Germaine Tillon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marc Bloch, Charlotte Delbo, Bruno Bettelheim and Roland Barthes: here are some of the intellectuals we will meet in this book. What they have in common is that they have experienced moments, more or less long and hard, when they have been prevented from reading, writing, teaching, painting, etc. All of them testified to these episodes of testing from which sometimes they never recover. Some were interned in prison or in a camp. Others have known confinement in a sanatorium. Still others chose to break with the intellectual world by setting up in a factory or by leaving for a faraway place. This book treats these limiting situations, whether suffered or chosen, as so many grounds for investigation: what do they say about the intellectual condition? What motivates these men and women to face the deprivations they are subjected to? Their reactions reveal to us how much the ordinary intellectual condition depends on literate learning, but also on material equipment (the office, books), on audiences (readers, students) and on solidarity (peers), in other words, on worlds that support identity. Basically what these accounts of captivity, these war diaries or these correspondences in exile show us are attempts to reconstruct these worlds. In the midst of ordeals and in spite of them.