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Time, moral and anti-moral: Améry and Levinas on historical responses to trauma

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Abstract

In this article I interpret Améry’s claims about the temporal dimension of trauma in the light of Levinas’s reflections on suffering and responses to suffering—and how both reject the temptation to generate narratives in which pain serves as a step toward transcendence and self-determination. That temptation finds support in Nietzsche’s critique of resentment, which identifies the refusal to forget as pathological, and against which Améry defends himself by demanding a substantive, intersubjective process of working-off the unjust past. I argue that for Levinas and Améry, progressive narratives intensify the moral inattention that normalizes the initial infliction of suffering, and that revising how we understand time is necessary to respond ethically to trauma and human vulnerability more broadly. In light of that analysis, I consider contemporary examples of memorialization and the assumptions about time that they reveal.

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Notes

  1. Améry (1980b, xi).

  2. This work builds on and is deeply indebted to Jill Stauffer’s analysis of the links between Levinas, Améry, and Nietzsche in Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (2015). My argument provides more of a close reading of four specific essays of Levinas’s and Améry’s in relation to each other, and in relation to the desire for a progressive narrative that operates at a social level.

  3. Améry (1980d, 28).

  4. Levinas (1990b, 291).

  5. In drawing these connections, I do not mean to conflate Levinas’s and Améry’s experiences of the Shoah. As Robert Manning argues, Levinas is not a typical survivor: he is interred in a prisoner of war camp as a French soldier, protected by the Geneva Convention, while his wife and daughter go into hiding in occupied France, and the rest of his family is murdered in Lithuania. By contrast, Améry survives torture and internment in several concentration camps (2022, 76).

  6. Levinas (2004, 14).

  7. Ibid., 14–15.

  8. Ibid., 15.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid., 17.

  11. Levinas (2001a, 185). On Levinas’s reading, the fall of communism in eastern Europe thus deprives us of a liberatory narrative that cannot easily by replaced by complacency that liberal societies will be a “fulfillment of all promises.” In this sense, the undermining of Marxist hope puts “our relation to time... in crisis.” Yet Levinas himself refuses to locate hope in this political vision of progress. Ethical responsibility is a possibility that carries no guarantee and no force: “I have no optimistic philosophy for the end of history.... the human consists in acting without letting yourself be guided by these menacing possibilities. That is what the awakening to the human is” (Levinas [1998b, 114]). Hence Levinas’s repeated argument that the just state must be continually challenged by the ethical, to avoid corrupting our obligations to each other.

  12. Nietzsche (1989, II:1).

  13. Ibid.

  14. Levinas (2004, 17–18).

  15. Ibid., 19.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid., 13, 21. My reading of Améry’s experience of torture amplifies Stauffer’s focus on how the responses (or lack of response) from others intensifies the collapse in trust, by thinking about how the multiple dimensions of moral inattention are expressed in the temporal features of traumatic symptoms.

  18. Améry (1980d, 28).

  19. Ibid.

  20. Levinas (1987, 19).

  21. Améry (1980d, 35); Ratcliffe et al. (2014, 6).

  22. Améry (1980d, 40, emphasis added).

  23. de Warren (2015, 89).

  24. Améry (1980c, 68).

  25. Ibid.

  26. Brison (2003, 103).

  27. Ratcliffe (2014, 1).

  28. Rosen (2011, 281).

  29. Ratcliffe (2014, 2).

  30. See Brison (2003, xi, 47–48); Herman (1997, 52).

  31. Stauffer (2015, 1).

  32. Ibid., 28.

  33. See Brudholm (2008, 115).

  34. Améry (1980c, 68–69).

  35. Ibid., 72.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Levinas (1990c, 149).

  38. Nietzsche (1989, III:15). The original German title of At the Mind’s Limits explicitly echoes Nietzsche: Jenseits Von Schuld Und Sühne translates as Beyond Guilt and Atonement. For more discussion of Améry’s direct references to Nietzsche, see Stauffer (2015) and Brudholm (2008).

  39. Ibid., I:10–11.

  40. Scheler (1998, 25).

  41. Nietzsche (1989, III:16).

  42. Améry (1980c, 69).

  43. Ibid., 79.

  44. Stauffer (2015, 126).

  45. Améry (1980c, 70). Brudholm suggests that “hingerissen” would be more accurately rendered as “tugged” or “torn into” (2008, 121).

  46. Stauffer (2015, 126).

  47. Ibid., 129, 126.

  48. Améry (1980c, 76).

  49. Ibid., 66.

  50. Ibid., 78.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Ibid., 76.

  53. Ibid., 75–76.

  54. Ibid., 79.

  55. Ibid., 68.

  56. Ibid., 72.

  57. Améry (1980d, 33).

  58. Améry (1980b, xi).

  59. Améry (1980a, xiv, emphasis added).

  60. See Stauffer (2015, 123–26).

  61. Levinas (2001b, 218).

  62. Levinas (1981, 97).

  63. Levinas (1998c, 91).

  64. Ibid., 92–93.

  65. That emphasis on the embodied passivity of pain resonates with Améry’s description of torture as a reduction of the person to a vulnerable body (Amery [1980c, 26–28]).

  66. Ibid., 95–96.

  67. Ibid., 96.

  68. Ibid., 99; see also Bernstein (2002).

  69. Levinas (1969, 228).

  70. Levinas (1998c, 99).

  71. Levinas (1998c, 93).

  72. Ibid., 100.

  73. Eitinger (1981).

  74. Grossman (2006, 410).

  75. Rosen (2011, 298).

  76. Levinas (1998a, 169).

  77. Brison (2003, 64).

  78. Améry (1980c, 77).

  79. Brudholm (2008, 71).

  80. Neiman (2019, 372).

  81. Ibid., 30.

  82. Equal Justice Initiative (2022).

  83. Serwer (2021).

  84. Florida Senate (2022).

  85. American Civil Liberties Union (2022); American Historical Association (2022).

  86. Améry (1980c, 77).

  87. Although this article focuses on how the past (rather than the future) is represented in the present, the political debates around climate change share some of these features: a resistance to recognizing the moral failings bound up with dominant American culture, and thus a resistance to the moral obligation to respond to those failings. The progressive narrative affirms the purposiveness of time while also disavowing responsibility for the past or future, and how one is complicit in how vulnerability is unevenly distributed in both.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Matthew Altman and Robert Manning for their insightful comments on drafts of this paper, which have considerably sharpened my thinking about these issues.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Central Washington University, 400 E. University Way, Ellensburg, WA, 98926-7555, USA

    Cynthia D. Coe

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Coe, C.D. Time, moral and anti-moral: Améry and Levinas on historical responses to trauma. Cont Philos Rev 56, 259–277 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-023-09602-6

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