I
Without giving up thinking about the secret in the perspective of responsibility, far from it, how is it that one has to come up against the question of witnessing (testimonium)? And why is the question of testimonium no different from that of the testamentum, of all the testaments, in other words of surviving in dying, of surviving, living on, before and beyond the opposition between living and dying?
| Aschenglorie […] | |
| … | |
| Niemand | |
| zeugt für den | |
| Zeugen | |
| Ash-glory […] | |
| … | |
| No one | |
| bears witness for the | |
| witness.[2] |
If we want to keep for them that poetic resonance to which, already, on the page, they mean to respond, we must remember that these words come to us in German. As always, the idiom remains irreducible. This invincible singularity of the verbal body already introduces us into the enigma of witnessing, beside that irreplaceability of the singular witness which indeed may well be what this poem is speaking to us about. It thus speaks of itself, signifying itself in speaking to the other about the other, signing and designing itself in a single gesture—"sealing and unsealing itself"—or again, to quote and displace a little the words of Murray Krieger: sealing while (by, through) unsealing itself as a poetic text.
This idiom is untranslatable, ultimately, even if we translate it. These three lines resist, and resist even the best translation. What's more, they come to us at the end of a poem which, however little certainty there may be about its sense, about all its senses and all its possible meanings, it is difficult not to think of as also related, through an essential reference, to dates and events,
Ashes are that which annihilates or threatens to annihilate even the possibility of bearing witness to annihilation. Ashes are the figure of annihilation without remains, or without a readable or decodable archive. Perhaps that would lead us to think of this fearful thing: the possibility of annihilation, the virtual disappearance of the witness, but also of the capacity to bear witness, that is, of what would be the only condition of bearing witness, its only condition of possibility as condition of its impossibility—paradoxical and aporetic. When bearing witness seems assured and so becomes a demonstrable theoretical truth, when there is a piece of information or a report, a procedure of proving or even an exhibit in a trial, it risks losing its value, its sense or its testimonial status. That comes down to saying—always the same paradox, the same paradoxopoetic matrix—that as soon as it is assured, certain as a theoretical proof, a testimony cannot be assured as testimony. For it to be assured as testimony, it cannot, it must not be absolutely certain, absolutely sure and certain in the order of knowing as such. This paradox of "as," "as such" (comme tel) is the paradox we can experience—and there is nothing fortuitous about this—apropos of the secret and responsibility, of the secret of responsibility and the responsibility of the secret. How can a secret be shown as secret? To take up Murray Krieger's words again, how can a mask be revealed as mask? And in what way might a poetic work be called upon to put this strange operation to work?
So it is necessary first to hear these lines in their language, and to see
Ashes, we were saying, annihilate or threaten to annihilate even the possibility of testifying to annihilation itself.
It happens that Celan's poem has as its title its own incipit. Thus its first line speaks of ashes, and it appears reasonably open to translation. It is Aschenglorie, in a single word, which André du Bouchet translates, in three words, as "Cendres-la gloire," and Joachim Neugroschel in two words, as "Ashglory." Word-for-word translation is already impossible. Infidelity has begun, and betrayal and perjury, from the very threshold of this arithmetic, with this accountability of the incalculable. The poetic force of a word remains incalculable, all the more certainly so when the unity of a word ("Aschenglorie") is that of an invented composition, the inauguration of a new body. All the more certainly so when the birth of this verbal body gives the poem its first word, when this first word becomes the verb which comes at the beginning. En arkhe en o logos [In the beginning was the word]. And if this logos was a light, for John, here it was a light of ashes. In the beginning was (the word) "Aschenglorie."
This glory of the ashes, this glory of ash, this glory which is that of the ashes but which is also of ash, in ash—and glory is minimally the light or the shining brightness of fire—here it is lighting a poem that I shall not even attempt to interpret with you. Light is also knowing, truth, meaning. Now this light is no more than ashes here, it becomes ashes, it falls into ashes, as a fire goes out. But (it is the mobile and unstable articulation of this "but" which will be important for us) ashes are also glory, they can still be re-nouned, sung, blessed, loved, if the glory of the re-noun is not reducible either to fire or to the light of knowing. The brightness of glory is only the light of knowing [connaissance] and necessarily the clarity of knowledge [savoir].
Why not even attempt to interpret this poem? I am quite willing to try to explain this limit. What matters is not what this poem means, or that it means, or that it bears witness to this or that, nor even that it names and what it names—elliptically as always. Ellipsis and caesura and the cut-off breathing presumably mean here, as always in Celan, that which seems most decisive in the body and in the rhythm of the poem. A decision, as its name indicates, always appears as [comme] interruption, it decides as [en tant que] a tearing cut.
Let us try to put ourselves in the region of this limit, at the passage of this line. We will be guided by a hypothesis: this line is perhaps also that line of necessary "extravagance" which Murray Krieger speaks of.
We have just alluded to some motifs which are in some way signalled by this poem, and which we know in advance intersect at the heart of the questions of responsibility, of the secret, of witnessing.
What then are these motifs? Well, one example would be the three, the figure of everything that takes itself beyond two, the duo, the dual, the couple. Now three is named twice, in the first stanza and close to the final stanza which is the one that names the Aschen (Aschenglorie, to repeat, in a single word in the first line, but Aschen-glorie, cut by a hyphen across two lines, near the end). Both times, there is a tripleness affecting both the road (Weg) and the hands (Händen), the knotted hands (we should also keep hold of the knot, the knotting of the link and the hands).
| ASCHENGLORIE hinter | |
| deinen erschüttert-verknoteten | |
| Händen am Dreiweg. |
Let us quote both French and English translations; they are not wholly satisfying, but no one can teach a lesson to anyone else here, by definition:
| CENDRES-LA GLOIRE revers | |
| de tes mains heurtées-nouées pour jamais | |
| sur la triple fourche des routes. |
| Ash-glory behind | |
| your shaken-knotted | |
| hands on the three-forked road. |
It would also be possible to translate into French as follows:
| Gloire pour les cendres, derrière | |
| tes mains défaites effondrées—toutes nouées | |
| à la fourche des trois voies. | |
| [Glory for ashes, behind | |
| your demolished collapsed hands—all knotted | |
| at the fork of the three ways.] |
I am not happy with this "pour les cendres" ("for ashes"), for it is just as much about the glory of ashes as the glory promised to ashes; and if, as I considered doing, we translated as "gloire aux cendres" ("glory to ashes"), it would be necessary to understand not only the glorification of ashes, but, as one might say of a still life, the figure of glory surrounded by ashes, on a background or an ornament of ashes. Which amounts to so many ways of noting the poetic stroke of genius in this untranslatable "Aschenglorie." Untranslatable the word remains, word for word, one word for the other, where the composed vocable does not decompose. For in the original version it is not divided, as it will be lower down, near the end, disarticulating and unifying itself to itself, this time, at the end of the line, by a strange hyphen. A hyphen of this kind is also an act of poetical memory. It points out the beginning in return; it gives a reminder of the initial undividedness of Aschenglorie:
| Aschen | |
| glorie hinter | |
| euch Dreiweg | |
| Händen. | |
| Cendres | |
| la gloire, revers | |
| de vous—fourche triple, | |
| mains. | |
| Ash | |
| glory behind | |
| your three-forked | |
| hands. |
One could also translate another way:
| Gloire | |
| de cendres derrière vous les mains | |
| du triple chemin. | |
| [Glory | |
| of ashes behind | |
| you hands | |
| of the triple road.] |
Thus "euch" (vous, you) has just replaced the "deinen" of the second line ("deinen erschüttert-verknoteten/Händen am Dreiweg," yours, your hands, the hands which are yours). The addressee of the apostrophe has gone into the plural. At any rate, it is no longer simply the same, it is no longer reducible to the being in the singular, masculine or feminine, to whom the first stanza is addressed. The two stanzas turn, they turn round, as a stanza [strophe] and an apostrophe always do. The two stanzas apostrophize more than one addressee.
Why point out, if not more than that, this allusion to the three, whether in connection with road (Dreiweg) or hands (Dreiweg/ Händen)? Because in fact we will soon be coming up against this motif of the third in the scene of possible/impossible testimony, of bearing witness that is possible as impossible. In its Latin etymology, the witness (testis) is someone who is present as a third person (terstis). We would have to look very closely at this to understand what it might imply. Testis has a homonym in Latin. It usually occurs in the plural, to mean "testicles." It even happens that Plautus plays on the word in Curculio, and exploits its being a homonym. Testitrahus means both complete and male, masculine. Some feminists, men or women, couldn't deprive themselves, enjoying or unjoying [s'en jouant ou sans jouer], of deriving from this an argument about the relations between a certain way of conceiving of the third person and bearing witness, on the one hand, and the chief, the head and phallocentric capital on the other. It is true that, in English, testis, testes has kept the sense of testicle—which could be an incitement to militancy.
In his Vocabulaire des institutions européennes [Dictionary of European Institutions], in the chapter on "Religion and Superstition," Benveniste analyzes a word, "superstes," which can mean "witness" in the sense of survivor: someone who, having been present then having survived, plays the role of witness. Benveniste makes an association between superstes and testis but also distinguishes them:
We can see the difference between superstes and testis. Etymologically, testis is someone who is present as a "third" (terstis) at a transaction where two persons are concerned; and this conception goes back to the Indo-European period of civilization.[3]
As always, Benveniste analyzes the etymology by following the line of a genealogical recollection which goes back to institutions, customs, practices, arrangements. In this valuable but profoundly problematic work which, as we see, wants to be a "dictionary of Indo-European institutions," the words are selected and then placed in a network according to the institutional figures of which they are also assumed to be, precisely, the witnesses. The words bear witness to the institutions; the vocabulary attests to an institutional sense. But even if we suppose that the sense exists before and outside these words (an improbable or virtually meaningless hypothesis), it is at any rate certain that the sense does not exist without these words, which is to say without that which bears witness to it, in a sense of bearing witness which still remains highly enigmatic, but inescapable here. If the words bear witness to a usage and an institutional practice,[4] the paradox here is concentrated in the analysis of the word testis, terstis, which attests, with regard to knowledge, thus
A Sanskrit text says: "Every time two persons are present, Mitra is there as a third"; thus the god Mitra is by nature the "witness." But superstes describes the "witness" either as the one who "subsists beyond," witness at the same time as survivor, or as "the one who holds himself to the thing," who is present there. We see now what can and must be meant theoretically by superstitio, the function of the superstes. This will be the "property of being present" as a "witness."
Benveniste's statements here open onto the larger context that we could reconstitute, in particular around superstes, the survivor determined as witness, and around testis, terstis, determined as a third. The witness is the one who will have been present. He or she will have attended, in the present, the thing of which he is witness. Every time, the motif of presence, of being-present or of being-in-presence, turns out to be at the center of these determinations. In Le Différend, a book in which the question of the witness plays a large role, Jean-François Lyotard approaches this question of the witness as third person a number of times, without reference to Benveniste or to Celan. But by privileging the example of Auschwitz and the debate around "revisionism" (which is naturally a debate about the status of testimony or bearing witness and of survival), he problematizes the idea of God as absolute witness.[5]
Quite obviously, we must take into account an undeniable fact: like the institutions to which it is thought to refer, which it ought to reflect, represent, or incarnate, Latin semantics (testis, terstis, superstes) only denotes one etymologico-institutional configuration among others—and even one among others for "us," assuming that we can say "we" Westerners. It is not, for example, to be found in German as well. The family Zeugen, bezeugen, Bezeugung, Zeugnis, translated as "witness," "to bear witness," "testimony," "attestation," belongs to a completely different semantic network. One would be hard put, in particular, to find in it an explicit reference to the situation of the third, or even to presence. In the family of what we will not risk simply calling homonymy are all the words we have just read in the Celan poem (Zeug, Zeugen, Zeugung). Elsewhere, they also mean tool, procreation, engendering, and indeed generation—both biological and familial. After what the word "témoin" [witness] (terstis, testis) bears witness to [témoigne]by its supposed genealogy, we have what is also witnessed to by the word Zeugen in its supposed genealogy or generation, etc. If we take account of the witness as terstis superstes, as surviving third, and even as inheritor, guardian, guarantee, and legatee of the will and testament, ultimately of what has been and has disappeared, then the crossover between on the one hand a genealogical or generational
Crossover of a vertiginous filiation, yes, perhaps. But it is vertigo which turns our head, vertigo in which we are going to turn and let ourselves be turned round, and not only between the tropes and stanzas of Celan.
In English, the Latin root does of course remain, with testimony and to testify, attestation, protest, testament. So it articulates together for us the two themes of survival and of witnessing, etc. But the family of witness and bearing witness is quite different, presumably opening out onto the aspect of seeing, and thus towards another semantic and poetic space in the final words of Celan's poem in translation: "No one/bears witness for the/witness." Finally—but this is where we should have begun—Greek makes no explicit reference to the third person, to surviving, to presence, or to generation: martus, marturos, the witness, who will become the martyr, the witness to faith, does not literally imply any of these values (third, surviving, presence, generation). Marturion means, to follow the institutional usage, "testimony," but also evidence or "proof."
Here we touch on a sensitive and heavily problematic distinction between testifying, bearing witness [témoignage], the act or experience of witnessing as "we"[6] understand it, and, on the other hand, proof; between testifying and, on the other hand, theoretical-constative certainty. This is both an essential distinction and one that is in principle insurmountable. But in practice the confusion always remains possible, so fragile and easily crossed can the limit sometimes appear, and whatever language and word is used. For this is not reserved for the Greek marturion alone: the Latin testimonium—bearing witness [témoignage], giving evidence, attestation—can come to be understood as proof. So language cannot of itself alone, as a lexicon or dictionary would do, be guardian and guarantee of a usage. A pragmatic slippage from one sense to the other, sometimes in the passage from one sentence to the other, can always occur. We should ask for what necessary—not accidental—reasons the sense of "proof" regularly comes to contaminate or divert the sense of "bearing witness." For the axiom we ought to respect, it seems to me, even though it may be problematized later, is that bearing witness is not proving. Bearing witness is heterogeneous to the administration of a legal proof or the display of an object produced in evidence. Witnessing appeals to the act of faith with regard to a speech given under oath, and is therefore itself produced in the space of sworn faith ("I swear to speak the truth"), or of a promise involving a responsibility before the law, a promise always open to betrayal, always hanging on this possibility of perjury, infidelity, or abjuration.
What does "I bear witness" mean? What do I mean when I say "I bear witness" (for one only bears witness in the first person)? I mean not "I prove," but "I swear that I have seen, I have heard, I have touched, I have felt, I have
The addressee of the witnessing, the witness of the witness, does not see for himself what the first witness says he has seen; the addressee has not seen it and never will see it. This direct or immediate non-access of the addressee to the object of the witnessing is what marks the absence of this "witness of the witness" to the thing itself. This absence is therefore crucial. It thus hangs on the speech or the mark of testimony inasmuch as it is dissociable from what it bears witness to: the witness is not present either, of course, present in the present to what he recalls, he is not present in the mode of perception, inasmuch as he bears witness, at the moment when he bears witness; he is no longer present, now, to what he says he was present to, to what he says he perceived; even if he says he is present, present in the present, here, now, by what is called memory, memory articulated in a language, to his having-been-present.