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Email this article Calling on Witnesses: testimony and the deictic
Julia Creet*
Department of English, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Abstract
The deictic, as place of ethical and aesthetic encounter, has been taken up for its play across various forms, including film, painting, and photography. “Calling on Witnesses” explores the particular case of the ethical appeal of the deictic in Charlotte Delbo's memoir Auschwitz and After and Michael Redhill's drama Goodness, two texts that exemplify the tensions between first- and second-hand witnesses. The deictic, best known as an ethics of exchangeability, operates differently here, where second-hand witnesses are rebuked for not knowing the experience of the other. In a new formulation of the ethics of the deictic, “Calling on Witnesses,” argues that second-person, second-hand witnesses are called upon to pay attention to their own future capacity for ethical and/or unethical action rather than the immediate details of testimony, which can only be transmitted as history.
Keywords: Patricia Yaeger; Michael Redhill; Charlotte Delbo; Avishai Margalit; holocaust; memoir; ethics; Emmanuel Levinas
*Correspondence to: Julia Creet, Department of English, York University, Toronto, ON M6H 2Y5, Canada. Email: creet@yorku.ca
Published: 28 December 2009
Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 1, 2009 DOI: 10.3402/jac.v1i0.4622
© 2009 J. Creet. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
In the second book of her trilogy in Auschwitz and After, “Useless Knowledge,” Delbo stages a challenge about the usefulness of memory and testimony to those who do not possess the knowledge of dispossession. “You cannot understand/you who never listened/to the heartbeat/of one about to die.”1 Delbo draws an absolute division between those who know intimately the kind of “useless” knowledge she possesses and those who don't, can't or would never want to know. Delbo has staged for us this central problem of the “transmission” of memory, called to attend an experience we did not have firsthand. Delbo calls us and rejects us as the same time, “You cannot understand. …” There are at least four interpellations of you in Auschwitz and After, voiced primarily in poetic form: “You who have wept two thousand years,”2 addressed to Christians Fascists, or perhaps Christians more generally; “O you who know,”3 an apostrophe to absent or dead fellow suffers; “You cannot understand,”4 to those who have never shared her experience; and, “You who are passing by,”5 to those who are oblivious. Arguably, there are overlaps between these categories, but each of these addresses invokes a specific use of the deictic, sometimes intimate, sometimes proximate, and sometimes accusatory, which, nonetheless, all deploy the powerful ethical and ideological appeal of an empty category filled by a reading you.
First-hand memory needs an interlocutionary context in which it can become testimony. And if the testimonies we encounter are of events not necessarily fresh, nor their contexts singular, and if they are, necessarily, narrated, stylized, guarded, externalized, already processed, and dependent on us for dialogic apperception and transmission, then again, how do we become second-hand witnesses and to what when we are hailed (and rebuked)? You must listen. Here, I grapple with the ethics of “proximity without intimacy”6 through a quick study of witnessing and the deictic, the call and reproach to a listening you, explicit in Charlotte Delbo's memoirs Auschwitz and After (1970) and in Michael Redhill's play Goodness (2005), and implicit, I argue, in every memory-turned testimony, where the content might become knowledge, but the process changes registers as it changes hands, transformed into a capacity rather than the details of a specific situation or trauma, which we should already be, ethically, helping to disseminate as history.
In The Ethics of Memory Avishai Margalit defines the moral witness as someone who witnesses the combination of evil and the suffering it produces.7 The paradigmatic moral witness, the model or exemplary moral witness, is not just an observer but also a sufferer who observes for a moral purpose with the sober hope “that in another place or time there exists, or will exist, a moral community that will listen to their testimony.”8 The observer and future memorialist should be willing to expose him or herself to personal risk in the faith of the intrinsic value of testimony. Witnessing is, for Margalit, “a species of an eyewitness,”9 a personal encounter or “undergoing something ‘inner’ … that is a necessary condition for being a witness, let alone a moral witness.”10 Margalit avoids the problem of confining witnessing to individual experience by explaining the necessity of a network of witnesses and that “testimonies are the most crucial way for us to acquire knowledge.”11 We sense some tension between the absolute quality of his definition of the first-hand moral witness and the need for a second-, third-, fourth-hand network, a moral community in a another time and place, that reinforces memory and knowledge for the future, a tension that frames one of the fundamental questions in memory studies: How are we called to witness second-hand? And to what?
Patricia Yaeger argues in “Testimony without Intimacy” that testimonies can sometimes have an “apotropaic effect; they can ward off the very empathy that we, as readers and listeners entangled in survivors’ stories, want to inhabit,” pushing us away “even as they pull us toward intimacy.”12 Testimony misbehaves through “aesthetic estrangement,” death by figuration in the form of personification, metaphor, simile, and scale, “reinforcing the gap between primary and secondary witnessing and asking readers and listeners to shed our comforting illusions of empathy, to negate compassion's thrill.”13 What happens, asks Yaeger, posing a question quite similar to mine, “to the reader or listener as ‘secondary witness’ when she gets stuck in the gap between what is said in testimony and the way a speaking body or written text says it?”14 To which she answers: “The wheels of testimony keep turning, but a figure of speech, a bit of body language, thrusts reader or listener away. The result is a glimpse of desuetude, of one's own uselessness, of failed intimacy.”15 If we are, as Yaeger argues, pushed away even as we are called to witness, then how and to what do we bear witness? Yaeger suggests that “[p]roximity without intimacy can be an ethical stance; it may be what testimony wants, what it tries to invent.”16 Yaeger's elegant and provocative essay steers us toward an understanding of testimony as both appeal and rebuke, an understanding that bears further thinking, particularly through the distinction between the moral witness and the secondary witness along generational lines.
Interestingly, Yaeger explicitly forecloses the running argument of Delbo's deictics “Delbo's figures of speech … destroy the reality effects that her intimate address to the reader as ‘thou’ help to create,”17 adding in a footnote that “[a]lthough Delbo does not explicitly deploy this intimate form of address, it is implicit throughout her memoir whenever she draws the reader close to her; when she calls the reader to be ‘near.’”18 The deictic is the most intimate of all addresses, a grammatical and a subjective capacity embedded in a poetics that revivifies what it has been destroyed by figuration with its invocation of a new “other” in every appeal/appel. But here, in the deictic (which can only be a here and there, now and then), a place where figuration comes and goes, we see the most intimate form of testimonial address and the most absolute evacuation of fixed content, or “reality effects,” in favor of a capacity, which we can choose, to some extent, to occupy or not.
The deictic, as place of ethical and aesthetic encounter, has been taken up for its play across various forms, including film, painting, and photography, most notably in the work of Mieke Bal.19 I have elsewhere addressed and engaged the idea of the visual deictic as a form of address in video-taped testimony,20 but here I find John Sundholm's formulation particularly useful. For Sundholm, deixis is an aesthetic action that points to the place of memory in its “peculiar position between history (the factual, external, and past) and subjectivity (the personal and internal present).”21 “Memory,” writes Sundholm, “is history in the present, a presence where both history and memory are coexisting.”22 If we transpose that coexistence onto testimony we have a kind of double deixis, where the testimony of the first-hand witness embodies both history and the present, which the secondary witness, in turn, hears in a present and embodies (or not) into the future.
The reason we should be interested in this form of address in particular is that the pronoun you belongs to a class of linguistic forms known pointing words or “shifters” (Jepperson via Jakobson), I, you, here, there, now, then, he, she, us, we, this, that, which are all context dependent in that we fill the content of the signifier in every given instance, “empty signifiers,” according to Émile Benveniste. Among these words you and I are the most potent of pointers, empty until we fill them with our presence, placeholders where we enter language and discourse, performatively interchangeable—I am you to your I—and necessarily implicated in theories of the ideological subject formation.23 Moreover, the relationship between you and I is fundamental to our interlocution with and ethical embrace of the “other.” If witnessing as a form of the transmission of memory and history demands an ethical relationship and a listening or reading other, how then do we understand its operation in that most direct of reading encounters when we are hailed as “you” in a moment of something closer to the “saying” than the “said,” in Levinasian terms, called into the position of the secondary witness of the then and there (history) in the here and now (memory), with implications for the day-to-come (ethics)? Ethics can never be acted upon in the past, but, rather is a capacity for the present and the future, what informs or will inform our current or next encounter or action.
Let me try to unpack this idea of the ethics of the deictic address in the context of the literature of memory and witnessing with the help of Carrol Clarkson's article, “Embodying ‘you’: Levinas and a question of the second person.”24 Clarkson provides a good gloss of Benveniste's key observations that I is utterly dependent on a you and that the discursive presence of you and I is the instantiation of subjectivity in language and the enunciation of performative acts of language. Clarkson uses Benveniste to argue that Levinas's staging of the ethical relationship between self and other in a relationship of discourse should be reconsidered as an I/you relationship rather than I/he or she. We are primarily interested here in a discursive event, the performative “saying” in Levinasian terms rather than the content of what is “said,” in that we are constituted as subjects to each other (and therefore subjects at all) in the moment of the utterance. But, here, the reversibility of Benveniste's you and I is a liability that Clarkson does not fully acknowledge. For Levinas, Self and Other are not interchangeable, but, rather, “proximate,” to return to a Yaeger's word in a new sense. “Proximity, beyond intentionality, is the relationship with the neighbour in the moral sense of the term.”25 Somewhat in tension with Levinas, Clarkson wants to expand this notion of the utterance to the encounter in a literary text, a useful shift that has been undertaken before by Steve McCaffery.
The text intervenes as the third term, the illeity that allows both writer and reader to acquire their reality.… Levinasian ethics comprises a radical break with immediacy in light of which the poem can be conceived as a mediation that declares proximity to the writer as absence, in this way delivering writing, not as gift or production, but as a spatial distancing that establishes a correlation between neighbourly parties; separating writer from reader, and equally bringing both into proximity.26
With this trot through a complicated set of turns around the question of proximity without intimacy, let us return to the call of Delbo's text. The first instance of her deictic call is perhaps the most disturbing to our notion that as witnesses we are called to an ethics of identification with the experience of the other.
You who have wept two thousand years
for one who agonized for three days and three nights
what tears will you have left
for those who agonized
far more than three hundred nights and far more than three hundred days
how hard
shall you weep
for those who agonized through so many agonies
and they are countless
Reading, rereading, writing, rewriting this poem I am struck by the call to a “you” in which I am both interpellated and not, called into the position of the guilty witness. I wonder now if her address is only to Christian Fascists. To Christians, yes, but she too was Christian, a political prisoner, persecuted for her ethics rather than ethnic or religious belonging. What “you” would find him or herself called by this appel? Are we not more likely to say: “I do not belong to that ‘you’; I weep.” As a Christian, I weep; as a Jew, I am not addressed, but occupy the third term, the absent “they” by dead relations. Here, in this first address, the “you” is one from which we, as secondary witnesses, run or stand historically accused.They did not believe in resurrection to eternal life
and knew you would not weep.27
The second example of the Delbo's direct address: “O you who know/did you know that hunger makes the eyes sparkle that thirst dims them …”28 is even more impossible to occupy. “O you who know” is both deictic and figurative, the apostrophe assumes an absent addressee, distancing the reader and the writer, while the text describes a physical reality. The text itself turns away from us, its reader, by assuming that we do not know, highlighting the impossibility or the longing of the writer for a reader, an appeal bound to fail. Delbo's address is to herself, and externalized “you” that now knows what she could not have imagined knowing. The conditional question, “did you know,” asks the absent addressees if they knew the signs of physical torture before the experience of it. This is not testimony in any straight-forward sense, but a call to those whose intimate knowledge of the self has been forever and dramatically altered by exceptional circumstances. This is a “you” into which none of us would wish to be called. This is a “you” that is pre-empted by the text itself.29 Perhaps even a non-human “you,” as Giorgio Agamben writes about the impossibility of the Muselmann, the walking dead who have lost all sense of subjectivity, bearing witness: “precisely this inhuman impossibility of seeing is what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away—this and nothing else is testimony.”30 We are as absent to the text as it is to us; we turn away from it as it turns away from us—this is testimony.
Both of these poems come early in the first book of Auschwitz and After, “None of Us Will Return.” Delbo never expected that she would live to bear witness, or that anyone would care to hear it, a sentiment of doubt about witnessing that carries through to the end of the trilogy. In the second book, “Useless Knowledge,” this doubt becomes a surety: “I came back from the dead/ and believed/ this gave me the right/ to speak to others/ but when I found myself face to face with them/ I had nothing to say/ because/ I learned/ over there/ that you cannot speak to others.”31 Foreclosing the possibility of testifying generates resentment toward the living, which leads Delbo, on the very next page to pray for “You who are passing by” in a poem she calls, “Prayer to the Living To Forgive Them for Being Alive.”32 Here, we, as readers, as secondary witness are hailed and commanded to do “something to justify your existence,” perhaps learn a dance step. But, Delbo cautions us, it is “better not to believe all/ those ghostly tales/ for if you do/ you'll never sleep again …”33 Delbo's isolation is not broken by her testimony; if anything, her aloneness is reinforced by the presence of the “you” who does not know and can never know. We cannot save her in any way and certainly not by assimilating useless knowledge. We cannot make the deictic turn from the you to the I—“There but for the grace of God go I”—for we are, in our otherness, only a reminder to Delbo that her testimony cannot be heard; we can never be forgiven our sin of not knowing. We are indeed hailed by her text, but not as witnesses, but, rather, as those who bear the responsibility to make the very most of our privilege of not knowing. This, I know intimately.
In the final book, “The Measure of our Days,” Delbo acknowledges that we might want to know, that we might ask questions in good faith, but that still we cannot hear the answers: “You'd like to know/ ask questions/ but you don't know what questions/ and you don't know how to ask them .…”34 How many times can we be called to witness and slapped back? Infinitely, for we are not meant to be conduits of information, or to imagine that similar things could happen to us, but to stand in and be battered by resentment, for no retrospective ethics of the deictic exists; we are called into failure, into non-communication.
What stance can we take then as secondary witnesses? Yaeger answers that we must struggle with and against this failure, even if figuratively: “The failure to fall, the failure to try for entanglement, proximity, or painful intimacy with the Shoah's obscenities (that is, the failure to embrace testimonial speech acts that both demand and deny identification), would mean that all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”35 Given that Delbo's deictics have forced us into positions of (dis)identification—dry-eyed Christians, Musselmen, the indifferent, uneducable—Yaeger's redemptive embrace seems likely to come up empty, grasping at historic realities (like tears in rain) to which we can never bear witness. Another answer to this conundrum—only one of many answers that will inevitably fail in some respects—might be thought through from the position of the second-generation witness who, full of post-memory,36 begins to think beyond what it means to identify with historical trauma.
Our capacity to witness second-hand is surely the question of Michael Redhill's play Goodness, which was restaged in Toronto in September of 2009 in preparation for a tour in Rwanda to mark the 15th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide.37 The central character of the play, “Michael Redhill,” makes an all-too-familiar, second-generation pilgrimage from Canada, the place where he was born, to Poland in search of some resolution to the slaughter of his great-grandparents and seven of their children by German and Polish fascists. Finding nothing but resistance to his naïve assumption that local memory will provide testimony, accountability and answers, he leaves. Drinking in a seedy London bar on his way home, feeling sorry for himself—his trip to an unrequited past was meant to be a diversion from his wife's sexual betrayal—he is accosted, somewhat mysteriously (Goodness toys with magical realism in places as does most post-memory), by a stranger who challenges Michael to call on an address where he will find answers to the questions the stranger articulates for Michael “Why do good people rush to do evil? And What do they Become?”38 In a bare staging of every narrative device of memory, storytelling, flashbacks, time-shifts, and tales-within-tales told by reliable and unreliable narrators playing multiple roles across times and places, “Michael” is called into witnessing the aftermath of a parallel genocide in some unnamed place through the memory of a reluctant and ethically questionable witness, “Althea” (truth). “Michael”/Redhill is not a particularly likeable character, nor is he a moral model; the play is not a healing gesture, for murder begets murder begets murder and as Redhill, the play's doppelganger author divulges, “the first act gets its fingernails under the edges of a scab, and the second act tears it off.”39 Testimony draws fresh blood to a wound and the wounded, Redhill suggests, as he stages this encounter between a witness and her secondary, but not in the way we might expect.
Althea is, as Margalit would have it, the paradigmatic moral witness, both observer and sufferer, though one also with blood on her hands. Althea, as a young woman, had been subject to witnessing the brutal and brutalizing slaughter of her family in a civil war that became an excuse for genocide. A decade later, still a young woman, she is a guard charged with minding “Mathias Todd,” a professor who had been an influential instigator of the conflict, about to be put on trial for a synecdochal murder, given that his role in the genocide is impossible to prove. Todd is either suffering from Alzheimer's or faking amnesia and cannot remember his crimes. To test his cognition, those who would have him held responsible no matter what (Althea initially holds this judgement, but begins to waiver), slay his daughter Julia, who Todd insists is his wife Margaret. Todd still cries out for his wife. Any charge of responsibility must be built on the capacity to remember; remembering what you have done after the fact as the parallel cognitive litmus test to knowing what one is doing as one commits a crime. Todd's prosecutor and persecutor “Stephen Part,” a lawyer who has devoted his life to justice (and revenge) is Julia's murderer. He and Althea conspire to hide the murder weapon, both protecting Part and keeping the evidence of his guilt and her failure to witness injustice, binding them in criminal act of revenge that brings no satisfaction or justice. Althea hides herself and her story in a dark apartment. When Michael rings her doorbell, at the prompting of the unsavory man in the bar, Stephen Part, Althea unleashes her testimony at Michael.
In Volcano Theatre's recent casting, the young Althea was played by Tara Hughes, a fair-haired white woman, while the elder Althea, the force of the story, and our conflicted moral witness, was acted, “searingly” as critics agreed, by Lili Francks, an African-Canadian actress of exceptional intensity. Race is everything and nothing in Goodness, invoking ethnic purges from Yugoslavia to Rwanda, led by murderous dictators from Pinochet to Saddam Hussein, serenaded by folk songs in a babble of languages, Hungarian, Zimbabwean, Macedonian, Turkish, Arabic, and Croatian—you get the idea. The genocidal ethnic conflict of two nations forced into one in which Althea brings back to life is never located anywhere, testifying to a memory of atrocity formed anywhere, now framed by the discourse of the holocaust.40 Althea has no illusions that her survival has a logic or that her testimony has a reason, except, perhaps, to testify to spread fear. “They killed us all. Except me. I was the last and … they sent me home. I don't know why. Maybe so there would be one person left to tell of their might.”41
I want to pair the fictional Althea with Charlotte Delbo, perhaps one of the clearest moral witnesses of our time, in order to illustrate that if we are to act as part of Margalit's network, we will be thrust into position of Michael, whose quest has become second-hand and cross-cultural, called to play the role of the you to Althea's I, witness to the testimony of Althea, horrifying but imaginary, empty but indexical in any number of contexts.
The deictic address is, in this iteration of Goodness, literary, narrated and performed on the stage. Both “said” and “saying.” Althea tells her story to Michael as a (re)play in which he is recognized as an observing presence, cast now into the role of primary witness, not to the original crime of genocide, but its messy and morally ambiguous politics of revenge. Stage directions tell us in any given moment, to whom the dialogue is directed “(to us),” and the movement of characters between times and places, “Michael gets up and walks into the past to get closer to the story.”42 The play enacts our desire to have been there, leaping over the frustration at only being able to witness second-hand, as if some moral purity is to be had in the witnessing of inhumanity and injustice (as Margalit suggests). Todd, speaking directly to Michael, in a moment of cogency, perhaps indicative of his overall sanity, says that Michael too would have liked the power of control over others: “When I spoke to the stupid, terrified people of my country, it was as if my tongue slithered into their skulls and spat ‘murder.’ I think you'd like that power.”43 Althea too accuses Michael of avoiding his own ethical conflict—he read his wife's diary to confirm her infidelity—by his interest in hers: “But you can't figure out what went wrong with your own story, so you are going to straighten out mine.”44 Clueless and confused, Michael feels accused, “all you seem to care about is making me look some [sic] clueless fuckwit anyway.”45 Testimony does have a way of making us look and feel like “fuckwits,” a crass and not very elegant response to our inability to know, but one that embodies the sense of stupidity and naiveté that Delbo would have us understand as a privilege.
“You sit down. And listen to my story,” Althea commands Michael at the end of Act One, unwilling to let him off the hook now that he has induced an opening. At the beginning of Act Two, Althea finally tells Michael the details of her ordeal, but not before she calls him into her fear, a fear that Redhill, as Althea's animator, inflicts on himself. “You're hiding now, standing behind your wife's dresses in your closet and they find you there and drag you out to the street, throw you down and the blood is roaring in your ears as you feel around in the dirt for your glasses and around you a human noose is tightening.”46 Here we have a deictic devoid of a specific here and now, asking us to imagine our own suffering. This horrifying call of us into an anywhere, anytime, is one that Hans Günther Adler, a rare German-Jewish survivor, used to brilliant effect in The Journey, written in 1950–1951, which languished in a small German edition until its translation into English in 2009. Adler begins, “No one asked you, it was decided already. You were rounded up and not one kind word was spoken.”47 Here, Adler uses the second-person in the passive voice in a story that slides between past and present to generalize an experience that could happen to anyone, a specific story and one located only in the journey, the ever-changing experience over which we have no control. These empty, frightening places into which we are plunked are the only places in which we, as secondary witnesses enter, but the slipperiness of the shifting context means that history or the future, might hail us into any actor on the stage, innocent or complicit, moral or immoral, cowardly or heroic, or some combination of both.
After genocide and revenge in Goodness collapse in a shocking moment of violence, Althea gives Michael the gun that Stephen Part had used to kill Todd's daughter (the same actress who plays Michael's ex-wife) in a somewhat ham-fisted, but effective, moment of moral probing: “You still believe that because a person suffers, they must be good? Because you suffer well, you think God will reward you with justice? I settled for less, and Stephen Part settled for less, and you're going to settle for less when your time comes. Because your wailing won't bring back your dead, and you'll have to do something.”48 Michael tells us that he threw the gun away, but he stands before us holding it at the end of the play, his roving stare accosting the audience, “How does it feel to be out there in the dark? Just watching. Invisible, but still a part of everything. A part of this. How does that feel?”49 The chorus sings a folk song in Zimbabwean, whose words we are not likely to understand, but are translated for us in the text: (Look around/pay attention/ To what is happening/ Pray/ O Pray to God).50
The one emphasized shifter, “this,” is specific to the play, to what we have just witnessed on the stage, and yet, completely empty of content until we fill it. We are invited to fill not only the there and then, and the here and now, but also our emotive response to it; we are asked to respond as if forced to encounter our own ethical choices watching in the dark. We are given the choice to be voyeurs of violence or consider our responses to witnessing (in the double sense of the word, to observe and to speak out) in the past or the future, where the content remains, to some extent, empty. The implication of Michael's address is that we are complicit in witnessing pain that is not ours. We cannot undo what we have seen or heard. We have been called into witnessing. We can dismiss it, but we cannot undo, unhear, or unsee it, even if we are as yet unsure to where or to what we should direct our attention. What we do with what we know or remember, or if we even understand ourselves to be a witness, is the test of our capacity to bear witness inherent in the call of the deictic.
Certainly we can be hailed into the position of the moral witness, in particular by the strength of the deictic address, but not necessarily called to recount the details of a particular atrocity. While Michael would bear witness to his own losses, he is taunted in Goodness. Instead, he is thrust into a situation that tests his ethical desire to bear witness no matter what his personal involvement. He is asked to develop his sense of injury into a capacity, a capacity to be drawn into the deictic encounter with an other who has a story to tell, which can no more be remedied than Michael's own losses. As you to Althea's I, as we are you to Delbo's I, Michael responds to the painful call of a woman he does not know, who describes a situation he can't imagine, with no sure moral center, to which he has no adequate response. Here we are, the second-hand witness. And to what end? How do we attend Delbo's deictic address, which hails us, contrarily into a naïve rather than ideological subjectivity? You who do not know, you who cannot know and you who care not to know? By recognizing that particularly in the context of witnessing, we cannot represent the Other or her experience, that we cannot bear witness to events through the experience of another, that we are even further from apprehending the Other in Levinas's terms, or apprehending the Other as a means of substantiating ourselves in the face of genocide. What we must attend to in our efforts to be moral witnesses is a capacity: a capacity to be attuned to witnessing those events that are visited on us or mark our own lives and a witnessing to the capacity of anyone, anywhere, at any time, to forfeit all ethics. This is perhaps not the process of “undergoing something inner” that Margalit would hold out as the promise of the moral witness, or perhaps it is: to witness in horror the possibility of our own degradation and, even more chillingly, the possibility that we might subject others to degradation is to anticipate the worst rather than remember it, which is, in the end, more likely to prevent atrocity than recounting, second-hand, the content of other people's trauma. As Michael Redhill says, “Goodness—if I can narrow it down—has a psychological purpose. If someone jumps up at the end of the play and says, I must ensure that genocide never occurs again on the planet, I think, well good, great, do what you can. But the person who jumps up and says, Fuck, could I kill somebody? … That is the question I hope is generated by Goodness.”51 Our proximity to others is exactly what is generated by testimony, but the intimacy of the horror is our very own.
NOTES
1. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 127.
2. Ibid., 10. In the original French, “you” is expressed as vous, indiscernible, as in the English translation, as either the singular or plural pronoun.
6. Patricia Yaeger, ‘Testimony without Intimacy’, Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (June 2006): 399–423, http://poeticstoday.dukejournals.org.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/cgi/content/abstract/27/2/399 (accessed November 30, 2009)
7. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 148.
17. Yaeger, ‘Testimony without Intimacy’, 411–2.
19. Mieke Bal, ‘Looking at Love: An Ethics of Vision’, Diacritics (1997): 59–72; Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
20. Julia Creet, ‘On the Sidewalk: Testimony and the Gesture’, Applied Semiotics, no. 15, http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/french/as-sa/ASSA-No15/index.html#index
21. John Sundholm, ‘“I am a Rhinoceros”: Memory and the Ethics and Aesthetics of Materiality in Film’, Studies in European Cinema 2, no. 1 (2005): 58.
23. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001); Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971); Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992).
24. Carrol Clarkson, ‘Embodying “You”: Levinas and a Question of the Second Person’, Journal of Literary Semantics 34, no. 2, MLA-IB (2005): 95–105, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:ilcs-us&rft_id=xri:ilcs:rec:mla:R04076825 (accessed November 10, 2009)
25. Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer 1987), 119.
26. Steve McCaffery, ‘The Scandal of Sincerity; Towards a Levinasian Poetics’, Pretexts: Studies in 7 Writing and Culture 6, no. 2 (1997): 173.
27. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, 10.
29. Jonathan Culler, ‘Apostrophe’, Diacritics 7, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/464857 (accessed December 8, 2009).
30. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daneil Heller-Roazen (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2002), 54.
31. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, 228.
35. Yaeger, ‘Testimony without Intimacy’, 422.
36. Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–28. Hirsch's recent article reviews—and defends—her formulation the generational inheritance of family memory. While we should draw a distinction between witnessing and family memory, the idea of being second-hand to experience is operative in both as we are called to attend the enunciation of either or both, given that they are often one in the same.
37. Michael Redhill is an internationally acclaimed Canadian novelist, poet, and playwright, author of the novel Martin Sloan, the Chalmers and Dora Award-winning play Building Jerusalem, and Light-crossing and Lake Nora Arms, both collections of poetry. His most recent novel, Consolation, won the City of Toronto Book Award, and was long-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Goodness was first staged by Volcano Theatre at the Tarragon in Toronto in 2005. It went on to win the Carol Tambor Theatrical Foundation's “Best of Edinburgh” Award in 2006 and garnered rave reviews in the UK and the US. It was considerably reworked for the 2009 run.
38. Michael Redhill, Goodness (Toronto, ON: Coach House Books, 2005), 21.
39. Quoted in Marlene Goldman, ‘The Voice Under the Lamp: An Interview with Michael Redhill’, University of Toronto Quarterly 76, no. 3 (January 2007): 913, http://resolver.scholarsportal.info/resolve/17125278/v76i0003/913_tvutlaiwmr.xml (accessed November 30, 2009).
40. In ‘Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness’, Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (Autumn 2006): 158–84, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/stable/3877146 (accessed November 10, 2009), Michael Rothberg argues that the correlation of the timing Belles lettres, Delbo's epistolary commentary on French colonialism and the Algerian War and Auschwitz and After, written much earlier but not published until 1965 demonstrates the emergence of holocaust testimony as a literary and legal genre called out, in effect, by the anticolonial struggles of that decade. Rothberg finds overlapping legacies of colonialism and the memory of the holocaust, which, he suggests, is new mode of collective memory in a “logic in which memories emerge in the interplay between different pasts and a heterogeneous present.” He calls this “the multidirectionality of memory: the interference, overlap, and mutual constitution of seemingly distinct collective memories that define the post-war era (162). Rothberg and Redhill in Goodness, make the argument that the opposite is also true: that we should read the memory of the holocaust in the context of subsequent ruptures, though Rothberg cautions that there is no “direct line from victimization and resistance under one set of circumstances to solidarity and opposition under another” (168).
47. Hans Günther Alder, The Journey, trans. Peter Filkins (New York, NY: Random House, 2008), 7.
49. Ibid., 102. Emphasis in the original.
51. Redhill quoted in Goldman, ‘The Voice Under the Lamp’, 921.
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