Impossibility

This chapter argues that the very prospect of witnessing in late modern public culture is defined by countervailing imperatives: the publicly lauded ideal that bearing witness to the past allows forgiveness, as compared to philosophical, theological, or literary arguments that it is impossible to effectively bear witness to atrocious violence or indescribable tragedy. The combined wisdom of frequently invoked postwar commonplaces holds that witnessing is, in a rhetorical sense, both imperative and impossible. This aporia warrants deeper consideration of the rhetorical, as well as political and moral, goods of witnessing. Chapter 5 identifies the widely promoted ideal of forgiveness in late modernity as a timely test case with which to consider the worldly rhetorical effects that witnessing may be said to produce. Examining popular as well as institutional relationships between witnessing and forgiveness suggests crucial insights regarding the rhetorical efficacy of witnessing as a now-commonplace idiom in Western public culture.