Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
- Part I: Writing After Nuremberg
- Part II: Territorial Rights
- 4 ‘We Refugees’: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights
- 5 ‘Creatures of an Impossible Time’: Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen
- 6 The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch
from Part II: Territorial Rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Illustrations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Gathering Ashes: The Judicial Imagination in the Age of Trauma
- Part I: Writing After Nuremberg
- Part II: Territorial Rights
- 4 ‘We Refugees’: Hannah Arendt and the Perplexities of Human Rights
- 5 ‘Creatures of an Impossible Time’: Late Modernism, Human Rights and Elizabeth Bowen
- 6 The ‘Dark Background of Difference’: Love and the Refugee in Iris Murdoch
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Love is the only justice. Forgiveness, reconciliation, not law.
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the GoodThis mere existence, that is, all that is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ust sis [I want you to be],’ without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (382)A note I made, in memory of the UNRRA camps. Branislav Djekic, Radovan …, Dragomir Pardanjac. Handsome Serbs. Also: Boris Leontic … (Draga and Djekic, with help from me and Mrs Lewis, came to England, I saw something of Draga. Then lost touch.) March 14. Thinking of Branislav Djekic and Dragomir Pardanjac – should they have gone home? Draga cd have had hopes for his boy. What happened to Draga?
Iris Murdoch, UNRAA NotesI want to start with two experiences that came out of working in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) camps in the aftermath of the war. The first is from Gitta Sereny's account of the trauma of repatriating children who had been stolen by the Nazis as part of the ‘Germanisation’ programme. Sereny had discovered Polish twins living with a German farming family. She later runs into them in a transit camp, awaiting their return to Poland.
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- Information
- The Judicial ImaginationWriting after Nuremberg, pp. 141 - 165Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011