MĂRTURIA CA FENOMEN EXISTENŢIAL

In this article, I propose an exploration of the phenomenon of testimony. I argue that the phenomenological approach enables an integrative understanding of testimony, conceived as a phenomenon that engages the entire existential structure of the subject by articulating the interrelations between language, presence, memory, truth, and temporality. The witness is not only the one who provides testimony but, primarily, the one who confronts, in experiential presence, an event whose overwhelming meaning institutes the subject as a witness: either as an “enduring witness”, when the event primarily concerns the witness's ownmost self, or as an “eyewitness”, when it primarily involves another. Testimony thus reveals its significance within the tension between its ontological dimension, where the witness is understood as “being-there” in the presence of the event on the experiential level, and its hermeneutical dimension, where the witness is summoned before others on the level of language. Moreover, a further distinction can be drawn between the “confessing-witness”, whose testimony pertains to what they themselves endured, and the “third-party witness”, whose testimony concerns what was observed from a certain distance, without direct involvement.