The Singularity of Witness : Memory, Poetry and the Refugee.

Struble, Maria Boikova (2008) The Singularity of Witness : Memory, Poetry and the Refugee. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis addresses the question of bearing witness. It hypothesizes that witnessing is singular in nature and as such, demands certain kinds of idioms. It problematizes modern politico-scientific conceptions of knowledge for their insistence on functionality, universalization and calculability. More specifically, it offers a systematic examination of witnessing in relation to the 'juridical,' the 'literary' as poetry, memory and the refugee. An underlying performative relationship between bearing witness, power and displacement will re-theorize the international order, defined by crises and liminality, as the condition of out-living sovereign, institutionalized security through negotiations borne out of the demands of lived experiences. An engagement with poetry and storytelling will engage the productive potential of language thereby challenging the scientific reduction of history, politics and memory to fact. Human beings, refugees more specifically, will be discussed as sentient in addition to being calculable and thus, as the very political agents, constituted and addressed through a rhetoric of responsibility, that inform the ways in which we as researchers comport ourselves in the world of humanity. Each chapter will address a specific component of witnessing in an effort to explain and understand better the nature of the productive, linguistic relationships that underwrite the practice of international relations.