Between Experience and Event. The Obligation of Witness

Abstract

The aim of this article is to outline the definition of literary testimony and to define the position of the witness as an obliged writer. A basic definition reveals testimonial literature as a set of texts, ontologically uncertain, full of tensions and aporias. These tensions between testimony and document, testimony and autobiography, and also relations truth-fiction, individual-collective, experience-event delimit the area of literary testimony. In this complicated structer the witness, charged, limited by the obligation with is double. This is the obligation to take an action — bear witness and the obligation towards the Other.