Pérdidas humanas y ambientales irreparables.

singularity. What I am suggesting here is that the latter experience is overlooked by Derrida in favor of the resuscitative potential of poetry. In that sense, language (poetry) bears witness to a truth that exceeds it, to a confession that does not aspire to make known, “for one will never reconcile the value of testimony with that of knowledge or of certainty.”256 For practical reasons, it is important to stress, once again, that a discourse on singularity and undecidability is also a discourse on justice since it relates to a moment of making a decision, thus making the founding of law a performative process. If that were not the case, then a discourse on singularity and conversely, a discourse on bearing witness, would remain locked in a purely

speculative universe. Failing to account for the productive potential of his

understanding of singularity, Derrida’s reading of poetry needs to be supplemented by a discussion of the actual implications for a responsible decision-making inherent in an engagement with the insecurity, contingency and irreducibility o f ‘event.’ One way of doing that is by engaging actual testimonies in an effort to examine the ‘applied’ resuscitative power of language vis-a-vis both academic and policy work.

Allow me to address summarily once again two implications of the relationship between testimony and truth as found in academic writings on the subject. This will allow me to return to Derrida and derive a few suggestions for refining the scope of his resuscitative discourse. First, James Booth endorses a view of witnessing as an imperative decision to speak. On the other hand, Veena Das, Jenny Edkins, Kelly Oliver, and Fiona Ross all caution against the unproblematic, linear transcription of memory into speech, against the “scientific assumption that the world is knowable only through words and that to have no voice is to be without

language, unable to communicate.”25? In addition, Michael Lambek and Paul Antze defend the thesis that “memories are never simply records of the past, but are interpretive reconstructions that bear the imprint of local narrative conventions, cultural assumptions, discursive formations and practices, and social contexts of recall and commemoration.’’258 A discussion of bearing witness as a linguistic idiom can only be made alongside an account of the political and ethical implications producing, securing but also problematizing the relationship between bearing witness, truth and the ways in which we comport ourselves in the world. My next chapter engages the poetic oeuvre of Paul Celan in an attempt to see whether Derrida’s characterization of poetry does indeed provide an opportunity for a discussion of political action.

Second, because there is an aporetic relationship between singularity and universality, bearing witness as a singular activity presupposes a generality of tools which allow the singular to be spoken, addressed and engaged. Justice addressed to singularity reveals the fact that there is no singular, private theory of justice that is not derived from justice in general. While this might suggest a possible disdain for the plethora of everyday, local decisions that underwrite the interactions of self with other, I would like to suggest that the “’ordinary’ is always exceptional, however little we understand its character as origin.”259 Nancy understands ‘origin’ as that which “does not signify that from which the world comes, but rather the coming of each presence of the world, each time singular.”260 In that sense, a discussion of bearing witness, as a performative (coming of presence) enunciation o f ‘event,’ must address a kind of unity made up of a multiplicity of events. Bearing witness, in addition to forging a theoretical exploration into the nature of Being, addresses the singularity of

257 R o s s , B e a r i n g W itn e s s , 5 0 .

258 L a m b e c k a n d A n tz e , T e n s e P a s t , v ii. 259 N a n c y , B e in g S i n g u l a r P lu r a l, 10. 260 N a n c y , B e in g S i n g u l a r P lu r a l, 15.

events via an ethico-political question(s) of living in the world. Poetry does not, then, recover or resuscitate language from its dying bed, if such a bed were conceivable, nor does the poet have the role of a prophet, a messiah, or as someone who “has an intimate, bodily experience of this spectral errancy, whoever surrenders to this truth of language ... whether he writes poetry or not.”261 What, then, is this ‘truth of language’ referring to?

Does a relationship between bearing witness and poetry make language visible as non-predicative, that is, as defined by and defining nothing else but itself? Not exactly. Both speaking and writing represent (universalize), despite the fact that they are wished and theorized away from such a formulation. In theory, ‘event’ is a singular occurrence in time and language in that ‘event’ is not recoverable with the kind of precision that can communicate or contain within itself the essence of this singularity. As already suggested, bearing witness as a singular engagement with ‘event’ is not an end; it (sur)passes language in the moment of its occurrence. This means that bearing witness uproots itself from the language of ‘event’ in order to address the nature of events. The latter is both the product of a decision informed by the desire for truth and an unveiling that “belongs, without fulfilling, to the space of the philosophical or onto-theological promise that it seems to break.”262 This desire for truth is supplemented by a desire to transgress the literality of meaning. This is

its aporia.

Thus, the aporetic character of every and any instance of bearing witness: always after the fact, always other than “the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” always a possible recruit for a discourse on the limit. The poetic (as an orientation within language), Derrida’s preferred testimonial idiom, is a product of the

261 D e r r id a , S o v e r e i g n t i e s in Q u e s t i o n , 1 05. 262 D e r r id a , O n t h e N a m e , 6 9 .

relationship between enunciation on the one hand and the excess of ‘event’ that defies enunciation on the other. If testimony bears witness to the historicity of ‘event’ and if poetry bears witness to the novelty of language, then the relationship between the two always remains a mutually constitutive one. Despite “the idiomatic, the irreducibly singular, as a necessary aspect of any act of writing,”263 one need problematize

singularity’s autonomy in an attempt to avoid falling into cultural, historical, socio­ political or theoretical boundaries. Derrida’s poetic, I argue, is one such boundary.