Where Nothing Happened

The Experience of War Captivity and Levinas’s Concept of the ‘There Is’

Bibliographic Data

ID12282941
AuthorsJohanna Jacques (0000-0002-7723-0037, Durham University, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume26
Issue2
Pages230-248
Publication date2016-08-04
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial & Legal Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0964-6639 • E-ISSN: 1461-7390
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0964663916661875
OpenAlexW2482959568
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited26

This article takes as its subject matter the juridico-political space of the prisoner of war (POW) camp. It sets out to determine the nature of this space by looking at the experience of war captivity by Jewish members of the Western forces in World War II, focusing on the experience of Emmanuel Levinas, who spent 5 years in German war captivity. On the basis of a historical analysis of the conditions in which Levinas spent his time in captivity, it argues that the POW camp was a space of indifference that was determined by the legal exclusion of prisoners from both war and persecution. Held behind the stage of world events, prisoners were neither able to exercise their legal agency nor released from law into a realm of extra-legal violence. Through a close reading of Levinas’s early concept of the ‘there is’ [ il y a], the article seeks to establish the impact on prisoners of prolonged confinement in such a space. It sets out how prisoners’ subjectivity dissolved in the absence of meaningful relations with others and identifies the POW camp as a space in which existence was reduced to indeterminate, impersonal being

Agency (philosophy · Epistemology · Nothing · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · World War II · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

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