Paul Marinescu, “The Experience of Testimony: from the Individual to the Collective”, in: Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Paul Marinescu (eds.), The Phenomenology of Testimony, Brill, 2025.
The question of testimony has recently attracted the attention of nearly all branches of the human sciences, from historiography and the juridical sciences to sociology and cognitive psychology. Numerous books and journal issues have attempted to capture the multiple facets of testimony, including all the associated questions, such as issues regarding the truth, representation of the past, action, justice, and the other (otherness). Philosophy is not exempt from this interest in testimony, as the phenomenon offers fertile ground for theories on the subject that elucidate concepts such as authenticity, limits of discourse, history, violence, image, dialogue, or trauma, as well as for epistemological theories that consider the role of testimony in the production, transmission, and certification of knowledge.
Notwithstanding the sustained effort of philosophical inquiry, through a variety of approaches and methodological pursuits, to highlight the richness of the experience of witnessing and testimony, many topics have yet to be explored in depth. Among these issues is collective identity, which has emerged, in a sense as a continuance of concerns regarding collective responsibility and intentionality. This reluctance to approach testimony in relation to collective identity stems from some of the issues involved, which put such theorizing at risk of running into aporias. These have to do with the position(s) of the witness, the retention of memories, the narration(s) of the event, the self-designation of the witnesses, the truth(s) of the witnesses’ statements, and, above all, the “who” of all these phenomena and operations, evolving from the singular to the plural.