Prof. Robert Eaglestone (University of London, Royal Holloway)
Ethics, pain and Holocaust testimony
The aim of this paper is to question the idea of 'Empathic Unsettlement' in engaging with the pain of others. Though adjacent to a range of other terms ('heteropathic identification' for example), 'empathic unsettlement' was first introduced by Dominick LaCapra to express the very oddness of testimony, the oddness of reading accounts of the pain of others: this term served also a political (or, perhaps, an "anti-political") use in the way it seemed to question the politics of identity. However, I want to suggest that this term does not in fact do the work ascribed to it: indeed, rather than escape political questions, it asks them anew. More than this, I suggest that it may even elides 'Other People's Pain' through strategies of representation. In consequence, I suggest, if we are to take the view that the Holocaust and the traumatic century really did question our most basic epistemological and ethical principles, that a much wider problematic around the whole issue of identification needs to be explored.
Robert Eaglestone's main interests are in the contemporary, spanning
literature (mainly fiction), philosophy and history.
In this context, he is centrally interested in issues of ethics,
aesthetics and the philosophy of history, and has spent some
years working through a series of questions about the legacy of the Holocaust
and the Second Word War in these fields.
He has worked and published on a number of modern European philosophers (including Heidegger, Arendt, Levinas, Derrida and Agamben among others) and writers (including Rushdie, Kertész, Carter, Coetzee). He has also published extensively on Holocaust testimony, fiction, historiography and poetry.
