Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death

328 Pages·2006·2.1 MB·English

by  R. Clifton Spargo

Vigilant Memory
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Vigilant Memory
Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust,
and the Unjust Death
r. clifton spargo
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
©2006The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2006
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spargo, R. Clifton.
Vigilant memory : Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the unjust death /
R. Clifton Spargo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN0-8018-8311-3(hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945).3. Grief.
4. Bereavement. 5. Elegiac poetry. 6. Ethics. 7. Conduct of life. I. Title.
BF575.G7S632006
152.4—dc22 2005024562
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
In Loving Memory of My Father,
Robert Clifton Spargo
1941–2005
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
Re-Theorizing Ethics 8
The Language of the Other 14
Ethics as Critique 19
Post-1945Memory 24
1 Ethics as Unquieted Memory 32
Facing Death 36
Mourning the Other Who Dies 40
To Whom Do Our Funerary Emotions Refer? 44
Reading Grief’s Excess in the Phaedo 48
The Death of Every Other 55
The Universal Relevance of the Unjust Death 60
The Holocaust—Not Just Anybody’s Injustice 67
2 The Unpleasure of Conscience 76
Is Sorry Really the Hardest Word? 82
Unpleasure, Revisited 89
The Bad Conscience in History 96
The Bad Conscience and the Holocaust 105
Coda 118
3 Where There Are No Victorious Victims 120
Accountability in the Name of the Victim 127
Not Just Any Victim 134
Levinas and the Question of Victim-Subjectivity 138
Just Who Substitutes for Another? 144
viii contents
Victim of Circumstances 158
Questionably Useful Suffering 166
4 Of the Others Who Are Stranger than Neighbors 179
The Stranger, Metaphorically Speaking 183
The Memory of the Stranger 190
Somebody’s Knocking at the Door . . . 201
Lest We Forget—the Neighbor 209
The Community of Neighbors—Is It a Good Thing? 216
How Well Do I Know My Neighbor? The Exigency of Israel
and the Holocaust 228
Afterword. Ethics versus History: Is There Still an Oughtin
Our Remembrance? 243
The Memory of Injustice 249
Nobody Has to Remember 254
Why Should I Care? 259
Notes 265
Index 305
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the contributions made by the following people either directly
to this book itself or to the advancement of my thought and scholarship during the
writing of it: Leslie Brisman, Susan Brisman, Bill Brown, Anne-Lise François, Kevis
Goodman, Geoffrey Hartman, Peter Hayes, Sara Horowitz, Christine Krueger, Walter
Benn Michaels, Anne Ream, Margaret Reid, Jahan Ramazani, and Michael Rothberg.
In graduate school Henry Pickford, in the context of many extended conversations
about philosophy and literature and through a Yale college seminar weco-taught on
the Holocaust, effectively introduced me to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. I ben-
efited immensely from conversations with a Levinas reading group at the Whitney
Humanities Center at Yale University in 1993–94(sponsored by David Bromwich)
and farther down the road from conversations with Brad Hinze, George Justice,
Aimee Pozorski, and Michele Saracino, also as part of a Levinas reading group, and
from many hours of discussing Levinas with Michele, whose dissertation (now a
book) on Levinas and the theologian Bernard Lonergan I helped direct.
Much of the research for this project as well as the early stages of its composition
were executed under the auspices of the Pearl Resnick Fellowship at the Center for
Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in
2000–2001. My deep gratitude to the Resnick family as well as to the superior staff of
the CAHS—especially to Robert Ehrenreich, Wendy Lower, and Paul Shapiro for
facilitating and deepening my engagement with the broader field of Holocaust Stud-
ies. I’d like to thank my editor Michael Lonegro for expertly overseeing the publica-
tion of this book as well as Trevor Lipscombe of the Johns Hopkins University Press
for his early sponsorship of the manuscript, my copy editor Elizabeth Gratch, and the
excellent editorial staff at the press. Two anonymous readers made insightful, chal-
lenging, and highly practical suggestions for improving the manuscript, and I hope
they will find their perspectives addressed (if not always in full) in this final offering.
I want to sound two special notes of appreciation—for the contribution of
Michael Bernard-Donals to this project at several key stages and for the opportuni-