Writing as Commitment: In Memory of the Philologist and Editor Maurice Olender (1946–2022)

Abstract

An epitaph for Maurice Olender, professor at EHESS Paris and one of the leading philologers and intellectual historians of the postwar generation. His “Langues du Paradis” (Le Seuil 1989) was translated into more then a dozen languages (Harvard UP 2009) and got famous as a fundamental analysis of the epistemological contribution of philology to European Antisemitism. Born into a family of Polish refugees in Antwerp in 1946, and trained in diamond grinding as a young man, Maurice Olender is best known in France and beyond for his series published by Le Seuil—first as “La Librairie du XXe sciècle,” and from 2001 on as “La Librairie du XXIe sciècle”—which he founded in 1989 and which has included such renowned authors as Monique and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Henri Atlan, Jacques Le Goff, Antonio Tabucchi, Italo Calvino, Yves Bonnefoy, Jean Starobinski, Donatella di Cesare, and again and again Lydia Flem and Georges Perec. Without a doubt, this series set a style and tone—arguably one of the most important in France, if not in Europe, for an entire generation.