Testimony/Bearing Witness - Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture
Testimony/Bearing Witness establishes a dialogue between the different approaches to testimony in epistemology, historiography, law, art, media studies and psychiatry. With examples including the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge and the Armenian genocide the volume discusses the chances and limits of communicating epistemological and ethical, philosophical and cultural-historical, past and present perspectives on the phenomenon and concept of bearing witness.
Author
Sigrid Weigel is Director of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin.
Table of content
Introduction /
Part I: Historical Perspectives /
1. The Presence of the Witness, Francois Hartog/
2. The Debate on Testimonies Concerning Miracles and History in 17th-18th Century France, Michèle Bokobza Kahan/
3. Enlightenment Perspectives on the Problem of Testimony, Axel Gelfert/
Part II: International Sites /
4. Testimony in Light of the Khmer Rouge Trials - Reflections of a Judge Involved, Marcel Lemonde /
5. The Armenian Case - Bearing Witness by mediation of the Second or Third Generation, Janine Altounian / « Quand le témoignage ne peut s’effectuer que par la médiation de la seconde ou troisième génération : le cas arménien » /« Wenn das Zeugnis nur durch die Vermittlung der zweiten oder dritten Generation erfolgen kann – Der armenische Fall ».
6. Testimonies in the Spaces of Promoting and Opposing Violent Extremism, Stevan Weine/
Part III: Holocaust- Paradigm and Intersection of Survivior Testimony and Philosophical Epistemology /
7. The Power and Perils of Being Believed, Benjamin McMyler /
8. The Testimony of the Traumatic Witness: The Tension between the Therapeutic Act and the Loss of Words and Their Meaning, Zohar Rubinstein /
9. Analysing Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Certainties, Scepticism, Relativism, Martin Kusch /
10. Probing the Limits of Visual Testimonies – A Cinematic Approach to Different Modes of Testimony from the Warsaw Ghetto in Hersonski’s A Film unfinished, Sigrid Weigel /
Part IV: Visibility and Media-History of Testimony /
11. Like a Thief in the Night: Witnessing and Watching, John Durham Peters/
12. Remembrance of Things Past: Testimony and Imagination, Peter Geimer /
13. The 1,001 Reflections of an Ongoing Catastrophe - From Visual to Cinematic Testimony, Aurélia Kalisky /
Part V: Epistemology of Testimony /
14. Epistemic Dependence and Trust. On witnessing in the third-, second- and first-person perspective, Sybille Krämer /
15. The Philosophy of Testimony: Between Epistemology and Ethics, Sibylle Schmidt /
16. Is Testimony an Epistemically Distinguished Source of Knowledge?, Dirk Koppelberg / Contributors / Acknowledgements