Much of the intense current interest in collective memory concerns the politics of memory. In a book that asks, "Is there an ethics of memory?" Avishai Margalit addresses a separate, perhaps more pressing, set of concerns.

The idea he pursues is that the past, connecting people to each other, makes possible the kinds of "thick" relations we can call truly ethical. Thick relations, he argues, are those that we have with family and friends, lovers and neighbors, our tribe and our nation--and they are all dependent on shared memories. But we also have "thin" relations with total strangers, people with whom we have nothing in common except our common humanity. A central idea of the ethics of memory is that when radical evil attacks our shared humanity, we ought as human beings to remember the victims.

Margalit's work offers a philosophy for our time, when, in the wake of overwhelming atrocities, memory can seem more crippling than liberating, a force more for revenge than for reconciliation. Morally powerful, deeply learned, and elegantly written, The Ethics of Memorydraws on the resources of millennia of Western philosophy and religion to provide us with healing ideas that will engage all of us who care about the nature of our relations to others.

Do we have a responsibility to remember the past? If so, why? And what people and what events ought we to remember? And who is the 'we' who ought to remember? These are the questions pursued by Avishai Margalit in this fascinating, provocative, and often exasperating book.

Margalit...explores questions that affect human behavior and relationships in an unusually sensitive way. Humanistic, Jewish, and psychological perspectives come together in his exploration of memory, an aspect of our being not under our control and beyond our understanding...The Ethics of Memoryoffers philosophy for human use in our time.

Discussing memory's relation to emotions, morality, ethics and forgiveness, Margalit reads the Bible, writers (such as Wordsworth, Edward Albee and E. M. Forster), myths and other philosophers (Kant and Max Weber) in order to make his finely nuanced argument.

This volume is novel in orientation, rich in suggestions and full of arresting lines that stimulate reflection and thought. The main unifying theme, as the title signals, is the treatment of memory, individual andcollective, as something responsive to ethical evaluation. Many subsidiary themes are woven in and around this central motif, making for a rich, stimulating text.

To say that it makes a substantial contribution to scholarship on an important topic would be an understatement. There is nothing like it in literature. It is morally powerful, deeply learned, closely argued, andelegantly and engagingly written. Margalit has an unparalleled ability to write clearly and forcefully about subjects that concern almost everyone, yet about which almost no one can say anything without sounding either banal orsentimental. He combines a remarkable sense of literary and cultural nuance with an analytic philosopher's eye for conceptual clarity and fine distinctions.

Margalit weaves a wonderfully clear account of what goes on in our minds and hearts when we encounter the past...[A] subtle and incisive book. Reading [Margalit], one realizes that the allocation of such labels as 'heroes' or 'victims' when we remember (or forgive) need not be a darkly inscrutable process in the depths of our minds. He brings it out in broad daylight, and the wonder of his exposition, which touches unblinkingly on a number of horrible subjects, is that it carries such a distinctly humane flavor.

The Ethics of Memory draws on the resources of millennia of Western philosophy and religion to provide us with healing ideas that will engage all of us who care about the nature of our relations to others. "[A] thought-provoking book ... For Margalit ... the paradigm is Jewish memories of the Holocaust, not Muslim memories of humiliation. Still, his sensitive meditations show how these two strains of hurt might be overcome ... Margalit is an astonishingly humane thinker. His philosophy is always tied to making sense of us humans in all our complexity. And yet he is committed to making sense of us in ways that will make us better." --Jonathan Lear, New York Times Book Review "The richness of Margalit's approach lies in its avidity, in the author's respect for every facet of existence; he can draw, in just a few paragraphs, examples from ordinary life and from momentous events." --Lee Siegel, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Avishai Margalit is the Schulman Professor of Philosophy at the <>Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.

Preface

1. Intensive Care

2. Past Continuous

3. The Kernel

4. Emotions Recollected

5. A Moral Witness

6. Forgiving and Forgetting

Notes

Index