Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Forgiveness may be implied in a certain Jewish humor that offers the possibility of forgiveness as its impossibility. Peter Banki makes me think that that a humanity capable of crimes against humanity is in just such a double bind with itself." -- -Jean-Luc Nancy "An extremely well-written, subtle, and moving meditation on the impasses of forgiveness in the face of the Holocaust and other unforgivable crimes, challenging our notions of what it means to be a person and whether there is a universal order of human beings that might allow perpetrator and victim to recognize in each other a shared humanity. Banki's book is an excellent study-supple in its interpretations, limpid in its style-and will be of great interest to students and scholars of literature, political science, philosophy, history, and anthropology." -- -Rochelle Tobias Johns Hopkins University
Table of ContentsPreface Introduction: To Forgive the Unforgivable 1: The Survival of the Question: Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower 2: Reading Forgiveness in a Marrano Idiom: Jacques Derrida 3: Crimes against Humanity or the Phantasm of "we, men" 4: A Hyper-Ethics of Irreconcilable Contradictions: Vladimir Jankelevitch Conclusion: Forgiveness as a Jewish Joke Epilogue: "What an Art of Living!" Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited
