Testimony in three voices: testis, superstes e arbiter

Abstract

In the tradition of the studies on testimony we find two well-defined forms of narrators, characterized by Émile Benveniste's (1969) studies, and widely used by research on authoritarianism and Shoah, which see in Brazil the contributions of Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2008) in setting the concepts of testimony testis and testimony superstes. In the wake of these studies, I propose a new category of testimony to the arbiter, which is configured in the narration performed through the recovery of the testimony heard. For a long time, this type of testimony had been devalued because it did not represent the traditional formulations of testis (third) testimony, that one saw and witnessed the painful scene, or the superstes witness (first), the one who lived and witnesses his own experience. We understand that the arbiter (second) testimony of the one who heard and arbitrate what and how to narrate must be validated as part of a testimonial triad, since it is involved in other forms of testimony, for we identify it in narrators, testis and superstes, when describing experiences of others told to him. This category of testimony also appears in what we call the second-generation narrative of the children of survivors, who in most cases narrate through the testimonial reconstruction of the experiences of others, or the testimonies of others, even in relation to their own experience.