Reviews for Soldier's Son

The average rating for Soldier's Son based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-12-05 00:00:00 James Ehrlich Robert Antelme lives, survives, and attests to (giving voice to the unspeakable, the unimaginable that remains) the fact that ethics is dissociated from morality, from morals. Justice is not manifest in the shoring up of debts, of "righting" what is "owed" in an economy of value; justice must be lived, forward, from now on in the approach of the future, by means of the relations to every other person; remembering the impossible that has shattered history, which cannot be properly remembered, and in so doing to refuse this possibility as one perpetuated and opened into the future. What should never have been forever marks us, wounds us, yet it cannot be reconciled by punishment - we must bear witness to its effects in the face of every person we meet, we converse or communicate with, German, Jewish, or otherwise. Opening the essence of the human, the absence of essence, the nothingness that remains outside of nothingness, overfull and indestructable, Antelme speaks the words of a neutral language which burn to the absence of this core without core. In the night, the darkest night, a word rings out. It belongs to no one, yet calls to each of us. Demanding death, refusing to die or to cease dying, it attests to what Antelme called the human, yet which severs itself absolutely from any conception of the human. The fault of the human, perhaps - never able to live up to this word, this nameless name. For even in the destruction of the human, this indestructable question, impossible in its remainder, resounds, continuously, pursuing us in the demand which we can only call, in the most passive of senses, ethics. An ethics which demands our perpetual adherence, our decisive response, despite the inability to answer, to bring to any end. An infinite demand, in our inescapable encounters with one another, with every other, both outside of and within "ourselves" - of every one who gives voice and visage to this improper word which binds us one to another in the distance marking our existence. Ethics - a word as insufficient as any answer we would make to it, in its name.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-27 00:00:00 Chiang Humor P