Witnessing and the Failure of Communication

Abstract

This article examines the Romani Holocaust experiences by mapping out the silences that haunt this question. As a case study, the article uses the testimonial documentary Porraimos: Europe’s Gypsies in the Holocaust and argues that the Romani Holocaust question is entangled in a moral discourse described in Lyotard’s Le Differend. Bearing witness to the differend can give new insights into the understanding of the Holocaust, the conceptualization of Romani identity, and the framing of media witnessing. The article concludes with a discussion of the face and its relation to witnessing arguing that the affective feel of the differend that interpellates one as a witness is delivered through the face.

Notes

1. ¹Recently, another documentary, A People Uncounted (Yeger, 2011), about the Roma Holocaust has received festival circulation.

2. ²Dominick LaCapra (2000) argues, “There is not a single name you might invoke that is entirely devoid of connotations or entirely innocent. In some way, that problem of implication … begins on the level of naming” (p. 160).

3. ³A roundtable discussion at the Symposium on Romany (Gypsy) Music and Culture at the New York University, November 21, 2011.

4. ⁴The gas chamber illustrates this point. It existed, but only those who died because of it could properly testify to its existence. Furthermore, “with Auschwitz, something new has happened in history … which is that the facts, the testimonies which bore the traces of here’s and now’s, the documents which indicated the sense or senses of the facts, and the names, finally the possibility of various kinds of phrases whose conjunction makes realty, all this has been destroyed as much as possible” (Lyotard, 1988, p. 57).

5. ⁵I thank my colleague Sun-Ha Hong for this observation.