The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he concludes that neither strategy works well in today's world. More effective are the day-to-day coping practices of some survivors. Drawing on testimonies of survivors from the Fortunoff Video Archives, Alford also applies the work of Julia Kristeva and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot to his examination of a topic that has been and continues to be central to human experience.

Picked a really dark bit of reading this month.

I've had a lifelong fascination with the Book of Job, various exegesis & have read a bit of ancillary material over the years. However, this book brings in a lot of personal accounts from #Holocaust survivors […]

[Original post on fosstodon.org]

Wondering if there is interesting work on the #philosophy of #statistics, #probability etc I should read. I know Hacking et al. But interested in work from the #hermeneutic, #poststructuralist etc traditions of critical #theory. The few mentions by #Gadamer etc don't go beyond received conceptions.

The elephant in the #poststructuralist third space: Why does “power” emerge as a fixed force for discourse and human thought?