The Care of the Witness

Michal Givoni teaches in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. She is co-editor of The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (2009).

• Introduction; 1. The ethics of witnessing and the politics of the governed; 2. Witnessing beyond politics: testimony theory between Auschwitz and the crisis of representation; 3. Witnesses as a public: the authority of experience and the critique of testimonies following the Great War; 4. Empathic listeners and alarmed spectators: secondary witnessing and existential ruin in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies; 5. Humanitarian governance and ethical cultivation: Médecins Sans Frontières and the advent of the expert-witness; Conclusion: revisiting the ethics of witnessing.

'At once thoughtful and provocative, Michal Givoni's The Care of the Witness traces the arteries of testimony that flow through twentieth-century experiences of war, humanitarian action and the Holocaust, exposing them to rigorous analysis. Anyone concerned with the political stakes of contemporary ethical speech should read this book.' Peter Redfield, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill