Abstract

The article focuses on a controversy between historians and psychoanalysts around the testimonial value of a Holocaust survivor (Serena N.). The survivor’s account of the Auschwitz uprising includes factual exaggerations, which has led historians to discard it. Psychoanalysts on the contrary stressed that the testimony accounted for something else: the possibility of resistance in the concentration camp, which gave the inmates hope in their struggle for survival. Survivors’ testimonies, so the argument, have both an epistemological and an ethical content. While philosophy’s insistence on the epistemological dimension of testimony has long generated a disregard for this ethical dimension, it would be equally wrong to construe a pure ethicality of testimony. Testimony is, first and foremost, an entangled social practice, which has tobe acknowledged in its agonal, its aporetic and its performative implications.