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This study offers a critical reading of several contemporary modalities of engagement outlined in the socio-literary trajectories of writers Annie Ernaux and Chahdortt Djavann. In the works of these writers, the dimensions that arise from a desire to renew how the writer intervenes are visible through a writing style which continually blurs the borders between fiction and documentary, individual perceptions of the world and the collective dimension of events. In doing so, it will interrogate the power of witnessing as a means of making possible the interchangeability of that which is private and that which is public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of female possession in Zinder schools in Niger, a phenomenon that most often results in collective trance scenes (Soumana, 2010). In this regard, the objective is to analyze the social representations of this phenomenon in the secondary schools of Zinder in Niger. On the basis of semi-structured interviews with the parents of the possessed, the student witnesses and the teachers, the analysis made it possible to understand the social representations of the chatter genius (idea of the supernatural of the appearance of the chatter genius in schools, origin of semantics), in Niger. However, some quantitative data collected from possessed women shows that the phenomenon affects young college girls more. The analysis also shows that the perceptions of students and teachers, religious beliefs and practices pertaining to animism and Islam influence the emergence of the nosology of the chatting genius (Aljanni me auran mata in Hausa). Since its appearance in Niger and mainly in Zinder, the chatter genius has first affected the regions acquired by the cult of possession, notably Niamey and Maradi, then that of Zinder. In addition, the analysis made it possible to understand that the existing interactions between heterosexual peers at school, most often resulting in chatting and romance, are at the origin of the concept of chatting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between memory and history, the stories of Jewish deportees and Spanish refugees detained at the Rivesaltes camp are rich and complex discursive objects. We will try to bring to light and describe in language and in speech the verbs to remember, to recall, to forget on which the process of recollecting and the life stories of witnesses are based. This will involve examining the memory verbs used and then analyzing how they work in speech before concluding on the place and role played by these verbs in the testimony account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What’s in a memory? And what about many accumulated memories? In the theater, they are sometimes used as shibboleths: to be able to say “I was there” is to express that one belongs to a certain generation of spectators. This dialogue between fellow witnesses is often complemented by particular stories that may escape critical notice and involve unexpected thresholds of consciousness or perception. The present text offers a few examples of this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are living performances grasped by those who witness them and pass them on “before they settle between the pages […] of the encyclopedias of theater”? By what means, with what instruments, according to what attitudes and strategies? This introduction sets out the itinerary of the “polyphonic investigation” collected in this volume, while proposing a preliminary typology of its “empirical anthology” as well as some conceptual reference points (drawn from Husserl, Merleau-Ponty or Bergson). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the idea that a testimony is always constituted by at least three parts--the word of the witness, the listening of the one to whom it is addressed, and language as a symbolic register where speaking and listening are inscribed. Thus, the structure of testimony would not be captured only by the subjective formula "I was there"--a subject designates himself in reference to a past experience--, nor by the intersubjective formula "I am speaking to you"--a subject designates himself and his listener in the synchrony of the word addressing the other. What is also necessary to consider, in order to capture the structure of testimony, is that "there is language"--the testimony transcends diachronically the speaker and the hearer by inscribing them inseparably in the symbolic register that they share, namely language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Witnessing is an increasingly important theme in the work of Jean-Luc Marion. According to Marion, the witness can be considered an appropriate figure to define the first person, the "I," without reducing it to subjectivism and without envisaging the intersubjective tie as binary (dual or dialogic), inasmuch as the testimony refers instead to a ternary relation. The present analysis investigates the difference Marion identifies between the religious witness and what seems to be, according to common sense, the regular witness. While in the latter case, the subject is completely foreign to the event to which s/he testifies, in the case of the religious witness, the commitment is total. We will tackle this difference by showing that the fact of testifying always implies a connection with effectivity, which reveals itself through the profound commitment characterizing the witness's life, up to the point of death. This becomes obvious when considering the role played by the witness's confessing speech, which establishes an unsurpassable ternary relationship between the witness, the object of the testimony, and the one to whom it is addressed, by deploying an absolute form of the social bond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text articulates the concept of subjective truth developed by Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, in connection to a conception of testimony which both exceeds and reveals the possibilities of thinking and acting of the witness. This imbalance between the testimony and the witness finds an important extension in the distinction between the Saying and the Said made by Emmanuel Lévinas in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This distinction opens up an understanding of thought as affectivity and allows witnessing to be viewed in the light of responsibility to the other. By being part of this philosophical heritage, Jean-Louis Chrétien shows how the testimony of the infinite is also phenomenalized in the experience of a chant that discovers its own modalities in this excess of beauty on the voice that tries to say it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Witnessing after the "end of philosophy," in the sense in which Heidegger mentions it in his famous lecture on "The end of philosophy and the task of thinking"--what does this mean for us and our world today? As a preparation for an answer to this question, the present study proposes to elaborate a radical hermeneutics of testimony, by invoking French philosophers who can be qualified as "post-Heideggerian"--Lévinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, among others--whose thoughts on testimony were developed through the essential critique on Heideggerian idea of attestation (Bezeugung) and the creative reactivation of the semantic resources historically preserved by terms such as "witness" and "testimony". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the mediatized death of Jamel Dunn in Florida in 2017, this paper situates the event of death within familiar cycles of moral condemnation, on the left, and the context of recursive circuits of mediatized and racialized violence, on the right. As we watch ourselves watching the boys watching (and filming) his death, the paper hopes to complicate our understanding of digital hate speech, moral subjectivity, and culpability. Between the curse of death and its recursive afterlife, it advances a tentative claim about ethical complicity across our digital media ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on a new form of mediatization of testimonials. The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center (Skokie, United States) offers a "holographic theater" in which a surviving Holocaust witness can be interviewed. In this theater, everything happens as if the Great Witness were there in person, interviewed by a facilitator to answer questions from visitors. But the Great Witness is not there, only a recorded holographic projection appears with which visitors can converse. How can a program and an algorithm replace a human presence? Interviews with visitors are carried out in stimulated recall and allow us to understand the dynamics of an exceptional experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are three possible ways of access to phenomena of suffered violence: the first is the experience of those who have suffered violence themselves; the second is the experience of eyewitnesses; the third, which is the most frequent one, is an indirect access through the testimony of people belonging to the first two categories. Each way of access has advantages but also serious difficulties, both in terms of the objectivity of the experience and of the possibility to express it in language. No one is free from an affective and a normative dimension; this implies that there is a certain tension with regard to the phenomenological reduction. The paper offers an analysis of these ways of access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of the positions taken by Canadian Jewish Congress on the issues affecting the repression of civil liberties and the infringement of the rights of religious non-Catholic minorities in Quebec in the decade following the Second World War shed new light on our understanding of the place held by representatives of the Jewish community in the social human rights movement in Canada. The CJC – the main voice of the community – in fact remained on the fringe of the movement protesting the Duplessis regime, refusing to condemn the Padlock Act and supporting the repression of the Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious minorities considered to be “seditious” or “subversive.” The controversies that ensued due to these positions demonstrate the ideological, regional, and class divisions the Jewish community and the “human rights community” were undergoing in the postwar period. They expose the tensions that existed within the CJC, between the leaders from Ontario and the Canadian West and their counterparts in Quebec, confronted more directly with the repressive “great darkness” and the pattern of inter-faith relations in this mainly Catholic province. On a theoretical level, this study demonstrates that human rights are a fluid discursive category that may be mobilized differently according to activists, based on their ideologies, their identities, their interests, and the local context in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ecclesiology of Wolfhart Pannenberg witnesses to the praiseworthy effort to reinscribe the Church in its theological reality, by means of the work of the Spirit which establishes it, beyond the simple gathering together of the baptised. It remains however dependent upon the abiding principles of Lutheranism which sees in the Church only a provisional reality, sign of the Kingdom which is essentially eschatological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Unity of the philosophical experience paints in an overall view going through various historical doctrines, the progress of the human spirit itself taken in the unity of its relation to philosophy. This book, which has no French equivalent, was published in 1937, and is one of the major witnesses to the philosophical -- and not only historical as is sometimes supposed -- work of Gilson. The remarkable recent translation has revived interest for it in the French speaking world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato si' constitutes a deepening of the Church's teaching on ecology, along the lines of what was sketched out by Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The integral character of the ecological preoccupation, which is found also in other realms of the political and social doctrine of the Church, bears witness to its anthropological nature. It invites towards a new presentation of the ethical bases, both individual and communitarian, of human activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Violence is inherent to human beings, it is even essential for the creation of a link with the other one, in the process of the psychological birth of the subject. The family is the place of prohibition of incest and murder where the child can learn how to manage his destructive impulses, but it is sometimes the place of his overflowing. At this point, it is about the destruction of the subject and the psychopathology of the link. Domestic violence prevails when the law of the strongest, exercised by one of the members of the family, replaces the common law of the exchange which is the basic foundation of the family as well as of the society. Child witness to marital violence attends with helplessness and thus with passivity, marital alarming scenes. It affects his psychic construction because these acting-outs meet his own destructive fantasies. Consequently, the anguishes are inescapable, but they differ according to the psychological maturity of the child, that is to say according to whether the scenes occur before, during, or after the oedipian stage. The future of the anguish will join or not to a trauma, in front of a situation that cannot be assimilated. “Identification with the aggressor” appears as the most frequent mechanism of defense, and will have long-term effects sometimes as generational repetitions, as we will show it in a clinical illustration revealing all the devastating impact of marital violence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The logic of evidence in Bartolistic literature, A reading of the Summa circa testes et examinationem eorum (Ms. Bruxelles, B.R., II 1442, fol.101 ra – 103 rb). – Bartolus teaches how to read testimonies from a logical point of view. On the one hand, the facts that the witness recounts constitute the minor premise of a syllogism, its conclusion being their legal characterization; therefore he is prohibited from pronouncing directly on any legal matter. On the other hand, given that the witness' knowledge of the facts has to stem from sensory perception, the information he provides has at least to constitute the minor premise of another syllogism, making for establishing the causa of his testimony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of the various possible relationships between religion and nationalism, this article focuses on the study of denationalizing theodicies. These theodicies are connected to various communities which are peripheral with respect to the systems of historical action. We therefore propose an idealtypic model to contrast the nationalization and clericalization processes, which legitimate state and church bureaucracies, with the theisation and denationalization processes of dissident religious movements. This model is then used to decipher the relationships between three religious groups--the Jehovah's Witnesses the Montreal Hassidim and the Catholic Pentecostalists--and the nationalist processes connected with the production and reproduction of the Canadian and Quebec states. The various transactions made lead to a limited partial acceptance of the State--particularly the Canadian state--on the part of the groups analysed, but a persistent rejection of the codes of national recognition, i.e. of nationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was Bryan R. Wilson who once remarked that the Jehovah's witnesses are so much concerned with recruitment that their whole movement is organised essentially towards the work of "publishing the good news" (Wilson, 1967:15). In a sense this remark is somewhat deceptive. The work of "publishing the good news" should not be mixed up with genuine recruitment, the latter being a possible--but not a necessary--sequel to the former. All Witnesses are engaged in publishing their message, convenient or inconvenient ; they are engaged in straight recruitment, however, only when and where they see their chance. Not all individuals outside the Watch Tower movement are, as it were, cut out for becoming serious candidates for membership, and the ordinary Witness is fully aware of this. Therefore, trying to avoid casting pearls before swine, he only proceeds to deliberate recruitment alter having separated non-promising and promising outsiders. In this paper the latter category is examined on the basis of Dutch research data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russell's failure to provide his movement with a clear authority structure together with the disappointment of 1914 led to central and local schisms alter his death, in which informal elites in the movement struggled for power. Russell's movement split into different groups, each emphasising a part of his message. The Pastoral Bible Institute catered for the introversionist perspective of individual character development and contemplative study ; the Laymen's Home Missionary Movement emphasised the exegetical and doctrinal complexity purveyed by a charismatic leader; the Watch Tower Society under Rutherford concentrated on evangelisation and en passant a rigid, centrally controlled sect structure ; and finally the Dawn Bible Student Association catered for those elements in Russell's following who eschewed the extremes and moved towards a denominational position, Rutherford, through the Watch Tower Society, succeeded in changing all aspects of the sect from 1919 to 1932 and created the Jehovah's Witnesses--a schismatic offshoot from the Bible student community. The subsequent development of the Jehovah's Witnesses and Bible student groups is used to illustrate a number of central sociological issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Watch Tower movement saw considerable expansion in northern France, especially in the mining basin where it essentially recruited Polish emigrant workers, but also French workers in lesser proportions. The author attempts to retrace the history of the spread of the movement in this region and examines the causes of its unique development in France. These causes could be linked to the social conditions of this population: social and cultural change, unsatisfied expectations, absence of political power, a crisis of confidence in the Catholic Church. They could also be subsumed under a more global hypothesis according to which the Watch Tower movement would have constituted a substitute homeland for the emigrant Polish workers. As for the French Jehovah's Witnesses, it was seen that they partially shared the Polish workers' fate, and individual particularities had to be taken into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]