Testimony/Bearing Witness

Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture

Sybille Krämer, Sigrid Weigel

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783489770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

What is the epistemological value of testimony? What role does language, images, and memory play in its construction? What is the relationship between the person who attests and those who listen? Is bearing witness a concept that is exclusively based in interpersonal relations? Or are there other modes of communicating or mediating to constitute a constellation of testimony?
Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media studies and psychiatry. With examples including the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge and the Armenian genocide the volume discusses the chances and limits of communicating epistemological and ethical, philosophical and cultural-historical, past and present perspectives on the phenomenon and concept of bearing witness.

Part I

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Chapter 1

The Presence of the Witness

François Hartog

The witness is a central figure of human communities. Through his intercession, one may connect the past and the present: the past of what took place and the present of its attestation. The codes reserve him a place. The judge makes appeal to him, just as the historian does who again takes up this pattern by directly investigating the witnesses or indirectly treating the documents as witnesses. ‘I was there, I saw and heard’, and ‘I say what I saw and heard’: such are the essential features of the testimony, the terms of the contract undergirding it and of its ensuing authority. The ‘and’ is fundamental. Indeed, what is it that conducts or compels this passage from seeing to saying, what is the constitutive act of the witness’s (very) being? To speak – and to be ready to speak again to someone as there is no testimony without one to whom it is told. To whom do we speak and why? The question arises here of the usages and effects of the testimony. Moreover, there exists an entirely religious aspect of testimony or, put better, a shaping of the witness by the religious. In fact, the revealed religions have needed him and have reserved him an important place. This is true of Judaism, of Islam and even more so of Christianity since the witness is the very foundation of the Christian faith, and the history of Salvation is that of the propagation of a testimony.

THE WITNESS BETWEEN LAW AND RELIGION

How have human communities encouraged, shaped and staged, dramatized, controlled and also prevented this presence and this always potentially disconcerting word? The witness is a cog in the functioning of a group: one appeals to him in order to guarantee an engagement, of which he also becomes the memory. He reports breaches of the rules or the laws of living together. This step is what constitutes him as a witness. The indispensable operator of the social game, he intervenes at the crossroads of two major domains of law and justice, on the one hand, and of the religious domain, on the other – even if it is quite clear that they have hardly ceased interfering with one another. From the instant that an oath is sworn and a witness is present, for example, the witness is either a physical person or a divine power; the religious and the juridical are summoned and intertwined. This witness-guarantor is also he who directly denounces or even punishes breaches of the given word. The Greeks were able to swear by making appeal to Zeus according to the formula Istô Zeus (that Zeus attest to it, be witness); as for the Romans, they said rather Audi Juppiter (listen, Jupiter). In Greek, the etymology of the word for ‘testimony’, martus, leads to the root of a verb signifying to remember (smarati in Sanskrit, in Greek merimna, which gave memor(ia) in Latin). The witness is memory. In Latin, the noun testis (testimony) leads towards terstis or him present in the third person (Hartog 2007, 248).

In ancient Greece as well as in the terms established by Aristotle in his Rhetoric, the judicial discourse deployed a variety of means to access the past and to resolve a dispute. Within a trial, the orator may appeal to two sorts of ‘proof’. For the matter, it would be better to say two means to carry the conviction (pisteis) insofar as the Rhetoric is a treatise of the argumentation. On the one hand, there are proofs termed ‘technical’ (entechnoi), ‘furnished by the method and our personal means’; on the other, atechnoi proofs, those ‘which have not been furnished by our personal means’. The former are to be ‘invented’, says Aristotle, while the latter are ‘given’. There are precisely the testimonies – but also the confessions given under torture and writings (e.g. legal texts) (Aristotle 1926, 1355b, 35–39 and 1375, 20–25). If therefore the witness has a recognized place in the procedure, it is not central: he is only an element of proof which the orator may emphasize, if favourable or, on the contrary, minimizes, if not.

Among the ancient Israelites, in contrast, the Deuteronomist credits the witness with a decisive role. In doing so, he also precisely codifies the usage. In the case of accusations of idolatry, it is stipulated that it is ‘upon the word of two or of three witnesses’ that ‘one shall be put to death whom merits death’ but ‘he shall not be put to death upon the word of a single witness. The hand of the witnesses will be first in putting him to death’ (Deuteronome, XVII, 6–7). The witness hence radically commits he who risks it. More generally, ‘A single witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity or any sin whatsoever; yet upon the word of two witnesses or upon the word of three witnesses, the matter will be settled… . If the witness is a false witness, if he has falsely accused his brother, you will do unto him that which he would have done unto his brother’ (Deuteronome, XIX, 15–16). As for Roman law, it also rejected the single witness. Constantine made this a law, which was afterwards integrated into the Code of Justinian. Reprising the Deuteronomic formula, the Middle Ages ended in the well-known maxim, testis unus, testis nullus – ‘one witness is no witness’.

In the French penal code, it remains the case that the witness participates in the manifestation of the truth (hence the oath and the oral character of the testimony) and that the testimony has probative value. Yet, to be fully admissible, the testimony must be framed and conform to certain procedural rules, the most well known being the strict injunction to keep to the facts, nothing but the facts. The word must, in short, be depersonalized, and the witness should take leave of himself so that his words (without affect or pathos) come to reinforce and illustrate (or, on the contrary, contradict) the qualification of facts such as they have been established by the judge. In sum, it is the inscription within a rational, even a positivist, framework of this word which we cannot reject or ignore but must control.

Regarding the directly religious aspect of witness, we observe that the irruption of the prophetic dimension transforms the witness but not, for all that, effacing the judicial element. In the Old Testament, we pass from the invoked deity – summoned as a witness, that is to say as the guarantor of a solemn commitment (as in Greece or Rome) – to a quite different configuration where it is men whom are called upon to testify to and for their God. Thus in the Second Isaiah, God in speaking to Israel proclaims, ‘You are my witnesses’ and ‘You are my servants whom I have chosen’ (Isaiah, XLIII, 10). And again: ‘You are my witnesses: is there a god besides me?’ (Isaiah, XLIV, 8). It falls upon Israel to testify, in becoming his servant, that Yahweh is indeed the one true God. This too is done before the nations which furnish, if possible, witness in favour of their (false) gods. ‘Announcer’, Yahweh demands of them, ‘that which is yet to come and we will know you to be gods’ (Isaiah, XLI, 22). Predictably enough, they are incapable of doing so. We remain well inside of a judicial context: that of a competition between true and false gods, between true and false witnesses, but that which constitutes Israel as a truthful witness is this privileged relation with its God. Let us remark – and the point carries significance – that by defining himself as ‘I am that I am’ within this prophetic economy of witness, Yahweh is the sole party finding himself in the position to bear witness both to and for himself. ‘By my own person I have sworn’, he tells Abraham, ‘I will bless you and multiply your race’ (Genesis, XXII, 16). Pronouncing this oath, he is himself his own witness. The law of double-witness evidently does not apply to him. In pronouncing this oath, he is to himself his own witness, and it cannot be otherwise. This is the very sign of his divinity.

With Christianity, the figure of the witness becomes yet more central and more complex, since between God and Israel arose a third, Jesus, who is the Messiah and who establishes himself as the witness par excellence to the point of becoming the ultimate sacrifice. But this third party, at once God and man, remains equally on the side of God and on the side of man. Does he testify for himself? Yes, but – as he clarifies – provided that the Father testifies for him and he for the Father. This is a way of ‘adapting’ the rule requiring that only God may bear witness to himself, entirely while responding to the accusations of the Pharisees when challenged thereon. There is, if I may say so, a quid pro quo between Father and Son.

On the side of man, the entire edifice of Christianity is a matter of witnesses because it rests upon a chain of witnesses: from the first among them, John the Baptist, until the final proclamation of Jesus at the moment of the Ascension – reprise and direct echo of that which we found in the Book of Isaiah. ‘You will be my witnesses’, Jesus announces, ‘until the ends of the earth’ (Acts, I, 8). Such has been, is and always will be the mission of the Church.

In the Gospel of John as in that of Luke, the witnesses – according to the ordinary meaning of the word – are those who have seen and heard, to which immediately is added ‘those who have become servants’ (Luke, I, 1, 4) or, that which amounts to the same, ‘those who have believed’ (John, XX, 8). It emerges from this that he who sees and hears without believing has not truly seen nor heard, and hence he cannot bear witness. This point is crucial, because it is that which permits the establishment of a tradition and the transmission of witness beyond the generation of the first apostles, who are the only visual witnesses. Furthermore, the testimony is received and constantly reactivated among the Christians by liturgical celebrations. Although he could not have seen nor heard Jesus, he who believes sees and hears, and he therefore witnesses in his turn, taking his place among this testimonial tradition which began on the day when the disciples entered into the empty tomb. Hence he may count himself among the witnesses of Christ. Furthermore, by creating with Eusebius of Caesarea the new genre of the Ecclesiastical History, the Church rests the legitimacy of history since the apostles in an unbroken chain of witnesses and of testimony. Eusebius makes himself its first enumerator (Eusebius of Caeserea, Ecclesiastical History, I, 1926, 1–2). Here we find the starting point of the figure – so important these days – of what we call in English a ‘vicarious witness’, a delegated witness. The Church is made of a long procession of witnesses, and of witnesses of witnesses, which are at the very basis of its authority.

THE CONTEMPORARY WITNESS

Why commence with this look back and this rapid archaeology of witness within – to be brief – the occidental tradition via Greece, Rome, Judaism and Christianity? Because they can help us, I believe, to better understand the contemporary situation in which the witness, after a relative eclipse, has come to occupy a place at the forefront. But who is this witness today? From what does it emerge, how is it apprehended?

In a large collective work bringing together philosophers and exegetes and published in 1972 under the title The Testimony, Gianni Vattimo began his intervention by noting that this seminar gave him ‘a vague impression of anachronism’. Why? Because for him, testimony – the word itself – was connected to the moment of existentialism. Yet existentialism was in full decline, while structuralism had established itself against the backdrop of the crisis of the subject, the indictment of which had been engaged by Nietzsche already and developed by Heidegger (Le Témoignage, 1972, 125). Today in 2015, the remark itself by Vattimo also seems quite anachronistic. Structuralism is no more, the subject is long since ‘back’ and the witness is everywhere. The volume’s table of contents can also give the reader an impression of anachronism but for another reason that was emphasized by Vattimo: no text treats nor considers the contemporary witness; he who had survived what one did not yet call the Shoah and, since, other genocides or who had come through other catastrophes. However, the Eichmann trial was held in 1961, Primo Levi had published If This Is a Man in 1947 and Roger Antelme released The Human Race in 1947. Yet this (new) witness had not yet made its way into reflections on testimony.

So what then is this contemporary witness? For contrast, Charles Péguy can lend an interesting perspective. One witness, he writes in Clio in 1912, believes that – in order to be a good witness – he must speak like a historian. Péguy thought that the Dreyfus Affair, the great crisis of his life, passed too quickly from memory to history, to that which he named a ‘souvenir historique’ or ‘historic memory’. ‘You are going to find this old man’, he writes. ‘Instantly, he becomes an historian. Instantly, he recites for you a fragment of the history of France. Instantly, he is a book, he recites a fragment from it’. (Péguy, Clio, 3, 1188). Why will he enact a ‘recollection’ (‘remémoration’) for you? For this difficult ‘operation of memory’, which consists of ‘plunging’, of ‘internally sinking into his memory’, he prefers the appeal to his memories.

To an organic recollection, he prefers a historic retracing. Namely, as everyone else, we must say the word, he would rather take the train. History is, in fact, this long, longitudinal railway which passes all along the coast (yet at a certain distance), and which stops at every train-station that it wishes. But it does not follow the coast itself, [the railway] does not coincide with the coast itself. (Péguy, op. cit. t. 3, 1191)

In short, the witness needed to speak like a historian and make history, while today, it is exactly the inverse: the historian would need to begin by speaking like a witness and deal with memory.

THE SURVIVOR, THE VICTIM

Borne by the great swell of memory, the witness – indeed himself a bearer of memory – in fact gradually imposes himself upon our public spaces. He has taken the face of the survivor and of the victim, of the survivor as victim. The public usage of the past has intensified according to the formula employed in 1986 by Jürgen Habermas at the moment of the Historikerstreit (Quarrel of the historians) over Nazism and German history (Hartog and Revel 2001). Yet, for the establishment of this history that the historians in France came to call ‘histoire du temps présent’, history of the present, the actors and participants are multiple. Among them, the witnesses have taken a growing position to the point that the historian Annette Wieviorka was able to retrace the ascent of what she named The Era of the Witness (L’ère du témoin), opened in 1961 with the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (Wieviorka 1998; Hartog 2007, 236–66).

Recognized, investigated, present – even omnipresent – this witness is less the testis than that whom the Latin designated as superstes, namely he who either stands upon the thing itself or remains beyond it, he who survived (Benveniste 1969, 276). The witnesses of the Shoah are those who crossed over and returned. ‘If the Greeks have invented tragedy, Romans correspondence and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation has invented a new literary genre, the testimony’. This formula from Elie Wiesel might be disputable, but each of us understands what it means. He defined himself as the witness and has become the bard of the Holocaust. In the same role of the witness yet in a more sober fashion – more secular and more tragic – there is also Primo Levi who, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, must recount his story each time ‘at an uncertain hour,/That agony returns’ (Levi 1989, 10; Rastier 2005). The testimony literature is indeed a genre in its own right, and today many authors write by adopting the position of witness of witnesses.

Since the Eichmann trial, witnesses and victims, that is the witnesses as victims, have come into plain view. The authority of the first has been reinforced by the quality of second. At the time of depositions, the accused faces certain of his victims. For the first time, in effect, the witnesses were called to testify: not regarding Eichmann, whom they had evidently never seen, but about that which ‘they had experienced’ (Wieviorka 1998). A witness first became the voice and the face of a victim, of a survivor whom one hears, whom one makes speak, whom one records and films. In this regard, the most considerable undertaking has been that which was launched in 1994 by the Spielberg Foundation with the goal of collecting all the testimonies of all the survivors of the Nazi camps and accordingly to have online the actual history of the deportation told through the voice of victims. Ideally, nothing needed to come and interfere with the face-to-face encounter between the witness and the spectator, who was then called in his turn to become a witness of witness, a vicar...