Where Nothing Happened
| Published date | 01 April 2017 |
| Date | 01 April 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663916661875 |
| Author | Johanna Jacques |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Where Nothing
Happened: The
Experience of War
Captivity and Levinas’s
Concept of the ‘There Is’
Johanna Jacques
Durham University, UK
Abstract
This article takes as its subject matter the juridico-political space of the prisoner of war
(POW) camp. It sets out to determine the nature of this space by looking at the
experience of war captivity by Jewish members of the Western forces in World War II,
focusing on the experience of Emmanuel Levinas, who spent 5 years in German war
captivity. On the basis of a historical analysis of the conditions in which Levinas spent his
time in captivity, it argues that the POW camp was a space of indifference that was
determined by the legal exclusion of prisoners from both war and persecution. Held
behind the stage of world events, prisoners were neither able to exercise their legal
agency nor released from law into a realm of extra-legal violence. Through a close
reading of Levinas’s early concept of the ‘there is’ [il y a], the article seeks to establish the
impact on prisoners of prolonged confinement in such a space. It sets out how prisoners’
subjectivity dissolved in the absence of meaningful relations with others and identifies the
POW camp as a space in which existence was reduced to indeterminate, impersonal
being.
Keywords
Camp, il y a, indifference, Levinas, prisoner of war, there is, war captivity
Corresponding author:
Johanna Jacques, Dur ham Law School, Durham University, Palatine Centre, Stockto n Road, Durham
DH 1 3LE, UK.
Email: johanna.jacques@durham.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2017, Vol. 26(2) 230–248
ªThe Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663916661875
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Introduction
In June 1940, a year into the Second World War and long after the Nazi persecution of
Jews had begun, something remarkable happened. A Jewish officer in the French army,
openly declaring his faith to his captors in the expectation of a certain death, was taken
into German war captivity and detained there in accordance with international law. He
was released unharmed 5 years later.
The officer in question was Emmanuel Levinas. He was not an exception; just among
the French forces that fell into German hands were 55,000 Jews (Spoerer, 2005: 505;
Wieviorka (2001: 106) gives a much lower figure of 10,000–15,000), and nearly all
survived German war captivity. In this respect, the Jewish members of the French armed
forces were in no different position than their non-Jewish colleagues, as both Jews and
non-Jews were equally protected by the French uniform. Nor was Levinas alone among
20th century French thinkers to count war captivity among his wartime experiences.
Fernand Braudel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Ricoeur, to name only a few, were also in
German war captivity.
And yet, Levinas’s experiences are of specific legal interest in a way that the
experiences of others may not be.
1
This interest stems not so much from the particular
details of his captors’ (often less than perfect) compliance with the laws of war than
from the particular juridico-political space (in the sense in which Agamben (1998)
applies this term to the concentration camp) in which Levinas found himself as a
protected Jew in Germany. Jewish prisoners of war (POWs) were in a special position
because they were excluded from two fronts, that of the limited wa r fought between
Germany and its enemies on the Western front and that of the unlimited ‘war’ between
Germany and those whom it regarded as its racial foes. While all members of the
French armed forces could expect their exclusion from further involvement in the
conflict after they had surrendered, this being required by the rules of the war in which
they were engaged, Jewish members were at the same time part of a conflict to which
no such rules applied. Hitler’s persecution of Jews did not just go to their national but
to their religious and biological identity; resisting him was not just a fight in which one
risked one’s life to win but a fight for life or death. In such a fight there should have
been no middle ground, and yet the Jewish prisoners found the mselves held – and held
by the very same foe who had wanted them dead – in a space in which they could
neither live nor die.
The difficulty of situating the space of the POW camp within the order of war also
applies to its legal coordinates. Surely, the camp was a legal space (rather than a space
outside of law), as it excluded the Jewish prisoners from the extralegal force of the
persecutions. But it also excluded them from exercising their legal agency both in war
and in civilian life, to which POWs were not permitted to return until the end of the war.
If the camp was not a space that permitted the exercise of legal agency, yet did not
release the prisoners into an extralegal space of freedom, where and what was it? Was it a
prison, as its name suggests, even though there was no intention on the part of the law to
punish or reform those within it? Was it a protective space, even though this protection
was not aimed at prisoners’ individual agency (on the contrary, this was suspended) and
merely ensured their collective survival as living bodies for the purpose of limiting war?
Jacques 231
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