The Care of the Witness
A Contemporary History of Testimony in Crises

The Care of the Witness explores the historical shifts in the crises of witnessing to genocide, war, and disaster and their contribution to nongovernmental politics.

Michal Givoni (Author)

9781107150942, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 October 2016

250 pages
23.4 x 15.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

'It is nearly impossible to imagine politics today without witnesses and testimonies, writes Michal Givoni. And, they have fundamentally transformed what we mean by ethics after Auschwitz. However, her breathtaking book shows us how little we have really understood these upheavals. Virtually everything we thought we knew about them now needs to be rethought. Patiently reading her way through a rich theoretical and practical corpus, Givoni takes us from World War I through the Holocaust to Doctors without Borders and social media today, and demonstrates how we might approach witnessing and testimony in a genuinely critical manner - which is to say, to take them seriously, for ethics and for politics.' Thomas Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Project, Bard College, New York

During the twentieth century, witnessing grew to be not just a widespread solution for coping with political atrocities but also an intricate problem. As the personal experience of victims, soldiers, and aid workers acquired unparalleled authority as a source of moral and political truth, the capacity to generate adequate testimonies based on this experience was repeatedly called into question. Michal Givoni's book follows the trail of the problems, torments, and crises that became commingled with witnessing to genocide, disaster, and war over the course of the twentieth century. By juxtaposing episodes of reflexive witnessing to the Great War, the Jewish Holocaust, and third world emergencies, The Care of the Witness explores the shifting roles and responsibilities of witnesses in history and the contribution that the troubles of witnessing made to the ethical consolidation of the witness as the leading figure of nongovernmental politics.

Introduction
1. The ethics of witnessing and the politics of the governed
2. Witnessing beyond politics: testimony theory between Auschwitz and the crisis of representation
3. Witnesses as a public: the authority of experience and the critique of testimonies following the Great War
4. Empathic listeners and alarmed spectators: secondary witnessing and existential ruin in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies
5. Humanitarian governance and ethical cultivation: Médecins Sans Frontières and the advent of the expert-witness
Conclusion: revisiting the ethics of witnessing.

Subject Areas: Human rights [JPVH], Ethical issues & debates [JFM], Violence in society [JFFE], First World War [HBWN], Genocide & ethnic cleansing [HBTZ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], African history [HBJH], European history [HBJD], General & world history [HBG]