LEADER 03706cam a2200373Ia 4500001 28363 005 20240621143544.0 008 980415s1996 xx r 000 0 eng d 035 (OCoLC)38572083 035 28363 049 LHMA 040 LHM |beng |erda |cLHM 090 D804.7 |b.M55 1996 100 1 Millet, Kitty. 245 10 To survive outside the law : |bthe testimonial communities of Holocaust survivors / |cby Kitty Judith Millet. 264 1 [Place of publication not identified] : |b[publisher not identified], |c1996. 300 iv, 247 pages 336 text |btxt |2rdacontent 337 unmediated |bn |2rdamedia 338 volume |bnc |2rdacarrier 502 Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 1996. 504 Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-246). 520 This interdisciplinary dissertation reflects on humanist scholarship's failure to analyze Holocaust survivor testimony. I give the reason for this failure in the introduction: the unique purposiveness of survivor testimony conflicts with the general purposiveness of testimony to serve communal interests. To illustrate how testimony subscribes to communal interests, I explore its use from the pre-Socratics to modernity. Modernity's codification of testimony as an object of knowledge, which conforms to the expectations of rule-based judgments, indicates that testimony is judicially-centered rather than victim-centered. But the purposiveness of survivor testimony orders its testimony to be victim-centered. The survivor's centrality to this purposiveness presupposes an ethics in which survivors are both victims and witnesses; thus they retain a personal interest in their testimonies. This duality fails legal protocols and produces aberrant and "incredible" testimonies. To become credible, the witness jettisons the victim's personal interest because it invalidates the witness. Therefore, the first chapter unites modernity's "rules of evidence" with the categorization of testimony as personal memory. Testimonies become necessarily fallible because they derive from a flawed faculty. However, survivors' case studies contradict this supposition: survivors' memories are vivid, dynamic, and incontrovertible. The survivors have been marked indelibly as victims of the Nazis. The produced testimonies are, then, both for the witness and for the victim. Because of this dual purposiveness, the survivor calls for an interlocutor who can hear the testimony. The second and third chapters examine this call through the works of Jean Amery and Primo Levi. Since the call is unconditioned, it can become a risk if the interlocutor rejects the survivor's purposiveness. Thus Levi demands "an ethics of witness." In the last chapters, I describe this ethics by comparing Shoshana Felman's theory of bearing witness to survivor testimony. Felman fails the survivor because she substitutes an observer's purposiveness for the survivor's. Therefore, I conclude that interlocutors forfeit the reimagination of survivor testimony for its remembrance. 530 Electronic version(s) |bavailable internally at USHMM. 533 Photocopy. |bAnn Arbor, Mich. : |cUMI Dissertation Services, |d1997. |e22 cm. 590 Dissertations and Theses 591 Record updated by Marcive processing 21 June 2024 650 0 Holocaust survivors. 650 0 Philosophy. 856 41 |uhttp://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=743176241&sid=8&Fmt=6&clientId=54617&RQT=309&VName=PQD |zElectronic version from ProQuest 956 41 |u http://dc.ushmm.org/library/bib28363/9635878.pdf |z Hosted by USHMM. 852 0 |bstacks |hD804.7 .M55 1996 852 |bwww 852 |bebook