La testimonianza del resistente. Peter Brandes, Paul Ricoeur e Primo Levi

To understand martyrdom, it is necessary to go back to the category to which it belongs: testimony. I begin and end the article by interpreting a work by Peter Brandes, in which he portrays a witness testifying for a murdered person (sections 1 and 5). In section 2, I analyze Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of testimony. According to Ricoeur, a philosophy of testimony is possible on the assumption that «the absolute makes sense for consciousness». I isolate four levels in Ricoeur’s philosophy of testimony: the testimony act, the testimony narration, the appropriation of the testimony narration, and the question on the possibility of a philosophy of testimony. In section 3, I find these four levels of testimony in Primo Levi’s writings on extermination camps. In Levi the first level is constituted by the «complete witnesses», the «drowned». However, there is another testimony act witnessed by Levi; I call it the testimony of the resister. In section 4, I briefly rephrase Friedrich Schiller’s theses on tragic art in terms of testimony as resistance to violence.