On Jean Améry Philosophy of Catastrophe

by Zolkos, Magdalena; Bernstein, J M.; Ben-Shai, Roy; Brudholm, Thomas; Grøn, Arne; Klein, Dennis B.; Millet, Kitty; Rosen, Joseph; Rothfield, Philipa; Sherwood, Melanie Steiner; Treitler, Wolfgang; Ubertowska, Aleksandra; Ure, Michael; Yeatman, Anna; Zissel

• ISBN13: 9780739147658
• ISBN10: 073914765X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-09
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

On Jean Améry provides a comprehensive discussion of one of the most challenging and complex post-Holocaust thinkers, Jean Améry (1912-1978), a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. In the English-speaking world Améry is known for his poignant publication, At the Mind's Limits, a narrative of exile, dispossession, torture, and Auschwitz. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in Améry's writings on victimization and resentment, partly attributable to a modern fascination with tolerance, historical injustice, and reconciliatory ambitions. Many aspects of Améry's writing have remained largely unexplored outside the realm of European scholarship, and his legacy in English-language scholarship limited to discussions of victimization and memory. This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Améry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness. What emerges from the pages of this book is an image of Amèry as a difficult and perplexing-yet exceptionally engaging-thinker, whose writings address some of the central paradoxes of survivorship and witnessing. The intellectual and ethical questions of Améry's philosophies are equally pertinent today as they were half-century ago: How one can reconcile with the irreconcilable? How can one account for the unaccountable? And, how can one live after catastrophe?

Author Biography

Magdalena Zolkos is a research fellow in political theory with the Central for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. ix
The Wounded Subject, Anagram: On the Philosophy of "Subjectivity after Auschwitz" in Amery's Work	p. 1
Contemplating Jean Améry's Loss of Transcendence	p. 21
Améry's Body: "My Calamity ... My Physical and Metaphysical Dignity"	p. 39
Politics and Personal Responsibility: Reflections on Jean Améry and Hannah Arendt	p. 61
Resentment and Recognition: Toward a New Conception of Humanity in Améry's At the Mind's Limits	p. 87
Imposition, or Writing from the Void: Pathos and Pathology in Amery	p. 109
Ver-rücktes Universe of Torture: Améry and Bataille	p. 135
Aufbrechen/Abbrechen: Toward an Aesthetic of Resistance in Jean Améry's Novel-Essay Lefeu oder Der Abbruch	p. 151
"Nachdenken"	p. 193
The Singular Case of Jean Améry	p. 217
Sympathy for the Devil	p. 235
Saying No and Fleeing Nowhere: Jean Améry's Introspection of Voluntary Death	p. 263
Suffering and Responsibility: Between Améry and Levinas	p. 277
Index	p. 307
About the Contributors	p. 315
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