The signature of the disaster: witness-ness in death camp and tsunami survivor testimony

The prominence of witness testimony in a range of contemporary political events is reflected in interdisciplinary efforts to theorise the act and genre of witnessing. Notably, this literature has framed the occurrence of errors, contradictions, and other instances of "problematic" speech in testimony as attesting to the traumatic quality of disastrous events. In this paper we extend this line of reasoning by recasting the fundamental quality or "witness-ness" of disaster survivor testimony outside a logic of representational correspondence. Instead, drawing on the philosophy of Maurice Blanchot, we suggest that the disorienting features of testimony can be interpreted as the disruptive influence or inscription of the disaster itself on the recollections of survivors; a certain "writing of the disaster." Furthermore, we suggest that different disasters disrupt the testimonies of its survivors in unique ways, thus imprinting a signature that betrays the material and psychological character of the event. The "witness-ness" of survivor testimony is therefore argued to dwell not in its representational accuracy, but in the distinctive, signature ways that it disorients the search for a coherent accounting of the disaster. We explore this proposition first in relation to Nazi death camp survivor testimony, before exploring this approach in the very different testimonial context of the 2011 tsunami in Tohoku, Japan. In the wake of these readings, we argue that the concept of the signature has potential not only for broadening the repertoire of testimonies admissible in the study of disaster, but also for investigating the societal impacts and "countersignatures" of disasters more generally.