Ethical Loneliness

This is a timely book--rarely has the fecundity of the continental approach to ethics been so clearly and persuasively on display. -- Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies, Penn State University To read Ethical Loneliness is to undergo the page-turning, yet profoundly uncomfortable, experience of struggling to hear the fractured stories told by survivors of worlds' end. Like a modern Vergil, Jill Stauffer's pellucid, teacherly voice leads us carefully and thoughtfully through an unsettling hell of testimonies, showing us how hard it is for us to linger in the discomfort of hearing about violent injustice without rushing through the ugly parts, forgetting the hard parts, dismissing the odd parts, straightening out the chronology, watering down the anger, denying the complicity, enforcing forgiveness or victimhood, whitewashing the ending, and missing what is not said and what cannot be put into words. Stauffer leaves her readers at knife's edge; she will not resolve the tension that she creates into either a narrative of retributive justice or one of restorative peace. In this way, her book embodies its own theoretical premise: that the productive ambivalence of a Levinasian dialogue between self and other changes/creates the self. To read Ethical Loneliness, then, is to become a new I who has traveled part of the way toward experiencing the isolation of an ethically lonely you. Only through that harrowing journey of hearing, Stauffer demonstrates, is there a possibility of a we. This book, or rather, this experience of listening, is destined to become, like Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, a classic text in the field. It is really that good. -- Linda Meyer, Quinnipiac University This probing and insightful book breaks the crust of legalistic approaches to mass violence and oppression to uncover the conditions of the repair of lives and worlds in human interdependence. Stauffer's bold claims for widely diffused reparative responsibilities are built on close discussions of how together we author - or destroy - selves and worlds. Her impressive blending of contemporary events and philosophical reflection reveals the wide scope of responsibility that implicates us in the repair of others' suffering in ways we are usually glad to ignore or resist. -- Margaret Urban Walker, Donald J. Schuenke Chair in Philosophy, Marquette University