'Faire' l'histoire: Ruines et empreintes dans l'oeuvre de Claude Simon

The work of Claude Simon is born from the wars that shook European consciousness between 1914 and 1945. For Simon, the experience of war is not an experience of history: it is an encounter with the inhuman, which totally disqualified all forms of writing. How then can history occupy such a primary place in the work of Claude Simon? I argue that it is through a radical refoundation of history and historiography.;Contrary to previous critical assessments, history in Simon is not so much a matter of a return of the Same, as it is the place where difference is inscribed. There is no return to History in Simon, but a return of history. As Simon has often stressed, the past experience manifests itself strictly in the present of writing.;In such a writing, representation is strictly impossible. It is therefore not from a mimetic viewpoint that one has to understand the place of photography and painting in Simon's oeuvre. Much of Simon's transformation of the writing of history is indebted to a photographic imaginary. As Walter Benjamin has shown, photography offers an entirely new way of conceiving history. While Benjamin's theses illuminate Simon's practice, I show that Simon's writing of photography offers a view of the "end" of history that Benjamin did not envision.;It is my thesis that Claude Simon "makes" history in writing, in an unceasing deconstruction followed by partial, fragmentary and contradictory reconstructions. In this writing, both photography and painting play a crucial role: without these two "arts," Claude Simon's work as we know it would simply not have come into being.