Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 37

use is difficult to reconcile with testimony’s noninstrumentality: the
testimony of a moral witness is intrinsically valuable; it is an end in itself. It
is intrinsically valuable although, or because, it is not dependent on factual
truth. Reporting factual truth is what political witnesses do; moral witnesses
testify to what it felt like to be subjected to evil. Such testimony possesses
intrinsic value independent of the question of whether it is factually correct
or not. Thus, journalists, owing to their dedication to factual truth, would
seem to be inclined toward the subject position of a political witness; artists,
on the other hand, might be expected to be closer to the subject position of
a moral witness because works of art do not normally claim factual accuracy.
Indeed, as Bennett (����:�) explains, with regard to works of art “faithful
translation of testimony” is not what matters; rather, what matters is art’s use
of its “unique capacities to contribute actively to [the] politics [of testimony].”
There is, however, an overlap between the political witness and the moral
witness.
The artist as witness and intermediary
Elsewhere, I analyzed Botelho’s work in light of the question of what it does
to transform spectators into participant witnesses who self-critically engage
with a work of art and the conditions depicted in it, including their own
involvement in and responsibility for these conditions (Möller ����:���–���).
In the present article, I am interested in both reading Botelho’s work in
light of Margalit’s understanding of the moral witness and thinking about
Margalit’s understanding of the moral witness in light of Botelho’s works of
art. Obviously, Botelho does not qualify as a paradigmatic moral witness as
he does not possess knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering. It is precisely the
lack of such knowledge that motivated his work on the colonial wars in the
first place. But observers can suffer, and they can be moral witnesses, too,
on the conditions outlined earlier. To begin with, then, I need to make two
alterations in Margalit’s concept extending what it means to be a witness.
First, I want to detach his concept from cases of unmitigated evil and suggest
that it be used to theorize any political regime inflicting major suffering
on people. I have three reasons for doing so. I am not an expert on the
religious and philosophical background from which Margalit derives his
understanding of unmitigated evil; I think that his concept is too important
to limit its application to such cases; and I am interested in the question of
what we can learn about cases of lesser evil when we look at them through
approaches and concepts developed in connection with the unmitigated
evil of the Holocaust. Remember that the Holocaust nowadays serves as the
model for memory construction in other cases as well (Wieviorka); concepts
36