Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

A Record that has Yet to Be Made

In spite of documents, the listener is listening to a witness because he is looking for something that hasn't existed yet--a record that has yet to be made. The victim's narrative begins with someone who testifies to an absence, to an event that hasn't yet come into existence, "in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its occurrence." While historical evidence may exist, overwhelming evidence, the actual trauma, as a known event and not simply an overwhelming shock, has not yet been witnessed.

The emergence of the narrative is, therefore, the process and the place where the "knowing" of the event is given birth to. The listener is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time. The listener then is the participant and co-owner of the traumatic event, coming to partially experience trauma himself. The listener then partakes of the struggle of the victim with the memories and residues of his/her traumatic past.

Prefer silence--to not return form the silence is rule rather than exception.

He or she must listen to and hear the silence, speaking mutely both in silence and in speech, both from behind and within the speech. He or she must recognize, acknowledge and address that silence.

TESTIMONY AND HISTORICAL TRUTH

A woman narrating her Auschwitz experience to Yale guys. She was an eyewitness to the Auschwitz uprising--she was fully there in her testimony. Talked about "four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was unbelievable."

But HISTORIANS CLAIMED THAT IT WAS NOT ACCURATE because only one had been blown up. They didn't accept or given credence to anything she said. That it was UTTERLY important to remain accurate, lest the revisionists discredit everything.

Laub then totally disagreed: the woman was testifying not to the number of chimneys blown up, but to THE REALITY OF AN UNIMAGINABLE OCCURRENCE. One chimney blowing up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The event itself was almost inconceivable. The woman testified to an event that broke the all compelling frame of Auschwitz, where Jewish armed revolts just did not happen, and had no place. She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth."

This lady was also part of "the Canada commando" who had to sort out the belongings of those who had been gassed. She emphasized with pride the way she would supply these items to her fellow inmates, saving their lives, etc. He asked her if she knew the name of the Commando. She was taken aback and said no. So he asked her nothing more about her work. "I had probed the limits of her knowledge and decided to back off; to respect, that is, the silence out of which this testimony spoke. We did not talk of the sorting out of the belongings of the dead. She did not think of them as the remainings of the thousands who were gassed. She did not ask herself where they had come from. They had no origin.

''My attempt as interviewer and as listener was precisely to respect--not to upset, not to trespass--the subtle balance between what the woman knew and what she did not, or could not know. It was only at the price of this respect, I felt, this respect of the constraints and of the boundaries of silence, that what the woman did know in a way that none of us did--what she came to testify about--could come forth and could receive, indeed, a hearing.''

Like in psychoanalytic practice, you often do not want to know anything except what the patient tells you, because what is important is the situation of discovery of knowledge--its evolution, and its very happening. Knowledge in the testimony is, in other words, not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right. ...not merely her subjective truth, but the very historicity of the event, in an entirely new dimension.

She was testifying not simply to empirical, historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination. The historians could not hear, I thought, the way in which her silence was itself part of her testimony, an essential part of the historical truth she was precisely bearing witness to. ...she saw ..the unimaginable taking place right in front of her own eyes. And she came to testify to the unbelievability, precisely, of what she had eyewitnessed--this bursting open of the very frame of Auschwitz. //

She had come, indeed, to testify, not to the empirical number of the chimneys, but to resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame of death; in the same way, she had come to testify not to betrayal, nor to her actual removal of the belongings of the dead, but to her vital memory of helping people, to her effective rescuing of lives. This was her way of being, of surviving, of resisting. It is not merely her speech, but the very boundaries of silence which surround it, which attest, today as well as in the past, to this assertion of resistance.