| Argamben
Translated | Lanjiang
Excerpt from | When the house burned down
Testimony and Truth
No one
for
Witnesses testify
--Paul Celan
(i)
The veracity of the testimony has nothing to do with its semantic content and does not depend on what it says. Of course, it can take the form of propositions, but unlike legal testimony, what it says cannot be verified and cannot be true or false. Testimony is not the obscure logos apofantico in the Aristotle sense, a discourse that says something about something. It's not even a prayer, a supplication, or a command. As long as it is not defined from what it says, testimony is always true: simply put, it is something that is given or not given.
The veracity of the testimony depends not on what it says, but on what it remains silent about, on what it leads to silent silence. A witness is a person who speaks only in a name that cannot be spoken. This doesn't just mean that he testifies for those who can't testify—for dead people, animals, stones, grass, dementia. The silence witnessed by His Word is the witness to the inner nature of itself, and those who testify to the truth are first and foremost silent. His testimony is so true that he experiences the impossibility of stating the truth in a proposition. Truth cannot take the form of a true proposition: truth is only something that is proven.
This means that the witness is not the subject of knowledge. The truth involved in the testimony can never give itself to intentional consciousness, and the consciousness of intentional consciousness must be expressed in the form of words, saying something. When the subject of knowledge falls into silence, the testimony begins. If the subject's mouth is sealed, this experience just opens the mouth of the witness. This does not mean that the subject is simply pushed aside and that he has nothing to do with the witness. It is precisely his silence that constitutes the possibility of testimony, for him — in place of the subject — to allow witnesses to testify. The subject of knowledge does not exist before testimony, but can be said to have emerged through testimony.
At first there was only silence (Sigé). The transformation of silence into silent silence by witnesses can only be achieved by testifying to a subject who cannot tell the truth. The subject's silence opens up the space for witness. Here are two clues. One is Sigé-testimonianza-verità, and the other is Logos-soggetto-conoscenza, which operate on the same plane and intersect at each point. Witnesses and subjects are two sides of the same testimony, as witnesses and Muslims (mussulmano) in Auschwitz.
(ii)
Aristotle does not seem to take testimony very seriously. In Rhetoric, he talks about this, listing it as proof of experience juxtaposed with law, contracts, torture, and oaths. He wrote: "There are two kinds of witnesses (martyrs): the ancient and the recent. The latter participated in the trial, while the former was outside the trial. By the ancients I mean poets and gnorimoi (meaning well known), whose words are famous all over the world, such as the Athenians who used Homer in the question of Salamis, and the inhabitants of Tenidos who testified to Periande of Corinth. In the testimony of ancient celebrities quoted by the orator in his speech, Aristotle also mentions proverbs. This is not so much empirical proof as the traditional authority is forced to testify against a supposedly inadequate argument.
Recently, the situation of witnesses has been different, in which Aristotle believes that all celebrities who express opinions on something are useful if these judgments are useful for the arguments that people are trying to prove, and finally, "those who share the risk, just in case they are considered perjury", i.e. witnesses in the correct sense, who can only prove "if something happened or did not happen, if it existed or did not exist", but not the quality of the act, such as "justice or injustice, convenience or not". In general, "the ancient witnesses were the most reliable because they could not be corrupted".
The connection between these world-renowned witnesses is real, very short-lived, and occasional is also taken for granted. And it was for such a purely procedural testimony that Kierkegor objected to his idea of "witnessing the truth," the opposite of a celebrity. "True witnesses, true witnesses are a person being whipped, abused, dragged from prison to prison, and finally... Crucified, hanged, burned or burned on a grill, his body was left isolated from the executioner's assistant in an isolated place". Here, too, the testimony has nothing to do with the semantic content of the information, but rather the authority of such witnesses is that "the testimony becomes particularly pronounced once the content of the message or action is assumed to be less important.". The witness of truth cannot provide the evidence he asserts, just as it is absurd to "demand that the existence of God be physically certain." His testimony can reveal the veracity of what he confirms only when it is completely divorced from the level of factual and verifiable propositions.
(iii)
What is the truth that witnesses testify for? Not a given thing (dato) in its non-verbal factuality, it is itself obscure, nor does it merely represent its name, it is equally closed to what it is named. However, the words and opinions of the speakers point precisely to these two abstract concepts that cannot be conveyed, forgetting each time the key to their role as speakers. Thus, speakers are divided into ideologiists, the former stubbornly seeking facts, believing that their existence in language is only accidental, as they say, superstructured; and communication, which allows news—the media—to replace things completely.
The truth witnessed by the witness is instead the thing at the time it is named, and the name it is given when it is named—that is, the thing in its illusory nature, or, in the poet's words, the entity "known in the medium of its appearance." It is precisely this truth, this pure knowability, that cannot be regarded as a problem in a proposition, but can only appear in the proposition as a rest or interruption.
What the language medium cannot say, what the witness cannot talk about, is the medium itself, the language itself. Knowledge can be spoken out, making it possible to know but not. It is this kind of silence that the witness brings to the discourse silence.
(iv)
To whom was the testimony addressed? Certainly not contemporaries of testimony, who, by definition, cannot fail to hear testimony. But the testimony was also not addressed to future generations. In fact, the witness is always at the end of time in some way, preaching for a world that is ending or has ended in his eyes, and those who witness to the end of the end certainly cannot expect a generation to come. The truth of witness never begins, it is basically always at the end of it– in any case, it is an ultimate or penultimate truth.
If a witness resorts to someone else, now or in the future, the latter can in turn testify on his behalf, confirming his testimony and acknowledging its authenticity. But testimony that requires further witness loses its value and ceases to be a testimony of truth. This is why the poet Paul Celan made it clear that "no one/for/witnesses testified", he always testified alone. Does this mean that testimony is useless, false, not directed at anyone, and arguably outside of history and time? The witness conveyed his words to God, to the animals, to the grass, to the stones — but never to man? For that reason, no one can testify for him? Or rather, no one testified for the witness, because the witness was dead when he turned around, and the dead could not testify. But once the Witness preaches to him, the past is no longer the past, it can no longer disappear, as helpless and speechless as it is imprisoned in the present heart.
What does it mean to bear witness to the dead? But if the witness is first and foremost Superman, a survivor, isn't that exactly what every witness does? Those who survived must be related to the deceased, or at least to the deceased inside. But in that sense, not everyone is a survivor, isn't that exactly the definition of a human being relative to other creatures, and that he has an essential connection to the past and the dead? Not only because man has known from the beginning that funerals and customs in various ways keep him in touch with those who lived before him— in a deeper and more essential sense, man is made up of the past, but he lives in the present. He survives to this day by evoking and remembering things that are no longer in him, but still burning in him. Man is a living person, but possessed by the past, and must face it and testify for it at every moment.
Because it is directed at the past, its own past, the witness is faithful in nature, it has a faithful form. This does not simply mean that it must be genuine and the witnesses must be sincere. Loyalty is the intimate persistence of what one has witnessed and the struggle for it. "Because" (Per cui) means here: substitution. To testify in place of someone who cannot testify is to put himself in his place, to bring his name, body, and voice with him: in this sense a man is loyal to him, loyal enough to depose himself and allow himself to disappear into him. There are no living witnesses: testifying means death first and foremost. For this reason, witnesses cannot lie, and false testimony is not testimony.
Witnesses testify for the dead and those of the past, taking their place. But this is not the case for the dead and the past, as long as they have spoken and are speaking– remembering the words of the past, but the task of memory. Witnesses bear witness to the silence of the dead and the past, and this silence is more unbearable and painful than their words. For the words of the dead, we are pleased to offer our speeches and our stories – for their silence, we can only bear witness.
(5)
After Jesus met the Roman governor Pilate at the Doge's Palace, who emphasized that his kingdom was not of this world, Pilate asked, "Then are you king?" Jesus replied, "You say I am king." I was born for this, and I came into the world for this purpose, to bear witness to the truth (ina martyreso teialetheiai)." The Roman governor of Judea famously asked the question, "What is truth?" It is not so much a philosophical objection to the idea of truth as it is a question of the adequacy of the defendant at trial, who insists on making an unclear answer. Jesus had to state whether he was king of the Jews or not; he did not, but unexpectedly knotted truth and testimony, saying that he was testifying for the truth, as if the testimony had nothing to do with the object of judgment (whether he was king or not), but rather implied his whole existence ("I was born for this, and I came into the world for this").
During another trial, the Pharisees pushed him before the adulterer who was supposed to be stoned to death according to the Law of Moses and demanded that he pronounce his verdict, and Jesus had already told him of the stakes in such testimony ("What do you say?). ”）。 Here, instead of answering, Jesus bent down again and wrote on the ground with his fingers. In the face of their stubborn insistence, instead of announcing the verdict, he made a condition: "The innocent will first throw stones" (8:37). After dispatching the woman, he suddenly uttered a word about himself—"I am the light of the world, and those who follow me do not walk in darkness"—and the Pharisees, as Pilate later did, did not mistakenly regard it as an unacceptable testimony in the trial: "You testify for yourself (peri seautou martyreis), your testimony is not true (hemartyria sou ouk estin alethes). "Of course, testimony about oneself is not only not testimony, but, in this case, it has a double incongruity, because it replaces explicit judgment.
Careful consideration must be given to the concise doctrine of witness that Jesus unfolded on this point. Jesus began by claiming that His testimony was valid ("I testify for myself, but my testimony is true"), and then declares that this amounts to a judgment. Not only are self-witness and judgment placed on the same level, but the former replaces the latter, because testimony is not one, but two-in-one: "You judge by the flesh, I do not judge." Even if I judge, my judgment is true (he krisis he emealethine estin), because I am not a person, but me and the Father who sent me. Your law says that the testimony of two men is true. I am my own witness (ho martyron peri emautou), and my father, who sent me, testified for me. ”(8：16-18).
The witness is twofold: the first, testifying for himself, declares an unacceptable testimony, but it is still true because it contains another testimony, guarantees its legitimacy, and replaces judgment. In this case, the second witness also testified for those who could not testify, and he brought a testimony that was impossible to testify. That is its truth.
(6)
In every epoch, one knows the experience of another language in which the veracity of the assertion does not depend on the correspondence between words and things. This experience is the oath, that is, it is a linguistic act that produces a linguistic act of fact. From this point of view, there is a distinction between the oath of commitment that cannot be false, and the oath of assertion, either true or false, which corresponds to a stage at which the oath has lost its original validity. As shown in the ancient process of taking the form of contrasting two vows in Greece and Rome, the initial question was not to prove the veracity of the assertion, but the magnitude of the vow's potency, which was as potent as the ritual expression of the law of bounds. Instead of ruling which oaths are true and which are false, the judge declares which oaths are sacred and which are not. For the true relationship between language and the world, the oath replaces a stronger connection, which magically—i.e., legally—guarantees the identity between language and things.
Nothing in the testimony can guarantee this connection. Problematic truths, even if expressed in words, do not include correspondence between what is said and what is done. In testimony, as with the oath, the key is not the power of the word, but its weakness. Witnesses testify that the composition of language cannot assert truth. However, there is no other place for witnesses to have access to truth, and there is no possible avenue other than language. He believed in words, and despite their fragility, he remained a linguist, a lover of words, until the end. But not as an assertion, but as a gesture.
This is why Plato called Alcesti's sacrifice to Admeto "witness" (The Drink, 176–b6). About what testimony? Of course it is a testimony of love ("by love", Plato wrote: "Alcutis surpassed Admetos's father and mother in love"). But it bears witness to more than that. Just as in Rilke's poem she must have said something to God ("She spoke to the God who understood her, and all men understood her in God"), but the testimony was not in her words. Yet no one could doubt what she said to God, and no one questioned their veracity. Alketis was a witness because she put her life in her words.
The witness gave up the verifiability of his words, but not because he, like the oath-taker, had a stronger connection, an oath (horkos, ρκο), a holy relic he held in his hand as he spoke. As he testified, he abandoned all security and external resources, and he fell into absolute loneliness. It was like Alketis suddenly feeling lonely in the crowd around him. Her gestures, her words, were as if we were muttering to ourselves, as if we were doing when no one was looking at us. That's why a witness can't lie, because no one can cheat — not even himself. Testimony is constituted in renunciation; no one can "testify for the witness, not even the witness himself".
(vii)
This can also be expressed in another way: the witness is only with his words, and what he witnesses—in all senses of the preposition "for" (per)—is first and foremost language. But what does it mean to testify for language? What does language need for testimony? Of course, every language needs a speaker, which itself contains the empty form in which the speaker stands and speaks, saying "I", "I" is where life and language meet in a single voice in an instant—that is, they fall together. But to say "I," to take the place of the speaker in a language, is not to testify.
In order to be able to speak, in order to say "I," then it can be said that the subject must forget the language, forget that he is speaking, and unreservedly immerse himself in the torrent of meaningful propositions, meaning-given points of view. He can also talk in circles if he wants to. But, in any case, his language was not alone, and he could not testify to it. Testimony is the experience of language that still exists when all sentences are spoken and all meaningful ideas are spoken—or are considered to be spoken. That is, when the speaker realizes that he is truly alone with his language – not in the face of the innumerable places in the language, but in the face of the silent language itself. When he first realized that he was speaking, he had irreversibly and poetically questioned his linguistic life, and he could no longer convey anything to others by speaking.
In this sense, the poet is a remarkable witness. In fact, the language of poetry is the language left behind when all communication and information functions are disabled, when the poet cannot speak to others—even himself—but only language. At this time, the poet finds himself magically and irretrievably alone with his word, and he can testify to it.
Reflection—I think"—instead the speaker is about to discover himself as a witness and a poet, finding a mirror in which to escape loneliness, a final refuge in which he can still somehow say meaningful words and claims. We are all attached to ourselves to escape the lonely encounter with language to avoid being forced into poetry. This is Hölderlin's most tenacious critique of reflection, the difference in his experience with his contemporaries, such as Schelling and Hegel.
Those who carry this experience through to the end — but there is no end to it — those who find themselves about to be in a state of silence with their own language may — and have been — accused of being insane, and may even accept the fact that others see them as madmen. This was Hölderlin's choice, and when he retired to the tower on the Neckar, when he said that he was no longer called Hölderlin, but Scardanelli or Buonarroti or Rosseti — names that were the names of the people who wrote the poems, which seemed to others to have no logical connection, and the separation of the paraaxes and words in the hymns eliminated all language, and finally made it appear in its pain and glory. Poetry is the language in which human beings testify against it.
(viii)
What does it mean to testify for language? The language involved in the testimony appeared to be a language that said nothing, nothing to say. But it is precisely here that the testimony determines itself, separating itself from any other linguistic experience. In fact, nothingness is the ultimate limit of a philosophy that is not witnessed. Nothingness is an experience in which language exists, but the world does not exist. Nothingness is the name of a language without a world. This means that, as Leonardo speculated, when he writes that "the so-called nothingness is found only in time and language," the experience of nothingness remains the experience of a language, and it does not question the primacy of language. It marks the threshold beyond which witnessing can begin. The man who dwells in this threshold, who puts himself in the void, cannot testify to the language.
One can express the experience in the testimony, saying that the witness experienced existence, on the contrary, language is not existence, and one cannot have language. But what defines his testimony is that, through the absence of this language, he testifies for the language, and he keeps the speech silent. The witness insists on standing in the position of the language, in the position of the missing word – and this is where the language is (ammutolimento). Just as the deaf-mute gestures indicate words they cannot pronounce, the sublime imitation of witnesses (mimica) also reveals language for the first time.
(IX)
The language of testimony is the language of names, not the language of propositions. Just as in Hölderlin's late hymns, words are stripped from their semantic background and restored to their status as pure names, so in the language of witnesses the sentence is reduced to a series of rests and separations, resembling a ruin with a single entry and word on it— even simple participles, such as in Hölderlin, the turning conjunction amber, i.e. "but."
Testimony is an idiom consisting only of words, that is, it does not refer to a substitute, but a word that refers to others and things. This is an impossible task, since a pronoun is a break in the sentence in which it appears, with no syntactic relationship with the rest of the proposition. A meaningful utterance consists only of interruptions, a continuous interruption, an unspoken interruption.
The witness, when he speaks, is not speaking, but calling, and continues to call persistently, and it is this insignificant apostrofe that constitutes his only, unshakable authority.
(x)
Gianni Carchia talks about the relationship between testimony and philosophy in a short and elegant essay. The way this is done is by challenging the distinction between testimony and method. Reducing testimony to method is in fact "the enduring temptation of the logos of philosophy". What the method wants to eliminate from the testimony is its irreparable factuality (fattualità), which is an event, not the result of an argument. "To testify means, first, to affirm the factuality of the truth ... The absolute disproportionateness of truth and intentional consciousness". Witnessing, it can be said, begins precisely when every predetermined path to truth— every method— fails. It is precisely because it suddenly finds itself with no path to truth that witnesses can only testify for it. Thus, Kalzia argues that Husserl's plane consciousness is opposed to object consciousness, and Heidegger's openness from the dimension of existence to the theory of existence, is inadequate. In these two people, there is still something similar to the "primacy of intentionality", and the rupture with the method is not really completed. "Only an encounter with the most thorough other is worthy of the name of witness", and in a way this encounter implies the suspension of all groups, so that "inability to communicate and loneliness are the most profound and fundamental signs of witness".
At this point, it is not surprising that Kalzia opposes the transcendence of testimony against the intrinsic nature of the method. "The transformation from the intrinsicity of the method to the transcendence of testimony heralds some kind of conversion, a metabasiseis allo genos." Here, however, it is necessary to revise the wording. Neither transcendence nor immanence can be used to define testimony. Rather, it is in their overlap, just as Spinoza expresses "causa immanente" in the meaning of a particular form of speech in Hebrew; it expresses an action in which we can identify who is the actor, who is the one who is acted upon, who is the active and which who is passive. Here, a cause, as the name suggests, is transcendent in terms of its result, it acts on itself, becoming, to a certain extent, an intrinsic motive.
In other words, testimony is associated with an ability to be touched (affetto) as long as it is not touched by an external object—or not only by an external object—but above all by its own ability to accept. The man who speaks is not touched by what he says, but by your ability to speak and remain silent; that is, you can testify.
Just as a subject does not bear an object, but its own affettibilità, not knowing what object there is, and it has only one knowability (conoscibilità), so the witness feels that what is produced inside the other object is not a verbal voice, but a silence of speakability. The purely speakable language that arises from this experience, which is both active and passive, transcendent and intrinsic, is the language of testimony, the language in which witnesses testify for and in their place. The word is not about what it is saying, but rather giving purely names and things to be named in the same gesture: testimony, that is, a testimony to truth, which has nothing but truth.
In this sense, witnessing does not mean to be in contact with knowledge, but with non-intellectual fields, and the witness may not know what he is witnessing, but, like Socrates, he does not eliminate ignorance of something, he remains faithful to his ignorance. Ways and means that we don't know, if we're aware of them, are as crucial as the ways we know them.
We are not introducing the metaphysics of mysticism into our minds; rather, it is the first time that we have grasped the essence of the experience of so-called "mysticism," which is not actually something obscure. When the last scholar in exile in the Plato Academy in Persia tried to express in words the supreme principles of thought, he felt compelled to state that when we say that it is unknowable or unspeakable, our words are inverted, no longer referring to an object, but to ourselves and our capacity to know. It is this daunting reversal that the witness experiences. In the non-intellectual region opened up to him at this time, there is neither "night" nor "cloud", but only clear and completely understandable experience, i.e., a pure power of knowing and speaking, where there is nothing to say or know. To be precise, in a pure language, in a purely ineffable language, the witness cannot silence it, because, again, no one testifies for the witness.
(xi)
Truth is a kind of erranza, without which man cannot survive. That is to say, it is a life form, a life form that is inseparable from human beings. In this sense, his life form is a wandering of truths that make him his witness.
If man is wandering for the truth, then he is also wandering for the unreal. That is, he could testify, but it was a complete lie. To what extent can a person lie and keep being human? In fact, it doesn't have any limitations. Man is a man who can wander without limit in the midst of non-truths and truths. It is this that constitutes the wandering of man, as a story that may end, but in itself has no end.
Man cannot articulate the truth, but he can condemn lies. However, the condemnation of falsehood is not a testimony. It is a prophecy, and therefore those who have lost the truth cannot hear it. However, to the question of "is this a person" we must answer: yes, the liar is still a person, and as long as he wanders outside the non-truth, he remains somehow connected to the truth. Only when the lie can be silenced, when there is and only one silent lie, then all wandering in the truth ceases, and with it comes the possibility of testimony.
The search for post-storia, the search for time that no longer wanders in history and goes deeper, is exactly the time of lies, but like lies, this kind of post-history is useless. The witness, on the other hand, knows that his testimony interrupts the history and discourse of lies, without opening deeper into time and discourse; he knows that there is no history of truth, only history of lies.