In 1943, Robert Antelme, a young man of twenty-six years old, an editor at the French Ministry of Information, joined the Resistance. Friendship decides for him. "We were not heroes," Marguerite Duras, married to Antelme at the time, will remember, "the Resistance came to us because we were honest people." In 1944 he is arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Germany, like his sister Marie-Louise. Buchenwald, Gandersheim and Dachau are the successive stages of this deportation. In Pain, Marguerite Duras narrates the days of April 1945 spent waiting for Robert, in the nightmare of his return. Found in Dachau, a presence without identity ("an Ecce homo without a subject, sample of nobody, sample not of a man, but Man reduced to his irreducible essence", Dionys Mascolo would write much later), he is taken from the field by friends of the. During the return trip, "hellish and wonderful", in a fever, he will not stop talking. "He speaks without end", he speaks stifled and suffocating for wanting to say the unspeakable truth that the human entails. A year later, returned to the flesh, he works on writing The Human Species, a book first published in 1947.
Written with a sobriety "at the level of things", The human species is a markedly anti-literary story, or rather pure literature. Unarmed writing of the disaster that reveals, in the words of Antelme himself, "as the only and last claim, an ultimate feeling of belonging to the species."

Community of the species thus affirmed that, far from reintegrating us into a reassuring presence of the human towards itself, it besieges and obsesses us in the form of an infinite undoing. As Mascolo will read: «The SS is not different from us. Personal innocence, no matter how deep it is supposed, is worth nothing next to that forced solidarity with the species as a bearer of evil, of death, of fire. There is no humanism in that. 'Our brother SS', it could be said... to say the inhumanity that there is in man».

In 1946, Antelme, a "communist" before any militancy, joined the Party, from which he was excluded in 1950. Opposed to the continuation of the war in North Africa, he was one of the signatories of the so-called "Manifesto of the 121 », a Declaration on the right to insubordination in the Algerian war, in whose final wording Maurice Blanchot intervenes decisively: «The refusal to serve is a sacred duty». In 1968 he is a member of the Student Writers Action Committee. He has suffered from hemiplegia since 1983, and died in 1990.