Refus du silence et révolte face à la souffrance dans l'oeuvre d'Elie Wiesel Auteure

Élie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, turned his work into an ongoing reflection on God’s silence, memory, and testimony. This article examines two pivotal moments in his writing: La Nuit, where the concentration camp experience is marked by the witness’s muteness and the unspeakable horror, and Les Juifs du silence, where a prophetic voice emerges, engaged in transmission. Through a comparatist and theoretical reading (Levi, Kertész; Blanchot, Levinas, Ricœur, Arendt, Derrida), we argue that Wiesel’s writing is structured around four figures of refusal: the refusal of literary ornament, of silence, of resignation, and of oblivion. These refusals are not mere negations but constitute both a poetics and an ethics of resistance. Finally, the study explores the memorial and political scope of this writing, which resonates with contemporary debates on postmemory and global memory.