Overview

Vigilant Memory focuses on the particular role of Emmanuel Levinas's thought in reasserting the ethical parameters for poststructuralist criticism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. More than simply situating Levinas's ethics within the larger context of his philosophy, R. Clifton Spargo offers a new explanation of its significance in relation to history. In critical readings of the limits and also the heretofore untapped possibilities of Levinasian ethics, Spargo explores the impact of the Holocaust on Levinas's various figures of injustice while examining the place of mourning, the bad conscience, the victim, and the stranger/neighbor as they appear in Levinas's work. Ultimately, Spargo ranges beyond Levinas's explicit philosophical or implicit political positions to calculate the necessary function of the ""memory of injustice"" in our cultural and political discourses on the characteristics of a just society. In this original and magisterial study, Spargo uses Levinas's work to approach our understanding of the suffering and death of others, and in doing so reintroduces an essential ethical element to the reading of literature, culture, and everyday life.

Full Product Details

Author:   R. Clifton Spargo (Associate Professor, Marquette University)
Publisher:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Imprint:   Johns Hopkins University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.40cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.590kg
ISBN:  

9780801883118

ISBN 10:   0801883113
Pages:   328
Publication Date:   27 October 2006
Recommended Age:   From 17
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction Re-Theorizing Ethics The Language of the Other Ethics as Critique Post-1945 Memory 1. Ethics as Unquieted Memory Facing Death Mourning the Other Who Dies To Whom Do Our Funerary Emotions Refer? Reading Grief's Excess in the Phaedo The Death of Every Other The Universal Relevance of the Unjust Death The Holocaust—Not Just Anybody's Injustice 2. The Unpleasure of Conscience Is Sorry Really the Hardest Word? Unpleasure, Revisited The Bad Conscience in History The Bad Conscience and the Holocaust Coda 3. Where There Are No Victorious Victims Accountability in the Name of the Victim Not Just Any Victim Levinas and the Question of Victim-Subjectivity Just Who Substitutes for Another? Victim of Circumstances Questionably Useful Suffering 4. Of the Others Who Are Stranger than Neighbors The Stranger, Metaphorically Speaking The Memory of the Stranger Somebody's Knocking at the Door . . . Lest We Forget—the Neighbor The Community of Neighbors—Is It a Good Thing? How Well Do I Know My Neighbor? The Exigency of Israel and the Holocaust Afterword. Ethics versus History: Is There Still an Ought in Our Remembrance? The Memory of Injustice Nobody Has to Remember Why Should I Care? Notes Index

Reviews

Reading through the lenses of witness and victim, both in mourning, Spargo's lucid analyses of Emmanuel Levinas's 'post-Holocaust' ethics make the compelling case that it is the consequences rather than the historical facts of the Holocaust that have profoundly and forever affected how individual human beings respond to their neighbors. - Michael Bernard-Donals, University of Wisconsin, Madison

A marvelously lucid and interesting analysis of Levinas's notion of 'after Auschwitz.' Contemporary Literature 2006 This book provides an immensely engaging, rich, and contemporary analysis of Levinas's ethics. -- Gregor Schnuer Substance Unique and indispensable for anyone engaged in scholarly treatments of ethics and politics. -- Claire Katz Shofar 2008 An impressively well-documented, well-researched study. -- Megan Craig Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 2008

Author Information

Author Website:   http://www.marquette.edu/english/faculty_pages/spargo.html

R. Clifton Spargo is an associate professor of English at Marquette University. He is the author of The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

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Author Website:   http://www.marquette.edu/english/faculty_pages/spargo.html

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