I argue that the il y a is intrinsically connected to Levinas’s understanding of the tragic, and that Levinas offers an original reading of Shakespearean tragedy that goes beyond traditional aesthetic conceptions of artistic and tragic form and breaks with ancient tragedy. The il y a is implicated in the limit moment Levinas encountered while in captivity, suspended from the world, when time was out of joint. Focusing on Hamlet, who some have argued represents a failure of aesthetic form, I (...) suggest rather that in construing Hamlet as the tragedy that constitutes a reflection on the meaning of the tragic il y a, Levinas identifies Shakespeare’s originality as a tragedian by pointing to the ungraspability of the formless. For Levinas, the tragic lies not in death but in having to be. Levinas’s incipient theory of Shakespearean tragedy provides insight into the complex role art plays for Levinas. (shrink)

During the Second World War, more than 60,000 Jewish members of the American, British and French armed forces became prisoners of war in Germany. Against all expectations, these prisoners were treated in accordance with the 1929 Geneva Convention, and the majority made it home alive. This article seeks to explain this most astonishing circumstance. It begins by collating the references to the experiences of Western Jewish POWs from the historical literature to provide a hitherto-unseen overview of their treatment in captivity. (...) It then asks what made their protection from persecution possible. To this end, it explores Germany’s wider motivations for its selective application of the Geneva Convention and highlights the role that military identity played in making its application seem necessary for all POWs from the Western front, including Jewish POWs. (shrink)

This article takes as its subject matter the juridico-political space of the prisoner of war (POW) camp. It sets out to determine the nature of this space by looking at the experience of war captivity by Jewish members of the Western forces in World War II, focusing on the experience of Emmanuel Levinas, who spent 5 years in German war captivity. On the basis of a historical analysis of the conditions in which Levinas spent his time in captivity, it argues (...) that the POW camp was a space of indifference that was determined by the legal exclusion of prisoners from both war and persecution. Held behind the stage of world events, prisoners were neither able to exercise their legal agency nor released from law into a realm of extra-legal violence. Through a close reading of Levinas’s early concept of the ‘there is’ [il y a], the article seeks to establish the impact on prisoners of prolonged confinement in such a space. It sets out how prisoners’ subjectivity dissolved in the absence of meaningful relations with others and identifies the POW camp as a space in which existence was reduced to indeterminate, impersonal being. (shrink)