L'espèce humaine

Partly first edition, revised and corrected, of which no deluxe copies were issued; one of the review copies.

Spine and covers slightly and marginally sunned, as usual.
Rare and valuable signed presentation inscription from Robert Antelme to Geneviève Hirsch.

"Il n'y a pas d'espèces humaines, il y a une espèce humaine. C'est parce que nous sommes des hommes comme eux que les SS seront en définitive impuissants devant nous."
["There are no human races; there is only one human race. It is precisely because we are men like them that the SS will ultimately be powerless against us."]

This seminal work on the Nazi concentration camp experience was first published in 1947. It was the third and final publication of the short-lived publishing house founded by Marguerite Duras and Robert Antelme, her husband from 1940 to 1946.
Initially unnoticed upon its discreet release — only a handful of copies were sold — the book was reissued the following year with new covers by Robert Marin. It faced the competition of numerous postwar accounts and initially struggled to find a readership. Yet, as recounted by F. Lebelley, "at a time when narratives abounded, the unique power of this work, marked by a stark sobriety, moved readers as a founding text. A writer’s book as well, which, as Duras acknowledged, ‘stepped away from literature.’ Robert Antelme would never write another. Despite the praise and accolades, L'Espèce humaine remained the singular work of a lifetime." (in Duras, ou le poids d'une plume).
Thanks to Albert Camus’s intervention, the book was reissued a decade later, in 1957, by Gallimard and finally reached a broader audience.
Since then, it has taken its place in literary history as one of the most significant works confronting the painful but essential reflection on concentration camps and the human condition. In its wake, writers such as his friend Jorge Semprun would embark on new approaches to the unspeakable task of writing about the camps.
As early as 1947, Antelme wrote in his foreword: "We had just returned, bringing with us our memory, our vivid experience, and felt a frantic desire to recount it exactly as it was. And yet, from the first days, we became aware of the gap between the language at our disposal and that experience [...] How could we resign ourselves to not trying to explain how we had come to that point? We were still there. And yet it was impossible. As soon as we began to tell it, we suffocated. To ourselves, what we had to say already seemed unimaginable."

Shortly after Gallimard’s reprint, this testimony received its most profound tribute from Maurice Blanchot:
"When man is reduced to the extreme deprivation of need, when he becomes ‘he who eats peelings,’ we see him reduced to nothing but himself, and man is revealed as he who requires nothing more than need itself to, by denying what denies him, preserve the primacy of human relation. One must add that need then changes, becomes radical in the literal sense, becomes a barren need, devoid of pleasure or content — a bare relation to bare life — and the bread one eats responds directly to the demand of need, just as need is immediately the need to live." (Maurice Blanchot, L'indestructible, in La Nrf n°112, 1962, reprinted in L'Entretien infini)

Presentation copies signed by Robert Antelme are of exceptional rarity.