Four TO REVERSE THE IRREVERSIBLE: ON TIME DISORDER IN THE WORK OF JEAN AMÉRY Roy Ben Shai 1. Introduction In this paper I will discuss the notion of ‘disordered time sense’ in the work of philosopher and survivor of Auschwitz Jean Améry. Jean Améry was born in 1912 in Austria under the name of Hans Mayer. His father, who was of Jewish origin, died when he was a child and his mother, who was a Catholic, brought him up. He studied philosophy and literature in Vienna and aspired to become a writer. In the mid 1930’s, as a result of the racial decrees of the Nuremberg laws, and the later Nazi take over of Austria, his passport name was changed to Hans Israel Maier, whereby he officially became, for the first time, a certified “Jew”. He escaped to Belgium and served the local Resistance until 1943, when he was captured by the Gestapo, tortured, and sent off to spend the last years of the war in concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz (Monowitz). After the liberation of the camps he returned to Brussels, where he was to remain for the rest of his life, and changed his name for the second time to Jean Améry, thereby publicly renouncing his Austrian identity. (We will see later, however, that he felt he could no more renounce his Austrian identity than he could assume a Jewish one. His literary name and identity—Jean Améry—will therefore remain a hybrid, or bastard identity, neither this nor that). He made a living as a freelance journalist for German-Swiss public- ations, writing on a wide array of cultural and political topics. At the Mind’s Limits from 1966 (Améry, 1980)—the text at the focus of the discussion to follow—was the first and last of Améry’s major texts to explicitly address his Holocaust experiences. The book contains five essays, combining philosophical reflection and personal testimony, and it was originally conceived and delivered as a series of talks on German public radio. Several other books in the same format followed. The last of them was dedicated to the subject of suicide, and shortly after its publication, in 1978, Améry took his own life. Disordered temporality is one of the central themes of At the Mind’s Limits. There is no separate essay devoted to it, but I take it to be an under-