What is the meaning of this growing predominance of testimony as a privileged way in the contemporaneity of transmission and communication? Why has testimony at the same time become so central and so ubiquitous in our last accounts of ourselves?
What, however, is at stake in the broader, deeper and least definable crisis of truth? What testimony does not offer is, however, a complete affirmation, a totalizing account of these facts. In testimony, the language is in process and prosecuted, it does not appear as a conclusion, such as the finding of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge. Testimony is, in other words, a discursive practice, as opposed to a pure theory. To testify - to swear, narrate, promise, and produce one's own discourse as material proof for the truth - is to perform an act of speech, without simply making an assertion. As an act of performative speech, testimony actually points to what in history is action that exceeds any corroborated significance, and that in events it is an impact that erupts any of the conceptual reifications and the constatative delimitations.