Jean Améry: Open Revolt
You never know who walks into Café Central—especially on the weekends—when the virtual world retreats. Every Friday we offer you company for the weekend—to share your thoughts.
Before me I see the prisoner foreman Juszek, a Polish professional criminal of horrifying vigor. In Auschwitz he once hit me in the face because of a trifle—that is how he was used to dealing with all the Jews under his command.
At this moment—I felt it with piercing clarity—it was up to me to go a step further in my prolonged appeals case against society. In open revolt I struck Juszek in the face in turn.
My human dignity lay in this punch to his jaw—and that it was in the end I, the physically much weaker man, who succumbed and was woefully thrashed, meant nothing to me.
Painfully beaten, I was satisfied with myself. Not for reasons of courage and honor—but only because I had grasped well that there are situations in life in which our body is our entire self and our entire fate.
I was my body and nothing else—in hunger, in the blow that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt. My body, debilitated and crusted with filth, was my calamity. In situations like mine, physical violence is the sole means of restoring a disjointed personality. From At the Mind’s Limits ...
