How Deep the Sky: Discussion of Special Issue on Evolution of Witnessing

Abstract

In discussing the articles by Laub, Knopp, Bodenstab, Hamburger, Alpert, and Bloch I highlight the experience of limit when considering Holocaust testimony. Limit marks the ability of our minds to be able to conceive of, know, and respond to the experience of massive trauma. Expanding the scope of this investigation illustrates existing human limitations, to be brutally demonstrated by the repeated failure of the civilized world to respond to post-Holocaust genocides, and demands complex understandings of their nature that include, but also go beyond, conceptualizations of dissociative not-knowing. I also consider the value of what I term “imaginative witnessing,” and its links to the aesthetics of telling a story, poetry, and to attachment theory. To the already developed notion of damaged or destroyed maternal introjects, I add the notion of the imperiled paternal introject as it relates to Holocaust survivors’ experiences of the breakdown of language, culture, and the ability to make meaning.