Testimony: Beyond the language of truth

Human Rights Quarterly

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 701-713

  Strejilevich, Nora ^a  

^a SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HUMAN RIGHTS; SOCIAL JUSTICE;

EID: 33748750435     PISSN: 02750392     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hrq.2006.0038     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Noemí Ciolaro, Pájaros Sin Luz: Testimonios de mujeres de Desaparecidos 144 (1999)(Testimony of Sonia Severini as translated by the author).
2. Elie Wiesel, The Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration, in Dimensions of the Holocaust 9 (1977) reprinted in Shoshana Felman, Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching, in Testimony: Crisis or Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History 5-6 (1992). Testimony: Crisis or Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History 5-6 (1992)
3. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The nazi Assault on Humanity 5-6 (Macmillan, 1961).
4. Imre Kerteész, Fateless 188-89 (1992).
5. Levi, supra note 3, at 54.
6. Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terrror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture 83 (1998).
7. Id.
8. This is in reference to the dispute between David Stoll and John Beverley in relation to Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú y Así me Nació la Conciencia. John Beverly, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth XIV-XV (2004).
9. Levi, supra note 3, at 5.
10. Ricardo Forster, El imposible testimonio: Celan en Derrida, 8 Pensamiento de los Confines 77, 79 (2000).
11. Dori Laub's case of the woman survivor "relating her memories as an eyewitness of the Auschwitz uprising" is a good example of this point. "She was fully there. 'All of sudden,' she said, 'we saw four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was unbelievable.'" Laub mentions that later on, in a conference of historians, psychoanalysts, and artists, her testimony generated debate. According to the historians, it was not accurate, since the number of chimneys was misrepresented, and thus her account was fallible, since accuracy was crucial. In their view, "the limits of the woman's knowledge in effect called into question the validity of her whole testimony." Laub disagreed. In his view, she testified to the breakage of a framework, and this was historical truth. "She had come, indeed, to testify, not to the empirical number of the chimneys, but to resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame of death." Dori Laub, Bearing Witness of the Vicissitudes of Listening, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Pscychoanalysis,and History, supra note 2, at 57, 59-62.
12. According to Lawrence L. Langer, "oral Holocaust testimonies are doomed ... to remain disrupted narratives ... by the quintessence of the experiences they record." Lawrence L. Langer, Preface of Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991).
13. Héctor Shmucler, Ni Siquiera un Rostro, 3 Pensamiento de los Confines 10 (1996).
14. Steven D. DeCaroli, Visibility and History: Giorgio Agamben and the Exemplary, 45 Phil. Today: Thinking in Action 9, 9-17 (2001).
15. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception 2-3 (Kevin Attell trans., Univ. of Chicago Press 2005)(2003).
16. At this particular time in history research and legal prosecution of crimes against humanity related to South American disappearances is at its peak - the task has become global. For instance, Judge Garzón has prosecuted Chilean and Argentine military responsible for the "Condor Plan" (a secret organization established by the State Terror regimes of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil, which facilitated the "mass murder corporation" teamwork during the 1970s). Garzón's attempt to extradite Pinochet, the Plan's main leader, from England for his prosecution in Spain was part of this project. Even if Pinochet finally returned to Chile and recovered his freedom, his image and status changed dramatically. The symbolic power of the dictator was shattered. "Long condemned as a pariah abroad, Pinochet has now been abandoned by his friends at home. The legacy he hoped for among his own military and the Chilean elite has desaparecido - disappeared, like so many of his victims. Today, Pinochet is as close as he has ever been to being prosecuted for crimes ranging from 'illicit enrichment' to international terrorism." Peter Kornbluh, Pinochet Stripped, The Nation, 27 Sept. 2004.
17. Ariel Dorfman, Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction 137 (1991).
18. Forster, supra note 10, at 77.
19. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma 65 (2001).
20. Hayden White distinguishes between two ways of recounting history: the first registers reality while the second allows reality to speak for itself in an account characterized by use of a third-person narrator and past tense. These traits contribute to a quasi objectivity since the omission of any reference to the actual narrator appears to allow facts to speak for themselves. Nevertheless, this type of history, familiar since the nineteenth century, recounts events using techniques of literary narration, such as the invention of beginnings, middles, and endings and the creation of plots and heroes. Clearly, its objectivity is questionable. Narrating history by means of fictional devices, which is what history does, shows its capacity to give meaning to the past. Just as fiction offers meaning through the manipulation of imaginary events, cultural fictions produce meaning when applied to reality. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation 45 (1988).
21. Felman, supra note 2, at 5.
22. Laub, supra note 11, at 57.
23. Laub, supra note 11, at 57.
24. LaCapra, supra note 19, at 70.
25. Hernán Valdés, Tejas Verdes: Diario de un Campo de Concentración en Chile 7 (1979).
26. Id. at 8-9.
27. Jorge Luis Borges. Emma Zunz, in El Aleph 69, 77 (1969) (author's translation).
28. LaCapra, supra note 19.
29. Hétor Shmucler, En la banalidad está el mal, 8 Pensamiento de los Confines 45, 47 (2000).
30. David William Foster, Foreword in Nora Strejilevich, A Single, Numberless Death ix, x (2002).
31. Alejandro Kaufman, Tramas de Barbarie, 6 Pensamiento de Los Confines 27 (1999).
32. Hernán Valdés, supra note 25;
33. Jacobo Timerman, Preso sin Nombre Celda sin Numero (Toby Talbot trans. 1981);
34. Alicia Partnoy, The Little School (La Escuelita)(1986);
35. Strejilevich, supra note 30.
36. See generally, LaCapra, supra note 19.
37. Id at 78.
38. Strejilevich, supra note 30, at 143-45.
39. Id. at 136.
40. Id at 139.
41. Id. at 171.
42. Shoshana Felman, Benjamin's Silence, 25 Critical Inquiry 201, 225 (1999).