Lecture
LCCP Colloquium "Testimony and Deliberative Practices"
- Date
- Tuesday 25 March 2025
- Time
- Series
- Centre for Continental Philosophy 2024-2025
- Location
-
P.J. Veth
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden - Room
- 0.06
The Centre of Political Philosophy and the Leiden Centre of Continental Philosophy are pleased to announce a lecture by Prof. Dr. Manca Erzetič. She has recently joined the International Center of Studies on Contemporary Nihilism (CeNic) as a research fellow. Prof. Erzetič holds a Ph.D. from the University of Ljubljana with a dissertation entitled Witnessing in Philosophy and Literature within the Historical Situation of the 20th Century. She works as a researcher at the Institute Nova Revija for the Humanities and currently teaches philosophy at the Faculty of Slovenian and International Studies at the New University (Slovenia). She is also the author of several academic and critical articles in the fields of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and cultural studies.
In my paper I focus on the relevance of testimony for deliberative practices, which can be said to have been under-emphasised in previous debates on deliberation. This seems relevant not only when it comes to considering deliberative practices in relation to historical time and its effects, but also directly in terms of their current applicability. Indeed, testimonies, by appearing in different contexts (personal and interpersonal, documentary, literary, legal, historical, religious etc.), can assume a crucial mediating role in different life-world situations. It is for this reason that I will first provide an existential and co-existential basis for understanding the phenomenon of testimony, which defines the different contexts in which it occurs and which has a common human value. In the second part, I will focus on the relationship between testimony and truth-telling, which seems to be of particular relevance for deliberative practices. I would like to mention here the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who is considered, especially on the basis of his Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive (1998), as one of the main theorists of testimonial experience. As I will show through a critical analysis of his discussion of testimony and truth in the recent book When the House Burns Down - From the Dialect of Thought (2022), some key points of departure for understanding and implementing deliberative practices are offered here.
All are welcome!