Blackwell Reference Online

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Jacques Derrida has repeatedly urged the need to distinguish between bearing witness and proof. His engagement with ethics and literature gives rise to a fascination with the act of giving testimony, an act that only has meaning “before the law” ( Derrida 2000a : 191). In order to bear witness there must be a listener or an addressee “to whom the witness is joined by a contract, an oath, a promise” ( Derrida 2000a : 190). Unlike other forms of communication centered on the transmission of knowledge or information, the act of testifying demands commitment and foregrounds its structural reliance upon the faith of an other: “The witness promises to say or to manifest something to another, his addressee: a truth, a sense which has been or is in some way present to him as a unique and irreplaceable witness” ( Derrida 2000a : 194). Hence the importance of recognizing the distinctions between testimony (requiring faith) and proof (associated with the order of knowledge) to which Derrida draws our attention. Yet, while he goes to great lengths in both Demeure and “‘A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text:’” to stress the difference between these two categories, bearing witness and proof, he recognizes that, in practice, the borders defining the two are continually breached: “The whole problem consists in the fact that the crossing of such a conceptual limit is both forbidden and constantly practiced” ... log in or subscribe to read full text