Abstract

This article takes as its focus the question, raised by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their 1995 book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, of what it means for an event to be constituted by the collapse of its witness. The discussion centres on a reading of the moment Yehiel Dinoor, a writer also known as K-Zetnik and one of the few eyewitnesses at the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, falls out of the stand and into a coma while attempting to provide his testimony. By rethinking this historical trauma as a ‘collapse of witnessing’, I suggest Felman and Laub shift the focus from a purely cognitive or epistemological question — a problem of knowing and not-knowing — to a question of communicating to others: a problem of address. It is the circumstance of having ‘no one to whom one could say Thou’, as Laub puts it, that constitutes the Holocaust, for the victims, as what the authors call an ‘event without a witness’.