Women in Philosophy Annual Journal of Papers Volume 6, 2010-2011 Print ISSN: 1943-7412 Online ISSN: 1943-7420 © 2011 47 PERFORMING DIGNITY The Restorative Value of Bodily Resentments Grace Hunt Jean Améry, an essayist and survivor of Auschwitz, claims that dignity hinges on the external affirmation or deprivation by others.1 In At the Mind's Limits, Améry analyzes the degradation performed against the Jews as a way to arrive at a conferred definition of dignity. He writes that, "if I was correct that the deprivation of dignity was nothing other than the potential deprivation of life, then dignity would have to be the right to live."2 Dignity, in other words, would thus require the consent of society insofar as social recognition, and not necessarily political right, inform Améry's crucial claim that It is certainly true that dignity can be bestowed only by society, whether it be the dignity of some office, a professional or, very generally speaking, civil dignity; and the merely individual, subjective claim ('I am a human being and as such I have my dignity, no matter what you may do or say!') is an empty academic game, or madness.3 Speaking from his own experience of torture in Auschwitz, Améry concludes that one's worth (dignity) can actually be granted or negated by others. It therefore makes no sense to claim it on one's own behalf. Axel Honneth's concept of dignity echoes this sentiment, which is to say that dignity is a value a person possesses only insofar as it is conferred by others. Honneth tells us that, "inherent in our everyday use of language is the knowledge-that we take for granted-that we owe our integrity, in a subliminal way, to the receipt of approval or recognition from other persons."4 If dignity hinges on external affirmation, then self-worth cannot be intrinsic or performative. Yet against his earlier claim about conferred dignity, Améry adds another, one that is not immediately assimilable to this recognitive or conferred framework of dignity. Referring to the possibility of resistance available to a person undone by violence, Améry says that "the degraded Women in Philosophy Annual Journal of Papers 48 person, threatened with death, is able ... to convince society of his dignity by taking his fate upon himself and at the same time rising in revolt against it."5 This is to suggest that, faced with the actual threat of death, the final annihilation of dignity, there remains an ineradicable appeal to a desperate capacity for self-preservation via a kind of performative resentment. My work attempts to augment this claim into "bodily resentments" which emerge in cases of extreme violence6 so as to reconcile Améry's two claims-dignity as conferred and dignity as selfaffirmed-by bringing Améry's account of fighting back into the conversation through Susan Brison's account of resistance in Aftermath.7 After surviving a nearly fatal sexual assault, the American philosopher struggled to recuperate dignity for herself. Her account reveals the performative character of dignity for survivors. Thus, by employing both Améry's and Brison's understandings of the meaning of the body as it fights back, I will attempt to develop an account of the fundamental relationship between resentment and dignity. To this end, I will first elaborate upon the ethical meaning that the body acquires as it resists through an analysis of Améry and Brison's narrations of their varying attempts to resist their attackers. I will then suggest that within Brison's recovery narrative, the implicit role of resentment emerges from her attempts, by means of her self-defense class, to regain her dignity. To illustrate the restorative power of bodily resentment, I explore the relationship between Brison's inability to resent and her subsequent inability to regain a sense of self-worth. Ultimately, however, I argue that Brison's account indicates an ersatz for dignity-self-respect performed via resentment-that exists in limit cases of extreme violence. The Language of Resentment Resentment articulates a claim about an injury or insult as a denial of some recognition (i.e. I resent that my personal space, my rights, or my social status have been denied or hindered). But implicit within the claim of resentment is an affirmation about one's sense of self-worth. Jeffrie Murphy develops this thought when he says, Grace Hunt ! 49 Resentment functions primarily in defense, not of all moral values and norms, but rather of certain values of the self... I am, in short, suggesting that the primary value defended by the passion of resentment is self-respect, that proper self-respect is essentially tied to the passion of resentment, and that a person who does not resent moral injuries done to him [sic] is almost necessarily a person lacking in self-respect.8 Understood in this way, resentment acknowledges that something owed or expected has been denied, but it also expresses a desire to have been treated better. In resenting, I acknowledge the denial of and desire for some form of acknowledgement. I define bodily resentments as self-defensive reactions to denigrations and violations of the body.9 They can occur during harm (as self-defense) or after harm (as performative resentment). Both, I argue, carry claims of self-respect. Bodily resentments are reactions not required in everyday circumstances. These resentments, I argue, are reserved for transgressions against what Améry calls the "bodily boundary." He says: The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of my self. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel.10 In the case of torture, security and dignity-normally granted at the level of rights-are denied on the surface of one's body. It is in this way that Améry brings the body into his articulation of dignity. Now, if we understand self-worth as exclusively conferred by others, then the defending self-worth via the defense of one's body loses force. That is, if dignity can only be conferred by others, then the claims of bodily resentment have no traction in such limit cases. But we find a very different articulation of the value of resentments in the accounts of Améry and Brison; in each account, bodily resentments are used as a desperate attempt to fight back against an attacker and thereby articulate a right to life. Their bodily resentments, I argue, actually become a condition of the recuperation of conferred dignity. Women in Philosophy Annual Journal of Papers 50 Fighting Back Although Améry maintains that dignity must be granted by society, he nonetheless articulates how, in the most desperate cases, the denial of dignity can be resisted. The first step he says is the unqualified acknowledgement of the denial. Having read the Nuremburg Laws in 1935, he realized that they applied to him and that they expressed, in "legal-textual form," the verdict "death to Jews."11 He admits that he could have taken "intellectual flight" and denied the new reality of German society, and maintained for himself a fantasy of intrinsic selfworth. He was tempted at times to say, "I am what I am for myself and in myself, and nothing else."12 Against this temptation, Améry understood he had to accept this verdict and act-out in spite of it. Which is to say that, even though Améry knew his dignity was actively being denied legally and socially, he nonetheless tried to "initiate proceedings to regain [his] dignity."13 This unauthorized repossession required Améry to remember what he had forgotten in the camps and what he claims turned out to be "more crucial than the moral power to resist: to hit back."14 The claim of Améry's bodily resentment is most clearly illustrated in an encounter with a former prisoner foreman. Améry recounts an instance wherein he recognized a prison foreman who had once struck him in the face. Empowered by vengeful resentment, Améry lunged forward and struck the foreman in the face, returning the original assault. He tells us, My human dignity lay in this punch to his jaw... I was my body and nothing else: in hunger in the blow that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt. My body, debilitated and crusted with filth, was my calamity. My body, when it tensed to strike, was my physical and metaphysical dignity. In situations like mine, physical violence is the sole means for restoring a disjointed personality. In the punch, I was myself-for myself and for my opponent."15 Améry's striking back reveals a kind of performative resentment that "gives concrete social form to [his] dignity by punching a human face."16 With the possibility of dignity located (however precariously) in his fist, Grace Hunt ! 51 Améry's story suggests that a fragmentary experience of self-respect can be operative even when a more robust or conferred dignity is lost. This subversive undertaking exemplifies what I call bodily resentment insofar as it is a desperate attempt to express self-worth at the level of the body after its having been denied during the attack. Améry's account of striking back upholds the necessity of revolt rather than any metaphysical or moral articulation of the body's surface. In limit cases where one is faced with death, physical resistances may not entail one's right to life, but they nonetheless counter the denial of dignity with an actual performance of life. One might thus say: "you may not be permitting my existence, but I'm performing it nonetheless." For Améry, this resistance took shape as a resentful counterattack against a guard who had once beat him. He was of course beaten after his retaliation, but was satisfied with himself nonetheless-and not for reasons of courage or honor. Rather, he acted "because I had grasped well that there are situations in life in which our body is our entire self and our entire fate."17 Thus, his bodily resentments can be understood as having performed an alternative, self-fashioned demand for dignity. Brison's retelling of her encounter with her attacker is a complicated narration of her attempt to resist totalizing harm during and after the attack. Even though she had been, as many women are, "primed, since childhood, for the experience of rape,"18 she admits the sheer incomprehensibility of the experience of brutal violence. Her narrative account of the attack with its varying responses to harm reveals several different stages or types of resistance, including what I will call rational, practical, and ethical resistances, the last of which most closely resembles bodily resentment. Analyzing her narrative in its approximate chronology, I will develop the meaning of these three different attempts to resist harm.19 Having been unexpectedly grabbed from behind and dragged into the bushes, Brison initially believed that she would have a chance to get away relatively unscathed so long as she could find something to say.20 In her first attempt to resist, Brison spoke to her attacker and tried to reason with him. She addressed him directly, calling him "sir," in an attempt to "appeal to his humanity."21 In speaking to her attacker, Brison attempted to articulate her right to self-preservation (a right that Women in Philosophy Annual Journal of Papers 52 she knew he would have to preserve for her). This first address was a language-based response; it expressed her rational self-interest. These interests are supported by ideals of justice, equality, intrinsic worth of persons, etc. It was her attempt to get her attacker to realize she was a person who did not want to be harmed, and that he-also a person- should not harm her. At this initial moment of the attack, Brison's social standing in the world was being denied and she attempted through reasoning and language to re-engage a recognitive contract; she needed him to see her as a person deserving of mercy. Brison recounts that when her appeal to his humanity had failed, she "addressed herself to his self-interest."22 Realizing that she would be unable to reason with him, Brison's resistance changed. This shift in resistance marks a realization about survival; her social standing would not be spared, and her life was now under threat. If she were going to survive, she would have to suppress her will and submit to his. This "practical" self-interest was an attempt to deny her own rational selfinterest (not to be attacked) in order to protect her physical self from death. She recounts that she told herself to "just follow his orders. Give him what he wants and he'll leave me alone."23 The suppression of one's rational self-preservation enabled Brison, for the time being, to give up control over her self in order to preserve a more fundamental level of life. She relinquished her desire to maintain her standing as a person deserving of mercy, in order to protect the possibility of survival. This practical forfeiture and subsequent submission was, however, short-lived. Brison recounts, "although I'd said I'd do whatever he wanted, as the sexual assault began, I instinctively fought back."24 She articulates her physical resistance as a strategy that was her "body's idea."25 Against her rational and practical self-interest that guided the earlier two attempts to resist harm, this third type of resistance inspired her to "fight like prey pursued by a stronger predator ... using animal instincts, not reason."26 This bodily "decision" ultimately so enraged her attacker that he strangled her until she was unconscious. Her instincts were, it seems, desperately attempting to protect something other than mere life. Her bodily resentments, incited by the sexual side of the attack rather than the attack on her life ("after all, there are two criminal acts to explain here"27), attempted to protect what was being attacked via sexual Grace Hunt ! 53 violence: a fundamental sense of self-worth. Brison's body mobilized a kind of self-interest of ethical action, whereby her "body had categorized and responded to [her] attacker when there was no hope for communication."28 This desperate and self-defensive revolt against the sexual attack marks a decidedly bodily and ethical refusal. Bodies threatened by rape and torture, illustrated by the testimonies of Brison and Améry, retain the capacity to react to harm; this capacity is an expression of ethical selfinterest designated to protect a fundamental bodily dignity.29 It is a spirit, Améry contends, that still stirs when death confronts him and tries in vain to exemplify its dignity.30 In addition to this recognitive refusal of dignity, however, there remained within Brison the possibility of a physical and nonetheless ethical enactment of dignity. This fact does not override the recognitive structure of the encounter, but supplements it with an additional source of dignity found in the expression of bodily resentments. Brison's account, like Améry's, illustrates a possible challenge to the recognitive view that dignity can only be conferred. Loss of Trust in the World I am not suggesting that striking back restores or prevents what would otherwise be lost.31 But I do want to highlight the way in which selfdefensive action is tied to dignity in both Améry's and Brison's accounts. Améry describes his long-awaited counter-attack as an administering of justice. He believes his fist attempts to reinstate a normative boundary, which in this limit case, is a body-boundary. Brison's articulation of her varied attempts to resist offers a more complicated account of the different ways she experienced the denial of dignity. For Brison, however, resistances during the attack did not actuate an experience of restored dignity. In fact, it was not until long after her attack that she could even direct feelings of anger toward her attacker. The sexual assault destroyed Brison's capacity to resent. Before turning to my analysis of how Brison's restored resentments enabled her return to life, I want to say more about the specific problem of rape as a form of denigration of dignity that results in the loss of the capacity to resent. Women in Philosophy Annual Journal of Papers 54 In The Struggle for Recognition, Axel Honneth's concept of conferred dignity develops out of D.W. Winnicott's object relations theory of emotional development. Winnicott posited that human beings develop- via the body-basic feelings of security that support all future relationships. These constitutive feelings of trust or security result from an infant's symbiotic relationship (or "undifferentiated intersubjectivity"32) with its primary caregiver. The trust developed first through omnipotence (wherein the infant hallucinates that all care is derived from itself) is constitutive for Honneth in the sense that it underwrites a capacity to develop a sense of self-confidence, or a trust in self.33 In addition to this constitutive trust, dignity further develops from affective and bodily fulfillment best understood in terms of Winnicott's description of the "holding stage."34 Referring to Winnicott's theory, Honneth writes that, "it is only in the protective space of 'being held' that infants can learn to coordinate their sensory and motor experiences around a single center and thereby develop a body-scheme."35 The development of the sense that one is loved enables children and finally adults to have interpersonal proximity and at the same time a capacity for being alone.36 Which is to say, if the primary caregiver is able to give "good-enough" care, an infant will develop out of its precarious dependence on the caregiver and learn to differentiate itself by articulating its own needs. Having those needs met develops into what Honneth understands as one type of conferred dignity: love. If a subject's "body-scheme"37 (her integrated sensory and motor capacities) is constituted through love that, for infants, is only experienced through the body by the tending to of needs, then we can begin to see how violence targeting the body disrupts a developmentally fundamental body-scheme and its associated feelings of safety and trust. Brison's near-fatal sexual assault brought about a fundamental loss of trust in the world, a term Améry uses to explain his experience of the world after having been tortured. This loss of trust entails the eradication of security, but also, and crucially, the eradication of the expectation of help. Rape, like torture, reduces emotional relatedness (relations that are intimately known through the body's surface and feelings) to a humiliating one-way relation; a "perverted togetherness" whereby one person's will extinguishes another's. In this relation, Grace Hunt ! 55 neediness and dependence characteristic of Winnicott's "holding stage" are brought to their limits and basic emotional and psychological expectations are destroyed. A person who is denied of those psychosomatic supports becomes a physical body lacking organized structures of relatedness. The loss of the expected reciprocal structure indicates a fundamental loss of trust in the world. Brison acknowledges that, "when the trauma is of human origin and is intentionally inflicted ... it not only shatters one's fundamental assumptions about the world and one's safety in it, but it also severs the sustaining connection between the self and the rest of humanity."38 Brison turns to Améry's account of the way traumatic physical harm can undo one's capacity to make sense of the world, where making sense of the world is the ability to feel "at home" or secure in the world. Brison takes this to mean that, "one's ability to feel at home in the world is as much a physical as an epistemological accomplishment."39 The Restorative Power of Resentments Brison speaks of the seemingly insurmountable difficulty she had in directing anger towards her attacker in the months after the attack. Brison had to re-learn her resentment by becoming reconnected with its motivating ingredients: feelings of anger and the concepts of blame and justice. She learned from other rape survivors that the inability to resent one's attacker is a common experience, and it is ultimately a problem in the capacity to blame. She recounts that while her husband wanted to kill her attacker, she struggled to attribute blame accordingly. Brison's frustrated and misdirected "anger" (she blamed herself-a common tactic for victims of sexual violence-in order to regain a sense of control) represents her initial and frustrated attempts to resent. This self-blame is both a sign of diminished self-worth and a practical defense against utter helplessness. Re-engaging anger and resentment became for Brison a matter of re-learning how to defend her body. Physical self-defense courses had everything to do with Brison's ability to resent: One might think it would be easier, and it certainly would be more appropriate, for victims of violence to blame their Women in Philosophy Annual Journal of Papers 56 assailants.... I was stunned to discover that the other women in my rape survivor's support group were, like me, unable to feel anger toward their assailants, and I was surprised to learn later that this was not unusual. It was not until after I had taken a self-defense course that I was able to get angry with the man who had almost killed me.40 In order to feel anger towards her attacker, she would "have to imagine herself in proximity to him, a prospect too frightening for a victim in the early stages of recovery to conjure up."41 Instead, Brison blamed herself and in doing so, recovered a false (and perhaps temporary) sense of control over her fate. Self-blame can, in this sense, be seen as an adaptive survival strategy, especially if "the victim has no other way of regaining a sense of control."42 Brison defends her strategy of self-blame against those who misunderstand it as "merely a self-destructive response to rape, arising out of low self-esteem, feelings of shame."43 Self-blame, she contends, is not equivalent to diminished dignity. Brison insightfully describes selfblame as a desperate need for control in response to the unmet expectation of help and the subsequent feelings of helplessness. While I agree that self-blame is a common adaptive response to the loss of control, I also think self-blame is intimately tied to a diminished dignity. Which is to say that self-blame is a result of an inability to externalize or perform her anger-a capacity that she lost when her dignity was denied. Anger and externalized blame return for Brison once she recovers some minimal sense of safety through consistent love and support from her family and friends, in addition to adequate distance from the original threat. Prior to taking self-defense classes, Brison's anger was directed at "safer targets": first herself, and later, her friends and family. These initial exercises in resentment are reminiscent of the Winnicottian scene of an infant who unconsciously tests its mother with aggressive attacks. If Brison's family can survive these attacks and offer consistent emotional encouragement, she will become aware, for the second time, that she is part of a world that she can trust. In addition to the support of her family, the physical enactment of bodily resentments was required in order for Brison to come back to life.44 The only way to break the double bind of self-blame and Grace Hunt ! 57 powerlessness was to enact a kind of self-empowered bodily existence. "We had to learn to feel entitled to occupy space, to defend ourselves," Brison recounts in reference to her self-defense training, adding that, "the hardest thing for most of the women in my class to do was simply to yell 'No!'"45 Through the verbal and physical delineation of one's body boundary-a kind of self-representation taken for granted when one feels a basic trust in the world-a body-related sense of security re-emerges and re-develops. Claim-making in the most basic sense described by Brison (the ability to deny another's claim upon one's body by yelling "No!") must, in the most desperate cases, be re-learned through talk therapy and "supplemented by action, for example, self-defense training-a kind of embodied narrative itself...."46 It is no wonder then, that the word "no" is taught alongside kicks and punches. Language bolsters and further articulates the claim that her defensive body performs; together language and action affirm Brison's desire and right to protect her body from harm, and to have it protected. Brison's account of her re-emergence through self-defense is an instantiation of the capacity to re-learn oneself via the performance of one's body boundaries. Brison's experience of attaching aggressive and defensive movement to language illustrates how the ability to restore a fundamental trust in the world is linked to one's freedom of movement and the freedom to resist. Both of these freedoms are articulated and performed through Brison's bodily resentments. Basic trust can be recovered I argue, by remembering and reenacting that earlier feeling of security. I take this to be the implicit claim of Brison's work; namely, that enacted physical security underpins recovery from trauma by enabling one to make sense of the world again, to reorganize a body scheme that had been disorganized by violence. If bodily resentments can signal and resist diminished dignity, as well as facilitate a person's reintegration into a social community, then even when resistance fails in the moment of the sexual attack, a deeper kind of dignity (in the form of the memory of trust and safety) lingers such that the possibility of recuperation remains. I argue that while loving recognition is necessary for the recuperation of dignity, it is not sufficient. One's self-respect must be remembered and re-enacted via bodily Women in Philosophy Annual Journal of Papers 58 resentments. The re-emergence of the self via performative resentment in Brison illustrates this point. Conclusion As I read it, Brison's recovery narrative depicts how she re-learned selfrespect through her bodily resentments. In this way, Brison's narrative elucidates an intimate relationship between the expression of bodily resentment and the recuperation of self-respect. This enactment reinstates the capacity to use language as the primary source of deliberate claim-making. Of course, this is something that in everyday life is taken for granted since in everyday life we can communicate our needs and expectations through language-we do not always need to physically express them. Within limit cases of violence, however, when the expectation of respect is lost, we find an embodied challenge to the standard recognitive view of dignity. In these most desperate cases, we find that Améry and Brison both feigned conferred dignity, what I call a self-fashioned ersatz for dignity, before the former could be properly restored. By presenting oneself as a deliberate and self-respecting person, one names oneself and projects the demand for respect out on the world. In this way, my reading of Brison's recovery complicates the structure of conferred dignity. My account honors the developmental story offered by Honneth, but adds to it an account of how, in those most desperate cases, one can actually reconstitute oneself for a second time. We can therefore take seriously the possibility that a body that has lost dignity in the recognitive or conferred sense can re-enact self-respect through bodily resentments. Granting this, there exists in a truly embodied sense a self-fashioned dignity-self-respect-that enacts itself prior to the substantial recuperation of social recognition. Grace Hunt ! 59 NOTES ! 1 Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Stanley Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 89. 2 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 88-89. 3 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 89. 4 Axel Honneth, "Integrity and Disrespect," in Political Theory (20:2, 1992), 188. This article also exists in similar form in Honneth's The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, trans. Joel Anderson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 131. I refer to the earlier article version because it states more explicitly the receipt of approval and that the recognition is a mechanism that is taken for granted. All other references to Honneth will be from The Struggle for Recognition. 5 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 89. 6 Extreme violence or limit cases of violence are herein defined as cases of physical abuse that are traumatic in the sense that they induce within the victim an overwhelming threat to security and/or life at the hands of another person. For the purposes of this paper, torture and violent sexual assault are considered paradigmatic of the type of harm that such violence commits. As Améry and Brison both make clear, torture and rape are able to destroy not only the feeling of safety, but the expectation of it. 7 Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 8 Jeffrie Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16. 9 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 131-144. 10 To be sure, Améry is here suggesting a controversial understanding of a defensive body; by describing his skin as a kind of fortified boundary Améry seems to side step the fact of his skin's inherent fragility. It was after all on that very surface that he was tortured and rendered totally defenseless. See Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 28. 11 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 89. 12 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 90. 13 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 90. 14 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 90. 15 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 90. 16 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 91. Women in Philosophy Annual Journal of Papers 60 ! 17 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 90-91. 18 Brison, Aftermath, 88. I too remember participating in a requisite self-defense class at my primary school. I was in the sixth grade, and the female instructor had us enact attack situations, demonstrating physical moves we were expected to make, as elevenand twelve-year olds against presumably adult attackers. I remember realizing at one point that we were learning how to defend ourselves from being sexually attacked, not, as I had originally assumed, from being robbed or bullied. 19 My analysis might be seen to loosely correspond to Honneth's three levels of denigration, although I do not think any strict correspondence exists. Brison's particular experience cannot be reduced to a conceptual model, and moreover, the book itself book admits a kind of refusal to over-intellectualize trauma. 20 Brison, Aftermath, 88. 21 Surprisingly, as Brison faded in and out of consciousness, her struggle to resist her death using language repeated itself: "even later," she says, "when I thought he was going to kill me to prevent me from talking about the rape, I managed to think of things to say, such as the story that I'd been hit by a car..." (Brison, Aftermath, 88). She knew reasoning would ultimately fail. When she realized, after repeatedly being choked, that he in fact wanted her dead, she stopped trying to reason with him and insteaded pleaded, attempting once again to engage his humanity or sense of mercy. 22 Brison, Aftermath, 2. 23 Brison, Aftermath, 88. 24 Brison, Aftermath, 88. 25 Brison, Aftermath, 88. 26 Brison, Aftermath, 89. 27 Brison, Aftermath, 3. 28 Brison, Aftermath, 89. 29 Of course, victims of extreme violence can lose the capacity to react. Améry describes the "Mussulman," a type of camp inmate that is "a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions" (Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 9). 30 Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 16. 31 Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish writer and Améry's barracks-mate in Auschwitz, calls Améry's entire victim morality one of "returning the blow." While Levi claims he admires Améry's decision to fight back, he admits he does not regret never having known how to. In fact, while it is possible that people who fight back and return the blows achieve dignity, they pay a very high price Grace Hunt ! 61 ! to it, since "they are sure to be defeated," (see Arne Johan Vetlesen, "A Case for Resentment: Jean Améry versus Primo Levi," in Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2006, 35. Also, see Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, New York: Random House, 1988). 32 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 98. 33 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 132-133. Honneth's analysis refers to Winnicott's The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London: Hogarth Press and the Insititute for Psychoanalysis, 1965) and Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). 34 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 99. 35 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, 99. 36 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition,104. 37 "Body-schema" is a phenomenological term, a concept that denotes an integrated set of skills that can anticipate and incorporate a world. I take this definition from Taylor Carman's "The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty" in Philosophical Topics, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1999. 38 Brison, Aftermath, 40. 39 Brison, Aftermath, 46. 40 Brison, Aftermath, 74. 41 Brison, Aftermath, 13. 42 Brison, Aftermath, 74. 43 Brison, Aftermath, 74. 44 Brison, Aftermath, 13. 45 Brison, Aftermath, 14. Similarly, Améry admitted to the difficulty in relearning "the ordinary language of freedom" (Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 20). Moreover, Améry says that even having 'relearned' this language 20 years after losing it, he never fully regained "real trust in its validity" (Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 20). 46 Brison, Aftermath, 68.