列维纳斯、德里达与布朗肖:历史沉默深处,或历史之外的见证

Levinas,Derrida and Blanchot:Testimony,in the Depth of the Silence of History,or Beyond History

书写的人无法撇开艰难的职责。确切地说,今天,书写者应该服务的不是历史的制造者,而是历史的承受者。——加缪,1957年诺贝尔文学奖晚宴致辞①书写,当然,就意味着放弃,放弃联系,放弃姓名,同时又不是放弃,而是宣告,欢迎那不在场的,却又意识不到那不在场者——或者,通过文字,在文字内含的缺席中,书写成为与无法记忆之物的联系。

Since World War II,the crisis of testimony has always been an important and challenging problem in legal,political,and historical research.The rise of witness literature,the theme of which is explicitly or implicitly Holocaust,becomes an important opportunity for contemporary thoughts to reflect on the inherent limits,or the blind spots,of historical thinking,regarding the issue of testimony.It also revives the religious and poetic dimensions of the concept of testimony,which have been repressed or even erased by positivism in secular modernity.By analyzing Levinas’critique of history,Derrida’s explanation of the compossibility between witness and literature,and Blanchot’s discussion on the paradoxical relations among literature,memory,and forgetting,this paper argues that literature and art witness the unexperienced in the depth of silence of history,or,beyond history,and guard the non-relational relation with the immemorial.