To Reverse the Irreversible: On Time Disorder in Jean Améry

"The politics of Nihilism: From the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary Israel", 2014

This essay shows that at the core of Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is a differentiation, which I term "the more difference", between two dimensions of value, namely, between values themselves and the value of these values. Unless this difference is maintained, values stand to lose their value (nihilism). Although establishing the moral difference was quintessential to Nietzsche’s work, I argue that he contradicted it by reducing the value of values with the value of life. Against this, I present the work of philosopher Jean Améry, who, in polemic against Nietzsche, called the value of the value of life into question, thus affirming the moral difference in a way that is more consistent, perhaps even more “Nietzschean”, than Nietzsche himself.

2012

At the center of this dissertation is a study of Holocaust survivor and essayist Jean Améry as a philosopher. Alongside my reading of Améry, with and against Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Agamben, I offer an original interpretation of the meaning of 'pathos' and 'pathology'. Pathos is an experience that is imposed on one, incapacitating, and passively undergone. Looking more closely at what is entailed in such experience, I suggest that pathology -as the logic of pathos-is a contrarian and irreconcilable modality of relation, and by extension, a thinking and being in revolt. I argue that moral thinking is pathological in this sense and that Améry's philosophy, which I develop further, is a 'moral pathology'.

This dissertation concerns the extent to which resentment can constitute an instrument of social reconciliation. In particular, it aims to investigate the nature and rationale of victims’ refusal to forgive and their fostering of resentments after crimes against humanity. To do this it analyses Jean Améry phenomenological account of victim's resentment and the immorality of forgiving in the context of escapist forgetfulness, as described in his essay Resentment (1966). It compares this perspective to the concept of worldly and political forgiveness developed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958). It argues that a more critical understanding of forgiveness and its implications are helpful for theoretical and practical reasons. Theoretically, it reveals important tensions in Arendt’s writing. Practically it highlights the importance of developing new modes of reconciliation in the field of transitional justice. The dissertation concludes that critical engagement with resentment as a instrument for reconciliation between antagonistic groups can be an effective catalyst for such an endeavor.

HEDGEHOG REVIEW, 2005

Spinoza, Adi Ophir, Jean Amery, Emmanuel Levinas

The constellation of pain, resentment, the body, and time – as they exist in the wake of the Enlightenment and in the dawn of a new barbarism - is found throughout the work of Jean Améry and Peter Sloterdijk. Both thinkers were especially influenced by Nietzsche’s readings of resentment, his challenge to the Enlightenment, and his turn to the body as the basis of a new kind of thinking which starts with pain, dwells in irreversible time, and ends with the possibility of action and joy. While this new thinking is novel and appeals to all humankind, the most unexpected points of convergence between Améry and Sloterdijk can be found in their particular neo-Nietzschean articulations of Jewishness: using what Harold Bloom would call revision, they both propose a revision of Nietzsche’s reading of Judaism as resentment. Améry associates Jewishness with “revolt” while Sloterdijk associates what he calls “kynicism” (as opposed to cynicism) with Jewishness.1 Intensely aware of the mortal blows that have been dealt to the Enlightenment, philosophy, and modernity as well as to the human body during the Holocaust, Améry and Sloterdijk both address – either directly or indirectly – the meaning of cynicism in relation to Jewishness, in particular, and the modern condition, in general.

Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, 2015

"Resentment is a recurrent problem for democracy. With its normative commitment to satisfying the principle of equal respect democracy encourages and legitimates the expression of resentment against injustice, inequality and corruption. Yet, as John Keane’s recent analysis of contemporary democracy implies, rising tides of resentment can easily turn citizens against democratic principles and promote so-called ‘democide’. The challenge of resentment has become all the more acute in the past 20 years since both established and transitional democracies began to take seriously the claims of resentments deriving from historical injustices. Democracies now also face the challenge of addressing resentments that cannot be undone and about which, or so some argue, little can be done. As Nietzsche famously observed, it is our impotence with respect to the past, the brute fact of its irreversibility, which makes us “gnash our teeth” and fuels what he calls ressentiment. The political physiognomy of ressentiment, as we shall see, is not pretty. If contemporary democracies are to successfully negotiate the risks and promises of acknowledging resentment, therefore, we need to undertake clear-eyed analysis of the phenomenon of resentment. This paper aims to clarify the relationship and differences between different forms of resentment, and to analyse the political implications of these forms. It begins by setting out the difference between resentment, as conceived by philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment in particular Adam Smith and Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment. Drawing on this brief intellectual history it suggests that we can distinguish three different concepts in contemporary uses of the term resentment. For the sake of convenience I label these concepts moral resentment, socio-political resentment and ontological ressentiment. It suggests first that contemporary defenders of moral resentment plausibly demonstrate that this emotion is one of the pillars of justice. Second, it argues that if we accept a broader notion of collective responsibility then we can also defend socio-political resentment as an important emotion for identifying and addressing collective and systematic injustices. However, the paper also maintains that socio-political resentment has the potential to trigger or galvanize ontological ressentiment. By carefully analyzing Nietzsche’s criticism of ‘slave’ ressentiment and his own alternative political ideals, it shows that ontological ressentiment gives rise to different kinds of totalitarian or perfectionist politics. While Nietzsche himself miscast legitimate socio-political resentment as a sign of physiological degeneracy, his analysis also illuminates how these legitimate grievances can transform into a radical envy and a ‘deep hatred of existence’ that identifies virtue with victimhood. Nietzsche’s analysis alerts us to an important political problem for democracies: viz., the slide from socio-political to ontological ressentiment. The paper concludes by suggesting that democratic political theory needs to investigate how to prevent socio-political resentment from sliding into ontological ressentiment to avoid the spread of dystopian political ideals and movements. "

Does atrocity age? What I mean to ask is, does time heal wounds that were genocidal or otherwise broad, deep, and caused by a fatal combination of human depravity and widespread indifference? Jean Améry famously refused to let the past be past in his essay “Resentments.” He argued that even if, with regard to the Holocaust, logically speaking, what happened is in the past, there is no moral sense to that. Morality requires of us that we refuse to let the past be whenever we are faced with a past that should have been otherwise. For him, writing 20 years after he was freed from the camps, time had not healed all wounds. Atrocity was not aging gracefully.

Using Jean Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits as a case study of a Holocaust survivor memoir, I assert a significant range of expression and develop an argument to illuminate counter-narratives of recognition and dispositions of forgiveness.

"Europe in the Eyes of Survivors of the Holocaust", 2014