‘The Absolute Event of History’: The Shoah and the Outside
‘The Absolute Event of History’: The Shoah and the Outside

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses two sorts of disaster considered in Maurice Blanchot’s L’Écriture du désastre (1980): the Shoah and the approach of the Outside. Blanchot’s account of suffering is examined, as is the role that Blanchot’s reading of Robert Antelme’s L’Espece humaine (1947) plays in L’Écriture du désastre. Differences between concentration camps and extermination camps are detailed, and it is questioned whether fragmentary writing is capable of responding to the horror of the Shoah in an adequate manner.

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