| At the center of this dissertation is a study of Holocaust survivor and essayist Jean Améry as a philosopher. Alongside my reading of Améry, with and against Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Agamben, I offer an original interpretation of the meaning of 'pathos' and 'pathology'. Pathos is an experience that is imposed on one, incapacitating, and passively undergone. Looking more closely at what is entailed in such experience, I suggest that pathology—as the logic of pathos—is a contrarian and irreconcilable modality of relation, and by extension, a thinking and being in revolt. I argue that moral thinking is pathological in this sense and that Améry's philosophy, which I develop further, is a 'moral pathology'.;Experiences of incapacitation push the mind to its limits. Undergoing them, or relating to them, can suspend and eventually modify habitual assumptions and mediating frameworks in a way that thinking alone cannot. This affords these experiences philosophical and edifying import. The focus on incapacitation counters a very long and diversified tradition in moral thought, which emphasizes action and agency, values autonomy and freedom, and devalues whatever stands in the way of attaining and securing them. I argue that this tradition is motivated by a prejudice for health, power, and well being. This results from, and perpetuates, a misunderstanding of pathos and passivity, and inattentiveness to them. Ironically, concern for free thinking and autonomous agency—or fear of what threatens them—ends up restricting our understanding of morality and the philosophical task, and securing the mind within its limits. Conversely, with its incapacitating effects, pathos enables us to encounter and challenge the limits of our mind.;It is partly due to these prejudices and self-restriction in the philosophical tradition that Améry's thinking in revolt—which I believe to be among the finest philosophical achievements of the last century—has rarely been recognized as philosophical and systematically studied as such. To correct this oversight is not only to contribute to the study of his work but to provoke the limits of philosophy itself and hopefully to modify its self-understanding. |
