Ethical Loneliness is one of those concepts that seems to be something that you’ve always known to be the case when you hear about it but in fact has never been thought—or at least clearly articulated—before. That is a tribute to the elegance of the concept and the clarity by which Jill Stauffer presents her arguments. Stauffer offers a profound way to think about ethics, not the ethics that we want to have, that is, some above-the-fray (and Kantian) determination of good and evil in all situations, but something far more human (and Levinasian). Hers is an ethics based on the shared fact that the world is not safe and we do not have the assurances that we often turn to ethical systems for in the first place. As Stauffer points out, all ethical systems based on the idea of individual autonomy and autarky seem to offer us the possibility that we are actually in control of ourselves (and hence safe). Related ideas like “human rights” suggest that we deserve, and therefore will receive, some basic forms of protection. Since such rights have no actual basis in reality (as Arendt also points out), Stauffer asks how we can be with one another in the absence of such palliatives.

The condition of ethical loneliness arises when individuals are subjected to acts of violence and abuse and no one else wants to acknowledge what they have gone through. It’s not that these people don’t ever get a chance to tell their stories. But even when they do, Stauffer makes a critical distinction between listening and hearing. People will say that they sympathize; Truth and Reconciliation commissions will attempt to offer restitution by allowing victims a chance to engage with their victimizers; trials similarly appear to offer victims of trauma a way to tell their stories. But generally speaking, while these events involve a lot of listening, they do not result in people being heard. Stauffer argues that to really hear what these people have to say would be to shatter the sense of safety and control that those of us fortunate enough not to have suffered a major trauma (and especially a trauma that was inflicted by other human beings) subscribe to. Very few of us are willing to do that. But for Stauffer, when we refuse to hear what we are listening to, we disconnect ourselves, not only from the people telling these stories, but from our own condition as human beings, our own frailty and vulnerability.

The stories that Stauffer tells in this book are often terrible ones. She tells the story of Jean Améry, a Jewish man who was imprisoned and tortured during World War II and whose account of these torments and what followed forms the heart of Stauffer’s book. She also tells the story of Charity Kondile, a black South African woman who’s son Sizwe was brutally murdered (actually barbecued) by white police officers, as well as that of Susan Brison, a French white woman, who was brutally raped and left for dead. These stories are awful but Stauffer tells them with respect and dignity. She says that these people “needed to have the wrongness of what befell them confirmed and denounced, not mainly by legal institutions or perpetrators but by the surrounding society in which they would have to live henceforth. They all needed help rebuilding a destroyed world” (p. 29). This, however, was a form of help that these people were generally denied, rendering these people ethically lonely.

The idea of ethical loneliness does not make demands. To think that it can is to remain within a moral system in which we have the power to decide and control what we do and how we respond to the world. But the point is precisely that someone like Améry learned that he couldn’t control the world. His despair and ultimately his suicide came from the fact that he could not will Germany into accepting that what happened to him must never happen again. Of course he probably heard the phrase “never again!” endlessly (and Mrs. Kondile as well, throughout her involvement with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa). But “never again” in this context becomes a kind of meaningless catchphrase to make people think that they are addressing, and thereby negating, an intensely negative and violent episode of history.

Ethical loneliness, then, is not a state of awareness about a condition that can be resolved by an act of autonomous will. Instead, Stauffer tells us that the path to resolution lies in the opposite direction; the subjects in question (that is, us) have to recognize the way our will cannot control a world of plural selves. It suggests that, instead of trying to control and do things to others, we need others to not do certain things to us.

This insight has a series of quite radical consequences in terms of thinking about ethics. For one thing, Stauffer effectively argues that we need to be weaker subjects; we need to dissolve, at least somewhat, our boundaries in the sense of recognizing that these boundaries were never very strong in the first place. Here, Stauffer makes Levinas speak to conditions of ordinary life and politics in a way that I think few others have achieved with the same degree of insight and clarity.

This book also makes theoretical innovations in terms of Nietzschean philosophy and the idea of ressentiment. Sticking with the prime example of Améry, Stauffer asks if Améry is fixated on changing the past, does that make him Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment? Critically, she makes a distinction between resentment (the emotion) and ressentiment (the Nietzschean concept) For Stauffer, resentment is actually a good thing; it is what keeps Améry dissatisfied with false declarations of sympathy and “never again.” Resentment actually keeps alive Améry’s hope for some kind of remediation despite all that has happened to him. She tells us that what Améry wants is not so much revenge as to have those who victimized him desire, as he desires, that what did happen would not have happened, “to undo what had been done” (p. 124). This is not the same thing as ressentiment, which fixates uniquely on the individual and her own personal sense of injustice. Whereas ressentiment seeks to deaden pain by turning to its own powerful emotions, Améry wants most of all not to forget. Améry’s resentment then says “Yes” to life; he dwells on the past because he knows that until that is resolved, there is no way to have a safe world for all people (not just for himself). Resentment is thus a mode of ethics; as Stauffer puts it “resentment is [Améry’s] path out of ethical loneliness” (p. 126) The one thing I add here is that I’m not sure that ressentiment doesn’t have its own value insofar as it affirms and preserves a self amidst all of that anger and pain.

Another critical ethical implication of the book is the way that Stauffer asks us to give up on perfection. I mean this not just in an anti-utopian sense (although Stauffer herself claims that she is, to some extent, projecting an idealist view of reconciliation) but in the sense that the demand for perfection is itself part and parcel of why we can’t hear. To open oneself to risk and contingency means to embrace a particular brand of irony, to recognize that even ill-meaning things can go well (at least in part) and well-meaning things can go badly (in part). Stauffer tells us that we have to be open to this contingency precisely because it decenters human agency from its absolute position; it shows that our actions do not work themselves out in ways that are within our control but have repercussions that we cannot anticipate and still must suffer from. Rather than seek to banish irony, we have to adapt to it. Here, too, I think this calls for a very different reading of Nietzsche than we ordinarily engage with. The Nietzsche that emerges from this reading is much less willful, or at least the will that emerges from this process is much less dominant; it is a will that submits itself to contingency without disappearing (in fact its condition of existence is precisely that submission).

As we enter into dark times that are sure to get darker, Stauffer’s book is far from a cure-all but it offers a sense that to contend with the traumas to come, we must in some sense get not just louder but also quieter. This stands, not in a passive sense of accepting whatever happens, but on the contrary, in a position of active, engaged hearing, of never giving up on the fact that we share this earth together and we that suffer what happens in and to it together, or not at all.