Jean Améry

Identity, Time, Failure
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-0-19-784691-9
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 296 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 167 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 538 g

In this volume, Ilit Ferber offers the first comprehensive philosophical study of Jean Améry's oeuvre. A Holocaust survivor and lifelong exile, Améry is best known for At the Mind's Limits (1966), his searing reflection on Auschwitz. Yet the prominence of this work has often obscured the breadth of his thought. Read together with On Aging (1968) and On Suicide (1976), as well as his essays on literature and culture, a fuller picture emerges: Améry's writings form a sustained meditation on identity, time, and failure.

Jean Améry: Identity, Time, Failure shows how Améry's autobiographical voice and his philosophical reflections are deeply intertwined. Rather than standing in opposition, they mutually illuminate one another, making his work a rare case where personal experience becomes the ground of philosophical inquiry. Across memoir, essay, and literary interpretation, Améry probes resentment, exile, aging, and voluntary death, with a style that is both intimate and uncompromising.

At the heart of the book is the claim that Améry should be understood not only as a witness but also as a philosopher in his own right. His refusal of consolation, his insistence on irreparable suffering, and his reflections on the fragility of selfhood position him as a central figure in twentieth-century thought.

Through close readings, this book brings Améry into dialogue with Sartre, Proust, Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Flaubert, and Jankélévitch. These dialogues highlight the originality of Améry's perspective while situating him within broader philosophical and literary traditions.

Both introduction and invitation, Jean Améry: Identity, Time, Failure guides readers through Améry's corpus and positions him at the crossroads of philosophy, literature, and testimony. It demonstrates why his voice-rooted in personal experience yet reaching beyond it-remains urgently relevant to questions of identity, mortality, and the limits of human endurance.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ferber, Ilit

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- INTRODUCTION

- a. The Challenge

- b. Three Moments

- c. Identity, Time, Failure

-

- A Note to the Reader

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- PART I: IDENTITY

- 1: The Time of Writing

- 2: The Question of Autobiography

- 3: On Aging: The Singular and the Universal

- 4: Polyphony

- 5: A.

- 6: The Mirror Scene: Améry and Beauvoir

- 7: Identity and Self-Alienation

- 8: The Necessity and Impossibility of Identity

- 9: Truth

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- PART II: TIME

- 10: The Prefaces

- a. Four Openings

- b. "The Unchangeable": The Later Prefaces

- c. "Restless Hours": The Early Prefaces

- 11: Améry in Search for Time

- 12: The Time of the Aged

- 13: "Le bal des têtes" scene: Améry and Proust

- 14: Resentments: From Delay to Irreversibility

- a. Beginning

- b. Delay

- c. Eternal Recurrence

- d. Natural Time and Forgiveness

- e. Moral Time and the Irreversible

- f. The Future

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- PART III: FAILURE

- 15: "The Saddest Kind of Success"

- 16: Untimely

- 17: The Mind, Failing

- 18: Social Aging

- 19: The Lecture Scene: Améry and Sartre

- 20: Sartre's Failure

- 21: Failure (Échec) and Being Outside the Logic of Life

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- "FOR I WAS MORE THAN I WAS": IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION

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- Notes

- Bibliography

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Ilit Ferber is Professor of Philosophy and Vice Dean for Research at Tel-Aviv University. Her work explores the philosophy of emotions, focusing on melancholy, pain, suffering, and failure. She has published widely on figures including Benjamin, Herder, Scholem, Freud, Améry and Heidegger, and her books include Philosophy and Melancholy (Stanford, 2013) and Language Pangs (Oxford, 2019). She has also co-edited volumes on moods, lament and the cry, edited the Hebrew translation of Améry's On Aging, and received the Kadar Family Award for outstanding research. Her current projects examine acoustics in Walter Benjamin, and the concept of irreversibility in Jean Améry and Vladimir Jankélévitch.