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Example research essay topic: Relieve Suffering Six Million - 1,105 words

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... is essay 'Reality and Its Shadow, ' Levinas argues that literature is irresponsible in as far as it encourages the contemplation of images, breeding passivity and paralysis. A classroom is often paralyzed by Borowski. The suffering in tragedies of another is offered for enjoyment or the tragic pleasure, as it is sometimes called.

Instead of evoking the responsibility to relieve suffering, the tragic artist freezes or immobilizes the face of suffering, detaching it from the human reality. Every artistic representation is the image of an absent other, because an image is what a person leaves behind in withdrawing her being from it. Literature conceals this absence by soliciting the contemplation of the image, reality's 'shadow. ' Criticism is the ethical activity of restoring literature to responsibility by reattaching images to the human reality (130 - 43). A literary text makes a claim on its readers that is logically prior to meaning, because it is all that remains of a being. This is particularly true of the traumatic texts of the Holocaust and of Slavery, to whom the nightmare of not being listened to is a constant threat. The statement that Slavery or the Holocaust is over and done with is the threat of indifference of the other.

The Holocaust and the slave narrative like forms of speech are testimonial before they are prepositional. They testify to beings whose being has been eliminated from the suffering it represents. And so it must be received before it can be analyzed and to analyze it prematurely and rush to interpretation is to convert Holocaust and slave testimony from speech by-the-other into speech for-the-other. No longer is the other identified with the voice within the testimony, the sufferer or witness by whom it is delivered; the interpreter usurps the other's place, assuming that the testimony is for him.

This is an act of indifference, which can be characterized as hermeneutics of suspicion and by which the otherness of the other is denied and lost sight of, does violence to the face of the text. Instead of acting on her behalf, the interpreter acts on his own. The text is treated as an object upon which to demonstrate his professional ingenuity. But a text is independent of interpretation, because the other exists apart from me. Speech by her is not necessarily speech for me.

To think that somehow her speech depends upon me is to threaten its existence. If interpretation is to avoid doing further moral damage it must spring from a moral response to the other; it can depend upon nothing else. It cannot presuppose, as all hermeneutics of suspicion do, that there is a difference between surface or 'literal' and concealed or 'poetic' meaning. Interpretation can only presuppose the otherness of the speaker from which my responsibility to her derives. And so it must pause to take its direction from her. The interpretive stance I adopt toward her is determined by the responsibility I assume toward her.

I must answer her, which means that I must try to translate speech by her into speech for her. Doubtless the "interpretive community" to which I belong, to say nothing of my biases and perspective, will interfere with my good-faith effort to do this. And so they are not irrelevant aspects of interpretation. But before it is anything else interpretation is the effort to cast my response to the other into speech that is intended for her. It is what I understand her to need.

In rhetorical terms, the audience for interpretation are the sufferers on whose behalf the text witnesses. Nevertheless, I must expect to betray them more often than I am adequate to the challenge of their need. Literature of Slavery and the Holocaust for example are a summons to responsibility for the victims of objectification, but this merely describes what is possible, not what is real. The reality of six million deaths in the Holocaust and "Sixty Million and more" deaths from 400 years of Slavery is something I can neither alter nor deny; the suffering on sixty-six million faces is something to which I can never adequately respond. But if I can do nothing about the past I may yet affect the future. It is often said that the purpose of studying the Holocaust is to prevent it from ever happening again.

As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman is quoted in "Reality and its Shadow" by Levinas, he says: Much more is involved in [studying the Holocaust] than the tribute to the memory of murdered millions, settling the account with the murderers and healing the still-festering moral wounds of the passive and silent witnesses. Obviously, the study itself, even a most diligent study, is not a sufficient guarantee against the return of mass murder[r]s and numb bystanders. Yet without such a study, we would not even know how likely or improbable such a return may be. (143) This indicates that the Holocaust does not belong only to history but also to possibility. If its outcome cannot be affected, its meaning can be.

Events mean nothing in themselves; they must be interpreted. But what this also indicates is that meaning arises from responsibility. The counterfactual possibility of doing something appropriate about the Holocaust is what creates a responsibility to it, and if meaning is to be discovered that is, to interpret the Holocaust, then interpretation must be shaped and guided by a responsibility. Paying tribute to the memory of murdered millions, responding to human suffering, will affect the interpreters as well. The effect, however, will be unpredictable, as Myra Sklarew knows: Children, today we offer you the holocaust. Here are the bodies here the bunkers here the young who were the guards.

We offer to you dear children this package. It may go off in your hands if you open it hastily or later if you set it aside. And in this way, Holocaust literature contributes to the moral life. But since response to it can never relieve suffering, it must be offered again and again. Again and again it must be returned to interpretation what startled us into interpretation in the first place. The emphasis will not be the text's message but the face that it evokes.

This face is not a surface beneath which a meaning is concealed; it is the image of a being whose being has been annihilated. To speak in response, to move back into interpretation, to reattach the face to being, we must enter into a relationship with people who, once having inhabited a world in which the Jews were selected for extermination and Paul D. had a bit in his mo...


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