Cristian Ciocan, “The Temporality of Witnessing”, in: Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Paul Marinescu (eds.), The Phenomenology of Testimony, Brill, 2025.
In what follows, I wish to analyze the temporal dimension of the phenomenon of witnessing. But how can this topic—the temporality of witnessing—be ap- proached? Can we speak of a special relation between witnessing and time? Of course! Witnessing fundamentally engages the temporalization of the sub- ject. For as Paul Ricœur said, through the very “formal indication” of the testi- mony—“I was there” ( j’y étais)—not only is the “self-designation” of the wit- ness as a first-person witness brought to light (since “I was there”), but this self- affirmation—one that refers to the spatial distance of a “there” of the event at stake (“I was there”)—also puts into play a temporal distance, indicated by the past form of the verb “to be”: “I was there.”1 Nevertheless, beyond the for- mal indication expressed in the grammatical tense, it is also possible that when we focus in detail on the “things themselves,” we might discover a plurality of other temporal aspects, of particular modes of temporalization that structure the privileged experience of witnessing.