This article discusses the role of Gulag literature in connection to testimony, literature and historical documentation. Drawing on the thoughts of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt, the article examines the difficulty of witnesses being believed in the absence of evidence. In particular, the article focuses on the vulnerability of the Gulag authors, due to the ongoing Soviet repression at the time of their writing. It examines the interplay between the repression and the literature that exposed it. The article contends that (...) the fictionalization of Gulag literature enabled the authors to go further in challenging Soviet repression. Focusing on the fictional accounts written by Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, it argues that the fictionalized Gulag literature makes the experience of the camp universe possible to imagine for those outside, allowing readers to believe in an experience that otherwise seems incredible. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Husserl offers an important, although almost completely neglected so far, contribution to the reductionist/antireductionist debate about testimony. Through a phenomenological analysis, Husserl shows that testimony works through the constitution of an intentional intersubjective bond between the speaker and the hearer. In this paper I focus on the Logical Investigations, a 1914 manuscript now published as text 2 in Husserliana 20.2, and a 1931 manuscript now published as Appendix 12 in Husserliana 15. I argue that, (...) in those texts, Husserl highlights three essential phenomenological features of testimony: a) testimony is personal, meaning that it only takes place among persons, b) testimony is social, meaning that it requires the joint effort of multiple cognitive agents, c) testimony is community-building, meaning that it generates a long-lasting social bond among the parts involved. (shrink)

The paper is divided into two parts. In the first one, I set forth a hypothesis to explain the failure of Husserl’s project presented in the Philosophie der Arithmetik based on the principle that the entire mathematical science is grounded in the concept of cardinal number. It is argued that Husserl’s analysis of the nature of the symbols used in the decadal system forces the rejection of this principle. In the second part, I take into account Husserl’s explanation of why, (...) albeit independent of natural numbers, the system is nonetheless correct. It is shown that its justification involves, on the one hand, a new conception of symbols and symbolic thinking, and on the other, the recognition of the question of “the formal” and formalization as pivotal to understand “the mathematical” overall. (shrink)

The peculiar legacy of Husserl’s mereology, chiefly studied by analytic philosophers interested in ontology, has led to a partial understanding of the III. LU, which is too often reduced to a chapter of “formal ontology”. Yet, the power of this Investigation goes far beyond: it enabled Husserl to deal, in the framework of a unified theory, with a vast range of particular problems. The paper focuses on one of these issues, namely abstraction, so as to expose how Husserl instrumentalizes his (...) formal tools in order to tackle material issues. The existence of an up and down pattern is uncovered: Husserl first reinterprets the psychological problem of abstraction in ontological terms, before coming back to the original problem with new insights. The second, correlative aim of the paper is to emphasize the key role played by Friedrich Schumann, a forgotten yet crucial character for Husserl’s conception of abstraction. (shrink)

Phenomenological literary criticism has long taken the one-on-one exchange with an other as the model for thinking about the reader-to-text relationship. However, new novels portraying genocides and civil wars are more likely to position readers as witnesses. Drawing on Jean-Luc Marion’s description of the subject as witness as well as works by Kelly Oliver and Jacques Derrida, this article offers a phenomenological description of the reader as witness. As witness, the reader is situated both by the literary text and also (...) by his or her particular embodied and intersubjective relations to the world. Constituted and no longer constituting, the reader/subject as witness finds herself a site in which other’s decisions have already been made, and her responsibility arises from the decisions she makes possible for others in the future. (shrink)

Płotka and Eldridge’s book is an important addition to the literature on phenomenology and phenomenological history, showing that phenomenology had a lively efflorescence in Eastern Europe during its first four decades. Historians have recently shown phenomenology’s intellectual, cultural, and social importance in postwar Eastern Europe, but this volume demonstrates that phenomenology’s independent East European trajectory began long before World War II—indeed from the earliest years of the movement. The review essay also raises the question of phenomenology’s social and political influence (...) beyond academic circles. (shrink)

I compare Plato’s and Husserl’s accounts of the non-original appearance and the original with a focus on their methodologies for distinguishing between them and the phenomenological—i.e., the answer to the question of the what and how of their appearance—criteria that drive their respective methodologies. I argue that Plato’s dialectical method is phenomenologically superior to Husserl’s reflective method in the case of phantasmata that function as apparitions. Plato’s method has the capacity to discern the apparition on the basis of criteria that (...) appeal solely to its appearance, whereas Husserl’s method presupposes a non-apparent primitive distinction between the original qua primal impression and the phantasm as its reproductive modification. On the basis of Plato’s methodological superiority in this regard, I sketch a reformulation of the Husserlian approach to appearances guided by the original interrogative context of Plato’s dialectical account of the distinction between true and false appearances, eikones and phantasmata. (shrink)

Considering that Husserl identifies passivity as the general principle of genetic dynamics and as given prior to any intentional activity, the original condition of possibility of such passivity must be clarified. Phenomenological analysis can successfully attest the presence of a drive-habituality operating prior to the level of the I, an instinct-character, thus, that raises the question about life as auto-affective capability. In the framework of a universal monadology the latter’s teleological orientation must be questioned in order to avoid that both (...) the limes constituted by the unconscious as well as affective being remain indeterminate and anonymous, which would not do justice to the transcendental rootedness of drive and instinct through the form of ipseity. (shrink)

We explore the idea that a testimony is always constituted by at least three parts—the word of the witness, the listening of the one to whom it is addressed, and language as a symbolic register where speaking and listening are inscribed. Thus, the structure of testimony would not be captured only by the subjective formula “I was there”—a subject designates himself in reference to a past experience—, nor by the intersubjective formula “I am speaking to you”—a subject designates himself and (...) his listener in the synchrony of the word addressing the other. What is also necessary to consider, in order to capture the structure of testimony, is that “there is language”—the testimony transcends diachronically the speaker and the hearer by inscribing them inseparably in the symbolic register that they share, namely language. (shrink)

This text articulates the concept of subjective truth developed by Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, in connection to a conception of testimony which both exceeds and reveals the possibilities of thinking and acting of the witness. This imbalance between the testimony and the witness finds an important extension in the distinction between the Saying and the Said made by Emmanuel Lévinas in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This distinction opens up an understanding of thought as (...) affectivity and allows witnessing to be viewed in the light of responsibility to the other. By being part of this philosophical heritage, Jean-Louis Chrétien shows how the testimony of the infinite is also phenomenalized in the experience of a chant that discovers its own modalities in this excess of beauty on the voice that tries to say it. (shrink)

This paper explores the contemporary phenomenological and psychoanalytical analyses of testimonies regarding traumatic historical events, with special attention to how such testimonies pose new challenges for the historiography of historical events in which witnesses participated. By exploring discussions on the memory of the Holocaust as well as the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression, this paper addresses the extent to which the tensions and temporalities underlying the process of bearing witness to and giving testimony about traumatic historical events might reshape (...) how their history is being told, written, and remembered. (shrink)

Witnessing is an increasingly important theme in the work of Jean-Luc Marion. According to Marion, the witness can be considered an appropriate figure to define the first person, the “I,” without reducing it to subjectivism and without envisaging the intersubjective tie as binary, inasmuch as the testimony refers instead to a ternary relation. The present analysis investigates the difference Marion identifies between the religious witness and what seems to be, according to common sense, the regular witness. While in the latter (...) case, the subject is completely foreign to the event to which s/he testifies, in the case of the religious witness, the commitment is total. We will tackle this difference by showing that the fact of testifying always implies a connection with effectivity, which reveals itself through the profound commitment characterizing the witness’s life, up to the point of death. This becomes obvious when considering the role played by the witness’s confessing speech, which establishes an unsurpassable ternary relationship between the witness, the object of the testimony, and the one to whom it is addressed, by deploying an absolute form of the social bond. (shrink)

This article proposes to analyze the relations between ethics and the poetics of testimony. It does so by testing Paul Ricoeur’s analyses of testimony with the literary work of the Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svletana Alexievitch. After having shown why witnessing occupies a type of expressivity that is singular in contemporary times, and then having been surprised by the strong links that unite witnessing and the experience of evil, Alexievitch’s work is chosen to explain what the resource of the poetic (...) could be, in the face of the question of evil. Ultimately, the consequences are drawn for the development of a practical wisdom in which testimony would be in a good place. (shrink)

Witnessing after the “end of philosophy,” in the sense in which Heidegger mentions it in his famous lecture on “The end of philosophy and the task of thinking”—what does this mean for us and our world today? As a preparation for an answer to this question, the present study proposes to elaborate a radical hermeneutics of testimony, by invoking French philosophers who can be qualified as “post-Heideggerian”—Lévinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, among others—whose thoughts on testimony were developed through the essential critique on (...) Heideggerian idea of attestation and the creative reactivation of the semantic resources historically preserved by terms such as “witness” and “testimony”. (shrink)

In order to develop a hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis of testimony, this essay will first argue that testimony is “said in many ways” without being homonymous and that contemporary epistemological approaches to testimony are not capable of accounting for all paradigmatic forms of testimony. Second, it is argued, following and extending the work of Paul Ricoeur, that by emphasizing the sense of engagement or Bezogenheit as a basic characteristic of testimony, we may find another approach to testimony that offers a phenomenological alternative (...) to the observational model of witnessing and the accompanying conception of testimony as report. Third, this approach is further developed and analyzed in terms of the four elements of testimony, namely, subject matter, witness, act of testifying, and addressee. (shrink)

In Max Scheler’s non-formal ethics of value, “good” is a value but by no means a “non-moral value”; rather, it is a second-order “moral value,” always appearing in the realization of first-order non-moral values. According to the relevant notion of the a priori of phenomenology, whilst all the non-moral values are given in “value cognition,” the moral value of good is self-given in “moral cognition”. The reflections and answers offered by Scheler’s non-formal ethics of value on “What is good?” constitute (...) the foundation of a phenomenological “meta-ethics”. (shrink)