Abstract

This study explores the temporal logic of what Wyschograd calls "the Death World," i.e. the anti-world of Auschwitz and how it provokes metaphysics to rethink the nature of transcendence and the meaning of historical life. While the ontological approaches of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty provide an entryway into the thinking of transcendent loss , they fail to appreciate the radicality of loss suffered in catastrophic events such as the Shoah . ;Catastrophic historical events, insofar as they hint at the collapse of history and of memory, demand an ethical form of discourse that can more radically assess how loss provokes mourning and how mourning might come to give human beings a sense of moral obligation. The narratives of Levi, Wiesel and Borowski, as well as the poems of Paul Celan, provide such a discourse of loss. It remains for metaphysics, as demonstrated in the thinking of Levinas, to address the radical loss undergone in the Shoah through a notion of ethical rather than ontological transcendence