Description: Ethics, like history, is returning to center stage in the academy and in intellectual circles. Historians confront the Holocaust, literary critics ponder what an ethics of reading might be, philosophers engage the very nature of ethics itself. Is ethics to be concern of an emerging decade, as historician was for the 80s and textuality for the 70s? And what kind of ethics?

What Happens to History examines such questions as the duty to memory, the responsibility to action in the present, the nature of witnessing and the responsibility to the other. Among the writers who appear here are historian Tavetan Todorov who marks the distinction between transcendent for theological ethics and critical ethics in his contribution 'The Use and Abuse of Memory'. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins poses a provocative challenge in his essay Reports of the Death of Culture Have Been Exaggerated'. The critic Gayatri Spivak's 'A Moral Dilemna' lays out the ethical problem at the heart of 'global-local' binaries. This is a rich volume of work on pressing questions of our time.

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