The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.1 (2003) 68-70

Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility after the Irreparable. James Hatley. Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Series, ed. Mary C. Rawlinson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. xiv + 268. $66.50 h.c. 0-7914-4705-7; $21.95 pbk. 0-7914-4706-5.

As a consideration of memory and memorialization, James Hatley's Suffering Witness weaves together three principal strands of thought about witnessing—phenomenological, ethical, and literary—and engages the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Taduez Borowski, and Berel Lang. His discussion asks each reader to examine what the "irreparable harm" of the Shoah can teach us about our relation to history, to testimony, to fiction, and to temporality (19). I want to focus on a central if silent problem in Levinas's thought, replicated in Suffering Witness: to what extent can we identify the particular and contingent occurrence of the Shoah with the persecution that Levinas claims is constitutive of human subjectivity? That is, does the infinite, immemorial past call us to witness in the same way that the determinate, if also memory-resistant, past of the Shoah does? A particular past is precisely one that cannot be constitutive of human subjectivity generally: a determinate historical event can impact only those who live through or after this event. Thus, if we are speaking of human subjects in general, it seems we must look to a more structural or formal aspect of the past—such as the passing of time itself.

Levinas speaks primarily of an immemorial past that resists historical representation and gives us little indication of the relevance of the determinate features of a subject's relation to history. ¹ Does it matter whether the subject lives before or after the Shoah? Does the degree or nature of the mediation by which the subject learns of the Shoah matter? In Levinas's Otherwise than Being, it is the formal passing away of time that indicates the asymmetry of the ethical. This is a trauma that [End Page 68] cannot be located in time, represented by memory, integrated into a narrative by the work of the imagination, or analyzed for its constituent elements by reason. This is a trauma at the an-arche of subjection, of all subjection, regardless of the specific characteristics of the human person. Levinas is simultaneously dismembering two major pillars of modernity at one time: the rise of history as both science and theodicy, and the ethical ideal of the autonomous subject.

Only a slippage here allows us to identify this "universal" trauma with the Shoah, or indeed with any single event in history, and it is not a harmless slippage. The danger is that the significant differences between witnesses to a particular historical event will be neglected; in order to respond sincerely (to use Hatley's term), we must respect the singularity of the witness and not imagine ourselves to have inhabited that singularity. This caution, too, leads us back to a certain commitment to historical truth. With Levinas, however, the problem is precisely that he speaks of a universal subjection while gesturing, more or less clearly, to a historical event. Otherwise than Being is a meditation on how a subject (any subject, it seems) becomes a subject, but it is framed by a dedication that makes specific and intimate reference to "those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists" and then enacts a shift to generality: "and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism" (v). Hatley emphasizes that we must resist the fantasy of immediacy by which we all suffer what another, displaced in time and circumstance, has suffered, as this would be another manifestation of hatred and consumption (18 ff.). My own sense is that Levinas invites us to share in the confusion between singularity and universality, to struggle to elaborate the relation between the immemorial past...