Introduction
1. Trauma and ethics: telling the other's story
2 Traumatic hermeneutics: reading and overreading the pain of others
3. Sartre and Beauvoir: a very gentle occupation
4. Camus's war: L'Etranger and Lettres à un ami allemand
5. Interpreting, ethics and witnessing in La Peste and La Chute
6. Life stories: Ricœur
7. Afterlives: Althusser and Levinas
8. Levinas the novelist
9. Testimony/literature/fiction: Jorge Semprun
10. Elie Wiesel: witnessing, telling and knowing
11. Sarah Kofman and the time bomb of memory
Conclusion.