a witnessing committed to the open structure of the future, to the foreign echoes emerging at the rim of this unbreachable gap. As Walter Benjamin allegorises, ‘translation finds itself not in the centre of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one’ (in Jennings and Bullock, 1996: 261) Translation reveals that speaking is located at the border of an uncrossable distance; at the edge of the forest of the unknown. It must recognise its own boundary yet remain faithful that there is still something that can pass through, even if it is just a faint echo of our voices.
References
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Bion, W.R. (1963) Elements of Psycho-Analysis. London: Heinemann.
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Bullock, M., Jennings, M. W. (1996) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 1. Metaphysics of Youth, Writings 1912–1926. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Clough, T.P. (2009) Reflections on sessions early in an analysis: Trauma, affect and ‘enactive witnessing’. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 19(2): 149–159.