48
IJARTISAN 11..EVIEW
In conclusion, "intellectual witness" is partial to itself it brings for–
ward those aspects of rationality that contribute
to
humanity, those writers
who refuse to sacrifice their intellect despite tht: inhumanity of modern
experience. Although I will not enter into argul1lents about Gadamer's
ideal of "conversation" or Habermas's "communicative action," these
relate rationality to democracy and continue to challenge a skeptical or
realpolitik
doctrine of social survival. In such debates the intellect becomes
a witness to its own survival rather than being seduced into guilt, self-fla–
gellation or abdication.
Witnessing, moreover, cannot take place without some hope in the
future, in generational transmission. Perhaps all writing presupposes this
hope-the manuscript in a bottle as well as tht: buried milk canisters of
Ringelblum 's "Oneg Shabbat." Yet the scorched intelligibility Nazism left
behind and modern efforts to rebuild and recover fi-om it in a time of
accelerating change have produced an uncertainty about who will trans–
mit, or who can identify long enough with a self to become a subjt:ct, to
establish a consistent sense of place, emplaceI11ent, belonging.
l.3ecause the identity of the survivors is so thoroughly shaped by their
experience, this may not seem to be an important consideration. l.3ut the
Ii terature puts us on our gurard. The Nazi Holocaust systematicall y denied
the victim any identity except of the most shameful and dehumanized
kind. An unbridgeable gulf appeared between being human and being a
Jew. "If This be a Man" is Primo Levi 's title for his Auschwitz experience.
"A different creator made me," Dan Pagis writes, comparing the shadt:
(z('0
he has become to the booted, uniformed guards usurping the
z clelll c1ohilll,
the image of God. The victim's identity became a non-identity. It is far too
easy to claim that
19-1-5
brought rewrsal and restoration. Who is speaking,
who is testifying, if Paul Celan spt:aks truly when he says: "Speaks true
who speaks shadow"l
Here the necessary function of intdkctual, or secondary, witnessing is
disclosed once mort:. It provides a witness for tht: witness, it actively
receives words that reflect the darkness of the t:wnt. For "blackbird"
Celan, for Ancel l AmseI, intelligibility is not the aim of witnt:ssing. His
poetry does not shine in the darkness to abolish it.lZ.ather, the poetic word
is as "darkness to a dying flame." Cdan's skeletalized "I" testifies to the
missing other as well as the missing
selt~
the "you" or "we," what Maurice
Halbwachs called the "affective con1I11unity" (bas is of all memory) and
Michael Pollak called the need for social identity. Intell ectual witness
stands in for that "you" or "we" by a commitment to the survivors' or eye–
witnesses' words. Like literature itself it moves within the damaged space
of speech, specifically conscious of past betraya ls and caught between the
distancing and the discovery value of time.
