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The Body's Testimony: Dramatic Witness in the Eichmann Trial

This article takes as its focus the question, raised by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their 1995 book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History , of what it means for an event to be constituted by the collapse of its witness. The discussion centres on a reading of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Paragraph (Modern Critical Theory Group) 2017-11, Vol.40 (3), p.259-278
Main Author: Caruth, Cathy
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:This article takes as its focus the question, raised by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their 1995 book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History , of what it means for an event to be constituted by the collapse of its witness. The discussion centres on a reading of the moment Yehiel Dinoor, a writer also known as K-Zetnik and one of the few eyewitnesses at the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, falls out of the stand and into a coma while attempting to provide his testimony. By rethinking this historical trauma as a 'collapse of witnessing', I suggest Felman and Laub shift the focus from a purely cognitive or epistemological question - a problem of knowing and not-knowing - to a question of communicating to others : a problem of address. It is the circumstance of having 'no one to whom one could say Thou', as Laub puts it ( Testimony , 82), that constitutes the Holocaust, for the victims, as what the authors call an 'event without a witness'.
ISSN:0264-8334
1750-0176
DOI:10.3366/para.2017.0234