Testimony/Bearing Witness. Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture

Ed. Sybille Krämer & Sigrid Weigel. London: Rowman & Littlefield 2017.

The volume bridges the yet separated perspectives of the philosophy of testimony and the post-holocaust-research. It provides a dialogue of approaches to bearing witness/ testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media and psychiatry.

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? – With examples including the Holocaust, the Warsaw ghetto, the Khmer Rouge and the Armenian genocide.

pdf of Sigrid Weigel’s article “Probing the Limits of Visual Testimonies: A Cinematic Approach to Different Modes of testimony from the Warsaw Ghetto in Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished

pdf der deutschen Version des Artikels in: Zeugen der Kunst. Hgg. von S. Krämer/ S. Schmidt. Paderborn: Fink 2016: