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Vigilant Memory

Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death

ISBN-13: 9780801883118
Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
By R. Clifton Spargo
Price: AUD $141.00
Stock: 0 in stock
Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 14/11/2006
Format: Hardback 328 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: Literary theory [DSA]

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Vigilant Memory focuses on the particular role of EmmanuelLevinas's thought in reasserting the ethical parametersfor poststructuralist criticism in the aftermath of the Holocaust.More than simply situating Levinas's ethics within thelarger context of his philosophy, R. Clifton Spargo offers anew explanation of its significance in relation to history.In critical readings of the limits and heretofore untappedpossibilities of Levinasian ethics, Spargo explores the impactof the Holocaust on Levinas's various figures of injusticewhile examining the place of mourning, the badconscience, the victim, and the stranger/neighbor as theyappear in Levinas's work. Ultimately, Spargo ranges beyondLevinas's explicit philosophical or implicit political positionsto calculate the necessary function of the memoryof injustice in our cultural and political discourses on thecharacteristics of a just society.In this original and magisterial study, Spargo uses Levinas'swork to approach an understanding in writing of the sufferingand death of others, and in doing so reintroduces anessential ethical element to the reading of literature.

AcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroductionRe-Theorizing EthicsThe Language of the OtherEthics as CritiquePost-1945 Memory1. Ethics as Unquieted MemoryFacing DeathMourning the Other Who DiesTo Whom Do Our Funerary Emotions Refer?Reading Grief's Excess in the PhaedoThe Death of Every OtherThe Universal Relevance of the Unjust DeathThe Holocaust'Not Just Anybody's Injustice2. The Unpleasure of ConscienceIs Sorry Really the Hardest Word?Unpleasure, RevisitedThe Bad Conscience in HistoryThe Bad Conscience and the HolocaustCoda3. Where There Are No Victorious VictimsAccountability in the Name of the VictimNot Just Any VictimLevinas and the Question of Victim-SubjectivityJust Who Substitutes for Another?Victim of CircumstancesQuestionably Useful Suffering4. Of the Others Who Are Stranger than NeighborsThe Stranger, Metaphorically SpeakingThe Memory of the StrangerSomebody's Knocking at the Door...Lest We Forget'the NeighborThe Community of Neighbors'Is It a Good Thing?How Well Do I Know My Neighbor? The Exigency of Israel and the HolocaustAfterword. Ethics versus History: Is There Still an Ought in Our Remembrance?The Memory of InjusticeNobody Has to RememberWhy Should I Care?NotesIndex

""An impressively well-documented, well-researched study.""

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Vigilant Memory

Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death