Philippe Mesnard's Poetics of Holocaust Testimony

Philippe Mesnard's book "Témoignage en résistance" challenges the notion that Auschwitz demands silence, countering Maurice Blanchot's 1995 correspondence and the Adornian dictum about poetry after Auschwitz. Drawing on a decade of research, Mesnard argues for the possible and sayable in Holocaust representation, analyzing a vast corpus from Sonderkommando manuscripts to "Schindler's List," Spiegelman's comics, and works by Rousset, Perec, Antelme, and Katzenelson. He poses aesthetic questions about the skills and tools survivors and artists used to transcribe radical violence. The book develops a poetics of testimony with four operational configurations—realist, symbolic, critical, and pathic—placed in historical and ethical perspectives attentive to reception conditions and contemporary falsifications. Published by artpress in March 2008, the work is reviewed by Emmanuel Tibloux.