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Absurd Dignity: The Rebel and His Cause in Améry and Camus
Full text linkIn “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” Jean Améry admits that in Europe, “the degradation of the Jews was...identical with the death threat long before Auschwitz. In this regard, Jean-Paul Sartre, already in...his book Anti-Semite and Jew, offered a few perceptions that are still valid today.” In no uncertain terms, Améry aligns his own project to “describe the...unchanging...condition” of the Reich’s victims with Sartre’s 1946 book on anti-Semitism, a philosophical gesture that was not uncommon for left- leaning Jewish intellectuals after the war. According to Robert Misrahi, who discusses at length what he calls Sartre’s “evident good will,” “his manifest care to render justice, and his desire, in the face of the Jews’ great suffering, to address himself to them,” Anti-Semite and Jew was primarily a “powerful affirmation of sympathy” for European Jews and, moreover, “an effective weapon against anti-Semitism.” Misrahi insists that French Jews were “astonished, even stunned for what we (Jews) were used to was hatred and contempt.” Sartre’s repeated assertions that the suffering of European Jewry was undeserved and unwarranted, are underscored by his declaration that Europe’s problem was not, after all, ‘the Jew’ but the anti-Semite, whose sadistic Manichaeism and profound fear of himself and his own instincts and responsibilities, had inverted European values so profoundly as to make genocide ethical. And although Sartre repeatedly emphasizes his intention to analyze primarily the situation of French Jews, he does not fail to connect European anti-Semitism with other forms of racialized hatred; ‘the Jew’ is only a “pretext,” since “elsewhere [the anti-Semite’s] counterpart will make use of the Negro or the man of yellow skin” because anti-Semitism, “in short, is fear of the human condition.” Given the profound radicalism of such declarations at the time, it is not a surprise that Améry confessed and enacted a deep affinity for Sartrean existentialism. And yet, despite Améry’s understandable eagerness to wave the Sartrean flag, Améry’s existentialism is less like Sartre’s, and, consciously or unconsciously, far more like that of Albert Camus. Although Améry never mentions Camus in At the Mind’s Limits, Améry shares Camus’ reverence for rigorous analysis that simultaneously resists the kind of moral and political rigidity that often leads to a falsification of human experience and history. This is perhaps most evident in their overlapping treatments and understandings of human dignity and its solitary champion, the absurdist ‘rebel.’
Dwelling in the Apocalypse: Capitalist Modernity, Antimodernism, Zombies
Full text linkThe Heideggerian question posed here as “what does it mean to dwell in a global age” leaves open, invites even, the possibility of committing two conceptual mistakes from which, depending on the theoretical universe we inhabit, two separate sets of problems arise. On the one hand, if the adverbial “in a global age” is taken to denote a radical historical caesura between “our age” and the age in which the concept was first deployed, one has to prove that the caesura is indeed not only historically operative but legitimate on an ontological level. This would, however, be a futile attempt: there hardly exists an essential, qualitative difference between the ontological regime of “our global age” and the one sketched in Heidegger\u27s 1954 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” We have not been blessed by any epochal turns, despite important switches – to move for a second to a different register—in regimes of accumulation. Thus, it may be concluded, the ontological question about the state of “dwelling in a precarious age” has already been posed and answered by Heidegger himself—from an ontological perspective, he is our contemporary. And of course, to such question there can in fact be only one answer: it is the same “metaphysics” that has precluded the possibility of “dwelling” (initiated a “denial of dwelling” as it is put here) throughout modernity that gave rise to our age as global. But then to avoid the mistake sketched out above and the repetition of an already accomplished analysis, the question as it is posed for us here (“what does it mean to dwell in a global age”) should be taken as a politicization of the original concept, foreign to a puritanically ontological Heideggerian diagnostics, although building on its foundations: what is to be done historically at this moment to enter “dwelling”?
Precluded Dwelling: The Dollmaker and Under the Feet of Jesus as Georgics of Displacement
Full text linkIn this article, I explore displacement as a force that precludes dwelling. I do so in the context of the georgic mode, a literary tradition defined by dwelling and by the kind of agricultural endeavoring that Heidegger relates to “building.” As he explains in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” to build is not only to make or to construct, but also “to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine” (147). Thus, in addition to creation outright, Heidegger’s “building” involves husbandry. His expansive definition multiplies the kinds of human activity described by building. When humans cultivate plants, they create a situation and environment wherein the crop can flourish. The generative force is nonhuman; growth comes from the plant itself. We cannot build a vineyard as we can a structure. In addition to placing humans in a caretaking role, the three terms in Heidegger’s title further indicate that the husbandman’s “building” requires his continual attention to his place and to his work. Building, in the agricultural sense of the word, requires prolonged physical presence and much thought. Heidegger’s choice of a vineyard underscores the importance of time to dwelling: as a perennial plant that requires years of investment before bearing fruit, the vineyard functions as a site where planning and labor, observation and care unfold across the seasons and over a period of years. The full scope of Heidegger’s dwelling, then, involves prolonged (if not permanent) and productive agricultural thinking and laboring. My fundamental premise is that Heideggerian dwelling reaches a confluence with the georgic mode.
A Phenomenology of Home: Jean Améry on Homesickness
Full text linkAs the contemporary nation state order continues to produce genocide and destruction, and thereby refugees, and as the national and international landscape continues to see the existence of refugees as a political problem, Jean Améry’s 1966 essay “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” takes on a curious urgency. I say ‘curious’ because his own conclusions about the essay’s aims and accomplishments appear uncertain and oftentimes unclear (note how Améry himself surprisingly suggests that his remarks will have “little general validity” – a statement that will need to be properly situated). My aim in what follows, then, is twofold. First, I intend to make clear the rich, suggestive, but perhaps underdeveloped phenomenological assumptions involved in this essay. Second, I want to show—but, unfortunately, only show—how these assumptions and Améry’s analysis points to a problem at the heart of contemporary conceptions of statehood, one which demands significantly more discussion.
The Poetics of the Orphan in Abdelkébir Khatibi\u27s Early Work
Full text linkLike many North African, Francophone, and world writers whose lives span the historic divide of independence from colonialism, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s work focuses in large part upon the idea of encounter, or, in French, “rencontre.” In this paper I focus upon the figure of the orphan in La mémoire tatouée and Le lutteur de classe à la manière taoïste, two of his earliest texts. By focusing upon the orphan as a multivalent term, and by following Khatibi’s emphasis upon language, literature, and even life itself as a game or experiment, we can see how Khatibi creates an ethics of encounter that derives its meaning from recuperating a negatively connotated word and transforming it into a term of positive value. With the term “orphan,” he shows how through encountering the Other, by extending beyond into the unknown, by exceeding the circumscriptions of ancestry, identity, and national culture, the individual rises into a new status of free living. Moreover, it is equally through the practice of writing that life redounds with life; writing for Khatibi is never a mimetic representation of life per se but a space for experimenting, for discovery, and for exceeding the parochial nature of an individual’s physical placement in the world. In this sense, the orphan status of his writing shows itself through his aggressively restless, polyphonic, and ageneric writing that uses the localization of genre only as a hinge to push against in the quest to articulate a new relation to the world
On Jewish Being: Notes on Jean Améry
Full text linkThat the question of identity takes on a sense of urgency, one with its own possibilities and impossibilities, the moment that identity is bound up with death, is hardy surprising. What follows are a series of reflections on the question of identity, Jewish identity, raised by Jean Améry’s remarkable text On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew (Über Zwang und Unmöglichkeit, Jude zu sein). Améry’s text was of course published in the wake of his own experiences as an active member of the resistance, as having been imprisoned in Auschwitz and as the victim of torture. Philosophically, rather than biographically, if there were a point of comparison, then it is to Levinas’s 1947 text Etre juif. Both pose the problem of how the question of Jewish identity, Jewish being, is to be understood in the wake of the Shoah. The meaning of the formulations - Jude zu sein, Jude sein, Etre juif, Jewish being – delimits the question to be addressed. This will be the case even if its point of address, namely what the question stages, is itself far from straightforward. Moreover, while what is demanded within that question is itself philosophically important, it is equally the case that the question of Jewish being is at work within both communities and synagogues across the Jewish world. As a consequence it is as much a philosophical question as it is one that has a structuring effect on how Jewish survival is conceived (and thus equally on what that survival is taken to be). How survival is understood is an issue that continues to exert its force. Who is the subject of survival? What is the subject of survival? Who or what has been subjected to the issue of survival? Survival is both more nuanced and complex than the brute fact of an afterlife. Jewish being as a present question – a question of the present - continues therefore.
Vitality: Carnal, Seraphic Bodies
Full text linkThis paper reflects on experiences of what i call vitality. Such experiences are neither idiosyncratic (they overlap major themes in Chinese philosophy, among other disciplines) nor mere romanticism (contemporary psychology lends credence to these accounts). Moreover, while some figures in continental philosophy do address the body—as perceiving, as sexed, as political—there has been almost no attention given to the active body of vitality. Drawing from the work of Michel Serres, this paper will uncover some of the significant features of such bodily experiences
Améry, Arendt, and the Future of the World
Full text linkOf all the terms Jean Améry might have chosen to explain the deepest effects of torture, the one he selected was world. To be tortured was to lose trust in the world, to become incapable of feeling at home in the world. In July 1943, Améry was arrested by the Gestapo in Belgium and tortured by the SS at the former fortress of Breendonk. With the first blow from the torturers, he famously wrote, one loses trust in the world. With that blow, one can no longer be certain that “by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me—and more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being.” In a vault inside the fortress, beyond the reach of anyone who might help—a wife, a mother, a brother, a friend—it turned out that all social contracts had been broken and torture was possible. His attackers had no respect for him, and no-one else could or would help
Book Review: Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmerman, eds., Reimagining the Sacred: Richard Kearney Debates God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), viii + 286 pages.
Full text linkA book review of Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmerman, eds., Reimagining the Sacred: Richard Kearney Debates God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)
Introduction: The Persistence of Dwelling
Full text linkEach of the essays collected here presents one or more flashpoints or crises in a history of 20th- and 21st-century dwelling