Amir Eshel has an ambitious project, which he began formulating in his previous book, Futurity (2013), and which his current collection of essays further extends and develops. To borrow a phrase from Bruno Latour, Eshel believes that literary studies “ran out of steam” and literary scholars often focus on the pains and melancholic memories of a traumatic past, rather than acknowledge the rich potential of poetic expression to generate new possibilities and push through moral and existential impasses. “When remembering traumatic historical events, contemporary literature acknowledges the pain of the past, but that remembrance is also an expression of futurity—it presents us with an opportunity to imagine a better future” (xii). The birth of a brighter future from a tragic and traumatic past is made possible through an anti-metaphysical turn. The poetic (Eshel concentrates on post–Second World War literature and arts) allows for the replacement of ideological commitments by a pragmatic worldview, moral imperatives by contingent observations, and abstract ideals by empathic communal relations and critical self-reflection.Eshel understands the poetic as a category that goes beyond the rational moral grammar of the Enlightenment, a tradition associated with Kant, which, in its commitment to a universal logic, fails to address the uncertainties and absurdities of human life. What enables the poetic to provide the sort of emotional and psychological outlet (what Eshel sees as “cultivating freedom”) foreclosed by reason-oriented (scientific) thinking, is that poems and works of art offer more than aesthetic pleasure. They can open a window to a new and imaginative Weltanschauung, one that not only guides us in the labyrinth of our lives but also inspires action, thus allowing us to “counter forces that restrict our cultural and political freedom” (xvi). Inspired by Hannah Arendt's ideas on tyranny as imbued in Western thought, Eshel posits the poetic as an outlet from such tendencies. At the same time, the poetic, as Eshel conceives it, both relies on and is itself a performance or manifestation of the sort of pragmatic philosophy inspired by Richard Rorty, a coming together of imagination and ethics. While Rorty discusses “philosophy as poetry,” Eshel complements Rorty's insight by reading poetry as (pragmatic) philosophy. Reading poems and artworks through such a pragmatic framework reveals their world-making potential, which allows for imagining alternative futures, and serves as an emancipatory means for cultivating individual agency that is based not on certainty or metaphysics but rather on skepticism and relations between people, providing an “immunity” against uncurbed romantic enthusiasm.Poetic Thinking Today is divided into three chapters, each addressing a different medium for poetic thinking. In the first chapter, “Thinking Poems,” Eshel offers readings of poems by Paul Celan and Dan Pagis that emphasize both writers’ efforts to divorce poetry from metaphysics, whether that metaphysics is conceived as divine justice or a secular faith in reason. According to Eshel, Celan's and Pagis's poems fluctuate between uncertainty and existential doubt, and their call for justice is set against an absurd reality. The two authors’ recognition of a godless world is by no means a submission to arbitrary life, but it serves as a foundation for a vision of ethical contemplation undirected by principle. Here Eshel borrows from the writings of philosophers including Rorty, Peter Singer, and Hilary Putnam, to envision a pragmatism attentive to the diversity of human needs rather than directed first and foremost by universal law.The second chapter, “Thinking Paintings,” focuses on the work of German artist Gerhard Richter, and specifically his Birkenau Cycle from 2014. Eshel examines Richter's process of creating the paintings, and particularly Richter's reservations about representing the horrors of the Holocaust which he expressed in his ongoing exchange with Didi Huberman. This conversation culminated with Richter's production of a series of four abstract paintings that pay tribute to four photos taken by Sonderkommando (Jews forced to work at the gas chambers) that were smuggled out of the concentration camp. Eshel explains Richter's artistic choice as driven by his attempt to move away from an abstract concept of evil, envisioning instead an artistic form that expresses resistance and hope in the human capacity to act even under the direst conditions. Eshel expands this concept by engaging with Arendt's discussion of collective acts of political resistance—specifically her notion of human “natality,” the human potential for constantly creating new beginnings.The third chapter, “Thinking Sculptures,” analyzes several sculpture-monuments by Israeli artist and architect Dani Karavan. While for Eshel poems and paintings can inspire self-reflection and challenge tyranny and atrocities, sculptures offer a communal experience, a “meeting place” (Mifgash, in Hebrew), as one of Karavan's pieces is titled. Karavan's sculptures utilize not only shape but also engravings of words and names. They create a space that stages an encounter between visitors while also granting visibility to the persecuted others they commemorate, such as the victims of the Third Reich (Jews as well as Sinti and Roma). Eshel closes with a coda that addresses the present political reality. Here, he analyzes the work of Laura Poitras, in particular her 2015 Astro-Noise installation, a work that operates on viewers’ minds as well as their bodies. To view this work of art, the spectator needs to lie on the museum floor and thus experiences “what it is like” living under such technological threat, conveying what Poitras calls “emotional understanding.” As in her Oscar-winning documentary on Edward Snowden, Poitras makes use of art to invoke poetic thinking that seeks to ethically intervene in contemporary debates on military means and political strategies.Eshel's suggestion to read these works as calls for a new sort of moral intervention is convincing; however, applying pragmatism in such a manner comes at a cost. Eshel's reliance on Rorty, I would argue, is rather selective, and the distinction between the poetic and the pragmatic is unfortunately lost in this book. Is the kind of ethical criticism Eshel envisions a matter of applying a certain ethical attitude—pragmatic, future-oriented, humanistic, anti-fundamentalist, and attentive to human suffering—to works of art and literature, or does it entail a questioning of preconceived ethical concepts altogether?Consider an example from a different field—feminism. Feminist legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon (2007) has argued that, with regard to gender relations, the problem is not that the ideal of equality is disregarded but, rather, that this ideal of equality itself functions as a mechanism for producing discrimination.1 Critics like MacKinnon aim not simply to make women equal to men but also to challenge the male-biased nature of our predominant ethical views. For such critics, ethics ought to involve a critique of the norms and concepts and the ways they are used rather than offering norms as an alternative to laws. Yet in making the case for pragmatic norms rather than laws, Eshel does not question ethical concepts themselves. His bottom line, despite the fascinating discussions that he presents, is an all-too-familiar moral lexicon of rights-based humanism.2Pragmatism, it is worth noting, does not only concern imaginative morality or applied ethics. It is structured around its own ideological presumptions, concepts such as individual choice and ideas of liberal freedom. The problem with pragmatic ethics is that it does little to articulate, much less interrogate, these presumptions and their moral implications. The poetic—following Eshel's definition of the term—is by contrast not necessarily bound to these constraints. Poetry and art may problematize agency, they can question the relation between good intentions and moral action or doubt the very process of making meaning. In other words, the absence of such constraints allows the poetic to offer a broader critical perspective on social relations and the limits of identity and agency. When pragmatic logic is simply applied by poetic means, the result risks losing both this critical element of literature and art as well as the richness of poetic expression itself.Eshel repeatedly claims, in the tradition of philosopher Peter Singer, that the poetic allows for “enlarging of the circle of the we” (36). But what if the “we” itself is problematic? Shouldn't poetry aim to transform this “we” rather than blindly endorse and enlarge it? What about those who do not wish to be part of this “we,” since it threatens who they are or wish to be? Eshel seems to imply that inclusion is always the answer. He makes the case that post-Holocaust poetry “reminds us” that people should not be “robbed of their citizen rights” (31). This is a remarkable statement coming from an expert of Holocaust poetry, as it implies that deprivation of rights is the result of some sort of amnesia rather than intentional and systematic policy. Even if one chooses to accept such claims, this still leaves open the question: Why not simply state this ethical position instead of “encrypting” it in literary and visual arts? In short, what is the uniquely added value of the poetic? Even if the claim follows Rorty and argues for the world-making potential of normative imaginary of the poetic, can the ethical message of poetry really be reduced to such terms as inclusion?One of Eshel's poetic case studies addresses Dan Pagis (1930–86), a prominent Holocaust poet. The Holocaust made its way into Pagis's poetry at a late stage of his literary life. It took him over fifteen years to find the aesthetic form that would allow him to express his experience as a survivor of a death camp, not only to articulate his own private trauma but also to grapple with the era as a historical event. Pagis's Holocaust poetry conveys the impossibility of testimony and vehemently protests both humanistic ideals and Jewish motives of divine justice. Against such views of the Holocaust as “another planet” or as a crime instigated by an inhuman dimension of mankind, Pagis insists that the greatest pain stems from the recognition that the perpetrators were all too human. As the opening words of his poem “Testimony” indicate, “No no, they definitely were human beings” (29). Eshel discusses this poem briefly but focuses on a different poem by Pagis, which complements the first, “Another Testimony.” This second poem not only confronts God's impotence in light of the murderous Nazi regime but further disavows the very notion of Godly image (T'zelem). The poem, in Eshel's view, narrates the “absence of the divine” (30) and with it the devastating failure of metaphysics as a foundation for ethics. In this wholesale rejection of ideals and almost nihilist rejection of all order and meaning, he argues, lies the potential of futurity. “It is incumbent on us to find a new ethical framework to replace the divine” (31)—an ethics that, instead of depending on religious traditions or metaphysical principles, would be “capable of negotiating” (32) different values, norms, and beliefs. In short, Pagis's poem rejects traditional moral thinking and calls instead for a pragmatic relational ethics.Eshel's reading of the poem is innovative but not unproblematic, since, by his account, Pagis nonetheless relies on some redemptive quality of humankind to overcome its own inhumanity—a quality that, according to this reading, Pagis transfers/transposes from God to Man. “Your collaborators Michael, Gabriel / Stand and admit / That you said / Let us make man / And the said Amen” (30). Yet even if Pagis is indeed condemning God, whose failure or crime is the creation of an immoral humanity, how could this kind of humanity provide moral relief? Pagis's “Another Testimony” appears instead as one of the most radical negations not only of divine justice but of humanism as well. Eshel, however, insists on a different reading, claiming Pagis aims to replace failed divine justice with a human, pragmatic one. Against God's power of judgment, Eshel argues, Pagis poses the human capacity to listen to the other's suffering. To emphasize his point, Eshel cites the line “listen to my heart that can't decide, see my hardship” (34). Yet this translation is Eshel's own, and it differs both from the Hebrew source as well as from a previously published translation, which he cites but does not justify his decision to change.3 The other, and in my view more accurate, translation of the line reads: “Listen to my heart hardened by Judgment, see my hardship” (emphasis added). The line is a response to God's inability to pass judgment mentioned in the previous line: “If there arise a matter too hard for thee in / judgement, between plea and plea / between blood and blood” (30). Should it be too hard for God to judge, He should listen to the poet's (witness's) heart, he who underwent the terrible experience of the death camp. The setting, as the title indicates, is judicial (Din in Hebrew), and the poem is an act of testimony; but it is also, as both “Testimony” and “Another Testimony” demonstrate, a paradoxical mission. Much of the power of these poems lies in the fact that “poetry after Auschwitz” is perhaps possible but not without a price: the price of giving testimony to something that destroys any notion of human agency. God resides in his court but cannot perform his duty, while the angels who collaborated in the crime of creating a man claim that all they did was follow orders. Eshel repeatedly cites the above-mentioned line to make the case for poetic openness and sensitivity: “In Pagis’ poem the relational listening to another's heart helps us arrive at a more humane justice” (35). While it is unlikely that Eshel believes that for Pagis the Holocaust was the result of people failing to listen to one other, Eshel nonetheless seems to interpret away the poet's harsh critique of humanism, which does not sit well with the pragmatic framework for which he explicitly advocates elsewhere.A similar issue arises regarding Eshel's examination of Richter's Birkenau series. The paintings pay tribute to photographs that were taken by the Sonderkommando. The photographers, who were Jewish forced-laborers in the death camps, risked their lives in the production of these photographs, taken so the world could see what was happening behind the camp walls. This is the key element in what Eshel calls “pictorial thinking,” the ethical dimension that these photographs convey and invoke: free and conscious moral action in the midst of an atrocity, which as such announces human resistance and hope. He writes, “I believe that the pictures silently ask, now that you have seen us: what would you do?” (78). Based on this insight regarding the original photographs, Eshel turns to Richter's paintings (which are presented in the entrance to the Reichstag building in Berlin alongside a reproduction of the photographs). Richter's choice of an abstract rather than figurative painting, according to Eshel, suggests moving from the particular historical event into the future: a broader reflection on human agency and responsibility in relation to tyranny and deprivation of human rights everywhere. Like Pagis's and Celan's poetry, “the work also invites us to reflect on our abilities as political actors, reminding us, in the abstract, of what Birkenau inmates were capable of doing. Parliamentarians entering the Reichstag and also everyone else, face the question: what are you willing to do? How would you act?” (97). Even if one ignores the leap from the acts of the victims to the responsibility of the state, the poetic thinking of Richter's work seems to be no different from the silent question of the original photographs, posing the very same question: “What would you do?” If this is the case, Richter's paintings did not induce new thinking at all. The work may be considered as a homage, but its unique contribution to futuristic thinking is questionable.Richter is one of the most telling examples of an artist who uses art to criticize views of collective guilt and guilt-cult (Schuldkult) as well as other Holocaust tropes in Germany. In some of his more provocative works, he paints over Holocaust photographs, associating them with advertisements and pornography. In works such as Birkenau he does not simply ask “what would you do?” but, rather, questions the very possibility of looking at this past—or rather, makes room for these questions without resolving them. Unlike Eshel's optimistic statement that Richter's art celebrates the “human capacity of changing history” (71), Richter appears to be much more cautious about what such change could mean in a consumerist, media-saturated age. Eshel cites Richter's statement, “painting is yet another form of thinking,” a statement that seems to accord with Rorty's view of literature and arts as metaphorical, rather than as a form of deductive or logical thinking. Christopher Voparil (2014) warns against such a reception of Rortian ethics: “We lose something fundamental in Rorty's account if we fail to appreciate the sociopolitical, rather than narrowly epistemological, concerns behind his notion that not just justification but ‘the True and the Right’ are matters of social practice.” Rorty is not merely advocating for openness and listening, instead of norms and ideals; rather, he makes the case for a process that addresses the ways the social and political shape and determine our capacity to be open and to listen. Eshel goes out of his way to distance himself from any metaphysics, only to find himself in the metaphysical cat's mouth, to paraphrase Franz Kafka's parable, and without offering an account of Rorty's central question: what is the position from which one speaks?The challenge Eshel poses is a real one: literary studies is currently in the throes of a crisis of commitment, in which liberal values are failing—both in theory and in practice—to address some of the most urgent issues of our time, from economic inequality to racial injustice to global warming. Literature, in my view, is important not because it provides a secular, pragmatic alternative, or changes reality. But it captures narratives, memories, desires, hopes, dreams, and ideals in relation to forms of life rather than in relation to citizenship and rights. Literature thus opens the door to a different set of demands: not only of inclusion but of the very forms of social and communal life. Therefore, poetic thinking is in great need today, and, in this sense, Eshel's efforts are appreciated. Yet such a vision of the literary also demands a commitment to think poetically about the various social and political problems with—and also beyond—philosophical solutions.