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A marvelously lucid and interesting analysis of Levinas's notion of 'after Auschwitz.'
This book provides an immensely engaging, rich, and contemporary analysis of Levinas's ethics.
Unique and indispensable for anyone engaged in scholarly treatments of ethics and politics.
An impressively well-documented, well-researched study.
Spargo's lucid analyses of Emmanuel Levinas's 'post-Holocaust' ethics make the compelling case that it is the consequences rather than the historical facts of the Holocaust that have profoundly and forever affected how individual human beings respond to their neighbors. As Spargo makes a strong case for a more expansive Levinasian ethics, he effectively links that ethics to the beginnings of political thought.
An intense and meticulous analysis of Levinas's attempt to redeem the force of ethical thinking from Nietzsche's charge of fraudulence. Spargo removes misconceptions (especially concerns about Levinas's belated relation to liberal thought and cultural pluralism), situates his reception in America, clarifies the impact on him of the memory of the Holocaust, and exposes the normative temptation by which moralists have evaded 'the imaginative vulnerability critical to ethics' through an over-objectifying or heroizing discourse. Almost every influential position held by contemporary thinkers on the study of death, which has always preoccupied ethical philosophy, is subjected to probing criticism. Spargo's book, a work of great intellectual energy, demonstrates a vigilance that leaves no aspect of Levinas, as philosopher or writer, untouched.
Spargo patiently inhabits the ethical imagination, alert to the risks of ethical thinking as such (of Western self-legitimation as of vacuous piety), but demonstrating, over and over again, how productive the Levinasian understanding of responsibility can be. Just as he engages a host of conflicting claims (by Blanchot, Badiou, and Agamben, etc.), so too, with breath-taking precision, Spargo shows Levinas in conflict with himself, all the while tracking the 'force of sociality' that lingers within this body of work, the 'unrealized politics' that enable us to imagine ethics in history. We need to keep reading Levinas, and to read him with Spargo’s own kind of vigilance.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
328
ISBN
9780801883118
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
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
Acknowledgments
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
