How Can Silence Become A Witness

“Silence” has a long history and has undergone evolution.From its core meaning,this term means the absence of speech/writing;from the perspective of its occurrence,this term implies a complex relationship between the unsayable/unwritable and the linguistic representation.Since the Second World War,silence suddenly gained the attention of the academic circles,and had presented a cultural phenomenon among interdisciplinary domains.For example,it is reflected in the fact that silence,as the absence of “testimony”,fundamentally challenged the representation limit of the event of Holocaust.Silence is an important starting point for Agamben’s rethinking of the after-Auschwitz proposition.For him,Auschwitz’s witnessing problem is not only about the disintegration of the words,but also about the inner silence of the words.This silence is not only captured by the biopolitical mechanism of the concentration camp,but also opening up a new ethical domain,which is called “the gray zone”.In this zone,the humanity of the witnesses(the ambiguity between good and evil)and the attitude of their testimony(the loss of justice)perhaps are unreliable,which exposes the testimony itself to the crisis of representational failure.But Agamben believes that it is still necessary for survivors to bear witness,because only they can assist the speechless to resume the mission of claiming the historical truth.In order to truly bear witness,on the one hand,the subject of the witness must give way to the “non-subject”of the speechless;on the other hand,the witnesses must yield testimony to the“non-language” spoken by the speechless,which makes the existing biopolitical mechanism be suspended.Agamben’s study of testimony contains two major problem domains about the“survival” and the “poetics”.As for the former,Agamben regards “Muselmann”/the living dead as the core code of the concentration camp,exploring the paradoxical dislocation between the survival and testimony.According to this special paradigm figure,the biopolitical construction of the 20 th century must be revised and reconstructed as “to make survive”.As for the latter,Agamben focuses on an experience of shame in an “anti-tragic conflict”.According to this unique experience,he found his witness paradigm for the “survival-remnant” people,and also found his testimony paradigm for the “survival-remnant” words.Both of them have a strong poetic direction.With the “poetry-testimony-truth”,Agamben tries to summon a messianic-redemptive and remaining hope.Overall,Agamben’s theoretical contribution is reflected in: finding a third way out for the representational dilemma of the Holocaust,that is,bearing witness to the ambiguous "non-" threshold of Auschwitz.This is a possible scenario for the present society to produce a new history.However,the shortcomings of Agamben’s theory are also reflected in the fact that he gives “remnants” too strong theological redemption,so that the testimonial effectiveness of interrupting the biopolitical mechanism is weakened at present,and he also makes the particularity of “remnants”too prominent out,so finally there is a risk of falling into agnosticism and historical nihilism.