Commentary

In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

Can we now perhaps find the place where

strangeness was present, the place where a person

succeeded in setting himself free?

The stakes. Groping for words and a new conceptual framework, Warren Poland goes out on a limb. To many, his language—words like “witnessing” and “otherness,” and names like Heidegger and Levinas—will seem unfamiliar, strange, even out of place and unnecessary to psychoanalytic practice. With the concept of witnessing, though, Poland is after implications that outstrip our usual discourse and loom large in the background of our meaning making, Moreover, the philosophical stakes are larger still because Poland's topic by its very nature outstrips all discourse, not only the psychoanalytic. That is to say, Poland is after the inexpressible—the unspeakable—itself.

While he is never explicit, the connotations of his title and his references are unavoidable: Felman and Laub's book probes Holocaust voices of testimony; Emmanuel Lévinas survived the camps; Heidegger embraced the Nazis but after the war remained resolutely silent; and the very phrase “to bear witness” now implicates that singular unspeakable trauma of our century. The Holocaust is a philosophical, ethical, and religious black hole that absorbs but does not illuminate: it is an event that cannot be explained by other events, that nachträglich, after the fact and ever afterward, changes and altogether confounds historical comprehension. Why then this subtext? What are the stakes? What connection can this literature of extraordinary, unspeakable trauma possibly have with our workaday clinical world? Just why did Poland search here?

Poland, I submit, is after meaning that cannot be reduced to other, antecedent meaning. This is to say, he is in search of understanding that cannot be settled, that at best spirals into new meaning that is still not enough. Trauma, then, serves as a template for inadequate and so unstable