Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death (review)

R. Clifton Spargo's study of Emmanuel Levinas addresses strong ethical concerns relating to our sense of memory, responsibility and justice. More specifically, Vigilant Memory concerns itself with Levinas's ethics, presenting key concepts in the philosopher's thought and striving to engage in a positive critique of his work. Focusing on the impact of the Holocaust on Levinas the theorist and foregrounding postmodern debates concerning ethics, Vigilant Memory formulates an understanding of what is at stake in the memory of injustice. Spargo demonstrates that for Levinas, the Holocaust serves as both the ultimate memory and the supreme injustice, a stance that leads Spargo to distinguish between the notion of "rights" and "responsibility" and to call for the formulation and practice of what he calls "vigilant memory."

In his Introduction, Spargo explains that his study responds to three main critiques of Levinas's notion of the memory of injustice. The first of these critiques, historical and political in scope, ponders the significance of memory, especially memory of the Holocaust, and questions whether memory of victimization is often accorded cultural importance it does not deserve. The second is a mainly political concern regarding the influence of memory on identity formation and the extent to which the emergence of the victim's subjectivity might foster political instability. The third and most cynical critique of Levinas's concept is one that posits a circumstance in which victims become opportunists and use their victim status as a means of attaining sympathy, attention and special political rights (27). Spargo's analysis centers on these three positions, which, taken up in turn, form the basis for his extended critical engagement with Levinas's work.

In his first chapter, titled "Ethics as Unquieted Memory," Spargo offers a reading that underscores how important the concept of memory is in the ethical system Levinas elaborates. Contrary to Heidegger's conception of death as the final, concluding experience of being, Levinas's holds that post-mortem memory of the dead entails responsibilities for the living. Spargo posits that the work of memory goes beyond funerary rites and rituals, and in this first chapter, his engagement with the Holocaust takes shape. The interdisciplinary reach of this study allows for the introduction of a historical perspective, which fluidly evolves out of the initial engagement with memory. The concluding passages of the chapter connect death, memory and the Holocaust to arrive at Levinas's concept of "unjust death." In addition to highlighting the ethical and political importance of the memory of injustice and underscoring its universal significance, Spargo emphasizes Levinas's concern for history, demonstrating its resonance with contemporary theories of historiography formulated, for instance, by Michel de Certeau and Hayden White. Spargo's discussion of historiography strengthens his claims concerning the need for vigilance with respect to questions of memory and the Levinasian challenge to "history proper," allowing for history to be understood not as what is remembered, but as what has been remembered so far.

The second chapter, "The Unpleasure of Consciousness," takes up the question of the ethics of mourning in Levinas's concept of bad conscience. Spargo shows the influence that Nietzsche's concept of bad conscience had on Levinas, recognizing, however, that the distance he takes from it allows him to formulate an understanding of bad conscience that bears on questions of memory, history and the moral self. The concept of responsibility is the one component of moral consciousness that Levinas is thought to be revising. Spargo shows how Levinas refutes the notion of responsibility as oppressive obligation and embraces the idea of an obliging duty that results from a rupture between intention and result, desire and reality. This makes the issue of complicity unavoidable and Spargo's discussion of "The Bad Conscience in History" and "The Bad Conscience and the Holocaust" argues for...