Too Much Modesty?
Bob has kindly linked to me on a whole host of topics, but with uncharacteristic modesty I can’t claim anything special. Rather reading the debate on his blog opened me up to Jean Améry and a point he raises:
“Améry’s principal contribution to understanding the Holocaust is his concept of losing trust in the world. Perhaps better than any other Holocaust writer, Améry shows that the liberal pillars upon which Western civilization rests are not dug very deep; they are merely taken for granted. Political freedom and human dignity are measured by what is “possible and humanly acceptable”; they are temporary and hastily constructed social arrangements which disappear at the first blow aimed at a prisoner. “[W]e can live,” Améry says, “only if we grant our fellow man life, ease his suffering, bridle the desire of our ego to expand.” In the material security of our daily lives, we are unaware just how much we trust others to grant us life, and if not to ease our suffering at least not to cause it. But the victim of torture, the survivor of Auschwitz, has lost that trust forever. “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured,” Améry concludes. He is indelibly burned with the knowledge that trust in the world—the trust that no one will lay hands on you—is astonishingly fragile, and can be lost at any moment. He knows something that they do not teach you in schools: that the Other can be absolute, and can exercise this absolute power by inflicting suffering”
Great quote.
Margaret
06/06/2009 at 06:20