In 1986 Dionys Mascolo finds, almost by chance, the letter that Robert Antelme addressed to him on June 21, 1945. With "ageless words" affected by an "original indeterminacy", an indicator of the cruel innocence of unusual speech, the letter it says at the same time the reincarnation of the person who signs it, his return to humanity, and the essential dispossession that occurs in that return. Those lines, the first ones written by the friend returned from exile in the camps, offer through oblivion the unexpected possibility of reading in their light what will come next.
The unspeakable nature of Antelme's experience, its impossibility of being communicated as well as its need to be shared, there were some, including Mascolo himself and Marguerite Duras, who could never escape. "Deported with him", "Judaized forever", "turned communists in their souls", they lived together during the post-war years seized by "the feeling of mutual liberation". The Parisian home on rue Saint-Benoît, which had served as a refuge for resisters, becomes "a place permanently open to friends", where, in the company of Edgar Morin or Elio Vittorini, spaces of unknown freedoms are traced.
After his exclusion from the Communist Party along with Antelme, in 1950, Mascolo will be one of the most combative and lucid inspirers of what he himself called "the man of communist demand." His search for collective writing, for a "communism of writing" that would overcome the seductions of being an author (that form of loneliness that, as he denounced, naturally turns all intellectuals into right-wing intellectuals), it will cause a good part of his thought to be disseminated in leaflets, communiqués and manifestos, already joining his signature to that of others, already anonymously. The Manifesto of the 121 or the movement of May 68, in which he took part, gave voice to the experience that Maurice Blanchot outlined in this sentence: "Communism: what excludes (and is excluded) from any already constituted community" .