Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes: Ethics, Aesthetics and the Subject of Judgment

The article focuses on Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes (2006) which it regards as part of an emerging cluster of French- and German-language 'Nazi perpetrator fictions' published from the mid-1990s onwards. The relationship between ethics and aesthetics, and the links of each to judgment, are explored via discussion of aspects of the reception of Littell's text, specifically, that it is kitsch and pro-Nazi. The status of the first-person narrator as an occupant of different subject positions (actor, self-conscious spectator, author) and the intertextual function of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Kant's 'categorical imperative' are considered. A final section assesses the reader both the narrator's fictional reader or addressee and Littell's 'real' reader in the light of Arendt's later work on 'thinking' and judgment.