At the Mind's Limits PDF Download

Author: Jean Amery
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253211736
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Jean Amery (1921-1978) was born in Vienna and in 1938 emigrated to Belgium, where he joined the Resistance. He was caught by the Germans in 1943, tortured by the SS, and survived the next two years in the concentration camps. In five autobiographical essays, Amery describes his survival--mental, moral, and physical--through the enormity and horror of the Holocaust.

Author: Jean Amery
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253335630
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
On Suicide is neither a defense of suicide nor an invitation to assisted suicide, but an analysis of the state of mind of those who are suicidal and who actually do commit suicide. It is also a strident defense of the freedom of the individual and a plea for the recognition of the fact that we belong to ourselves before belonging to another person, or an institution, nation, or religion, and that our right to choose to end our life can have priority over social entanglements and biological destiny. Book jacket.

Author: Jean Améry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
On Aging, the first of Jean Amery's books after At the Mind's Limits, is a powerful and profound work on the process of aging and the limited but real defenses available to those experiencing the process. Each essay covers a set of issues about growing old. ""Existence and the Passage of Time"" focuses on the way aging makes the old progressively see time as the essence of their existence. ""Stranger to Oneself"" is a meditation on the ways the aging are alienated from themselves. ""The Look of Others"" treats social aging - the realization that it is no longer possible to live according to one's potential or possibilities. ""Not to Understand the World Anymore"" deals with the loss of the ability to understand new developments in the arts and in the changing values of society. The fifth essay, ""To Live with Dying,"" argues that everyone compromises with death in old age (the time in life when we feel the death that is in us). Here Amery's intention, as encapsulated by John D. Barlow, becomes most clear: ""to disturb easy and cheap compromises and to urge his readers to their own individual acts of defiance and acceptance.""

Author: Thomas Brudholm
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592135684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
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.

Author: Jean Améry
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681372509
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Fans of Flaubert's Madame Bovary will want to read this reimagination of one of literature's most famous failures, Charles Bovary. Part fiction, part philosophy, Charles Bovary, Country Doctor is also a book about love. Charles Bovary, Country Doctor is one of the most unusual projects in twentieth-century literature: a novel-essay devoted to salvaging poor bungler Charles Bovary, the pathetic, laughable, cuckolded husband of Madame Bovary and the heartless creation of Gustave Flaubert. As a once-promising novelist who was tortured by the Nazis and survived a year in Auschwitz, author Jean Améry had a particular sympathy for the lived experience of vulnerability, affliction, and suffering, and in this book—available in English for the first time—he asserts the moral claims of Dr. Bovary. What results is a moving paean to the humanity of Charles Bovary and to the supreme value of love.

Author: Jean Améry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253058783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
In April 1945, Jean Améry was liberated from the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. A Jewish and political prisoner, he had been brutally tortured by the Nazis, and had also survived both Auschwitz and other infamous camps. His experiences during the Holocaust were made famous by his book At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities. Essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left features a collection of essays by Améry translated into English for the first time. Although written between 1966 and 1978, Améry's insights remain fresh and contemporary, and showcase the power of his thought. Originally written when leftwing antisemitism was first on the rise, Améry's searing prose interrogates the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism and challenges the international left to confront its failure to think critically and reflectively.

Author: Yochai Ataria
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030280950
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This volume explores themes originating from the work of Jean Améry (1912–1978), a Holocaust survivor and essayist—mainly, ethics and the past, torture and its implications, death and suicide. The volume is interdisciplinary, bringing together contributions from philosophy, psychology, law, and literary studies to illuminate each of the topics from more than one angle. Each essay is a novel contribution, shedding new light on the relevant subject matter and on Jean Améry's unique perspective. The ensuing picture is rich and multifaceted, uncovering unforeseen traits of Amery's thought, and surprising correlations that have so far been under-researched. It invites further studies of the Holocaust and its consequences to take their cue from non-neutral first person reflections.

Author: Jean Améry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
The essay "Anti-Semitism on the Left" (pp. 37-51) appeared previously in English in "Dissent" 29, 1 (1982); it appeared first in German in "Merkur" 337 (1976).

Author: Jill Stauffer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231538731
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being acknowledged. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice. Jill Stauffer examines the root causes of ethical loneliness and how those in power revise history to serve their own ends rather than the needs of the abandoned. Out of this discussion, difficult truths about the desire and potential for political forgiveness, transitional justice, and political reconciliation emerge. Moving beyond a singular focus on truth commissions and legal trials, she considers more closely what is lost in the wake of oppression and violence, how selves and worlds are built and demolished, and who is responsible for re-creating lives after they are destroyed. Stauffer boldly argues that rebuilding worlds and just institutions after violence is a broad obligation and that those who care about justice must first confront their own assumptions about autonomy, liberty, and responsibility before an effective response to violence can take place. In building her claims, Stauffer draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Améry, Eve Sedgwick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as concrete cases of justice and injustice across the world.

Author: Vivaldi Jean-Marie
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030023451
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This book elaborates Jean Améry’s critique of philosophy and his discussion of some central philosophical themes in At the Mind’s Limits and his other writings. It shows how Améry elaborates the shortcomings and unfitness of philosophical theories to account for torture, the experience of homelessness, and other indignities, and their inability to assist with overcoming resentment. It thus teases out the philosophical import of Jean Améry's critique of philosophy, which constitutes his own philosophical testament of being an inmate at Auschwitz. This book situates At the Mind’s Limits in the context of twentieth-century Continental philosophy. On the one hand, it elaborates Améry’s engagement with key philosophical figures. On the other hand, it shows how thoroughly Améry denounces the limits of the philosophical enterprise, and its impotence in capturing and accounting for the crimes of the Third Reich.