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Hello All,

In the most recent Dialog (Dialogue 282 – Cultural Traditionalism vs. The Old Gods) Dr. Farrell makes the comment that certain human actions (e.g. mass murder, genocide) dehumanize both the perpetrator and the victim. In relation to this he mentions Edith Wyschograd’s fine book Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death. If this topic is of interest to you I would like to recommend Simone Weil’s “Reflections concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” and “The Illiad or The Poem of Force”. Also Bruce Wilshire’s book Get ‘Em All! Kill ‘Em!: Genocide, Terrorism, Righteous Communities. I highly recommend the work of both of these authors.

A review of Spirit in Ashes by Judith Butler appears in the journal History and Theory, Vol. 27, Number 1 (Feb. 1988), pp 60-70. Below is the beginning of the review …

REVIEW ESSAYS: SPIRIT IN ASHES: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death. By Edith Wyschogrod. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. Pp. xvi, 247.

Edith Wyschogrod’s Spirit in Ashes argues the provocative thesis that the
accomplishment of a technologically induced mass death in the twentieth century requires a radically new philosophical account of death. Institutionalized death worlds, like those of the concentration camps in World War II, place a moral and intellectual demand upon contemporary philosophers to articulate the unprecedented historical experience of the technologically effected destruction of millions of human lives. Wyschogrod reviews for her reader a variety of established philosophical positions on the meaning of death within human experience, and proceeds to show that the technological accomplishment of mass death in this century forces a fundamental reevaluation of the meaning of space, temporality, sociality, language, and the structure and meaning of the self. Clearly within the purview of Hegel’s view in The Phenomenology of Spirit that the fear of death occasions the emergence of self-consciousness, Wyschogrod is also grounded in Heidegger’s later reflections on technology and the distortion of the life-world, and yet moves beyond both of these positions to voice a contemporary phenomenological perspective on an experience which, she claims, is radically unprecedented. Her task carries a large conceptual burden. Not only does she endeavor to establish a critical comparison of Hegel and Heidegger, but to discern which elements of their philosophical vocabulary help to illuminate the phenomenon of a technologically accomplished mass death, and then to identify and transcend these limitations in their formulations as well. Impressive in its scope and originality, Wyschogrod’s analysis delimits the contemporary reflection on mass death as a kind of philosophical grieving, the work of mourning in which not only “a lost one,” but “the lost many” must be incorporated into the selves that remain. This grieving process relies on the rehabilitation of poetic language, especially the act of recollective naming in which the loss is borne linguistically. Wyschogrod analyzes the institutionalization of mass death in the twentieth century in terms that defy the cultural seductions of forgetfulness through the recollective power of language. This is a brave effort not only to account philosophically for the specificity of twentieth-century European horrors, but to establish philosophical reflection itself as part of the necessary work of mourning. Indeed, this reflection on mass death is precisely such an instance of what a reflective lamentation might be, and that Wyschogrod achieves this, to whatever degree, must be appreciated as a courageous effort to defy what Benjamin and Heidegger have referred to as the pervasive and morally decadent character of contemporary forgetfulness. This review will recapitulate her arguments in brief, take issue with some particular limitations that the Hegelian and Heideggerian framework imposes on her analysis, and question whether Wyschogrod’s turn to the poetic act of naming suffices to recollect the dead in the way that she describes. I will argue as well that Wyschogrod’s suggestions regarding the work of mourning that postmodern selves must undergo are radically and significantly true, and that the limitations of her analysis can be attributable to certain uncritically accepted presuppositions of phenomenological parlance.