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Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History QUOTES

Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History QUOTES

1 " I would suggest that what the translator has to give up is the temptation to translate history by making sense of it, that is, by using an apologetic or apocalyptic discourse. What the translator fails to do is to erase the body, to erase the murder of the original. "

― , Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

2 " The absence of an empathetic listener, or more radically, the absence of an addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish of one's memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness, annihilates the story "

― , Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

3 " The traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of “normal” reality, such as causality, sequence, place, and time. The trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after. This absence of categories that define it lends it to a quality of “otherness”, a salience, a timelessness and a ubiquity that puts it outside the range of associatively linked experiences, outside the range of comprehension, of recounting and of mastery. Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore, as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect. "

― , Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History