Trauma and Testimony

Abstract

This article examines questions of trauma and testimony from the perspective of political community. It argues that terms such as riots, pogroms, and genocide reflect the points at which the body of language becomes one with the body of the world. Hence the performative force of these terms comes from their capacity to relocate narratives of violence and to anchor them to juridical-political discourses. The article asks for double vision in which life and its forms are subjects of the political but then are remade at the level of the personal. Critiquing grand projects for building identity and/or self, the article asks for mindfulness towards experience and forms of making the experience of violence knowable when saying gives way to showing.