en

Roland A. Champagne

2000

OpenAlex

Dysfunctional has become ethical and political dilemma in postmodernity. In dysfunctional nature of friendship, strangeness is a crucial factor. This strangeness is recognition of alterity and lack of relationship of otherness to self. In this regard, two survivors of Holocaust offer cogent commentaries. Emmanuel Levinas describes ethics as face-to-face response toward other (1986) while survives within Hannah Arendt's insight that every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which [s]he was born a and in which, to extent of his distinct uniqueness, [s]he always remains a stranger (Essays 308). Arendt's experience after 1933 was that an abyss had opened to reveal the disloyalty of friends (14). Hence, role of had to be revaluated in face of catastrophe of Holocaust. Levinas was and continues to be a major voice in this reevaluation of since Holocaust. With inspiration from his ethic al writings, we can portray as a response to call of other in a deliberate attempt to bridge void between self and other. Despite these voices, some contemporary theorists maintain that is still problematic in postmodernity. Jacques Derrida, who himself is strongly influenced by Levinas (Adieu), submits a volume often essays (Politics) telling us about cogency of Montaigne's sixteenth-century outcry: Oh my friends, there is no friend. Meanwhile, though Maurice Blanchot rhapsodizes about his ethical friendship with Levinas (Writing; Friendship), his political flirtations with Fascism during 1930s (Bident) are problematic. Because dysfunctional is becoming more and more of a pattern in postmodernity, we need more examples of exceptional that can be unique and that can make friend functional. The intersection of Arendt's and Thomas Mann's works provides opportunities to situate in this manner. On one hand, Arendt was a perceptive political theorist whose essays have been generally concerned with loss of human freedom in political governance. She prefers political writings of Plato to Aristotle and sees crucial dilemma as placing at center stage the typically Socratic question What is friendship? (Life 101). Of course, problem is how to answer question. She often positioned her discussions of as ethical comfort within conflicts of a politically charged milieu. For this reason, Arendt's writings have become a lively subject of discussion in France. From her adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's role of compassion as a moral and political principle, Arendt is portrayed by one of her astute French translators, Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, as asking questions about place of ethics and generosity in politics (241). [1] Since Aristotle, who claimed in his Nicomacheon Ethics that the science for good of man is politics (300), relative positioning of ethics and has been debated. But this positioning of as crucial ethical problem for is also unsaid problem in writings of Thomas Mann, Arendt's fellow native German who like her came to United States in aftermath of Nazi debacle. Both Arendt and Mann used their writings as arenas in which to dramatize struggle for role of ethics after their departure from their homeland in face of great political evil. Both had written prior to their emigration from Germany. But departure from their homeland made them portray differently in their writings. While Arendt was primarily a political theorist who used principles of ethics and philosophy to engage her contemporaries in debates about human governance, Mann portrayed great struggle between aesthetics and ethics and seemed to ignore centrality of political struggles o f his characters to obtain control over their lives. …

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Friendship | Postmodernity | Politics | The Holocaust | Psychoanalysis | Philosophy | Postmodernism | Alterity | Sociology | Aesthetics | Literature | Epistemology | Law | Theology | Psychology | Art | Social science | Political science