Ileana Bortun, “Testimony as Articulation of Natality: an Arendtian Approach to Bearing Witness”, in: Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Paul Marinescu (eds.), The Phenomenology of Testimony, Brill, 2025.
Although Hannah Arendt’s work does not contain an extensive account of tes- timony, her name is often mentioned when witnessing and bearing witness are discussed in connection to extra-ordinary experiences, especially unimagin- able predicaments or horrifying atrocities, such as the crimes against humanity carried out in the 20th century. She is invoked because of her insights into the fate of stateless refugees and the plight of Holocaust victims, which are paradig- matic examples of extreme, out of the ordinary phenomena that would be com- pletely unbelievable or even unknown in the absence of survivor testimonies and, therefore, shed more light on the significance of testimony as such. How- ever, the relevance of Arendt’s thought for the problematic of testimony has not yet been fully explored. As I hope to show in this paper, from an Arendtian perspective it can be argued that testimony has a fundamental role not only in “dark times,” with respect to extreme situations or unprecedented crimes, but also in “normal” times, in ordinary everyday life, without thereby losing its connection with the extra-ordinary.