“Accessible, close and not lost, only one thing remained, in the midst of all the losses: the language”
Paul Celan
In virtual networks, in WhatsApp groups, in that digital environment where an important part of our political conversation takes place, videos of situations that occur outside that world multiply. On the train, on the subway, on the street. In transportation, some people speak up. They have no flyers or papers or anything to sell. They have a language, a testimony, a body. They tell their story. They were born to tortured women, they have children who need public health, they are health doctors, they went through the concentration camp. Everyone speaks on her behalf to remind us that there is life in common if crime does not become state policy. Each person makes their word fear and trembling the ultimate demand for understanding.
Language revives in these interventions. It shows unifying force, political recognition. It is not the language devastated by tautology, remade by a format that dismantles it into loose particles so that everything can be said and nothing of what is said matters, the language of denials and lies. We witness this devastation daily and with horror. In the way that a regime protected by the media and the digitalization of existence (in that new being-with-device that we are) corrodes the possibility of distinguishing truth and lies. Our tongue devastated in that impossibility.
The testimony is an incantation against that. It is not abstract argument. It is a present sensitivity that stops and says: I lived this, it happened to me, I come to tell you. The testimonial force is that mobilization of each cell, of each particle of the subject, to say here I am. Being is the one who does not lie, the one who prevents lies, the one who leaves the word in pure boldness. That is why testimony calls for embrace, even from those whom we do not know. We want to embrace that word that, thus incarnated, obliges us. And that is said not in a scene prepared to accommodate it – as happens, for example, in the judicial scene or in an assembly – but rather it bursts into the daily journey, in each person’s being in their own things, their virtual link, their personal communication. Breaks in and asks to be heard, anachronistic language of testimony.
A language is put into play and into the abyss. If it is not understood, nothing social still belongs to us. We inhabit a territory that is no longer that of agglutinated collective existence, but rather that of a hating distance. In part it is like that. The loud testimony comes to request their arrest, to remind us that we are a tense, torn, loving, living community. And that we are a community as long as we share that language, a language, capable of telling the truth. Every time someone stops on the subway or train to remind us what he or she experienced, to demand that we understand the politics of that particular experience, they ask us to live committedly the political condition of our lives. Which is the same as saying, let’s sustain the effort to live together, against the forces that bet on disintegration, violence, war and lies.
