On Jean Améry
Philosophy of Catastrophe
By (author) Magdalena Zolkos Contributions by J M. Bernstein, Roy Ben-Shai, Thomas Brudholm, Arne Grøn, Dennis B. Klein, Kitty Millet, Joseph Rosen, Philipa Rothfield, Melanie Steiner Sherwood, Wolfgang Treitler, Aleksandra Ubertowska, Michael Ure, Anna Yeatman, Markus Zisselsberger
Publication date:
09 December 2011Length of book:
344 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739147658
On Jean Améry provides a comprehensive discussion of one of the most challenging and complex post-Holocaust thinkers, Jean Améry (1912-1978), a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. In the English-speaking world Améry is known for his poignant publication, At the Mind's Limits, a narrative of exile, dispossession, torture, and Auschwitz. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in Améry's writings on victimization and resentment, partly attributable to a modern fascination with tolerance, historical injustice, and reconciliatory ambitions. Many aspects of Améry's writing have remained largely unexplored outside the realm of European scholarship, and his legacy in English-language scholarship limited to discussions of victimization and memory.
This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Améry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness. What emerges from the pages of this book is an image of Amèry as a difficult and perplexing-yet exceptionally engaging-thinker, whose writings address some of the central paradoxes of survivorship and witnessing. The intellectual and ethical questions of Améry's philosophies are equally pertinent today as they were half-century ago: How one can reconcile with the irreconcilable? How can one account for the unaccountable? And, how can one live after catastrophe?
This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Améry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness. What emerges from the pages of this book is an image of Amèry as a difficult and perplexing-yet exceptionally engaging-thinker, whose writings address some of the central paradoxes of survivorship and witnessing. The intellectual and ethical questions of Améry's philosophies are equally pertinent today as they were half-century ago: How one can reconcile with the irreconcilable? How can one account for the unaccountable? And, how can one live after catastrophe?
This volume, a welcome addition to scholarship on Jean Améry, examines his work from various perspectives. The collection consists of essays analyzing Améry's œuvre from a philosophical, linguistic, and literary point of view. Scholars from Australia, the United States, Canada, Poland, Denmark, and Austria draw on a wide variety of theoretical frameworks, entering into a cross-disciplinary dialogue with each other, while employing the latest research findings to bring Améry's often forceful, provocative argumentation into focus. Whereas his essays have hitherto received attention in the German-speaking world, Zolkos' merit has been to assemble contributions in English about the œuvre of this survivor of Auschwitz. It is rewarding to see Améry's essayistic, journalistic and literary work, which continues to be relevant in today's world, finally granted the global attention it merits.