In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescription. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational mode of ethico-political labour, an arduous working-through produced out of the struggles of groups and persons who engage in testimonial tasks in order to confront corresponding perils produced by instances of situational or structural violence; it is the work of witnessing, the normative and political substance generated through the performance of patterns of social action, which matters. Using Celan's allegory of the poem as a message in a bottle, I consider bearing witness as a web of cosmopolitan testimonial practices structured around five dialectically related tasks and perils: giving voice to mass suffering against silence (what if the message is never sent or does not reach land?); interpretation against incomprehension (what if it is written in a language that is undecipherable?); the cultivation of empathy against indifference (what if, after being read, it is discarded?); remembrance against forgetting (what if it is distorted or erased over time?); and prevention against repetition (what if it does not help to avert other forms of suffering?).
Adorno, T.W. (1973) Negative Dialectics. New York : Seabury Press.
2.
Adorno, T.W. (1981) `Cultural Criticism and Society', pp. 17-34 in Prisms . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
3.
Adorno, T.W. (1982) `Commitment', pp. 300-18 in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum.
4.
Agamben, G. (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive . New York: Zone Books.
5.
Alexander, J.C. (2002) `On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The "Holocaust" from War Crime to Trauma Drama', European Journal of Social Theory5(1): 5-85.
6.
Arendt, H. (1998[1958]) The Human Condition, 2nd edn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
7.
Barnett, M.N. (2002) Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
8.
Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
9.
Boltanski, L. (1993) La Souffrance à distance: morale humanitaire, médias et politique. Paris: Métailié.
10.
Celan, P. (2001) `Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen', pp. 395-6 in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan. New York: Norton.
11.
Cohen, S. (2001) States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity.
12.
Coq, C. and J.P. Bacot (eds) (1999) Travail de mémoire 1914-1998: une nécessité dans un siècle de violence. Collection Mémoires , no. 54. Paris: Autrement.
13.
Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
14.
Derrida, J. (2001) The Work of Mourning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Duras, M. (1960) Hiroshima mon amour. Paris: Gallimard.
15.
Engle, K.J. (2007) `Putting Mourning to Work: Making Sense of 9/11', Theory, Culture & Society24(1): 61-88.
16.
Felman, S. and D. Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York and London: Routledge.
17.
Friedländer, S. (ed.) (1992) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the `Final Solution'. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
18.
Friese, H. (2000) `Silence - Voice - Representation', pp. 159-78 in Robert Fine and Charles Turner (eds) Social Theory After the Holocaust. Liverpool : Liverpool University Press.
19.
Geras, N. (1998) The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy After the Holocaust. London: Verso.
20.
Habermas, J. (1989a) The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
21.
Habermas, J. (1989b) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
22.
Habermas, J. (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
23.
Habermas, J. (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
24.
Halbwachs, M. (1994[1925]) Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Albin Michel.
25.
Halbwachs, M. (1997[1950]) La Mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel.
26.
Hartman, G.H. (1996) The Longest Shadow In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
27.
Hersey, J. (1985) Hiroshima. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
28.
Hogan, M.J. (1996) Hiroshima in History and Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
29.
Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
30.
Huyssen, A. (2000) `Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia', Public Culture12(1): 21-38.
31.
Jaspers, K. (1947) The Question of German Guilt. New York: Dial Press.
32.
Kurasawa, F. (2004) `Cinema, or, An Art of Urban Memory in an Age of Forgetting', Public29: 24-49.
33.
LaCapra, D. (1994) Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
34.
Langer, L. (1991) Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
35.
Lanzmann, C. (1985) Shoah. Paris: Gallimard.
36.
Le Goff, J. (1992) History and Memory. New York : Columbia University Press.
37.
Levi, P. (1988) The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage.
38.
Levi, P. (1996) Survival in Auschwitz. New York : Touchstone.
39.
Levy, D. and N. Sznaider (2002) `Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory', European Journal of Social Theory5(1): 87-106.
40.
Lifton, R.J. and G. Mitchell (1995) Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial. New York: Avon Books.
41.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1988) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
42.
Maclear, K. (1999) Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness. Albany, NY: SUNY Press .
43.
Menchú, R. and E. Burgos-Debray (1984) I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. London: Verso .
44.
Moeller, S.D. (1999) Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Misery, War, and Death. New York and London : Routledge.
45.
Nora, P. (ed.) (1984-92) Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard.
46.
Oliver, K. (2001) Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
47.
Power, S. (2002) `A Problem from Hell': America and the Age of Genocide . New York: Basic Books.
48.
Ricoeur, P. (2000) La Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli. Paris: Seuil.
49.
Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
50.
Rorty, R. (1998) `Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality' , pp. 167-85 in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
51.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1973 [1755]) `A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality', pp. 27-75 in The Social Contract and Discourses. London: Dent.
52.
Sturken, M. (2002) `Memorializing Absence', pp. 374-84 in Craig J. Calhoun, Paul Price and Ashley S. Timmer (eds) Understanding September 11. New York: New Press .
53.
Todorov, T. (1996) Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. New York: Metropolitan Books .
54.
Vidal-Naquet, P. (1992) Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.
55.
Wieviorka, A. (1998) L'Ere du témoin. Paris: Plon.
56.
Yavenditti, M.J. (1974) `John Hersey and the American Conscience: The Reception of "Hiroshima"', Pacific Historical Review43(4): 24-49.
57.
Yoneyama, L. (1999) Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
58.
Young, I.M. (1997) `Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought', Constellations3(3): 340-63.
59.
Young, J.E. (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
