There is now a large literature that deals with psychological, theological, philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political responses to the Nazi death camps and other recent cases of atrocity and extreme suffering. C. Fred Alford adds another book to this continually growing corpus. The subject is disturbing, serious, and urgent; it calls attention to the horrific century recently past and its legacy for us all. Alford's treatment makes demands on the reader. He calls upon rich resources as his focus of attention—the Book of Job, the writings of Primo Levi, the myth of Sisyphus, and the survivor testimonies in the Fortunoff Video Archives for Holocaust Testimonies at the Yale University Library. He also draws on subtle, if difficult, collaborators to help him understand these resources, the experience of Nazi and other atrocities, and responses to them—among them Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and George Orwell, as well as psychoanalysts such as D. W. Winnicott. The result is not easy to summarize. I found it hard to discern the book's plot and central claims. But if I am right, running through its chapters is a thread that is worth extracting.

Alford asks a fundamental question: Is the experience of extreme suffering, extraordinary pain and agony, meaningful? Or, as he sometimes puts it, after Auschwitz, is there still access to some form of transcendence? Does such suffering fit into our lives and our world? Can we cope with it and go on in our ordinary lives, somehow engaging with the absurdity and yet reducing it? For all their contemporaneity, questions like these are very old ones. By and large, in the West, religious thinkers and philosophers make room for suffering and evil in ways that are well known. And people regularly accept such suffering even if they cannot grasp its significance. Alford takes the death camps and the atrocities of the last century to shake these traditional foundations, and he asks anew, is such suffering meaningful or utterly absurd? He provides no arguments that Auschwitz was a watershed, but he follows Levi, Jean Amery, Arendt, many survivors, and a host of others in thinking that it was. His question is about responding to it with honesty and seriousness, in life but not in thought. In this regard, like Emmanuel Levinas, Emil Fackenheim, and others, his task is about resisting intellectual accommodation, the temptations of theodicy, and turning—or returning—to life.

The book has an introduction and four chapters. The extreme views, that suffering is meaningful or meaningless, are framed in chapters 2 and 4, with diffuse observations on the Book of Job and Primo Levi. The mediating position is discussed in chapter 3, on the testimony of Holocaust survivors. A concluding chapter, in a sense, elaborates on the point of such survival by articulating how “paying attention,” as Alford calls it, is the honest and worthy response to the horrors and the pain of “surplus absurdity.” One way of reading the book's narrative, then, is as a dilemma, two extreme solutions to be rejected in favor of an intermediate one. Another is to read it dialectically, akin to Hegel's readings of various modes of everyday consciousness; a further alternative would be to take Alford to have set out the three views in order to find some truth in all three positions and to construct from them a synthetic portrait of authentic response to extreme suffering.

Alford begins with Job, who experiences not only injury and loss but also “affliction,” the destruction of his soul and social degradation. It is a state that Kristeva calls “abjection,” in which Job, who suffers, is in danger of losing his very self. For Alford, Job then finds himself in a luminal space, an in-between, which he experiences as characterized by an ambiguous sense of threat and of “being-held,” of risk and yet being comforted, secured. For Job, the world does not care, but he nonetheless feels cared for (p. 35). Job may not understand why he is subjected to pain and suffering, but God's final assurances leave him with a feeling of being encompassed and cared for (p. 36). He comes to accept his place without understanding; he finds satisfaction in his ambiguity, his “naked vulnerability” (p. 53). In a sense, those assurances and God's appearance that does nothing to clarify his situation or to redeem Job do, however, free him to live with his abjection, to live in a world not made for man (p. 11), to live with his mortality (p. 12).

Levi does not, cannot, learn Job's lesson. For him, the extreme suffering of Auschwitz is ultimately soul destroying. He allows no idealizing of human institutions and humanity itself. For Levi, the world of Auschwitz and afterwards is absurd; those who survived the camps were the worst. The most pious died. Those whom Levi recalls, who learned how to survive in extremis or whose character and style enabled them to do so, cast morality aside. The old vocabulary of “good” and “evil,” of “right” and “wrong,” “just” and “unjust,” was meaningless. Unlike Job, Levi felt no comfort, no sense of being-held and protected, of being sheltered. Only death could purify him from a life with corpses (pp. 107–9), a life in which our customary ways of thinking, our expectations about rationality and humanity, had lost all grip. And as “the social world [becomes] less rational … the natural world becomes more rational by default” (p. 113). That is, there is no commensurability between the natural and the moral worlds. Alford calls this situation “surplus absurdity”: “Auschwitz marks a turning point in which the human absurd, what I call ‘surplus absurdity,’ exceeds natural absurdity. The result is to rationalize the natural world while transforming the social world in the site of the absurd” (p. 114). The challenge, then, concerns how the human will experience and can respond to this absurdity, this “intersection of humanity and nature” (p. 117): “When humans choose to make the social world as unresponsive as—and, more wantonly, destructive than—the natural, the result is surplus absurdity. Doubling is how humans survive such a world” (p. 118).

Doubling is the chief strategy of the Holocaust survivors whose testimonies one can find in the Yale archives and whose videotaped records Alford studied. If, he asks, they in fact died in Auschwitz, as so many have claimed in their reflections, how do they live now? (pp. 58–59) They have learned, he points out, to be and not to be, to have died and yet still to live—by living a double existence (pp. 64 ff.). Such doubling is expressed in a host of ways, among them in the separation of deep from ordinary memories and in the sense of shame. But however it is manifest, doubling is a strategy of survival; it allows the victim to cope with the loneliness, the sadness, the guilt, and to endure the unbearable. It does not cure, but it does heal (p. 85).

In a sense, then, for Alford, the survivor's strategy of doubling is a middle ground between Levi's living among the corpses and the absurdity that torments him and the equanimity, the assurance, and liberation that Job experiences. It incorporates both: It honestly admits the seriousness of the horror, and it nonetheless clings to life.

There is more to Alford's understanding of this trio of responses, however. Recall that both Job and Levi are left with the natural world, for one as a domain for his free action, for the other as a domain more rational than, but still not hospitable to, human life. But is this the human plight, to be left with nature alone? Doubling is a coping, but, Alford asks, is there any room left in ordinary life for transcendence, for an experience of the sublime or the holy? Or are we now trapped in an iron cage, constructed out of an absurd social life and a silent, if modestly rational, nature? Or (p. 132) is there an alternative route to a limited meaningfulness for human life, to a kind of domesticated transcendence?

Alford's answer is that there is. The access to transcendence, he says, did not die at Auschwitz. For many, it was foreclosed long before; one need only think of Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. For others, it is still possible (p. 131). The question is whether now—in a time of the surplus absurdity born out of the encounter between humanity and nature, there is an “alternative for living within and amid absurdity” (p. 132). Indeed, he claims, there is such an alternative. Alford calls it, after Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, “paying attention” (pp. 132–33). To my mind, it also draws us toward Emmanuel Levinas and Stanley Cavell, although elsewhere Alford argues that Levinas fails to appreciate it (see “Emmanuel Levinas and Iris Murdoch: Ethics as Exit?” Philosophy and Literature 26 (1) [2002]: 24–42). What such attention involves is forgoing too much thought and the detachment that thinking and knowing presuppose, turning from being enthralled with one's own self to a concern for others, with submitting oneself to social practice and institutions and abandoning spontaneity. Paying attention means an attentiveness to individuals, a just and loving gaze, “to see the other person justly, honestly, compassionately” (p. 133). It is a move “toward increasing depth, privacy, and particularity,” to a loving knowledge of the other.

Alford calls this turn to “paying attention” a “backdoor to transcendence, sublimity in the dimension of the mundane” (p. 135). What he means is that the relationship with others “requires on a human, everyday level precisely those qualities of modesty, ignorance, and openness to the mystery of otherness that will never be solved” (p. 135; cf. 140–43). We may always find Auschwitz inexplicable and beyond our ken, but we can and must go on in its shadow. By turning to others with humanity and love, we find a transcendence that is still accessible to us and seek to heal the pain of suffering of the most absurd kind. It makes the absurdity a little less absurd.

I have isolated the central argument that runs through Alford's book, insofar as I have understood him accurately, as if it were a dilemma: Is transcendence, a meaningful life, possible after Auschwitz? In fact, this account may be a distortion of the central thread; the book does not do much to help the reader to identify it. Alford finds subtle nuances and ambiguity in both Job and Levi; much of what they portray, these profoundly literary resources, is true, he claims, and cannot, in their juxtaposition, be abandoned and left behind. And the resolution of the survivors, to cope with the trauma by constructing, living, double lives, is insufficient by itself. In a sense, then, it may be Alford's intent to locate the benefits as well as the excesses and lapses in all three positions in order to find a way to a transcendent response that nonetheless retains its concreteness, its home in the ordinary lives of people struggling to cope with absurdity and hope. His strategy, that is, might be more dialectical and less dilemmatic than I have suggested.

This is a short book. It employs a good deal of jargon from figures like Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze. Its claims are hard to locate and to clarify. It is not a book in religious thought or ethics or political theory or moral psychology. It combines all of these at times and more. It is, in its own way, highly speculative. But it is not for this reason easily dismissed, for it asks a serious question: Are meaning and indeed transcendence (if meaning requires it) possible after Auschwitz and in our world, one of extreme suffering, affliction, pessimism, and a disturbing absurdity in human life? These are significant themes, and although Alford addresses them creatively and in a way that tends to dazzle as much as convince the reader, once my eyes became acclimated to the spectacle, I found something valuable here. But it does not come easily, and not all will be persuaded by it.