[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

attestation slips a plurality, most notably an acceptance that my history can be recountedin diverse ways, represented by others. (p. 299) Moreover, it is in this intermediate timeand the indirectness of the connection to close relations that the range of our differencesof points of view in relation to an event is shaped, a gap that is the very shape of ourtemporality: what makes us contemporary can also make us anachronistic -- and the “petitmiracle de la reconnaissance” or of recollection is perhaps just such an experience ofanachronistic contemporaneousness.The civic dissensus appears then, just as it does with contemporaries, somewherebetween the judge and the historian, in a common rhetorical space open to discussion. Adiscussion that works our memory, argument, and even our imaginations tireless, and ofwhich we only know that the rules, boundaries, and audience are not the same, dependingon the spheres. The historians and the judges both must certainly at times find support inthe finality of the facts and on this practical perspective according to which history is notfinished; but they do it differently. And there is no absolute third party that allows themto settle this. (p. 314f)However, it is exactly this dissensus that forms citizens capable of standing in theabsence of a last judgment, capable of holding the tension of the sharing of theresponsibility between the singular imputation of fault to the guilty individuals, and thepolitical imputation to a consenting community. The citizen appears in the refusal thatguilt be so tightly focused that all others can unload it onto a few guilty emissaries. Butthe citizen also appears in the refusal that responsibility is so diluted, explained, compared,and relativized, that no one is responsible for anything. (p. 330) The citizen is moved totake the responsibility on herself and share it.3. The Credibility and Conflict of the Good WitnessWe will to come back to this point, as we now go far afield, and it will be our first longdigression. One of the main problems that Ricoeur faces in this book, and which is foundas much on the major side of representing of the past as on the minor side of just memory(neither too much nor too little), is the one of the credibility. In this he connects with thealternative that frightened Giovanni Levi, that men believe they can know everything,represent everything, say everything, and thus tumble into general skepticism, either byimpossibility or, worse, with the feeling that any hypothesis, if well enough equipped, canbe verified. Ricoeur writes:What finally brings about the crisis in testimony is that its irruption clashes with theconquest made by Lorenzo Valla in The Donation of Constatine. Then it was a matterof struggling against credulity and imposture, now it is one of struggling againstincredulity and the will to forget. (p. 176)It is this remark that I would like to meditate on in the lines that follow, because Ricoeurmakes a sensible point not only about the historic condition, but about the contemporarycondition, and language and politics in general. And I believe it important to point outeverything in the book that bears on it because I believe that it is one of the main questionsthat the book leaves us with, a common question that it opens.In the cited passage Ricoeur speaks of archives. But more broadly it is of course aboutthe credibility of the testimonies, that asks, beyond the critical confrontation, a minimumof mutual approval, the acceptance that there can be for each something indubitable: “wehave nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assure ourselves thatsomething did happen in the past.” (p. 147) It is the foundational thesis of the book.98