Bearing witness as a Boundary Case: Survivor Testimony, Legal Testimony, and Historical Testimony
in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture. Ed. Sara Jones, Roger Woods. Palgrave Macmillan 2023:
By examining the metamorphoses of the testimony of survivor-witnesses in court and in the writing of history, Weigel replaces so-called aporias (the ‘crisis of representation’, the problem of ‘subjectivity’) by an analysis of the survivor-witness, characterised by immediacy (Benjamin and Améry), as a boundary case of law and justice (referring to Arendt) and of law and history (referring to the paradigmatic role of the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial and the witness as media figure). It rejects the ‘crisis of truth’ by unpicking the idea of ‘the truth’ (with Benjamin). And it criticises the pathos formula of an ‘event without a witness’ (Agamben), which disregards the testimonies of non-survivors, such as the Auschwitz scrolls.