In these times of violence, of conflict, of religious or ethnic wars across so many territories and in so many societies, it is surely the sign of a stubborn optimism to devote an issue of Plurielles to the theme of dialogue.
Dialogue real or imagined, interreligious or intergenerational; exchange inscribed in history, in literature, or in the human sciences, in the past or in the present… One sees that our theme could be declined endlessly.
And it is true that the times, the themes, the modes, the places, the subjects, the beings at work in dialogue are as innumerable as those that mark out the countless conflicts, individual or political. Under what conditions can dialogue exist? At what price? What is its place in our lives? Does it help us to grasp who others are, to understand the sources of conflicts and confrontations, to aid in their resolution? But as Edmond Jabès used to say, is not the first benefit of dialogue dialogue itself?
The oldest of all conflicts is doubtless that of the religions. After centuries of Inquisition and persecution, the Church committed itself, following the Second Vatican Council, to a dialogue with the Jews. An important advance, even if this dialogue has its many difficulties and limits, many prejudices to confront in the concrete experience of any interreligious encounter, just as there are many apories in the dialogue between philosophy and revealed religion.
Our century, which was the century of extreme violence and of genocides, was also the one that, in the will to understand and to prevent repetition, attempted to open a dialogue with the perpetrators, however difficult or impossible that dialogue might be. One major attempt in this direction was the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, after the end of Apartheid. This will to understand may concern justice after mass crimes, but one may also attempt to establish a real dialogue with the executioner — this is the meaning of Gitta Sereny’s work; one may also evoke a dialogue between executioners and victims within the frame of literature, as the Polish writer Kazimierz Brandys did.
Yet another attempt: that of intergenerational dialogue, which makes it possible to grasp something of how the Shoah was perceived, or distorted, by the descendants of Nazi parents or grandparents. In the case of victims’ lives rebuilt after the war, dialogue can at times scarcely be resumed — as between those two survivors, hidden together as children, whose story is recounted in this issue.
As we know, within any testimony there arises the necessity, for the victim or the survivor, of imagining the presence of a reader, of a listener real or imagined, whose attentiveness restores to them their place in the human species from which their executioners had sought to expel them. And this listener may just as well be the free citizen of the world whom Zalmen Gradowski addresses, as the dead companion, the engulfed one with whom Elie Wiesel holds dialogue from book to book.
To evoke what the Shoah was, or still other assaults upon humanity, through a dialogue with the younger generations — whether directly or by way of films such as See You Soon Again — touches the same set of problems. Likewise, in our society where certain disoriented young people may be tempted by terrorism, exchange with a concerned adult can prove illuminating, beneficial.
What are, for us and for our interlocutors, the meaning, the risks, and the effects of dialogue? What do we wish to share with the other? An in-depth analysis of these questions is offered, taking as its starting point Edmond Jabès’s final work, Le Livre de l’hospitalité (The Book of Hospitality). In the course of an interview on the role of Akadem, Laurent Munnich tells us that he has made of this website a virtual space where the various modes and expressions of Jewish identity among the Jews of France can enter into dialogue, or at least cross paths. A contrario, it is the exchange that has become impossible with her left-wing activist friends that Brigitte Stora evokes in an interview about her latest book.
Psychoanalysis is not forgotten, with two contributions: one on the place of dialogue in psychoanalysis, the other on a subject that concerns us all — intergenerational dialogue.
On the political plane, to promote a concrete dialogue between Jewish and Arab Israelis as the basis for a future peace with the surrounding Arab world: such is the task the Givat Haviva Center sets itself.
Finally, outside the dossier, we publish a political contribution on the current internal threats weighing upon democracy in Israel.
Our European societies, threatened from without by Islamist terrorism, are threatened from within by a disquieting rise of intolerance and of populisms. The effects of social déclassement produced by globalization, particularly in the former communist Europe, have helped clear the way for regimes that are increasingly authoritarian, nationalist, and increasingly tempted by antisemitism.
The risk of seeing the next presidential elections in France open the gates to the Front National is only becoming clearer, and we are far from the singing tomorrows that the building of Europe seemed to promise — even though that project has guaranteed us, for the first time in the history of Europe, seventy years without a major war.
Let us stay alert, but let us avoid being too pessimistic. The citizens’ surge that, in Austria, defeated the election of a president drawn from the FPÖ — a party founded by former Nazis — proves to us that nothing is settled in advance.
Paris, January 2017