Robert Antelme’s Two Sentences JEAN-LUC NANCY For me, as certainly for many others, Robert Antelme’s name is not the — amma len uritenased j petsitte! toa body olwork This is not due to the few articles that he pul ind; i ished or left behind; it is due to what, for want of a better term, I shall call a different posture, or a dif- revues, also, thanhigenintalgaatalaatec! oc“ queeiaomntontitemady in this sense, the name “Robert Antelme” is hardly a name at all. It When cei Antelme” is spoken, these two sentence are heard; that is all. ‘The first sentence declares that “man” (which constitutes his species, what is special to him) is nothing other than an absolute, impenetrable _ _ resistance to annihilation; that man, through whom annihilation enters the world, is nothing other than the more precisely, he is being, or existence, as absolute affirmation. This affirma- tion is sufficient; it is the affirmation of nothing outside itself. It is suf- ficient “unto itself,” although in itself it has no “self.” This sentence defines an ontology and an ethic: an ontology with- out substance or subject, an ethic without morality or right. It defines 13ON ROBERT ANTELME'S THE HUMAN RACE that it is itself. Its ethos: its manner, its bearing, its behavior, even its rage. _ The other sentence of Robert Antelme is here, in the letter written upon his return from the camps to Dionys Mascolo, who has published it: that were barely formed and in any case hadn’t aged... but were shaped upon my breath alone: that, you see—that happiness—wounded me definitively. ...”# It defines a A poetics of being, or of what exists, newly born to the sense that itis, newly born to the feeling of absenting itself, thrust up from nothing, for nothing, a poetics that engages the praxis of the same ethos, —his manner and his suffering—were to pronounce them, and only them. I would prefer for now to add nothing more. Not be silent, but to let to become understood (which is the meaning of the word phrasis).? For here we find ourselves unwearying- ly back at the beginning again, where the words are barely formed. In any case they haven't aged. OCTOBER 1993 114