We explore the idea that a testimony is always constituted by at least three parts—the word of the witness, the listening of the one to whom it is addressed, and language as a symbolic register where speaking and listening are inscribed. Thus, the structure of testimony would not be captured only by the subjective formula “I was there”—a subject designates himself in reference to a past experience—, nor by the intersubjective formula “I am speaking to you”—a subject designates himself and his listener in the synchrony of the word addressing the other. What is also necessary to consider, in order to capture the structure of testimony, is that “there is language”—the testimony transcends diachronically the speaker and the hearer by inscribing them inseparably in the symbolic register that they share, namely language.

Witnessing after the “end of philosophy,” in the sense in which Heidegger mentions it in his famous lecture on “The end of philosophy and the task of thinking”—what does this mean for us and our world today? As a preparation for an answer to this question, the present study proposes to elaborate a radical hermeneutics of testimony, by invoking French philosophers who can be qualified as “post-Heideggerian”—Lévinas, Ricoeur, Derrida, among others—whose thoughts on testimony were developed through the essential critique on Heideggerian idea of attestation (Bezeugung) and the creative reactivation of the semantic resources historically preserved by terms such as “witness” and “testimony”.

This text articulates the concept of subjective truth developed by Søren Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, in connection to a conception of testimony which both exceeds and reveals the possibilities of thinking and acting of the witness. This imbalance between the testimony and the witness finds an important extension in the distinction between the Saying and the Said made by Emmanuel Lévinas in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. This distinction opens up an understanding of thought as affectivity and allows witnessing to be viewed in the light of responsibility to the other. By being part of this philosophical heritage, Jean-Louis Chrétien shows how the testimony of the infinite is also phenomenalized in the experience of a chant that discovers its own modalities in this excess of beauty on the voice that tries to say it.

Witnessing is an increasingly important theme in the work of Jean-Luc Marion. According to Marion, the witness can be considered an appropriate figure to define the first person, the “I,” without reducing it to subjectivism and without envisaging the intersubjective tie as binary (dual or dialogic), inasmuch as the testimony refers instead to a ternary relation. The present analysis investigates the difference Marion identifies between the religious witness and what seems to be, according to common sense, the regular witness. While in the latter case, the subject is completely foreign to the event to which s/he testifies, in the case of the religious witness, the commitment is total. We will tackle this difference by showing that the fact of testifying always implies a connection with effectivity, which reveals itself through the profound commitment characterizing the witness’s life, up to the point of death. This becomes obvious when considering the role played by the witness’s confessing speech, which establishes an unsurpassable ternary relationship between the witness, the object of the testimony, and the one to whom it is addressed, by deploying an absolute form of the social bond.

This article proposes to analyze the relations between ethics and the poetics of testimony. It does so by testing Paul Ricoeur’s analyses of testimony with the literary work of the Belarusian Nobel Prize winner Svletana Alexievitch. After having shown why witnessing occupies a type of expressivity that is singular in contemporary times, and then having been surprised by the strong links that unite witnessing and the experience of evil, Alexievitch’s work is chosen to explain what the resource of the poetic could be, in the face of the question of evil. Ultimately, the consequences are drawn for the development of a practical wisdom in which testimony would be in a good place.

In this article, the author explains the context and circumstances in which he begun, back in the 60s, the first French translation of Sein und Zeit, in collaboration with Alphonse de Waehlens. The article describes the methods and perspectives the first French translators adopted during their work of translation. The article ends with a few considerations concerning the incompleteness of the Heideggerian’s project of Sein und Zeit, explaining this nonachievement by Heidegger’s abandonment of the existential perspective he assumed in Sein und Zeit.

The author explains in a summary way a series of aspects which point to the need, now as well as 18 years ago, of a new Italian translation of Sein und Zeit. Besides the new interpretative perspective coming from the publication of Heidegger’s Freiburg and Marburg lectures, the inaccuracies of the first Italian translation (in both editions: of 1953 and 1970; the third edition 2005 maintains the original terminology of P. Chiodi) can be resumed to the following: 1. the translation stands upon an Existentialist interpretation of the existential analytic and does not comprehend that the Heideggerian meditation of die Frage nach dem Sinn vom Sein als solchen should be understood in a radically positive direction. 2. It shows an insufficient knowledge of Dilthey and Husserl, both playing an essential role in Heidegger’s philosophical project. 3. It does not take into account that the real object of Heidegger’s meditation in Sein und Zeit is the Vorfrage des Seins and the language of metaphysics; therefore it does not acknowledge the systematic character of his terminology and makes difficult the understanding of Heidegger’s Wende (which the first translation confounds with the Kehre of the Seinsfrage).

In the beginning of this article, the author discusses the biographical context of his engagement in the French translation of Sein und Zeit in the 1980s, under the guidance of Jean Beaufret. He integrates the discussion into the general problem of philosophical translation. The author argues that one of the most important things in this matter is the decision of translating. Concerning Heidegger translations, the author – answering to some critics he received – insists upon the idea of the intimate relationship between thinking and poetry, justifying his constant appeal to examples from literature in his translator’s notes at the end of his version of Sein und Zeit.

This contribution discusses the problem of translating Heidegger. Heidegger’s „reiterative destruction“, the core of his phenomenological method in the 20s, is operating as an over-interpretative translation of a traditional text to reveal what is unwritten and unsaid in it. What does it mean, therefore, to translate Heidegger, i.e. to translate a translation? In the second part we briefly present a survey of French translations from Heidegger’s works in the last twenty years and discuss the problematic editorial situation in France.