Passionate Ethics‪.‬

The first words of Theodor Adorno's remarkable reflections on his friend and colleague, Walter Benjamin, make reference to "the philosopher who took his life while fleeing Hitler's executioners" (p. 229). The paragraph continues with several dense Germanic sentences before Adorno writes Benjamin's name, a defamiliarization of conventional memorials and memorializing which require the early and repeated invocation of the subject's name. This deferral of naming has the effect of situating Benjamin's death less as the tragedy of a singular individual than as part of a group, the collectivity of those who suffered under the policies and practices of Nazi Germany, and shifting the reader's focus from the death of one man to the experiences of many people. While Adorno's strategy may appear to run counter to the expectations of his readers, may brush them against the grain -- to borrow Benjamin's own phrasing -- it has the merit of foregrounding the wider social and political conflicts which presided over a catastrophic moment of European history. In turn, this inflection serves as a salutary reminder that the life celebrated cannot be separated from the transindividual and impersonal histories in which it was lived out. In parallel but uniquely different ways, contemporary memorials often seek to mediate the complex relationship between a collectivity, an individual life, and those who remember: the Vietnam memorial not only inscribes the name of each soldier on massive walls of stone whose sheer size gives the impression of swallowing up the individual at the same time that the polished stone reflects back the faces of readers seeking out a particular name; the AIDS Quilt utilizes a traditionally unregarded women's handicraft to construct individualized panels which produce the interaction between the men, women and children whose lives are remembered and the processes of sustaining and giving form to those memories.