There are stories which are untold... Albert Aniel

Albert Aniel

"Is being Levi a role?"

Jacques Levi

« It’s not a role. I would say, it’s something more abstract, but it’s something that is experienced through actions. Curiously, this is also related to the theatre, which is a system set up by action. To bear this name carries a special responsibility. It’s not a game, in the sense that an actor is playing a role. There’s something heavy about it. And when I say this, what matters above all is how the people around us perceive this name, whether it is written with an "I" or a "y", as well as its pronunciation.

 People often pronounce 'Levi' differently. Some Jews, including me, may take offence at this. For complicated reasons, we can get the impression that someone who calls us "Levi" in a certain way has something against the Jews. It is something intangible.

 I really liked your introduction and the way you spoke about the sacred, because the vision of the theatre that a Levi has, sitting in front of you, as a theatre teacher, is precisely a vision of the sacred. For me, theatre only makes sense if it possesses a necessarily sublime quality. Either it is sublime or it is not. To echo Shakespeare, this is undoubtedly what he meant by "to be or not to be": either it is sublime, or it is not; whether it belongs to the realm of being, or it is not.

And this is perhaps the most complex thing for me, as a Jewish drama teacher, to convey to non-Jewish people—without judging them, of course — who may have less of a sense of the sacred. "

Albert Aniel

The defining issue of our time.

There’s scientific and economic progress—not everything is falling apart. And yet, it feels like we’re heading toward war. How do you explain this situation?

Danielle Perez

People are afraid. Whether it’s the COVID crisis, the climate crisis, or the wars all around us, we haven’t received many positive signs that everything is going well. So we have to look for what is going well, and it’s our own resources and our friendships, family ties, and cultural connections that ultimately sustain us and push us toward optimism.

But if we want to remain objective and conduct a dispassionate analysis of the information we receive every day, it still tends to push us toward pessimism rather than optimism. That’s it.

And with regard to—I’d like to say—the Jewish community, there are still, aside from the spillover of the Middle East conflict that has existed for years and years, personally, there are two additional factors that, in my view, have always existed but have been terribly exacerbated—and which, to me, are frightening. These are two phenomena known as traumatic invalidation and traumatic inversion.

Traumatic invalidation denies the suffering of others. So, only my suffering exists, and the other person—in fact—isn’t suffering, or their suffering is meaningless. On October 7, this is what we saw among very young people, and it was still incomprehensible when posters of Israeli babies were being torn down.

This is an example of traumatic invalidation. That baby doesn’t exist. It will be another baby in another conflict. It exists; it matters. But that one doesn’t exist. That’s what Jewish feminist movements have highlighted. The rapes of Jewish women or the rapes of Israeli women—they don’t matter. Other rapes are more important. So, are these proven facts or not? I’m not here to say for sure. But something has emerged—and is emerging with increasing force—from that perspective.

Traumatic inversion is even worse. To me, it’s about reclaiming history and inverting it—using the narrative and turning it on its head. For example, using terms specific to the Holocaust to truly invert the narrative, so that the victims today become the perpetrators, using the exact same terms that were once used to define them as victims. And so this denies any legitimacy and pushes the Jewish community to become increasingly perplexed, to no longer know how to argue their case, and to feel completely estranged from their own history—from their own transmission of that history—and forced into a state of constant justification.

This idea of using the law as a means of seeking justice for the dead.

I realised that my own approach to the law — viewing it as a combat sport and a means of winning cases — is rooted in the tradition of the centre where I work, the Perelman Centre for the Philosophy of Law at the Université libre de Bruxelles.

For me, too, it was a way of doing something for my grandparents — though I’ve only really come to realise that very recently. According to the information we have, my grandmother died during the death march after being imprisoned in the camps.

My grandfather was transferred from one concentration camp to another, eventually working on the production of V1 and V2 rockets in 1945, before being liberated and reunited with his children.

Albert Aniel

You mention your career path and the influence of Chaim Perelman. That photograph of his hanging in your office – what does it silently tell you today about the state of the law?

Benoît Frydman

I wanted to put it there as a sign of continuity. It was also my initiative to name this centre for the philosophy of law after Perelman.

I remain committed to the conception of law as articulated by Perelman and his colleagues from the end of the Second World War until the early 1980s. This was a period of great development for this school of thought, which is based on the idea that, in fact, the application of the law is not mechanical,

but that what is at stake in a trial involves interests and values which, in order to potentially convince the judge and win the case, must be expressed through arguments within the rhetoric of law. 

One must build one’s case by becoming a specialist in argumentation, and to do so, one must study court cases and the reasoning judges provide in their judgements. It is also a struggle to bring about changes in the law; in other words, it is about winning certain cases that will transform the law, ensuring that the law will no longer be the same as it was before.

So there is both the art of waging legal battles and a struggle to transform the law towards greater justice, which naturally followed the terrible events of the Second World War and the complete collapse of the previous rule of law.