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Outside presence: realizing the Holocaust in contemporary French narratives

Steve Buckler’s article, ’Historical Narrative: Identity and the Holocaust’, produced in this issue, is valuable for its open discussion of what often remains silently predetermined or protected within historiography: the constitution of a discourse deemed properly historical (and the subordination of articulations deemed not to have reached that level); the social formations which this discourse confirms (and hence the pressure placed on subordinated articulation to conform to pre-established patterns of social formulation) ; and the circular (and hence exclusive) process operating between the two. What is equally remarkable about the article, given the central position it confers on consensus-based narrative, is not its ultimate lack of resolution of the tension between socially validated narrative and non-integrated voice (for its consensual argument may logically rely on our reactions for that resolution). It is rather the embarrassment and anxiety which accompanies this irresolution, and which the article attempts to quell by proposing an actantial and consensual view of identity-formation as the proper perspective for the self-confirmation of historiography. This anxiety figures negatively what is held at bay by the presentation of socially confirmed limits for professional and personal expression. What is figured is what lies outside the presence and self-presence of an ultimately normative historiographical, and indeed social, process. The tension present in the article derives (and this is for me one of