Time, moral and anti-moral: Améry and Levinas on historical responses to trauma

Continental Philosophy Review 56 (2):259-277 (2023)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In this article I interpret Améry’s claims about the temporal dimension of trauma in the light of Levinas’s reflections on suffering and responses to suffering—and how both reject the temptation to generate narratives in which pain serves as a step toward transcendence and self-determination. That temptation finds support in Nietzsche’s critique of resentment, which identifies the refusal to forget as pathological, and against which Améry defends himself by demanding a substantive, intersubjective process of working-off the unjust past. I argue that for Levinas and Améry, progressive narratives intensify the moral inattention that normalizes the initial infliction of suffering, and that revising how we understand time is necessary to respond ethically to trauma and human vulnerability more broadly. In light of that analysis, I consider contemporary examples of memorialization and the assumptions about time that they reveal.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 97,319

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2023-02-26

Downloads
26 (#698,672)

6 months
7 (#953,618)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Cynthia Coe
Central Washington University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence.Emmanuel Levinas & Alphonso Lingis - 1981 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (4):245-246.
Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard.Jill Stauffer - 2015 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ressentiment.Max Scheler - 1994 - Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press. Edited by Manfred S. Frings.
Evil and the temptation of theodicy.Richard J. Bernstein - 2002 - In Robert Bernasconi & Simon Critchley (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Lévinas. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 252--267.

View all 6 references / Add more references