Empathy and the Ethics of Reading in Primo Levi, Jorge Semprun and Bernhard Schlink

Abstract

This article considers the negotiation of an ethics of reading in the work of Levi, Semprun and Schlink. It focuses on empathy, a particular problematic which both invokes and dismantles the old dualisms – emotion and cognition, prejudice and reason – that appear to structure moral being. These authors criticise empathy for its interpersonal action, which restricts understanding to the level of the individual at the expense of the socio-political whole. Empathy, is also subjected to an immanent critique, suggesting that moral identification can be brought to a self-contradictory extreme. Here Levi introduces the traditional distinction between scientific ‘knowing’ and hermeneutic ‘understanding’ as a means of disciplining the empathetic imagination. But such distinctions are challenged by the temporality that characterises moral being: is an empathetic understanding prior to and constitutive of all knowing? Even if one disregards this question, empathy must be re-installed and its integrity defended by all three writers, in order to resist the instrumentalisation of the Holocaust and its victims.

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Notes on contributors

David Dwan

David Dwan is a PhD research student at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. His thesis considers W.B. Yeats’ perception of newspapers and the assumptions about subjectivity, community and communication that reside therein. The present article was written in fulfilment of the assessment requirements for the MA in Holocaust Literature at QMW in 1997–98.