Entitled "Les Amitiés de Robert Antelme", this paper will explore the key -- but as yet unrecognized -- contribution made by Antelme's thought and political activism to the theorizations of diversity and difference which have shaped French thought over the past half century.

It is impossible to imagine a history of these theorizations that would not include among its most prominent features the names of Blanchot, Derrida, and Nancy. In distinct but mutually entwined idioms, these thinkers have done more than most to address the possibility of thinking community not as it is usually conceptualized -- namely, as an ecstatic fusion grounded in a shared identity (a model Nancy rightly identifies as fascistic) -- but otherwise, as an oppositional assemblage bound only by the weakness, exposure, finitude, or lack to which its members are subject. From Blanchot's political writings of the late 1950s, this other thought of community makes its way into Nancy's _La Communauté désoeuvrée_ (first version published in essay form in 1983, to which Blanchot responded the same year with his _La Communauté inavouable_), and subsequently, as "La nouvelle Internationale", into Derrida's _Spectres de Marx_ (1993), where it names the diffuse grouping of those anti-capitalist protestors more recently dubbed "altermondialistes". These interventions are among the most significant attempts by recent French thinkers to negotiate the twin necessities of affirming the possibility of collective struggle, while preventing this collectivity from collapsing into an exclusive myth of shared interiority: that is to say, while maintaining the possibility of diversity, or difference. The argument of this paper will be that these interventions can be properly understood only in the light of their relation to the work of Robert Antelme.

In his 1947 concentration camp memoir _L'Espèce humaine_, Antelme develops an understanding of humanity as founded not in shared attributes, but in an irreducible weakness: the human is what remains, irremissibly, when all other properties have been stripped away. This is also a model of resistance, necessarily displaced from the realm of political agency to that of species being: that the human is irreducible means that the torturer, who seeks to remove it utterly, will never quite succeed. And as a political deportee, Antelme draws the lessons of this new conceptualization of resistance for subsequent notions of solidarity: henceforth, he suggests, any concept of solidarity which does not wish to repeat the attempt to divide up the human race will have to learn to ground itself first in the destitution of the poorest, the most utterly disposessed. And it is this way of thinking solidarity that, informing Antelme's post-war political activism, has made its way into more recent thought on such matters.

Its presence may first be noted in the opposition of Antelme and those around him to the war in Algeria (from the 1955 Comité d'intellectuels contre la poursuite de la guerre en Afrique du Nord, to _Le 14 Juillet_, founded to protest De Gaulle's prise de pouvoir in May 1958, to the "Manifeste des 121" in 1961), and then again, most significantly, in opposition to the American war in Vietnam, and the events of May 1968. It is around these oppositional moments that Blanchot picks up Antelme's displaced solidarity, theorizing it as "refusal", and elaborating the structures of indeterminate community that will resonate with Nancy and, especially, Derrida, whose _Spectres de Marx_ spends some time analyzing these very theorizations.

Antelme's eroded solidarity is founded, impossibly, in our shared finitude. On this basis, Nancy calls him "peut-être le meilleur temoin" to the other form of community he, after Blanchot and with Derrida, is seeking to formulate. The name Antelme most frequently gives to this riven structure is one which Blanchot, especially, will celebrate: "amitié". I would argue that no serious contemporary consideration of the problematic of diversity and difference can afford to neglect the question of the foundation of community, as it is only in relation to this question that we can correlate the demands of what we want to see as shared properties (or universalism) against those of specificity and distinct identity. The radical challenge of Antelme's thought (and of those who respond to this thought) is to argue that commonality is both necessary and, if thought in terms of shared properties, exclusionary: it calls on us to think this commonality in terms of what we share without owning, the mutual exposure which alone permits solidarity with the poorest. This question is also, clearly, to the fore in the various current attempts to resist the violence and dereliction of global capital. The claim of this paper, then, will be that a clear understanding of what is at stake in debates about diversity and community, as well as of the history of aspects of these debates in recent French thought, has to pass through an appreciation of the "amitié" of Robert Antelme.