Description: The concept of the witness in Derrida and Levinas. Ethical considerations for the educational use of survivor narratives Despite the crisis in testimony , the concepts of trauma, survivor and post-traumatic witnessing have been reclaimed from the disciplinary marginality of psychoanalytic discourse and used to redeem subaltern pasts and to commemorate national traumas. As collective memory is widely called upon today to legitimate identity in post-colonial or post-communist and to promote national solidarity against terror and terrorists, commemoratives practices such as public mourning and survivor testimonies are becoming more and more integrated in schools. The political appeal to collective memory and the new-age appeal to the therapy of the self (i.e., witness testimonies as a way to work through trauma) have obscured the fact that such commemorative practices are also used in order to inflict secondary trauma, to consolidate images of the enemy, to separate, to reproduce legacies of persecution, to forget, even to request the use of violence. The paper problematizes this use of testimony and re-visits the philosophical concept of witness in Derrida and Levinas. Analyzing Derrida's discussion of the witnessing as living on (after the death of the friend) and Levinas' discussion of the witnessing as generosity and altruism, the paper explores whether witnessing must be reconsidered in the context of learning how to live with others and take leaps of faith toward a new community of friends rather than commemorating death in the name of a redemptive future. Methodology: Philosophical inquirynarratives