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1946.
11. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1946.
12. See Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).
13. Paris: Tallandier, 2008.
14. Paris: Éditions du Pavois, 1947.
15. See Georges Bataille, “Réflexions sur le bourreau et la victime,” Critique 17 (October 1947): 337–42.
16. Paris: Gallimard, 1957.
17. See Eric Marty, Bref séjour à Jérusalem (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).
18. See Monica Kelley, “Borrowed Voices: Diversions of Writing and Responsibility in Jean Giono” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1998), 92.
19. Grenoble: B. Arthaud.
20. Jankélévitch, Le mal, 57, 59, 151.
21. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. William Aggeler (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954). For the original French version, Les fleurs du mal, see http://fleursdumal.org/poem/099.
22. Jean Giono, Oeuvres romanesques completes, six volumes (Paris: Gallimard, 1971–83), 1300.
23. Ibid., 1306.
24. Jill Robbins, Altered Readings: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
25. Emmanuel Levinas, Carnets de captivité (Paris: Grasset, 2009).
26. Pierre Bouretz, Témoins du futur: Philosophie et messianisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 869.
27. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme (Paris: A. Michel, 1976), 41. See also 144, 195, and 325.
28. Emmanual Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1978) (hereafter cited in text as EE). This quote is from the foreword.
29. Ibid.
30. See Emmanuel Levinas, De l’évasion (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982), and Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’hitlérisme (Paris: Rivages, 1997).
31. Levinas, Carnets de captivité, 112.
32. Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil.
33. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1922).
34. Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Le mythe nazi (La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 1991). I use the translation published in Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 291–312.
35. Levinas, Difficile liberté, 326.