Marcel Cohen's 'Faits, II': A Fragmentary Poetics of Human Experience

Marcel Cohen's 'Faits, II' is a collection of brief, atomized narratives that explore themes of deportation, terror, failure, and amnesia across multiple geographies. The book adopts a fragmentary poetics, described by Michel Braud as 'the failure of a dream of narrative plenitude,' a stance that emerged after Auschwitz. Cohen, influenced by Walter Benjamin's dictum 'I have nothing to say. Only to show,' presents these stories as direct illuminations of human monstrosities and affective states. The work rejects grand narratives and instead focuses on minute details, echoes, and juxtapositions, akin to American objectivist poetry like Charles Reznikoff's 'Holocaust.' Cohen is compared to Montaigne for his attention to the infinitesimal, and to Kafka for exploring lives crushed by external forces. 'Faits, II' is neither sociological document nor narcissistic mirror but an investigative work that captures the incoherence and disparity of the real, charging each detail with strange potential. The text oscillates between microscope and telescope, revealing horror and pity for human agitation and death drive. The review was written by Pascal Boulanger and published in artpress in June 2007.