Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death (review)

R. Clifton Spargo’s study of Emmanuel Levinas addresses strong ethical concerns relating to our sense of memory, responsibility and justice. More specifically, Vigilant Memory concerns itself with Levinas’s ethics, presenting key concepts in the philosopher’s thought and striving to engage in a positive critique of his work. Focusing on the impact of the Holocaust on Levinas the theorist and foregrounding postmodern debates concerning ethics, Vigilant Memory formulates an understanding of what is at stake in the memory of injustice. Spargo demonstrates that for Levinas, the Holocaust serves as both the ultimate memory and the supreme injustice, a stance that leads Spargo to distinguish between the notion of “rights” and “responsibility” and to call for the formulation and practice of what he calls “vigilant memory.”