The Voice of Misery : A Continental Philosophy of Testimony

"From analytic epistemology to gender theory, testimony is a major topic in philosophy today. Yet, one distinctive approach to testimony has not been fully appreciated: the recent history of contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony. In this book, Gert-Jan van der Heiden argues that a continental philosophy of testimony can be developed that is guided by those forms of bearing witness that attest to limit experiences of human existence, in which the human is rendered mute, speechless, or robbed of a common understanding. In the first part, Van der Heiden explores this sense of testimony in a reading of several literary texts, ranging from Plato's literary inventions to those of Kierkegaard, Melville, Soucy, and Mortier. In the second part, based on the orientation offered by the literary experiments, Van der Heiden offers a more systematic account of testimony in which he distinguishes and analyzes four basic elements of testimony. In the third part, he shows what this analysis implies for the question of the truth and the truthfulness of testimony. In his discussion with philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Badiou, Van der Heiden also provides an overview of how the problem of testimony emerges in a number of thinkers pivotal to twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought."-- Provided by publisher Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 12 Part I. To Give a Voice: Six Literary Experiments 18 1. Letters for the Soul 20 Literary Experiments on Truth 22 Letters in the Phaedrus 23 Articulating the Voice of Misery 28 2. Experiment I. Socrates, the Interpreter 32 The Contours of a “Proper” Dialogue 35 Socrates Speaking Directly 38 Theodorus Remaining Silent 41 Interpreting Protagoras 44 3. Experiment II. Alice, the Secretarious 50 Articulate and Inarticulate Voices 50 Keeper of the Secret 54 A Faint Lament 61 Hurbinek’s Demand to Speak 64 4. Experiment III. Helena, the Poetess 70 Hermes, the Interpreter 70 Helena, Hermes’s Heir 72 A Place to Be 77 How (Not) to Trust Language 80 5. Experiment IV. Johannes, the Poet 86 Experimenting Existence 86 To Tell a Secret 89 The Communicable and the Incommunicable 94 The Divine Language 97 Three Languages, Three Voices 98 6. Experiment V. Bartleby, the Scrivener 104 Deleuze’s Bartleby 104 Stretching the Limits of Understanding 108 To (Bear) Witness (to) Bartleby 111 The Advent Of Bartleby 113 Inhumanity and Incomprehensibility 115 Perverted Language, Perverted Communication 118 7. Experiment VI. Er, the Messenger 124 Philosophers in Exile 124 Called to Bearing Witness 128 Limbo of Separated Souls 131 The Plain of the Unforgettable 135 Part II. A Distinctive Sense of Testimony 140 8. Elements of Testimony 142 Orientations to Testimony 142 The Reserve/Object, Subject, Act, and Hearer of Testimony 147 The Reserve/Object of Testimony 147 The Act of Testimony 151 The Subject of Testimony 152 The Hearer of Testimony 153 Relating to Lyotard 154 The Guise of a Miracle 160 Hume on Credulity 162 Hume on Testimonies of Miracles 164 9. An Exceptional Attestation 168 Logos Hermeneutikos and an Aristotelian Example 169 Disclosed to Uncanniness 172 The Voice of Attestation 176 The Witness, the Voice, and Its Giving to Understand 177 The Act that Generates: Bezeugung as Zeugen 179 The Deception and the Faith of the Hearer 182 Naked Existence 186 The Promise of Language 190 10. A Typology of the Witness 194 Glossolalist, Prophet, Poet, and Interpreter 196 The Glossolalist 196 The Prophet and the Poet 201 Martus, Testis, Superstes, and Auctor 207 Istōr and the Absolute Witness 207 Martyr, Superstes, and Testis 210 Auctor 215 Part III. On the Threshold of Being and Language 218 11. An Ontology of Testimony 220 Demand as Onto-Logical Category 223 Leibniz’s Account of the Demand of the Possible 224 The Demand of Being to Be Said 226 A Mere Potentiality in Aristotle 228 Bare Existence 230 The Naked “That” of Bare Existence 230 The Birth of Humankind 232 Infancy 233 12. The Truth and Untruth of Testimony 238 The Ambiguous Kerygma of the Symbol 239 The Blessing and Curse of the Vow 245 Veridiction and Testimony 249 13. Subject and Commitment 256 Conversion and the Witness to the Truth 256 To Live an Other Life 260 Militantism 260 The Scandal of the Truth 262 The Desubjectification of the Survivor 264 The Distance of the Third 271 14. In Lieu of a Conclusion: Celan’s Poetics of Testimony 274 Perhaps, a Turn of Breath 274 The Gorgon-Head 277 Poetic Testimony 279 Death-Bringing Discourse and Dreadful Silence 279 The “Reserve of the ‘Perhaps’ ” 282 To Bear Witness to Reality 285 Notes 288 Works Cited 320 Index 334