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