Steven Ungar - Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France Since 1930

I dedicate this book to the past and for the future: to the memory of my father's mother, Anna Lowy Ungar (1893-1944), who died at Auschwitz, and to my daughters, Anna and Shira.

This book contains revisions of previously published materials. Sections of chapter 1 appeared in Helios 17 (1990) and Diacritics 22, no. 2 (Summer 1992). A shorter version of chapter 2 appeared in South Central Review 13, no. 2 (1989) and in Richard J. Golsan, ed., Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture: Commitments and Controversies (Hanover: University of New England Press, 1992). A section of chapter 3 appeared under the title "Drole d'histoire, drole de recit: lire V Arret de mort" in Seminari Pasquali di analisi tes tuale, no. "HArrtt de mort" (Pisa: ETS Editrice, 1991). Chapters 5 and 6 contain passages from articles published in Studies in Twentieth-Century Lit erature 10, no. 1 (Fall 1985) and MLN 102 (1987). A section of chapter 7 is taken from "Gray Zones: Vichy, Maurice Blanchot, and the Problem of Aftereffect," in Nancy Harrowitz, ed., Tainted Greatness: Anti-Semitism, Preju dice, and Cultural Heroes (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). I thank the editors of these journals and presses for permission to reprint. The introduction, most of chapters 1,3,5, and 7 and all of chapter 4 appear here in print for the first time.

This convergence is discernible first in a change of object that has cast the 1930s as a Janus-like decade, both conclusion of the Third Republic and prologue to the 1940-4 Etat Francais at Vichy. This model of concurrent decline and renewal remains contested. Some have trivialized it as contingent and relative, a result of passing time rather than anything more marked and meaningful. Others have seen instead the consequence of a turn (return?) to history associated with "new historicisms" and poststructuralist theorizings of culture. Yet others have linked it to counterhistories that revise received accounts with a polemical intent.2 My sense when I began this project about ten years ago was that the convergence of literary and historical concerns I had identified was more than a surface effect, that it was directed less toward the data on which historical understanding was produced than toward assumptions of method, object, and ambition on which this production was grounded. To state this somewhat differently, the change in question was less a matter of adjusting or correcting details than something more emphatic on the order of what historians of science have referred to as epistemological breaks (Gaston Bachelard) and paradigm shifts (Thomas S. Kuhn).

Scandal and Aftereffect grew from my overlapping interests in literary theory, France between 1930 and 1945, and the writing of history. The project took a decidedly critical turn once I realized the extent to which issues of writing historyinvariably also issues of writing in historyentered fully into the encounter between post-Enlightenment reason and the emergent technologies of communication analyzed by Jean-Francois Lyotard in conjunction with a postmodern condition of knowledge.3 Yet postmodernity should not be equated with a specific moment, doctrine, or set of practices. Following Lyotard, I take it less as a finite duration than as a conditiona precondition, reallyimposed by a shift from understanding measured as a concern for achieving adequate representation toward a looser appreciation of how signs circulate as images and simulacra. What, then, are the implications of this shift for inquiry into the recent past that it supplements? If modernity is inevitably no longer what it was twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago, what might it mean to think (rethink?) a determinate duration within it at a moment when the concerns of literary critics and theorists of culture converge increasingly with those of historians? What, finally, might this rethinking mean if and when it undermined received understanding by disclosing modernity as something other than what it had been taken to be?