Abstract
Witnessing Auschwitz is confronted with “Levi’s paradox”: The speechless as a thorough witness cannot testify because of their death; and the survivor as an exception of Auschwitz, to some extent, is only a pseudo-witness. Agamben argues that neither the speechless nor the survivor can bear witness alone, and the witness should be seen as a threshold constructed by the mutual “exclusive inclusion” of the speechless and the survivor, that is, a fractured construction of “unity-difference.” As a result, the impossibility and possibility of witnessing constitute each other. The survivor who bears witness to the speechless’s impossibility of witnessing is the witness; the witness is the one who can bear the responsibility of witnessing through bearing witness to the impossibility of witnessing. In the same way, testimony also presents itself as a fractured construct, which comes from language that bears witness and responds to the non-language. Testimony is the non-language testified by language. For Agamben, this means that the language of testimony no longer signifies, because the non-language testified by language is the Voice/dead language, which is “no-longer” a voice and “not-yet” any meaning. The essence of testimony is Voice/dead language. It is also the testimony as Voice/dead language that establishes the foundation for the possibility of literature. If literature wants to justify its existence after Auschwitz, its language must be Voice/dead language.
First Page
139
Last Page
147
Recommended Citation
Zhou, Yiqun. 2021. "“Levi’s Paradox” and Its Solution: Giorgio Agamben’s Poetics of Witnessing." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 41, (6): pp.139-147. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol41/iss6/2
