Robert Antelme by Crowley Martin

Author:Crowley, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The gesture of refusal thus takes place on the ungraspable basis of what Antelme terms in 1967 'la loi qui est au-dessus de toute loi' ('En vue de la défaite américaine', 100); the community so founded remains marked by its necessary absence, riven by the separation which is also the condition of its poor solidarity.

Ten years later, many of those who had come together around Le 14 Juillet, and had subsequently militated in support of the Algerian fight for independence, found themselves together once more, in the Comité d'action étudiants-écrivains (CAEE) formed in the Sorbonne in May 1968. The May events as a whole, of course, present an image of just the kind of fractured, open community whose history is here in question; it might even be argued that it was precisely this inchoate, even acephalic quality that allowed the protestors something of their force.

Consequently, key texts published in the CAEE's journal Comité (and subsequently attributed to Blanchot) mobilize the recurrent themes of this fractured solidarity. In 'En état de guerre', for example, we find again the weakness, fragility, and dispersal of the 'Nous' of radical refusal: 'Aux autres, c'est-à-dire, si possible, à nous, la pénurie, le défaut de parole, la puissance de rien'. In 'Affirmer la rupture', refusal affirms the articulated, spaced quality of this (non-)community, being 'un refus qui affirme [...], une affirmation qui ne s'arrange pas, mais qui dérange et se dérange, ayant rapport avec le désarrangement ou le désarroi ou encore le non-structurable'. The rupture thus affirmed is, as another title has it, a 'Rupture du temps', a mystical-cum-Leninist view of revolution as 'arrêt, suspens', recalling the temporal impossibility which marks both Blanchot's 1958 elaboration of 'Le refus', and Antelme's erosion of solidarity. Finally, the communism affirmed in this revolution is a 'communisme sans héritage', defined in opposition to the PCF as 'ce qui exclut (et s'exclut de) toute communauté déjà constituée', not least 'la classe prolétarienne, communauté sans autre dénominateur commun que la pénurie, l'insatisfaction, le manque en tous sens'.27

These theorizations by Mascolo and Blanchot elaborate around Antelme's political itinerary a notion of negative, articulated, or spaced community which thus not only accompanies his own activism, but at the very least echoes, and arguably indeed responds to, his own interventions both in L'Espèce humaine and elsewhere. It seems clear, therefore, that the model of fractured solidarity disclosed throughout Antelme's testimony at least gives onto the shape of the communities of refusal theorized by Blanchot and Mascolo in 1958 and 1968. But the proximity of Antelme to these theorizations, his own contemporary use of their idioms, and the influence he exerted on the group during this period, all suggest that the connection might reasonably be thought as more than one of anticipation. What I would now like to argue is that, beyond his own political trajectory, a similar relationship of uncanny anticipation, and even arguably influence, may hold between Antelme's model of solidarity and work by major later thinkers to whom he displays less close biographical but, I shall try to show, significant intellectual connections.

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