On Jean Améry Quotes

“National Socialism was thus, for Levinas, a result of the idealism of European philosophy, which defined “freedom” as the basis of subjectivity. For both thinkers, the violent barbarity of Nazism embodied a form of identity that was based on the extermination of alterity.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“Working-through historical trauma is thus possible not in relation to the historical perpetrator, but through an encounter with contemporary alterity and an engagement with new forms of suffering.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“Meister draws on American reunification after the U.S. Civil War as a basis for discussion. In particular, he focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to bring the civil conflict to a close.5 He writes: Rather than compelling all Americans to acknowledge the pain that slavery inflicted on those whom our nation previously treated as others, the figure of Lincoln invites all Americans to identify themselves as victims who survived the experience of slavery and Civil War. (Meister 1999: 136)”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“Meister’s work combines moral psychology, political theory and psychoanalysis in order to evoke the dynamics of reconciliation (Meister 1999; 2005). He asks the question: how does a nation deal with historical trauma so as to set itself upon a pathway of recovery?”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“moral and political “falsification,” namely, the rehabilitation of Nazism.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“Desmond Tutu (2003: 2), Chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, forgiveness and reconciliation are necessary for the creation of a better future. By contrast, Améry (1984a) depicts a bleak future, provoked by the Nazi ghetto, in which death is its inevitable conclusion”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“Or Paul Celan? For me these are very important events in my life and in history, too, in literary history, even in religious history. What does it mean, when people like them, who could give so much, who have given so much, decide: Enough? I almost would say: Whose fault was it? Man’s fault? God’s fault? A suicide is a very great question mark, just like a sword which is looking for the wound. (Treitler 2006: 32)”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“I die, therefore I am. Or: I die, therefore, life and everything there is as far as judgments are concerned has no value. Or again: I die, therefore I was, at least in a foolish way in the moment before the leap, what I could not be because reality would not allow it to me.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“Enlightenment thought has reconfigured the Shoah as a collective swindle; enlightenment became mass fraud.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“Améry’s analysis of the conditions, possibilities and limits of moral repair. Second, I argue that Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment is conceptually and morally distinct from Améryean ressentiment in all but one crucial respect: viz., the logically absurd desire to undo the past. Third, I argue that Améry insists on the sharing of ressentiment in post-conflict societies because he believes it is symptomatic of the kind of compassion that protects against the repetition of past political evils.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“political community. It is the renewal or cultivation of compassion, he implies, that may make it possible to re-establish co-existence in post-conflict societies. For Améry, I suggest, compassion in its literal sense of entering into or sharing another’s suffering is the source of political trust. He argues that by sharing survivors’ ressentiment about the past, citizens of post-conflict societies demonstrate that they can be trusted to meet the normative expectations that their community radically and unforgivably breached. Améry makes a strong, if implicit case that it is compassion that might ensure “interstellar distances” will never again separate neighbors. I develop this interpretation”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe

“Améry’s analysis implies that acknowledgement of and compassion for victims’ justified anger can short circuit the connection between normatively-oriented resentment and pathological ressentiment. The first upshot of Améry’s analysis is that citizens of post-conflict societies ought to have compassion for victims’ resentment on both moral and prudential grounds. Sympathy for victims’ resentments helps avoid its degeneration into destructive ressentiment.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe