Dislocated Positions of Bearing Witness

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationship between lack and possibilities of bearing witness in a “posthistorical” context. We wanted to see how discussions about indeterminacy and testimony change the way in which we understand possibilities of truth in relation to the speaking subject. The limit of the language of testimony and memory generate experiences of incompleteness and inadequacy which make us negotiate the position of the subject between an impossible historical truth and the non‑discursive truth of revelation. We argue that the resistance to representation which drives the language of testimony reflects the improper position of the witness or between historicity and existence or between attention and inattention. There is always an already lost historical event that we have to testify for and that foreshadows possibilities of significance. The witness can only generate discourse from inside a dislocated position which also describes the layered discursive structure of revelation.