Testimony

Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History

Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135206024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

In this unique collection, Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub examine the nature and function of memory and the act of witnessing, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. Moving from the literary to the visual, from the artistic to the autobiographical, and from the psychoanalytic to the historical, the book defines for the first time the trauma of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing "the unprecedented historical occurrence of...an event eliminating its own witness." Through the alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, the authors focus on the henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event, literature and evidence, speech and survival, witnessing and ethics.

ONE

Education and Crisis, Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching

SHOSHANA FELMAN

I

Trauma and Pedagogy

Is there a relation between crisis and the very enterprise of education? To put the question even more audaciously and sharply: Is there a relation between trauma and pedagogy? In a post-traumatic century, a century that has survived unthinkable historical catastrophes, is there anything that we have learned or that we should learn about education, that we did not know before? Can trauma instruct pedagogy, and can pedagogy shed light on the mystery of trauma? Can the task of teaching be instructed by the clinical experience, and can the clinical experience be instructed, on the other hand, by the task of teaching?

Psychoanalysis, as well as other disciplines of human mental welfare, proceed by taking testimonies from their patients. Can educators be in turn edified by the practice of the testimony, while attempting to enrich it and rethink it through some striking literary lessons? What does literature tell us about testimony? What does psychoanalysis tell us about testimony? Can the implications of the psychoanalytic lesson and the literary lesson about testimony interact in the pedagogical experience? Can the process of the testimony—that of bearing witness to a crisis or a trauma—be made use of in the classroom situation? What, indeed, does testimony mean in general, and what in general does it attempt to do? In a post-traumatic century, what and how can testimony teach us, not merely in the areas of law, of medicine, of history, which routinely use it in their daily practice, but In the larger areas of the interactions between the clinical and the historical, between the literary and the pedagogical?

The Alignment between Witnesses

In his book entitled Kafka's Other Trial, writer, critic and Nobel prize laureate for literature Elias Canetti narrates the effect that Kafka's correspondence has had on him:

I found those letters more gripping and absorbing than any literary work I have read for years past. They belong among those singular memoirs, autobiographies, collection of letters from which Kafka himself drew sustenance. He himself . . . [read] over and over again, the letters of Kleist, of Flaubert, and of Hebbel . . .

To call these letters documents would be saying too little, unless one were to apply the same title to the life-testimonies of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky. For my part, I can only say that these letters have penetrated me like an actual life.¹

A “life-testimony” is not simply a testimony to a private life, but a point of conflation between text and life, a textual testimony which can penetrate us like an actual life. As such, Kafka's correspondence is testimony not merely to the life of Kafka, but to something larger than the life of Kafka, and which Canetti's title designates, suggestively and enigmatically, as Kafka's Other Trial. Both through Kafka's life and through his work, something crucial takes place which is of the order of a trial. Canetti's very reading of Kafka's correspondence, in line with Kafka's reading of the letters of Kleist, Hebbel and Flaubert, thus adds its testimony—adds as yet another witness–to Kafka's Trial. Canetti writes:

In the face of life's horror—luckily most people notice it only on occasion, but a few whom inner forces appoint to hear witness are always conscious of it—there is only one comfort: its alignment with the horror experienced by previous witnesses.²

How is the act of writing tied up with the act of bearing witness— and with the experience of the trial? Is the act of reading literary texts itself inherently related to the act of facing horror? If literature is the alignment between witnesses, what would this alignment mean? And by virtue of what sort of agency is one appointed to bear witness?

The Appointment

It is a strange appointment, from which the witness-appointee cannot relieve himself by any delegation, substitution or representation. “If someone else could have written my stories,” says Elie Wiesel, “I would not have written them. I have written them in order to testify. And this is the origin of the loneliness that can be glimpsed in each of my sentences, in each of my silences.”³ Since the testimony cannot be simply relayed, repeated or reported by another without thereby losing its function as a testimony, the burden of the witness—in spite of his or her alignment with other witnesses—is a radically unique, noninterchangeable and solitary burden. “No one bears witness for the witness,” writes the poet Paul Celan.⁴ To bear witness is to hear the solitude of a responsibility, and to bear the responsibility, precisely, of that solitude.^{4 - bis}

And yet, the appointment to bear witness is, paradoxically enough, an appointment to transgress the confines of that isolated stance, to speak for other and to others. The French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas can thus suggest that the witness's speech is one which, by its very definition, transcends the witness who is but its medium, the medium of realization of the testimony. “The witness,” writes Levinas, “testifies to what has been said through him. Because the witness has said ‘here I am’ before the other.”⁵ By virtue of the fact that the testimony is addressed to others, the witness, from within the solitude of his own stance, is the vehicle of an occurrence, a reality, a stance or a dimension beyond himself.

Is the appointment to the testimony voluntary or involuntary, given to or against the witness's will? The contemporary writer often dramatizes the predicament (whether chosen or imposed, whether conscious or unconscious) of a voluntary or of an unwitting, inadvertent, and sometimes involuntary witness: witness to a trauma, to a crime or to an outrage; witness to a horror or an illness whose effects explode any capacity for explanation or rationalization.

The Scandal of an Illness

In Albert Camus’ The Plague, for instance, the narrator, a physician by profession, feels historically appointed—by the magnitude of the catastrophe he has survived and by the very nature of his vocation as a healer—to narrate the story and bear witness to the history of the deadly epidemic which has struck his town:

This chronicle is drawing to an end, and this seems to be the moment for Dr. Bernard Rieux to confess that he is the narrator. . . His profession put him in touch with a great many of our townspeople while plague was raging, and he had opportunities of hearing their various opinions. Thus he was well placed for giving a true account of all he saw and heard . . .

Summoned to give evidence [appelé á tèmoigner] regarding what was a sort of crime, he has exercised the restraint that behooves a conscientious witness. All the same, following the dictates of his heart, he had deliberately taken the victims’ side and tried to share with his fellow citizens the only certitudes they had in common—love, exile and suffering . . . Thus, decidedly, it was up to him to speak for all . . . Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice done them might endure.⁶

Camus’ choice of the physician as the privileged narrator and the designated witness might suggest that the capacity to witness and the act of bearing witness in themselves embody some remedial quality and belong already, in obscure ways, to the healing process. But the presence of the doctor as key-witness also tells us, on the other hand, that what there is to witness urgently in the human world, what alerts and mobilizes the attention of the witness and what necessitates the testimony is always fundamentally, in one way or another, the scandal of an illness, of a metaphorical or literal disease; and that the imperative of bearing witness, which here proceeds from the contagion of the plague—from the eruption of an evil that is radically incurable— is itself somehow a philosophical and ethical correlative of a situation with no cure, and of a radical human condition of exposure and vulnerability.

In an Era of Testimony

Oftentimes, contemporary works of art use testimony both as the subject of their drama and as the medium of their literal transmission. Films like Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, The Sorrow and the Pity by Marcel Ophuls, or Hiroshima mon amour by Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, instruct us in the ways in which testimony has become a crucial mode of our relation to events of our times—our relation to the traumas of contemporary history: the Second World War, the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, and other war atrocities. As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference.

What the testimony does not offer is, however, a completed statement, a totalizable account of those events. In the testimony, language is in process and in trial, it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge. Testimony is, in other words, a discursive practice, as opposed to a pure theory. To testify—to vow to tell, to promise and produce one's own speech as material evidence for truth—is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement. As a performative speech act, testimony in effect addresses what in history is action that exceeds any substantialized significance, and what in happenings is impact that dynamically explodes any conceptual reifications and any constative delimitations.

Crisis of Truth

It has been suggested that testimony is the literary—-or discursive—mode par excellence of our times, and that our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony. “If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet,” writes Elie Wiesel, “our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony.”⁷ What is the significance of this growing predominance of testimony as a privileged contemporary mode of transmission and communication? Why has testimony in effect become at once so central and so omnipresent in our recent cultural accounts of ourselves?

In its most traditional, routine use in the legal context—in the courtroom situation—testimony is provided, and is called for, when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question. The legal model of the trial dramatizes, in this way, a contained, and culturally channeled, institutionalized, crisis of truth. The trial both derives from and proceeds by, a crisis of evidence, which the verdict must resolve.

What, however, are the stakes of the larger, more profound, less definable crisis of truth wh...