Spirit in Ashes

Contemporary phenomena of mass death – such as Hiroshima and Auschwitz – have brought with them the threat of annihilation of human life. In this provocative and disturbing book, Edith Wyschogrod shows that the various manifestations of man-made mass death form a single structure, a "death-event", which radically alters our understanding of language, time, and self. She contends that the death event has its own logic and driving force that she traces to pre-Socratic philosophy and to certain mythological motifs that recur in Western thought.