| Abstract | In L'Écriture ou la vie (1994) Jorge Semprún reflects on the difficulties of writing about his internment in the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War. He also thinks about the need to opt for life when the memories of the camp, as revitalized in his writing, strive for its impedance. The author struggles for a standpoint in this difficult transaction, between permitting the urgency to write devour his life or living a present grounded on the erasure of the past. In the novel studied here, Semprún places his having lived through horror in a framework that does not banalize this experience, one that allows him to portray his past, find a voice, speak, and write the truth of the camp without having to give up life. To do this he will need to open the Derridean archive to include experiences like his in need of a language and meaning. This also sets Semprún on the search for an interlocutor, one who will be able to recognize the author's right to personal memory. In the post-national state as defined by Jürgen Habermas, Semprún will be able to articulate a memoir of the horror of Buchenwald, one that will allow him to define the kind of political action needed to impede the emergence of concentration camps in the future.
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