Suchergebnisse

During the twentieth century, witnessing grew to be not just a widespread solution for coping with political atrocities but also an intricate problem. As the personal experience of victims, soldiers, and aid workers acquired unparalleled authority as a source of moral and political truth, the capacity to generate adequate testimonies based on this experience was repeatedly called into question. Michal Givoni's book follows the trail of the problems, torments, and crises that became commingled with witnessing to genocide, disaster, and war over the course of the twentieth century. By juxtaposing episodes of reflexive witnessing to the Great War, the Jewish Holocaust, and third world emergencies, The Care of the Witness explores the shifting roles and responsibilities of witnesses in history and the contribution that the troubles of witnessing made to the ethical consolidation of the witness as the leading figure of nongovernmental politics

During the twentieth century, witnessing grew to be not just a widespread solution for coping with political atrocities but also an intricate problem. As the personal experience of victims, soldiers, and aid workers acquired unparalleled authority as a source of moral and political truth, the capacity to generate adequate testimonies based on this experience was repeatedly called into question. Michal Givoni's book follows the trail of the problems, torments, and crises that became commingled with witnessing to genocide, disaster, and war over the course of the twentieth century. By juxtaposing episodes of reflexive witnessing to the Great War, the Jewish Holocaust, and third world emergencies, The Care of the Witness explores the shifting roles and responsibilities of witnesses in history and the contribution that the troubles of witnessing made to the ethical consolidation of the witness as the leading figure of nongovernmental politics

AbstractSince the summer of 2015, hundreds of Arab Palestinians from Israel have joined the massive number of volunteers who flocked to Greece and other locations in Europe to assist refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries. Based on their stories about their experiences of volunteering, this essay examines how the affective regime of humanitarian action in crises mutates when such action is practiced by ordinary people who are living through their own protracted political crisis. Focusing on the empathy that Palestinian volunteers have practiced in their encounters with refugees, I show that the Palestinian relief actions and the solidarity of shared precariousness they embody challenge the premises of Western humanitarianism but also complicate the picture sketched by studies on "other humanitarianisms" from beyond the Western and universalist frame. I claim that empathy—one of the main humanitarian resources the Palestinian helpers have mobilized—has prompted a composite sense of affinity in which the similarities between the helpers and the refugees were both stressed and qualified. This affinity, as I further show, draws not just on the helpers' traumatic memories and cultural and ethnic affiliations but also on their fears of the future.

During the 20th century, witnessing outgrew its original affiliations with legal evidence and religious belief and became a social vocation in its own right. This essay explores the ethical expertise with which witnessing has been infused as the witness became the deferred result of a process of subjective transformation by probing some of the meta-testimonial discourses that emerged in response to the Great War, the Holocaust, and Third World emergencies. Against the ethical redefinition of witnessing advanced by Jean-François Lyotard, Shoshana Felman, and Giorgio Agamben, it analyses ethical witnessing as a practice of self that binds individual autonomy to institutional platforms, technological innovations, and reflective procedures that tackle the pitfalls of witnessing, maximize its potential, and trace its most adequate and resonant forms.

This article seeks to analyse contemporary humanitarianism as an advanced-liberal formation of global governance. It tracks the emergence in the 1970s of the French humanitarian organisation Médecins sans Frontières and shows that its care for and control of distant victims has been commingled with and dependent upon care for Western selves. The article contends that humanitarianism 'without borders' was the outgrowth of the legitimacy crisis of the medical profession, and that its practice of witnessing has ultimately been a mode of ethical self-cultivation by means of which physicians could fashion themselves as more enlightened personae. It further shows that the recent concern with the detrimental side effects of humanitarian action should be deciphered as the culmination of the practices of the self in which global humanitarianism has been embedded since the 1970s.

Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent