The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory by Malpas Simon. Wake Paul

Author:Malpas, Simon.,Wake, Paul.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134123346
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The understanding that the event of testimony effectively produces the event, witness and a co-witness (to testimony) has buttressed the idea that texts can be traumatic, facilitating the over-extension of the category of testimony — an over-extension commensurate with that of the expansion of the category of victim. As Felman puts it, testimony is the ‘literary — or discursive — mode par excellence of our times’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 5). Examples of Felman's over-extension of testimony include her commentary on the so-called testimonial response of her graduate class at Yale after a viewing of videoed testimonies of Holocaust survivors from the Fortunoff Archive (of videotaped Holocaust testimony housed at Yale University). In her account of the class, Felman quotes her address to the distressed class, whose members had difficulty in articulating their responses to the videotape. As Felman said at the time, ‘the event of your viewing…was not unlike [survivor-poet Paul] Celan's own Holocaust experience, something akin to a loss of language’ in which ‘language was…incommensurate’ with the experience of viewing — an experience of the suspension of knowledge. It is ‘this loss Celan precisely talks about’. Nevertheless, all that remains of the event is language, which must ‘pass through its own answerlessness’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 51). More precisely, all that remains is testimony: in this case, the class's verbal and written response to Felman's course. If the force of trauma is felt in language, then all linguistic responses to trauma, no matter how distanced from the historical origins ofthat trauma, are, by the logic of this interpretation, testimonial. So, the class's written and verbal response to watching testimony is testimonial and so enacts a traumatic knowledge and its elusiveness, and Felman's response to the class is also testimonial and by implication traumatized (Felman and Laub 1992: 51–55; see also see Horowitz 1992: 45–68; Michaels 1996: 1–16).

Where Felman focuses on a chain of testimonies and witnesses in the pedagogical scenario outlined above, in her reading of Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah, the documentary itself ‘embodies the capacity of art not simply to witness, but to take the witness stand’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 208). Here trauma texts ‘take on particular characteristics we ordinarily assign exclusively to persons’ (Hungerford 2001: 78). When Lanzmann takes survivor Simon Srebnik back to the site of Chelmno, Felman claims that ‘Srebnik in effect is returning from the dead (from his own deadness)’ and that ‘Srebnik's return from the dead personifies…a historically performative and retroactive return of witnessing to the witnessless historical primal scene’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 258). Although noting the performative nature of Srebnik's return (as in its staging by Lanzmann and that staging's provocation of traumatic memory), Felman implies that Lanzmann's film is not the representation of witnessing but witnessing itself. Again, text and trauma have become one.

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