Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi, and the Foundations of Responsibility by Robert Harvey (review)

Many who read this review will have some familiarity with Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s 1952 ontological exploration of pause and purpose. Fewer will have grappled with the extreme minimalism of his later works, such as Film (1964), Lessness (1970), Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), and, most pertinent to the work at hand, Worstward Ho (1983). Robert Harvey, chair of the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and a professor of French and comparative literatures at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has undertaken such a mission, but not for the sole purpose of elucidating the later Beckett so much as to work toward a more challenging and, ultimately, more resonant task, to suggest a post-Holocaust universal ethics.

Witnessness is an insightful, thoughtful, playful, and useful book for scholars in many fields, literature, philosophy, and Holocaust studies among them. It is a newful book for those interested in Primo Levi and his concept of the “complete witness.” And it is a remindful book for those who see in Dante a philosopher of the contemporary, ante litteram. all right, so I do not pun as well as Harvey, and Harvey does not pun as well as Becket, but reading this book, with its copious -nesses (starting with the title) and jeux de mots (naught/knot/not, one/l’on/l’uom, etc.), one comes away with a renewed appreciation of the punfulness of English in its various forms—Hibernian, “standard,” and back-translated from French—and Harvey’s artfulness in exploding language to reveal precious kernels of acuity.

Harvey’s book opens with a preface, “Witnessness: The Coordinates.” The mathematical bent of his titling is in line with the process of verbal and conceptual addition and subtraction he applied and also governs the structure of the book itself. After the preface, Witnessness proceeds with twenty-five brief chapters, titled in the lowercase and most five to six pages long, on topics as varied as now and readerliness, with echoes of Becket (“lessness,” the title of his 1970 prose piece), Levi (“al fondo,” a slight variant on Levi’s chapter “Sul fondo,” in Survival in Auschwitz), and Dante (“dimness,” a nod to the selva oscura in which the pilgrim finds himself in Inferno 1:1). Harvey evokes Dante even in the structuring of his book, reminiscent of the three canticles of the Divine Comedy and Dante’s 1 + (33 × 3) structure (introductory canto + ninety-nine cantos divided evenly among three canticles). Here, similarly, our author provides an introductory chapter (on -ness, or capacity), plus twenty-eight chapters divided evenly among three groupings numbered in the manner of modern philosophical tomes (or contemporary software versions), starting at 1.1 and ending with 3.7.

The three “coordinates” of Harvey’s “algorithm of ethics” are witness, wit, and witnessness (x). These “lexographic constellations,” as he calls them, are inspired by Beckett’s Worstward Ho and are flanked by extensive readings of Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved and Dante’s Purgatory—“a bridging text (or perhaps a témoin) between Primo Levi and Samuel Beckett” (x). (It should be noted that Harvey adopts an erroneous title for Levi’s seminal work, calling Se questo è un uomo “If This Be a Man,” rather than If This Is a Man, although no subjunctive is used either in the original Italian or in Stuart Woolf’s English translation.) A fourth text should be added to this triad, however, and familiarity with it will aid the reader in imagining Harvey’s “ethics for everyone”—imagination being at the base of his stance—that is, Georges Didi-Huberman’s 2008 Images in Spite of All.

What, then, is witnessness? Harvey defines it as “the state, condition or potential for being a witness,” where witnessing contains “the key to the establishment of ethical relations among us” and wherein “witnesses alone may save the honor of the name, ‘human...