<i>On the Defensive: Reading the Ethical in Nazi Camp Testimonies</i> . By S <scp>haron</scp> M <scp>arquart</scp> <i>On the Defensive: Reading the Ethical in Nazi Camp Testimonies</i> . By MarquartSharon. (University of Toronto Romance.) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. x + 220 pp., ill.

The central focus of Sharon Marquart’s interesting, original, and astute study is how Holocaust testimonial writings can be read defensively when well-intentioned readers unwittingly become complicit in the repression and denial of atrocity by retreating into conceptual ‘understanding’ and false claims to knowledge. The first two chapters analyse the Buchenwald testimonies of Jorge Semprún, as authoritative, intellectual witness and representative of the male deportee community. In Chapters 3 and 4, principally drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the human in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988) and Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après trilogy (Paris: Minuit, 1970–71), it is argued convincingly that Delbo offers an implicit critique of defensive responses to atrocity that rely on mastery of knowledge about the Nazi camps. Marquart applies Jacques Rancière’s pedagogical distinction between the methods of the ‘maître explicateur’ and ‘maître ignorant’ (Le Maître ignorant: cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1987)) to explain the contrast between the approaches adopted by Semprún, Robert Antelme, and other male deportees to engage their readers and those adopted by Delbo. Semprún’s writings tend, on the whole, to receive less comprehensive analysis in the selective discussion that ensues, cast as the ‘maître explicateur’ who routinely silences or abandons others in his testimonial approach (pp. 61, 98). This approach neglects the narrative sophistication of his understanding of memory and bearing witness that is rooted in an ethical and political commitment to the Other (explicitly represented, for example, in Le Mort qu’il faut (Paris: Gallimard, 2001)), which evolved over almost forty years of writing and reflecting on Buchenwald. Both Delbo and Semprún are politically committed witnesses for whom gender and class are important categories in authorizing and explicating their different approaches to testimony. While acknowledged here, these aspects could have been examined more extensively in relation to their individual œuvres. Moreover, for the reader to accept that ‘a defensive ethics of the male deportee community’ exists (p. 168), the gender-political dimension of this contention remains to be argued, otherwise it risks constituting, in turn, a codified response to that community. In a final, well-judged conclusion, Marquart offers a Barthesian reading of photographs from L’Album d’Auschwitz (Paris: Seuil, 1983) to argue that responses to atrocity can move beyond codification and defensiveness by learning to see the victims of the Nazi camps and their concerns. This is an important book that insightfully questions the ways readers can engage with Holocaust and trauma writing, and will be of interest beyond French studies.

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