Full text of one of Aadi Arya Karthik submissions for a class at Oxford.
“The Testimonial Problem of τέχνη”
There is a motif common to several Balkan folktales, most prominently the Greek
“The Bridge of Arta” and the Serbian “The Building of Skadar”: a prince or master builder is
forced to immure his beloved young wife within the foundations of a large construction
project to put an end to its repeated collapsing. Perhaps “The Building of Skadar” is most
exemplary: in it, the motif is elaborated by the presence of three brother princes, each
married, and a master builder who is told by a mountain-spirit that the fortress upon which he
is laboring will not stand without the sacrifice of one prince’s wife. The three brothers agree
to determine by chance which of their wives is to die, but the older two renege and warn their
wives, leaving the youngest’s wife—the only one with child—to be sent to her death. When
she realizes what is being done to her, she demands that a hole be made in the foundations so
that she may continue to nurse her child.
The battle-lines are clearly drawn: on one side stands τέχνη (the master builder) allied
with the Law, both that of man (the princes) and that of nature (the mountain-spirit); against
all this, a single woman—martyr and μάρτυς, witness. The outcome of the encounter is
deeply ambivalent: the woman loses her life, and any trust she had in her husband, in the
Law, but emphatically keeps hold of her femininity, in this case her ability both to nurse her
own baby and (per the end of the folktale) to restore. Insofar as the martyr is witness she is
witness to what she possesses, despite the efforts of the Law to strip all that is owned in the
conventional sense from her: here a motherhood, elsewhere (in the hagiography of a Saint
Lucia or Saint Agnes, say) a virginity.
The witness is always caught between her witnessing and the Law: Derrida calls this
the “testimonial problem of τέχνη.” What is characteristic of testimony is that it is always a
second option, always an inferior substitute for proof, and thereby fallen; and, in the Law’s
appropriation of the witness, the former is attempting to handwave this deficiency,
improperly elevate to the status of proof what is not proof. We may name this handwaving
representational thinking, following Heidegger, or more accurately statistics: in statistics the
witness is demanded and asserted to the world to be perfectly faithful reporter of reality, just
as a lab-scientist might. For a perfectly faithful reporting of reality to take place would
require the perfect cooperation of the reality which played itself out, of the language to be
used in the report, and of the self to be called to the stand and interacted with: of perfect
transmission within the Lacanian Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. This amounts to nothing
less than the assertion not only that unfallenness is attainable, on par with the still vaguely
respectable Hegelian assertion that utopia will come once the institutions we have already
thought up and begun to implement have fully actualized themselves, but that it has already
been attained: the utterly unsupportable hubris of the Fukuyama-types. Unsupportable? But
whom does it concern, for whom is it scandal, apart from the overly inquisitive philosopher,
that the Law consents on the sly to the necessary fictionality, surreality, particularity of that
testimony, the universal reliability of which is what is cited in support of its being awarded
legitimacy? No one, after all, has ever proved that there is anything at all wrong with being
wrong.
The testimonial problem of τέχνη gestures toward the crisis, dramatized in “The
Building of Skadar,” in which, in some cases, the subject does not accept the deal the Law
offers to her: it is common knowledge that what afflicts her is her imperfection, that what she
requires is legitimacy; it is also known that what the Law needs is the image of functioning as
sole purveyor of legitimacy; why, then, does the subject not accept the legitimacy the Law is
willing to offer her in exchange for her simple cooperation, her cooperation in receiving this
legitimacy? Out of petulance, perhaps, where petulance is the name for the witness’ witness
to her own knowledge, come by with difficulty, of what imperfection consists in—of her own
imperfection. A questioning of this knowledge’s value is of course a questioning of the value
of the subject, so much of whose life has been dedicated to the obtainment of this knowledge;
and this obtainment-askesis will certainly have had its opportunity cost. That is to say, the
subject lacks much that others have: the prince’s wife lacks the simple power over the
environment, the agency, which her husband and the men around her possess, lacks the favor
bestowed upon both of her sisters-in-law, the love of her own husband. For the subject was
directly presented with a choice: have this pretense at legitimacy, or have knowledge both of
one’s own illegitimacy and of the unknowing (and hence less honest, worse) illegitimacy of
those who participate in the pretense at legitimacy. In all probability she was not let herself
make this choice; she only inherited a situation at birth in which for her it was fated to be in
one way or in the other. The actual immediate choice offered to the prince’s wife in the
folktale, for example, is not the real choice between life and morality but the non-choice
between morality (the appeal to be able to continue with one’s mothering in death) and
nothing, death without consolation. Given that she has ended up with the latter (for which
womanhood in one of its many contradictory forms is a stock symbol), she is called upon to
convincingly justify the superiority of the choice which she was made to make: naturally, this
would take the form of an appeal to intellectual honesty, to an obligation toward the
dispelment of illusions no matter the consequences. But certainly, like all justifications,
rationalizations, this one takes place purely after the fact. And nothing can change the fact
that the subject’s position is itself deeply and perhaps untenably antinomic: I am giving a
fiction, she says, not a testimony; and no proclamation of yours will alter this basic truth; but
this is itself testimony toward her knowledge of herself and the situation, each fiction being a
testimony no less than each testimony is a fiction. To insert knowing-my-fallenness as real
skin between being-fallen and being-unfallen is to conjure a “partial unfallenness” to which
knowing guarantees access; yet it is property of fallenness that there is a difference in kind
between it and its opposite, and what is characteristic of the gap which such a difference
posits is its inability to be interpolated, to be bridged by measure, number. This is to say: the
one who knows their fallenness is asserting that she has something (she knows) and has
nothing (she is fallen) simultaneously; the time-honored φάρμακον in such a situation—see
e.g. the episode with Laelaps and the Teumessian Fox, but also the fact that martyrs are after
all martyred—is the death and catasterism of those involved, but it is not exactly clear what
this would have to do with anything: the martyr gains nothing by putting herself to death; the
world, seeing nothing wrong with incoherence, antinomy, does not see why it ought to put the
martyr to death. It might perhaps be said that the presence and pervasion of such an antinomy
is precisely what it means that the subject is fallen.
In general, when the martyr is already determined as martyr, her encounter with the
Law cannot result in anything but her death—her being put to death thanks to her refusal to
cooperate, her unrepentant perjury, her loyalty to a “higher” morality: that inflicted upon her
by language or by God. The martyr never desires death: even the Circumcellions, a group of
Christians who allegedly would roam the North African deserts and assault travellers in
pursuit of martyrdom, were after a confrontation with the Law and not simply suicide. And
the orthodox martyr does not even seek out such a confrontation; the prince’s wife, after all, is
certainly not looking to be immured. But is the death which is the martyr’s a death in the
familiar sense? In Blanchot and Heidegger, that is, we are presented with two conflicting
visions of the temporal character of death: death as what has always already come upon us,
our own being-dead-already (which is, per Blanchot, to be identified with death as imminent,
as not-too-far-off); and death as what is always yet to come, even one’s own justified
assertion that one will never die. Death at its most anindividual, antiparticular; death at its
most individual, particular. It might be said that, for Blanchot, death is original sin, while, for
Heidegger, death is even a release from the burden of original sin, a slipping through its fingers: the opposite phenomenon. And it is clear that the death the martyr earns for herself— at least in the stories—must be the latter, even as we all know that what is coming for us is the former: death as meaninglessness, as shirking of responsibility, as being gratuitously shot —as Blanchot might have been—by the Nazis, and so having failed to stop them. Thus we come upon the greatest irony of martyrdom: the actual dramatic encounter with the Law in which the martyr is allowed to be martyr, to testify to their own inability to testify, to exhibit a certain nobility—this is in each real situation evaded, this never takes place, for the death which it would bring about with it is not a death we see except in the most stylized, the most fictional of fictions. There are no martyrs, there are no witnesses, and so there is no testimonial problem of τέχνη, for there is no one to object to τέχνη’s always marching onward. So it historically always has been, and will be.
Aadi Arya Karthik 