Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard

Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard

Jill Stauffer

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 0231171501

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being heard. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice.

Jill Stauffer examines the root causes of ethical loneliness and how those in power revise history to serve their own ends rather than the needs of the abandoned. Out of this discussion, difficult truths about the desire and potential for political forgiveness, transitional justice, and political reconciliation emerge. Moving beyond a singular focus on truth commissions and legal trials, she considers more closely what is lost in the wake of oppression and violence, how selves and worlds are built and demolished, and who is responsible for re-creating lives after they are destroyed.

Stauffer boldly argues that rebuilding worlds and just institutions after violence is a broad obligation and that those who care about justice must first confront their own assumptions about autonomy, liberty, and responsibility before an effective response to violence can take place. In building her claims, Stauffer draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Améry, Eve Sedgwick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as concrete cases of justice and injustice across the world.

A World without Why

Agonistics: Thinking The World Politically

The Moral Foundations of Politics

On Constitutional Ground

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“the effect of testimonies generated through the truth commission, media, academics and others is far broader Repair 55 and perhaps more complex than naïve assumptions about testimony’s healing effects suggest.”70 Along those lines, Debra Kaminer and her coauthors found that there was no significant difference in the rates of depression, PTSD, or other anxiety disorders among those who gave public testimony, closed testimony, or no testimony before the TRC in South Africa.71 In other words,.

Talking about procedure, legality, and blame, I focus on how abandonment and loss are achieved and how they may be alleviated or compensated. In doing so I emphasize harms undergone more than wrongs inflicted. To set the context for the stakes of that shift, chapter 2 follows a tangent to the main argument, because its course is currently central to questions of reconciliation and recovery. In chapter 2, I discuss the retributive and reparative goals of postconflict trials and truth commissions.

Might be called revisionary practices: they Revision 113 work, in a present moment, to revise memory or experience of a past, with the hope of opening up a future not fully determined by past harms.2 For anyone whose past should have been otherwise—who needs to rebuild a self and a world after being abandoned by humanity—some revisions are positive, making the present more livable than it otherwise would be. Other revisions are negative, failing to release the present moment from past harm,.

Hear. Perhaps then people and the institutions they design will be able to listen for their own failures—and thus begin to live up to what justice after complex conflict or long-standing injustice demands. The book then ends with a short meditation on how the relationship between selves, time, and other selves impacts our ideas and practices of justice and recovery. 1 Ethical Loneliness Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not.

Reminder that she was connected to the wider world of her people—and as a form of narrative foreshadowing (55). In Mrs. Konile’s culture, “dreams are used to endure suffering and to read happiness, to interpret losses and accomplishments, to bury the dead and to raise children, as well 160 Desert as to communicate with God and the neighbors” (57). Thus it was normal for Mrs. Konile to bring a dream to the TRC (though, as Krog points out, we may not be helped in understanding it by Freud or.

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