Description
Book SynopsisIn this original and magisterial study, Spargo uses Levinas's work to approach our understanding of the suffering and death of others, and in doing so reintroduces an essential ethical element to the reading of literature, culture, and everyday life.
Trade ReviewA marvelously lucid and interesting analysis of Levinas's notion of 'after Auschwitz.' Contemporary Literature 2006 This book provides an immensely engaging, rich, and contemporary analysis of Levinas's ethics. -- Gregor Schnuer Substance Unique and indispensable for anyone engaged in scholarly treatments of ethics and politics. -- Claire Katz Shofar 2008 An impressively well-documented, well-researched study. -- Megan Craig Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 2008
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Re-Theorizing Ethics
The Language of the Other
Ethics as Critique
Post-1945 Memory
1. Ethics as Unquieted Memory
Facing Death
Mourning the Other Who Dies
To Whom Do Our Funerary Emotions Refer?
Reading Grief's Excess in the Phaedo
The Death of Every Other
The Universal Relevance of the Unjust Death
The Holocaust—Not Just Anybody's Injustice
2. The Unpleasure of Conscience
Is Sorry Really the Hardest Word?
Unpleasure, Revisited
The Bad Conscience in History
The Bad Conscience and the Holocaust
Coda
3. Where There Are No Victorious Victims
Accountability in the Name of the Victim
Not Just Any Victim
Levinas and the Question of Victim-Subjectivity
Just Who Substitutes for Another?
Victim of Circumstances
Questionably Useful Suffering
4. Of the Others Who Are Stranger than Neighbors
The Stranger, Metaphorically Speaking
The Memory of the Stranger
Somebody's Knocking at the Door . . .
Lest We Forget—the Neighbor
The Community of Neighbors—Is It a Good Thing?
How Well Do I Know My Neighbor? The Exigency of Israel and the Holocaust
Afterword. Ethics versus History: Is There Still an Ought in Our Remembrance?
The Memory of Injustice
Nobody Has to Remember
Why Should I Care?
Notes
Index
