The testimony involves a paradox, a paradox that takes different forms but is distinguished by how the testimony is the weight of an impossibility. The poet Paul Celan wrote the poem Aschenglorie (Ashes-glory, 2014) wherein you find the words:
No one
bears witness for the
witness
In relation to this verse Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub writes: “To bear witness is to bear the solititude of a responsibility, and to bear the responsibility, precisely, of that solitude.” (1991, p. 3) The verse is so loaded with absolute responsibility and utter loneliness, with the weight of the uniqueness of witnessing, that it in itself is a speech act that opposes the interpreter's grasp to understand. The witness thus performs her own loneliness. Derrida interprets this verse and writes how the poetic witnessing in Celan’s poem speaks in itself, in an invincible singularity and as such is untranslatable. The verse speaks of "things" that are not in the words themselves: they thus represent something that cannot be seen. The event or thing is not mentioned in the poem; leading to a questioning of whether the witness can possibly be a source of guarantees, or a source of knowledge. Derrida writes how this understanding of the witness leads to an extinction of the subject, as such: “Perhaps that would lead us to think this fearful thing: the possibility of annihilation, the virtual disappearance of the witness, but also its capacity to bear witness.” (2005, p. 68) The witness becomes desubjectified: she disappears and can by this no longer testify.
The understanding of the witness’ paradox is also found in Primo Levi’s writings and how he formulates his testimony in If this is a man (1991) as the saved witness, in contrast to the drowned witnesses that did not survive Holocaust. Giorgio Agamben names the development of these two witnesses as "two impossibilities of bearing witness" because neither the saved nor the drowned can tell the ‘true story’ (2008, p. 39). Derrida formulates this paradox in other, but similar terms: ”For it [the testimony] to be certain to be guaranteed as testimony, it cannot, it must not be absolutely certain … in order of knowing as such.” (2005, p. 68) When the testimony is produced in the name of truth, it risks losing its status as testimony.
The impossibility of testimony is also considered by The Latina Feminist Group (2002). They write how testimonies tend to be regarded as dependent products, where the process and the product are separated, which separates the process of being a witness from the testimony. The testimony becomes a product for someone else. The underlying premises for this paradoxical situation of the witness is that the dominated discourse in society tends to determine the conditions that witnesses speak in: determine how and in what manner the witnesses have the opportunity to come forward and be listened to. The paradoxical situation of testimony involves a lack of authority, which leads to difficulties – impossibilities – to speak and act.
In this paper I am interested in the pedagogical aspect of witnessing and testimony, and through that give an answer to the paradox of testimony. What kind of pedagogical possibilities are there in witnessing? To answer this I will in the paper presentation at ECER turn to the phenomenon of translation, as it has been developed by, among others, Walter Benjamin and The Latina Feminist Group, with the purpose to give an answer to the paradox of testimony.
