On Jean Amry

On Jean Amry provides a comprehensive discussion of one of the most challenging and complex post-Holocaust thinkers, Jean Amry (1912-1978), a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. In the English-speaking world Amry is known for his poignant publication, At the Mind's Limits, a narrative of exile, dispossession, torture, and Auschwitz. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in Amry's writings on victimization and resentment, partly attributable to a modern fascination with tolerance, historical injustice, and reconciliatory ambitions. Many aspects of Amry's writing have remained largely unexplored outside the realm of European scholarship, and his legacy in English-language scholarship limited to discussions of victimization and memory. This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Amry. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Amry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness. What emerges from the pages of this book is an image of Amry as a difficult and perplexing-yet exceptionally engaging-thinker, whose writings address some of the central paradoxes of survivorship and witnessing. The intellectual and ethical questions of Amry's philosophies are equally pertinent today as they were half-century ago: How one can reconcile with the irreconcilable? How can one account for the unaccountable? And, how can one live after catastrophe?