The storm and Adorno

The storm hit us on Sunday and for five days we were without power. It's so hard to live without power particularly in the context of modern America. If one were in a village in Nepal or Tibet, perhaps it would have been manageable to live for weeks without power because then the imagination would not expect, would not have a known reference to look to. During this time, we took a suitcase of clothes and our dog, jumped into a car and drove as far as we could get at 9 PM that night. In semi-darkness, I grabbed whatever books seemed important to me at the time. On reaching a little bed & breakfast we had stumbled upon, I found myself reading the works of Theodor Adorno and the writers of the Frankfurt school e.g. Habermas. What it must have been like, writing in exile, away from home, leaving behind one's possessions, living in uncertainty, waiting to hear the latest news about the homeland. Adorno and his Frankfurt friends had escaped to America and would face a kind of inhumanity expressed in the form of passive indifference. This was something Kant had warned against when he wrote about the ethics of hospitality. Hospitality is not simply allowing the stranger to come and live temporarily in one's country, but it is also the spirit of making that stranger feel welcome. As Gayatri Spivak mentioned when she visited our class this week, the first thing most people are told when they are allowed to stay in a foreign country is the law of return. Perhaps it was all that pent up feeling of exile or facing passive inhospitality that drove Adorno to write about ethics inherent in aesthetics. Adorno emphasized the importance of "non-identity thinking" - the moment one moves beyond a subjectivity tied to identity connected with race, ethnicity, nation-state etc, one begins to understand subjectivity in terms of what Confucius would call 'human-ness' - an affinity with the human no matter where he or she is from. This is an affinity that seeks to understand rather than judge, that seeks to value individuals not so much for their usefulness but for the value of their humanity.

Austerlitz

A book that directly contrasts with "When we were orphans" is Sebald's "Austerlitz. This is one of the best books I've read this year. It is disorienting at first but starts to come together in the latter part of the book. All this is part of the whole sense of being lost, of losing one's childhood, of trying to piece the fragments while recognizing the fluid, slippery nature of memory. The book is an aesthetically and ethically brilliant work of memory set in the context of the holocaust.

When we were orphans

Just read this work and am appalled by it. In my opinion this is the worst of Ishiguro's work. It may be aesthetically well-written but I think it is ethically flawed primarily because it trivializes the massacre of the Chinese by the Japanese during WWII. The protagonist in his search for his mother is seemingly deluded and delusional in that his obsession causes him to ignore the reality of what is going on around him. Some could argue that this is part of Ishiguro's aesthetics, that he is not concerned about representing history but is instead exploring the instability of subjectivity which in part may reference the art for art sake's argument i.e. the work of art should be appreciated for itself not for some moral or transcendental message believed to be inherent in it. The question here concerns the ethics and responsibility of writers in adequately representing global trauma, global holocaust and global massacres without trivializing them. This is particularly so given that the book is written for western readers who may be less aware of the asian holocaust. By glossing over this event which is superficially mentioned in the background of the text, the author is complicit in the larger, political trivializing of this in the imagination of the west.