Jill Stauffer, "Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard" (Columbia UP, 2015)
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What is the central argument of Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness book?
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Kerry Figdor, Robert Talese, and Alexis MacLeod. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Jill Stauffer, Associate Professor and Director of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights at Haverford College. Her book, Ethical Loneliness, The Injustice of Not Being Heard, is just out in paperback from Columbia University Press. In Ethical Loneliness, Jill Stauffer argues that survivors of unjust treatment and dehumanization can experience further harm when individuals and institutions will not or cannot hear the survivor's claims about what they suffered and what they are owed for having suffered.
She calls this further harm ethical loneliness. With Stauffer's analysis, the harm of ethical loneliness can lead us to rethink how we understand responsibility for harm, the work of repair, the role of retribution in repair, and how we are constituted as subjects such that we are capable of striving to undo unjust deeds, even mass atrocities. Focused on hearing and what practices of hearing justice demands, Stauffer looks to survivors' stories to analyze how the harm of ethical loneliness can be inflicted, even by people with intentions to help and hear survivors. She then shows how her visionary and reparative work can be done to hear those stories with an ear to how the world may need to change in light of survivors' claims.
Hello, and welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks so much for joining us. So will you tell us a bit about yourself, your background as a philosopher, and your interests, and how you came to write this particular book?
Well, I suppose the disciplinary identification that most activists accurately describes me as philosopher, but I've always sought to do interdisciplinary work, mostly because I think the problems I'm interested in can't be solved by the approach of only one discipline. But I myself have found the most fruitful inspiration for my own writing in continental philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Nietzsche, although the book also engages with Eve Sedgwick's essay on paranoid and reparative reading and Jean Amory's writings on life as a survivor of concentration camps. scholars from many disciplines and various stories told by survivors of harm, and it treats all of these materials as equal. I think writing the book taught me a method.
The method is to allow the stories to tell me how to use the philosophies I had in mind, rather than using philosophies to circumscribe what the stories could tell. And I think I might've learned that lesson at least in part from my time on the board of Voice of Witness, which is an oral history book series that publishes the stories of people most affected by human rights crises in their own words. I became attentive to all the baggage a listener can bring to a story and how that baggage can sometimes lead to a failure to hear what is being said. The book also grew out of my experience of teaching in an interdisciplinary justice oriented program. I taught a class called Forgiveness, Mourning, and Mercy in Law and Politics, and I was struck by how my students were really sure that forgiveness could only be good and resentment could only be bad.
And I was searching for a way to show them that it matters what you're asking people to forgive, and it matters what conditions are on the ground where forgiveness is supposed to take place. And that's how I found the work of Jean Amory, who taught me a lot about the possibilities and dangers of resentment. And then I think a third thing that animated the book was the whole field of transitional justice studies. I just wanted to counter the idea that trials and truth commissions get the job of recovery from harm done on their own.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central argument of Jill Stauffer’s Ethical Loneliness book?
0:01–7:34
2
How does Stauffer define “ethical loneliness” and why does it matter for survivors of injustice?
7:34–14:44
3
Why can well‑intentioned helpers still inflict ethical loneliness on survivors?
14:44–23:47
4
How do stories function as a method for hearing and responding to harm?
23:47–30:56
5
What does the Hannah Holocaust testimony case reveal about failed hearing?
30:56–38:21
6
Why do trials and truth commissions fall short of addressing ethical loneliness?
38:21–46:13
7
How do resentment and forgiveness shape the politics of repair and safety?
46:13–53:56
8
What alternatives to prisons does Stauffer propose to stop generating ethical loneliness?
53:56–1:00:35
Speakers
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