La Nuit. Entre la tentative d’animalisation, la mémoire et l’intertexte biblique chez Elie Wiesel
The Night by Elie Wiesel. Between Attempted Animalization, Memory and the Biblical Intertext

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines La Nuit (Night) by Elie Wiesel through the combined lenses of animalization, memory, and biblical intertextuality, with particular attention to the work’s palimpsestic formation and its theological and ethical implications. Beginning with the complex editorial history of the text – from its original Yiddish version …Un di velt hot geshvign to the French La Nuit – the study highlights how successive rewritings transform an angry testimonial narrative into a refined literary work addressed to a broader non-Jewish audience. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality, the paper argues that La Nuit functions simultaneously as memoir, anti-biblical narrative, and hypertext, especially as an “anti-Exodus” marked by divine absence. The analysis focuses on the systematic dehumanization of the deportees, interpreted as a process of forced animalization, and on Wiesel’s use of Jewish biblical, Talmudic, and kabbalistic references to reframe the Shoah within a symbolic and theological discourse. Central to this reading is the role of memory as an ethical act that preserves humanity in the face of radical evil and divine silence (hester panim). Ultimately, the paper positions La Nuit as an “anti-Tanakh” that denies redemption while affirming testimony as a moral responsibility toward the victims and the future.

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