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R. Harvey, Witnessness : Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility

R. Harvey, Witnessness : Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility

Publié le par Marion Moreau (Source : Harvey, Robert)

Robert Harvey, Witnessness. Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibilities.

New York: Continuum. 2010.

176 p.

EAN : 9781441100726.

Prix : $27.95.

Witnessness est un ouvrage de littérature comparée et de philosophie qui suggère une nouvelle formulation de "notre" faculté morale. Cette lecture spéculative de l'"intraduisible" Cap au pire de Samuel Beckett (au regard du Purgatoire de Dante et de l'oeuvre de Primo Levi) postule une éthique universelle fondée non pas sur des structures mentales rationnelles ou des prescriptions morales, mais sur les pouvoirs de l'imagination. 

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Witnessness posits a universal ethics based neither on rational mental structures nor on moral principles, but on the extra-rational powers of the imagination.  Harvey pursues this ethics by staging a speculative reading of Samuel Beckett's ‘untranslatable' text, Worstward Ho, alongside Dante's Purgatorio and Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved and If This Be a Man.  Many of the thirty concise chapters that compose Witnessness are built upon notions whose names (e.g. dimness, lessness) take inspiration from Beckett's unique and precise vocabulary.  Harvey explores the particular experience of the witness-as recounted in Dante and Levi-for signs of a general, common, and innate witness-like attitude that protects the other and that we see expressed in Beckett's penultimate prose piece.