[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

What confidence in the word of others reinforces is not just the interdependence, butthe shared common humanity, of the members of a community. This needs to be saidin fine to compensate for the excessive accent placed on the theme of difference inmany contemporary theories of the social bond. Reciprocity corrects for the unsubstitutabilityof actors. Reciprocal exchange consolidates the feelings of existing along withother humans – inter homines esse, as Hannah Arendt liked to put it. This “betweenness”opens the field to dissensus as much as to consensus. And it is the dissensus thatthe critique of potentially divergent testimonies will introduce on the pathway fromtestimony to the archive. To conclude, in the final analysis, the middle level of securityof language of a society depends on the trustworthiness, hence on the biographicalattestation, of each witness taken one by one. It is against this background of assumedconfidence that tragically stands out the solitude of those “historical witnesses” whoseextraordinary experience stymies the capacity for average ordinary understanding. Butthere are also witnesses who never encounter an audience capable of listening to themor hearing what they have to say. (p. 166)I think that here we have a firm grasp of the disturbing point, that keeps us in suspenseand requires the courageous response of attestation: to testify in spite of the feeling thatit is not heard. But this requires and calls for no less than the courage to hear, to listen.And it is also necessary that the listeners be believable, capable of rebuilding theirexistential consistency as listeners while really taking account of what they heard, andcapable of making it so that this experience, far from closing them, opens them to thepossibility of other experiences of listening. The reception of the testimony is as importanta critical element as its reliability. The whole question is to increase the public’s abilityto actually receive the testimony. This point seems quite important to me, and it seemslegitimate to me to consider that Ricoeur suggests it implicitly.In the lonely anguish to which we have just pointed, a thoroughly terrible philosophicalquestion slips in, the question of skepticism, that is also the one of solipsism. One comescloser here to Wittgenstein, and to the question of skepticism, i.e., the withdrawal of eachinto one’s private language, doubting that whatever it is can really be known or communicated.We need not believe that we can share our experiences so easily, and even lessto impose them on others. However, one does not remember all alone, and history is thework of many:In this regard, the earliest memories encountered along this path are shared memories,common memories (what Edward Casey places under the title “Reminiscing”). Theyallow us to affirm that “in reality, we are never alone”; and in this way the thesis ofsolipsism is set aside, even as a temporary hypothesis… In other words, one does notremember alone. (p. 121-122)It is precisely in the section on the exteriority of memory according to Maurice Halbwachsthat this formula intervenes. Ricoeur follows this up with the important remark that “it isthe connectedness of memory, dear to Dilthey…that has to be abandoned” and by thequasi-Leibnizian idea that “each memory is a viewpoint on the Collective Memory, thatthis viewpoint changes as my position changes.” (p. 122, 124)Credibility appears from then on as indissolubly linked to the test and exercise ofdissensus, of the feeling of discordant voices. This discordance can be mapped onto thegreat historical processes:100Osiel is drawn to the dissensus provoked by the trials’ public proceedings and to theeducational function exerted by this very dissensus on the level of public opinion and