Jean Améry: Beyond The Mind’s Limits

354 Pages·2019·3.508 MB·English

by  Yochai Ataria, Amit Kravitz, Eli Pitcovski

Jean Améry
Beyond the Mind’s Limits
Edited by
Yochai Ataria · Amit Kravitz · Eli Pitcovski
Jean Améry
Yochai Ataria
Amit Kravitz
Eli Pitcovski
Editors
Jean Améry
Beyond the Mind’s Limits
Editors
Yochai Ataria Amit Kravitz
Tel-Hai Academic College Ludwig-Maximilian University
Upper Galilee, Israel of Munich
Munich, Germany
Eli Pitcovski
Tel-Hai Academic College
Upper Galilee, Israel
ISBN 978-3-030-28094-9 ISBN 978-3-030-28095-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28095-6
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
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A
cknowledgments
We would like to thank Tel-Hai Academic College for supporting
this project.
v
c
ontents
Part I Limits: Bound to the Past 1
1 Jean Améry and Primo Levi: The Differences in Likeness 3
Berel Lang
2 On Historical Objectivity, the Reality of Evil and Moral
Kitsch: Jean Améry as a Witness 15
Amit Kravitz
3 Jean Améry and the Generational Limits of Resentment as
Morality 35
C. Fred Alford
4 Registers of Undesirability, Poetics of Detention: Jean
Améry on the Jewish Exile and Behrouz Boochani on the
Manus Prison 55
Magdalena Zolkos
5 The Ethics of Resentment: The Tactlessness of Jean
Améry 85
David Heyd
vii
viii CoNTENTS
Part II The Mind: Torture and Consequences 103
6 Torture and Torturers 105
Eran Fish
7 Torture: Reading Améry, Rereading Jewish Law 119
Amos Israel-Vleeschhouwer
8 Total Destruction: The Case of Jean Améry 141
Yochai Ataria
9 Language in Exile, Exile in Language 159
Dana Amir
10 The Healing Power of Imagination: Playfulness in
Impossible Situations 171
Mooli Lahad
Part III Beyond: Philosophy and Literature 199
11 Without Love or Wisdom: On Jean Améry’s Reluctant
Philosophy 201
Roy Ben-Shai
12 Jean Améry on the Value of Death and Dying 221
Eli Pitcovski
13 Jean Améry: Suicide, the Refusal to Heal, and
Humanistic Freedom 237
Grace Campbell
14 Between the Logic of Life and the Anti-logic of Death:
Reflections on Suicidality in the Wake of Jean Améry 261
Yael Lavi
CoNTENTS ix
15 “The Nonsense that You Cannot Write Poetry After
Auschwitz”: Jean Améry, the Interrupted Writer 285
oshrat C. Silberbusch
16 Realism Contested: Jean Améry’s Charles Bovary, Country
Doctor 313
Adrian Switzer
Index 341
n c
otes on ontributors
C. Fred Alford is Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland, College
Park. He is author of over fifteen books on moral psychology, including
Trauma and Forgiveness: Consequences and Communities (2013), and
Trauma, Culture, and PTSD (2016). He co-edits the Psychoanalysis and
Society Book Series with Cornell University Press and served as
Executive Director of the Association for Psychoanalysis, Culture and
Society for over ten years. He curates the blog www.traumatheory.com,
and www.godblog.org.
Dana Amir is a clinical psychologist, supervising and training analyst
at the Israel psychoanalytic society, a faculty member at University of
Haifa (head of the interdisciplinary doctoral program in psychoanaly-
sis), poetess, and literature researcher. She is the author of six poetry
books and three psychoanalytic non-fiction books: Cleft Tongue (2014),
On the Lyricism of the Mind (2016), and Bearing Witness to the Witness
(2018). Her papers were published in psychoanalytic journals and pre-
sented at national and international conferences. She is the winner of
many national and international prizes, including The Frances Tustin
International Memorial Prize (2011), the International Psychoanalytic
Association (IPA) Sacerdoti Prize (2013) IPA Hayman Prize (2017),
and the IFPE (International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education)
Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educators Award (2017).
Yochai Ataria is an associate professor at Tel-Hai Academic College,
Israel. He conducted his post-doctoral research in the Neurobiology
Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is the author of the
xi
xii NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS
following books: The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017); Body
Disownership in Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (2018); The
Mathematics of Trauma [Hebrew] (2014); and Not in Our Brain
[Hebrew] (2019). In addition, he co-edited the following volumes:
Interdisciplinary Handbook of Culture and Trauma (2016); Kafka: New
Perspectives [Hebrew] (2013); The End of the Human Era [Hebrew]
(2016); 2001: A Space odyssey—50th Anniversary [Hebrew] (2019).
Roy Ben-Shai is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence
College in New York. Former recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon post-
doctoral fellowship at Haverford College. Co-editor of The Politics of
Nihilism: From the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary Israel (2014). His
essays on Jean Améry and on nineteenth–twentieth-century continental
philosophy appear in Telos, The European Legacy, and the Journal of
French and Francophone Philosophy.
Grace Campbell is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland.
Her work focuses on the philosophy of self-destructive behavior with an
emphasis on the writings of Jean Améry and Sabina Spielrein.
Eran  Fish is a post-doctoral researcher in philosophy at Ludwig-
Maximilian University of Munich and a fellow of the Minerva Foundation.
His fields of research are, in particular, moral and political philosophy. He
holds a PhD in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and
has studied legal theory at New York University.
David Heyd is Chaim Perelman Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. He was born in Jerusalem and earned his PhD
in philosophy at oxford University (Wadham College). Since 1976, he
has been teaching at the Hebrew University, serving for some time as
head of the philosophy department and as director of the university pro-
gram for outstanding students. Heyd’s main areas of research, in which
he has published books and articles, are ethics, political philosophy, and
bioethics. He has served on many public committees on biomedical
issues, leading to regulation and legislation of medical practice in the
fields of procreation, genetics, euthanasia, and research.
Amos Israel-Vleeschhouwer is a lecturer at the School of Law at the
Sapir Academic College in Sderot, Israel, and has initiated the Sapir Legal
Innovation and entrepreneurship Lab. He serves on the board of
PICATI—the public committee against torture in Israel—and volunteers