Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility

This is a work in comparative literature and philosophy that offers a new and important way of thinking the ethical capacity of human subjectivity. "Witnessness" posits a universal ethics based neither on rational mental structures nor on moral principles, but on the extra-rational powers of the imagination. Harvey pursues this ethics by staging a speculative reading of Samuel Beckett's 'untranslatable' text, "Worstward Ho", alongside Dante's "Purgatorio" and Primo Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved" and "If This Be a Man". Many of the thirty concise chapters that compose "Witnessness" are built upon notions whose names (e.g. dimness, lessness) take inspiration from Beckett's unique and precise vocabulary. Harvey explores the particular experience of the witness - as recounted in Dante and Levi - for signs of a general, common, and innate witness-like attitude that protects the other and that we see expressed in Beckett's penultimate prose piece.