Auschwitz, Ethics, and Testimony: Exposure to the Disaster

Abstract

Witness testimonies provide a singular challenge to historians of Auschwitz. Survivor accounts offer a privileged perspective on the world of the camp, yet as recent conceptual work has shown the performative structure of these texts exceeds and eludes this representational duty. The challenge for historians is that, given their privileged, ‘insider’ status, any equivocality regarding the content of witness testimonies provides space for Holocaust denial. This paper offers a critical reading of one historical strategy for meeting this challenge: Exposing witness accounts to an uncompromising criteria of evidentiality and plausibility, designed to test their representational quality as a means of preempting negationist attempts to manipulate ‘faulty’ accounts. Drawing on Lyotard, I argue that, even as this strategy succeeds in refuting individual cases of denial, by refusing to enter into dialogue with the language game of testimony, and, more importantly, by invalidating any attempt to do so, this strategy actually reiterates the tactics of those deniers it is designed to oppose, thus undermining its own important work. Rather than rejecting this historical approach, I argue that it is compromised only by an historiographical insistence on imposing this ‘evidential’ language game as universal and representational; if we conversely recognise its performative, nonrepresentational status, it is more equipped to refute denial and without making of testimony a collateral damage.

Rethinking the camp: On spatial technologies of power and resistance

“…Charlesworth (1994) has instead discussed Auschwitz as a contested place of memory and has interrogated from a geographical perspective the landscape of Holocaust sites (see Charlesworth and Addis, 2002; Charlesworth, 2004a, 2004b; Charlesworth et al, 2006). Through a series of interventions, Carter-White (2009, 2011, 2013) has investigated the spatialities of the Nazi concentration camps and their representation in literature, films and the social media. Minca (2006, 2007) has applied an Agambenian perspective on the nomos of the concentration camp in two interventions in which he reflects on the ‘spatial’ in Agamben’s work and, in particular, on his theory of the camp in relation to the foundations of the modern state and its biopolitical geographies.…”

The figure of authority: the affective biopolitics of the mother and the dying man

“…Fergus' voice is mobilised in the name of retributive justice. Experiential authority involves the production and performance of particular truths through the testimonial and through the incomplete communication of traumatic experience (Derrida 1986, Caruth 1996, Blanchot 2000, Carter-White 2009.…”

‘No news today’: talk of witnessing with families of missing people

“…Ben and Jane's discussion of their 'failed' witness testimony resonates with Carter-White's writing about such problematic forms of representation, particularly as Ben and Jane's words seem to have been 'assessed and potentially discarded according to a criterion of scientific evidentiality' 34 connected with male suicide typologies. The 'scientific evidentiality' is not fully present in this case, not only because we do not have police records, 35 but more because the most obvious evidential traces of Paul are gone, and what remains are only the abandoned car, its contents and words about Paul, the latter doing an unstable job of saying who he is/was.…”

“…This may be a problem that relates to the inherent instability of witness talk, and to its fissured relationship to systematic knowledge and process (and what might be deemed 'factual' evidence): 'Witness testimony is particularly effective at highlighting the problematic implications of this approach'. 38 Yet, given that much of the 'investigative methodology' 39 of police enquiry comprises just such evidence, the treatment of it in these cases is lamentable and raises problems about how such professionals act on and, importantly, around witness talk. The families above are both engaged in detailed discursive work about the character of their sons, and their intimate knowledges of their characters may or may not be helping to explain whether their sons were being suicidal or illegal or thoughtless in their 'going missing', but their character witness is seemingly not well regarded by the police.…”