Narrating trauma - Testimonies of historical catastrophes

Abstract

The text carries out a reflection about some of the main issues concerning the gesture of testimony, highlighting the apories of witnessing. Departing from the idea that testimony only exists under the sign of its collapse and impossibility, the essay stresses the dilemmas raised from the convergence between the individual task of the trauma storytelling and its collective component. In historical catastrophes, as in the cases of genocides or violent mass persecutions of particular groups of people, the memory of the trauma is always a search for a compromise between the individual memory work and another, more collective. The testimony is analyzed as a part of a complex "politics of memory".