"... if Améry’s pessimism disparages life, his humanism reaffirms it. By trying to make sense of our existence, Améry reminds us of why human life is precious." —Alan Wolfe, The New Republic "The pessimistic tone of this book is provocative and should interest students and faculty involved with issues of aging." —Choice "The writing challenges and searches, trying to cut beneath conventional language and expectations, seeking to delineate qualities of lived experience in their most essential dimensions." —Contemporary Gerontology (...) Five profoundly moving and courageously honest essays about the process of aging by the famous Belgian author of At the Mind’s Limits. Each essay covers a set of issues about growing old, from the way aging makes the old progressively see time as the essence of their existence to the argument that everyone compromises with death in old age. (shrink)

This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. 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.

The article provides a close reading of Jean Améry’s essay, ‘Resentments’ from the perspective of temporality. Although firmly grounded in a specific historical and political context (Améry, a Holocaust survivor, reflects on the aftermath of his experiences during the war), I argue that this essay offers valuable insights into Améry’s philosophy of temporality. After establishing the context and structure of Améry’s ‘Resentments’, the article delves into a discussion of the temporal aspects found in the text: (...) (1) Delay: the emergence of resentments and their connection to trauma. (2) Eternal Recurrence: Améry’s critique of Nietzsche, along with surprising interconnections between their ideas. (3) Natural Time and Forgiveness: Améry’s critique of the temporal structure of forgiveness and the morally questionable prioritization of the future over the past. (4) Moral Time and the Irreversible: the distorted temporal structure of resentments, and Améry’s thought-provoking exploration of the phantasy of time’s reversibility. (5) The Future: Améry’s direct address to the young Germans and his unexpected suggestion on how they should treat their past and history, emphasizing responsibility rather than blame, as the key their past provides for the possibility of their future. (shrink)

2016 marks the 50 th Anniversary of the publication of Jean Améry’s collection of essays dealing with his experiences at Auschwitz entitled Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. Translated into English as At The Mind’s Limits: Contemplations By A Survivor On Auschwitz And Its Realities, Améry’s collection immediately set a standard for philosophical accounts of the camps that even today remains unchanged. More uncompromising than the texts of Wiesenthal, Levi, Borowski, and Wiesel, Améry’s collection (...) philosophically explores the extreme limit of the survivor’s experience in the camps as well as the ensuing trauma of living in its wake. (shrink)

Arguing beyond hasty dichotomies and unexamined moral assumptions, _Resentment's Virtue_ offers a more nuanced approach to an understanding of the reasons why survivors of mass atrocities sometimes harbour resentment and refuse to forgive. Building on a close examination of the writings of Holocaust-survivor Jean Améry, Brudholm argues that the preservation of resentment or the resistance to calls for forgiveness can be the reflex of a moral protest and ambition that might be as permissible, humane or honourable as the (...) willingness to forgive. (shrink)

Most current talk of forgiveness and reconciliation in the aftermath of collective violence proceeds from an assumption that forgiveness is always superior to resentment and refusal to forgive. Victims who demonstrate a willingness to forgive are often celebrated as virtuous moral models, while those who refuse to forgive are frequently seen as suffering from a pathology. Resentment is viewed as a negative state, held by victims who are not "ready" or "capable" of forgiving and healing. Resentment's Virtue offers a new, (...) more nuanced view. Building on the writings of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry and the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Thomas Brudholm argues that the preservation of resentment can be the reflex of a moral protest that might be as permissible, humane or honorable as the willingness to forgive. Taking into account the experiences of victims, the findings of truth commissions, and studies of mass atrocities, Brudholm seeks to enrich the philosophical understanding of resentment. (shrink)

Against the view that trauma cripples the survivor’s ability to account for his or her own experience, Jean Améry, a survivor of Auschwitz, argued that trauma speaks a language of its own. In this language, what may be taken as a clinical symptom, the inability to let go of a traumatic past, is actually an ethical stance on behalf of history’s victims. Améry wrote about aging in similar terms. Aging and death are an assault on the values (...) of life, an assault that Améry rejected with equal vigor, and in much the same terms, as he rejected the history that does not stop with the Holocaust. In the second case, Améry is mistaken. Aging and death, allowed to proceed at a natural pace, serve life, the succession of generations. This argument is pursued by comparing Améry’s position with that of a large group of Holocaust survivors. It may appear as if Améry’s argument about the Holocaust has little to do with his argument about aging. In fact, they are related, to the detriment of both arguments. (shrink)

The questions of forgiveness and political justice have recently become intertwined with the “transitional justice” project, the aim of which is the coming to terms with past human rights violations. This article demonstrates that “transitional justice” is less concerned with providing justice than with achieving historical closure, moral redemption, and a “new beginning.” It proposes that justice requires a profound reflection of a political nature by introducing and discussing Jean Améry's concept of resentment. Central to Améry's view (...) of resentment is the restoration of the victim's social status and dignity, the validation of the experience of victimhood; his view therefore contrasts with the Nietzschean derogative view of ressentiment. On the basis of Améry's conceptualizations and with reference to Derrida's notions of “hiatus” and “forgiveness as impossibility,” the article problematizes the relation of ethics and politics—which the “transitional justice” project takes as given. It suggests that to theorize on justice, one needs to parenthesize the moral imagery of forgiveness and bring thirdness to the fore as the space where the identities of “victims” and “perpetrators” are established and played out. (shrink)

As the contemporary nation state order continues to produce genocide and destruction, and thereby refugees, and as the national and international landscape continues to see the existence of refugees as a political problem, Jean Améry’s 1966 essay “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” takes on a curious urgency. I say ‘curious’ because his own conclusions about the essay’s aims and accomplishments appear uncertain and oftentimes unclear. My aim in what follows, then, is twofold. First, I intend to (...) make clear the rich, suggestive, but perhaps underdeveloped phenomenological assumptions involved in this essay. Second, I want to show — but, unfortunately, only show —how these assumptions and Améry’s analysis points to a problem at the heart of contemporary conceptions of statehood, one which demands significantly more discussion. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 11 Heft: 1-2 Seiten: 133-165.

La obra de Jean Améry es uno de los intentos más notables de reflexión filosófica crítica y sistemática realizada por un superviviente del Holocausto. Jean Améry ejemplifica a través de su propia persona y de su escritura un _ethos_ inflexible de humanismo radical, frente a un mundo transformado por el totalitarismo en ámbito de extrañamiento. En este artículo queremos acercarnos a su pensamiento desde la perspectiva de la original teorización del resentimiento que en él se desarrolla. (...) Una reflexión sobre la condición humana y sobre la exigencia de justicia y reparación entendida como ontología negativa de la condición humana y como una moralidad que teoriza el futuro como una suerte de imposibilidad. (shrink)

For their testimonial value, Jean Améry's writings are obligatory reading for anyone interested in studies of the Holocaust. But Améry can and must also be read as philosophy, argues Roy Ben-Shai. In Améry's work, the combination of the testimonial and the philosophical constitutes a "twilight", a revolt against the separation of pathos (experience) and logos (the intellect), and a call for the insertion of the victim into philosophical discourse.

Jean Améry, superviviente de la Shoá, experimentará durante dos décadas la clausura de la palabra, como consecuencia traumática de la violencia y la tortura padecidas. Desde mediados de los años sesenta hasta su muerte, Améry se ocupará ensayística y literariamente de la destrucción infligida a él. Su empresa narrativa será el esfuerzo titánico por subvertir el “topos de inaplicabilidad”, asociado con el recuerdo del dolor extremo, determinante para su condición de víctima, mediante la palabra. una palabra capaz (...) de devolverle –siempre de modo parcial y subsidiario– la condición de sujeto. Sin embargo, la experiencia del dolor será inaprehensible, subsumida por el tiempo en la etérea forma de una abstracción. La memoria se revela a Améry como incapaz frente a la substancia del dolor, tan solo asequible a recurrentes escenas de penosa claridad para la visión. (shrink)

One of the best known and most widely accepted premises regarding the experience of pain and suffering is its singular, private nature. Pain’s violence isolates us from everything else, embedding us completely within our own suffering so that there is nothing else but pain: no world or objects, no relationship with other people, no past or anticipation of the future. An utter withdrawal. But pain’s isolating force is dual: it affects not only those who suffer, but also those who are (...) not in pain. Thus, it is precisely in pain – the exemplary state in which we need others with us to offer their help and sympathy – that we find ourselves in solitude; and it is precisely in the state of pain that we leave others to suffer alone. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida has suggested that forgiveness be understood as the unforgivable: in order for forgiveness to be pure, its object must be the unforgivable. Furthermore, he states that no conditions should be imposed on granting forgiveness. The article seeks to show that this purity has to be forgone since the offender has to repent and ask for forgiveness, in order for a victim to forgive. The article also examines the monstrous as the object of forgiveness, using the case of (...) class='Hi'>Jean Améry as an example. (shrink)

At the center of the following essay is an analysis of At the Mind's Limits by Jean Améry––philosopher and survivor of Auschwitz. The essay tries to define and refine, via comparison and contrast with works by Hannah Arendt and René Descartes, the unique conception of morality that arises from Améry's text. “Victim morality,” as it will be called here, is a non-normative morality which is patient and victim-based rather than agent or actor-based. It is grounded in a (...) heightened exposure and sensitivity to reality and suffering, which results from a reduction of a human being to “a bundle of reactions.” This process cannot be voluntarily undertaken but is violently undergone. The claim is that morality not only survives the loss of humanity but is only fully exposed where humanity falters. My torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body that can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well …. They did not come to force the story out of me of what I had said to the barbarians and what the barbarians had said to me …. They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal. –J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians. (shrink)

That the question of identity takes on a sense of urgency, one with its own possibilities and impossibilities, the moment that identity is bound up with death, is hardy surprising. What follows are a series of reflections on the question of identity, Jewish identity, raised by Jean Améry’s remarkable text On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew. Améry’s text was of course published in the wake of his own experiences as an active member of the (...) resistance, as having been imprisoned in Auschwitz and as the victim of torture. Philosophically, rather than biographically, if there were a point of comparison, then it is to Levinas’s 1947 text Etre juif. Both pose the problem of how the question of Jewish identity, Jewish being, is to be understood in the wake of the Shoah. The meaning of the formulations - Jude zu sein, Jude sein, Etre juif, Jewish being – delimits the question to be addressed. This will be the case even if its point of address, namely what the question stages, is itself far from straightforward. Moreover, while what is demanded within that question is itself philosophically important, it is equally the case that the question of Jewish being is at work within both communities and synagogues across the Jewish world. As a consequence it is as much a philosophical question as it is one that has a structuring effect on how Jewish survival is conceived. How survival is understood is an issue that continues to exert its force. Who is the subject of survival? What is the subject of survival? Who or what has been subjected to the issue of survival? Survival is both more nuanced and complex than the brute fact of an afterlife. Jewish being as a present question – a question of the present - continues therefore. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida ha propuesto entender el perdón como lo imperdonable: para que el perdón sea puro, su objeto debe ser lo imperdonable. Plantea, además, que no debe haber ninguna condición para que el perdón sea otorgado. Se busca mostrar que esta pureza debe ser sacrificada, ya que, para que una víc..

What is the relation between philosophical categories and everyday experience? Can an effectively first-person account of an historical experience rise to the level of a philosophical argument? This essay argues that Jean Amery’s account of his sufferings under the Nazis intends to generate a justificatory argument, a transcendental deduction of sorts, for the category of ”resentment’ against its philosophical critics, most importantly, Nietzsche.

Contemporary accounts of evil attempt to identify features or properties that transform an act of wrongdoing into an act of evil. What is missing from the discussion, however, is a phenomenology of evil that engages with the standpoint of the subject that undergoes evil. This paper discusses basic themes for a phenomenology of evil through a critical comparison between Hannah Arendt and Jean Améry’s respective conceptions of evil. Central for this discussion is a claim Arendt and Améry (...) share: evil destroys subjectivity and undermines trust in the world. Furthermore, both argue that the perpetrators of evil inhabit a distorted moral framework. They differ, however, insofar as Améry foregrounds the subject that undergoes evil, a standpoint that remains tacit in Arendt’s account. Recounting his torture by the Gestapo, Améry reveals how embodied subjects experiences evil and how it is in light of these experiences that perpetrators of evil should be understood. (shrink)

Of all the terms Jean Améry might have chosen to explain the deepest effects of torture, the one he selected was world. To be tortured was to lose trust in the world, to become incapable of feeling at home in the world. In July 1943, Améry was arrested by the Gestapo in Belgium and tortured by the SS at the former fortress of Breendonk. With the first blow from the torturers, he famously wrote, one loses trust in (...) the world. With that blow, one can no l onger be certain that “by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me — and more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being.” In a vault inside the fortress, beyond the reach of anyone who might help — a wife, a mother, a brother, a friend — it turned out that all social contracts had been broken and torture was possible. His attackers had no respect for him, and no-one else could or would help. (shrink)

Kant suggests in The Metaphysics of Morals that we may sometimes say something untrue or insincere since others are free to interpret our statements as they wish. (1996, 6:238) Yet he also argues that even in conflict situations we should be truthful so as to not eliminate trust and to make it possible for a rightful condition to arise. My paper considers the conditions Kant believes essential to maintain basic trust so that in better times peace is possible. It also (...) considers their relation to sincerity. I argue that Kant’s view can provide a model for building political trust after wars and other forms of conflict. Furthermore, I consider the need for the possibility of help as also necessary for trust, through the work of Jean Améry. In certain situations, sincerity is not the most important thing. More important are truthfulness and the willingness to act as if we were sincere and thought others and the world worthy of our trust. (shrink)

This article examines the different ways in which torture can be seen to have shaped the political and theoretical outlook of Frantz Fanon and that of his enthusiastic reader, the former Auschwitz prisoner Jean Améry. Building on the latter’s suggestion that torture was the essence of the Third Reich, the reader is asked to apply that insight to an unconventional interpretation of the routinization of torture in contemporary statecraft.

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 asso ciates what he calls “kynicism” 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. (shrink)

At the 50 th anniversary of the Jean Améry’s Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten, published in English as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations By a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, this work is garnering increased attention in the Anglophone world. Perhaps it should not be surprising that there is increased interest in this book at this moment when our attention is repeatedly drawn to the plight of immigrants and exiles, state sanctioned use of torture, (...) and police violence — all themes At the Mi nd’s Limits deals with at length. While this recent attention is certainly appropriate, it nevertheless tends to blur the specific and particular socio-political and cultural contours of the work. Améry becomes a writer about the plight of the victim in general, such that specificity of his Jewishness is lost and the already submerged theological dimensions of his work remain obscure. (shrink)

Kant suggests in The Metaphysics of Morals that we may sometimes say something untrue or insincere since others are free to interpret our statements as they wish. (1996, 6:238) Yet he also argues that even in conflict situations we should be truthful so as to not eliminate trust and to make it possible for a rightful condition to arise. My paper considers the conditions Kant believes essential to maintain basic trust so that in better times peace is possible. It also (...) considers their relation to sincerity. I argue that Kant’s view can provide a model for building political trust after wars and other forms of conflict. Furthermore, I consider the need for the possibility of help as also necessary for trust, through the work of Jean Améry. In certain situations, sincerity is not the most important thing. More important are truthfulness and the willingness to act as if we were sincere and thought others and the world worthy of our trust. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In a statement too strong even to summarize his own views, Jean-Paul Sartre famously declares in “Existentialism is a Humanism” that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.” It is bad faith, according to him, to attribute what I am to my family, culture, condition, etc., because through awareness of what I am and have been, I can determine whether what I am will continue into the future. Human being, as a result, is nothing but what (...) he or she has chosen or decided. In “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” Jean Améry rejects that view.He explicitly rejects the idea that “I am what I am for myself and in myself, and nothing else.” In doing so, he is one of a group of Jewish thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, who reject Sartre’s ideas about Jewish identity and identi ty more generally, ideas expressed particularly in Reflections on the Jewish Question but amplified by views expressed in “Existentialism is a Humanism” and Being and Nothingness.Those in the group go out of their way to express their gratitude to Sartre f or writing on “the Jewish question” after the war --Sartre who wrote because he saw no mention of the 77,000 Jews in France who were deported and murdered by the Nazis. (shrink)

In “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” Jean Améry admits that in Europe, “the degradation of the Jews was...identical with the death threat long before Auschwitz. In this regard, Jean- Paul Sartre, already in...his book Anti-Semite and Jew, offered a few perceptions that are still valid today.” In no uncertain terms, Améry aligns his own project to “describe the...unchanging...condition” of the Reich’s victims with Sartre’s 1946 book on anti-Semitism, a philosophical gesture that was (...) not uncommon for left- leaning Jewish intellectuals after the war. According to Robert Misrahi, who discusses at length what he calls Sartre’s “evident good will,” “his manifest care to render justice, and his desire, in the face of the Jews’ great suffering, to address himself to them,” Anti-Semite and Jew was primarily a “powerful affirmation of sympathy” for European Jews and, moreover, “an effective weapon against anti- Semitism.” Misrahi insists that French Jews were “astonished, even stunned for what we were used to was hatred and contempt.” Sartre’s repeated assertions that the suffering of European Jewry was undeserved and unwarranted, are underscored by his declaration that Euro pe’s problem was not, after all, ‘the Jew’ but the anti -Semite, whose sadistic Manichaeism and profound fear of himself and his own instincts and responsibilities, had inverted European values so profoundly as to make genocide ethical. And although Sartre repeatedly emphasizes his intention to analyze primarily the situation of French Jews, he does not fail to connect European anti- Semitism with other forms of racialized hatred; ‘the Jew’ is only a “pretext,” since “elsewhere [the anti-Semite’s] counterpart will make use of the Negro or the man of yellow skin” because anti-Semitism, “in short, is fear of the human condition.” Given the profound radicalism of such declarations at the time, it is not a surprise that Améry confessed and enacted a deep affinity for Sartrean existentialism. And yet, despite Améry’s understandable eagerness to wave the Sartrean flag, Améry’s existentialism is less like Sartre’s, and, consciously or unconsciously, far more like that of Albert Camus. Although Améry never mentions Camus in At the Mind’s Limits, Améry shares Camus’ reverence for rigorous analysis that simultaneously resists the kind of moral and political rigidity that often leads to a falsification of human experience and history. This is perhaps most evident in their overlapping treatments and understandings of human dignity and its solitary champion, the absurdist ‘rebel.’. (shrink)

En su Genealogía de la moral, Nietzsche situó el resentimiento del débil en la base de la moralización de los valores originales del fuerte -entre ellos, la crueldad inherente a la afirmación de la vida que transformó éstos en negativos. A esta idea del resentimiento como un mecanismo esencialmente distorsionador se opone Jean Améry, víctima de la violencia nazi, en Más alla de la culpa y la expiación , donde reivindica su resentimiento hacia los verdugos y sus cómplices (...) como un instrumento de verdad para exigirles el reconocimiento de su crimen y la negación de su condición de verdugos. El objetivo del artículo es reconstruir la trama conceptual en que se articula la divergencia entre Améry y Nietzsche, mostrando los diferentes compromisos ontológicos sobre la moral que sustentan sus respectivas concepciones del resentimiento. (shrink)

This paper addresses the Harmful Dysfunction Analysis of mental disorder. We argue that some mental conditions meet both of its criteria —the dysfunction criterion and the harm criterion— and yet should not count as mental disorders because of their value. We contend that the harm criterion, by taking harm as a proxy for disvalue, is an inadequate normative criterion in these cases. Therefore, further ethical considerations should be included as a normative criterion. To illustrate our view, we draw on the (...) experience and reflections of Jean Améry, a philosopher and Holocaust survivor who resisted the diagnosis of KZ-Syndrom. (shrink)

Da nur der einzelne Mensch, nicht aber etwas ihn (seinen individuellen Leib im Sinne Jean Amérys) Überschreitendes frei sein kann, darum, so lautet Sartres logisch nicht zu widerlegendes Urteil, kann keinem Objekt eine in diesem selbst angelegte Fähigkeit, Entscheidungen zu fällen, zugesprochen werden. Wenn ein Subjekt einem ihm Äußeren – etwa Gott, der Natur, dem Staat, dem Kapital oder dem Schönen, dem Glück oder sonst etwas –, eine derartige Autonomie zuschreibt, belügt es sich, meint Sartre: um der Angst vor (...) seiner Freiheit Herr zu werden und sich für seine Taten nicht verantwortlich fühlen zu müssen. Wenn man Adornos Ästhetik dieser Subjektbestimmung konfrontiert, läßt sich jedoch zeigen, daß, so sehr Sartre logisch im Recht sein mag, die Kritik im Grunde darauf zielen muß, genau jenes für Sartre Unmögliche dennoch zur Darstellung zu bringen: um die Verkehrungen erkennen zu können, dank derer das Kapital als automatisches Subjekt, als Souverän, agieren kann. (shrink)

Jean Améry’s memoir of his imprisonment and torture by the Nazis links the loss of “trust in the world” to the violence he experienced. The loss of trust makes him feel homeless. He can no longer find a place in the intersubjective world, the world for everyone. What is this “trust in the world”? How does violence destroy it? In this article, I use Améry’s remarks as guide for understanding the relation of violence, trust, and homelessness. Trust, (...) I argue, is crucial to the constitution of the intersubjective world. Violence, by undermining trust in Others, destroys the sense that this world is “for everyone.” In excluding the victim from its “for everyone,” it enforces a homelessness that transforms the victim’s very being-in-the-world. (shrink)

This paper explores the theme of torture in the Colombian Truth Commission’s Final Report, focusing on its characterization of torture as a way of annulling a person’s identity. Drawing on Jean Améry’s approach, I argue that torture destroys the victim’s world and explore the further implications of this assertion. I begin by highlighting how the history of torture distorts legal and medical practices, masquerading as a quest for truth while exercising a farce of power, disintegrating the victim’s lived (...) body. By delving into Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh,” I also explain how torture erodes the carnal trust that connects us to the world and enables proper communication. Consequently, torture results in an utter negation of the self and the world. In conclusion, I suggest that torture as understood as the destitution of a person’s world, can serve as a paradigm for comprehending the experiences of violence faced by victims in Colombia. (shrink)

La nostalgie est cet état psychique qui se tient quelque part entre le deuil, la dépression et la mélancolie, avec lesquels on la confond souvent. Définie très tôt comme la maladie de l’exilé, la nostalgie est un pharmakon, à la fois baume et poison pour celui qui s’y adonne. À partir des écrits de Jean Améry, survivant de la Shoah, et de sa propre expérience auprès des survivants du génocide rwandais, l’auteur, psychanalyste, distingue ici deux positions face à (...) la nostalgie : la position nostalgique et l’évitement, toutes deux à l’origine d’états pathologiques qui peuvent conduire à la mélancolie, voire au suicide. (shrink)

“Rien n’arrive ni comme on l’espère, ni comme on le craint. Nothing really happens as we hope it will, nor as we fear it will.” 1 Améry appropriates this quote of Proust to highlight how our imaginative powers can never approach its reality during an extreme event. This failure of what he coins our anticipatory imagination is depicted in his phenomenological account of torture, an event whose extremity is later compared to another embodied experience: that of aging. Equating torture (...) with aging may seem shocking to some, and Améry was critiqued for suggesting such a parallel, particularly since he narrates a lived experience with the latter at the mere age of fifty-five. He revisits this critique in the preface to the fourth edition of On Aging: Revolt and Resignation where he states: "Today as much as yesterday I think that society has to undertake everything to relieve old and aging persons of their unpleasant destiny. And at the same time I stick to my position that all high- minded and reverential efforts in this direction, though indeed capable of being somewhat soothing- are still not capable of changing anything fundamental about the tragic hardship of aging." - Jean Améry, On Aging [Améry’s emphasis] The “today” of society that Améry referenced was 1977. But what about today? Is Améry correct in projecting that despite our best efforts nothing fundamental can change the quite unbearable experience of aging? Are attempts to aid the aging complicit in a “vile dupery” that ends in “metaphorically empty” phrases such as “rest in peace”? 3 I would like to pose these questions in the wake of a heated debate in France regarding the legality of assisted suicide for aging persons. Thus, this paper seeks to not only dissect his account of aging but to ask whether his philosophy could be read alongside current French thinkers to better assess comment mourir dans la dignité. (shrink)