期刊名称:No Foundations : Journal of Extreme Legal Positivism
电子版ISSN:1797-2264
出版年度:2016
期号:13
出版社:CoE Foundations
摘要:To read Jill Stauffer’s book, Ethical Loneliness, is to undergo the page-turning yetprofoundly uncomfortable experience of struggling to hear fractured and brokenstories told by survivors of worlds’ end. The critical insight of the book is that we areall responsible to attentively hear these stories of atrocity. This injunction to hear isthe core of the work, and it performs that imperative as well as asserting it.In the course of the book, Stauffer introduces the reader to victims testifyingbefore truth commissions and before archivists, to witnesses who hear thosetestimonies, or fail to, and to contemporary philosophers of restorative andretributive justice. The experience of listening that went into writing this book wasitself a harrowing one, as it took Stauffer to the ICC, to holocaust video archives, andto the South African Truth and Reconciliation transcripts and recordings. In thatsense, the book itself is a heroic act of listening, as well as a call to listen. Staufferpresents us with the victims’ own words and voices, and she puts these voices indialogue with a gentle grace that tries to enable and not to usurp the reader’s effortto hear. She asks the reader to think about what it means to hear those who suffer,because hearing is the first step out of the moral isolation of both those who endureatrocity and those who ignore it.