We live in a period of unrestrained violence—from the genocides in Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, to the slower but no less devastating march of fascist erasure on the streets of Minneapolis. In such a moment, it can feel as though the only political act left to us is to bear witness. That is, to speak into the abyss of violence a word of testimony and of protest that refuses erasure. And yet, contemporary witnessing to atrocity is often animated—sometimes quietly—by a desire for redemption. Testimony is asked to do more than remember the dead; it is asked to vindicate them. Through religious theodicy, national reconciliation, or trauma discourse, suffering and atrocity are repeatedly folded into narratives that promise meaning, progress, or moral resolution. For example, here in Canada, the concept of reconciliation often is deployed to suggest a new era of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in this nation that presumes that the colonial past (represented primarily by residential schools) has been overcome.
But what if this demand for redemption is itself part of the problem?
In the aftermath of mass atrocity, testimony regularly exceeds what it can ethically bear. The dead cannot authorize the futures built in their name. Survivors, as Primo Levi famously insisted, are only proximate witnesses—those who lived, often by chance—while the “true witnesses” were silenced forever (see Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved). When testimony claims too much, it risks becoming prescriptive, crystallized, and ultimately weaponized.
Against this redemptive impulse, I propose a different figure of witnessing: the remnant.
In my recent book, Theopolitics and the Era of the Witness, I theorize the remnant as neither a heroic survivor nor a redeemed community. It names what remains unassimilated—the trace of the dead that refuses reconciliation with history’s forward march. Drawing on biblical traditions and Walter Benjamin’s weak messianic philosophy of history, remnant witnessing resists the conversion of loss into meaning. It remains with the dead not to justify them, but to let their suffering interrupt the present.
Lament as Witness
The remnant first appears not as doctrine or identity, but as lament. Early post-Shoah witnesses such as Levi and Paul Celan did not testify toward futurity or redemption. Their writing registers a refusal—a refusal to allow the dead to be redeemed through narrative closure, political purpose, or moral lesson. Lament does not heal; it protests. It insists that something has been lost that cannot be made right.
For this reason, lament is not resignation. It is an active resistance to theologies, national myths, and humanist narratives that demand coherence from catastrophe. In lament, the dead are not folded into stories of progress. They remain vexing, unresolved, and demanding.
Lament does not heal; it protests. It insists that something has been lost that cannot be made right.
In this sense, lament stands as a refusal of modernity’s dominant temporality. Where modern political and theological imaginaries presume that history moves forward through rupture, repair, and improvement, lament interrupts the demand that catastrophe be made legible as progress. Modernity requires that loss be rendered productive—whether as moral lesson, nationalism, or historical necessity. Lament resists this conversion. It refuses the promise that time itself redeems suffering and instead exposes the violence by which modern narratives of progress ask the dead to authorize the present. Lament, then, is not pre-modern nostalgia but a critique internal to modernity’s own claims about history and progress.
To call the dead “martyrs” often accomplishes the opposite: it instrumentalizes their deaths in the service of identity or nation. The language of the remnant, by contrast, resists this capture. The remnant is not what survives for a future; it is what remains against the ease of futurity.
Benjamin Against Redemption
Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “tradition of the oppressed” offers a crucial grammar for remnant witnessing (Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”). Against historicist time—in which past suffering is redeemed by future progress—Benjamin insists that history appears instead as accumulated wreckage. The task of the witness is not to interpret catastrophe as a lesson learned, but to “fan the spark of hope” that flickers precisely where history has failed.
For Benjamin, the “tradition of the oppressed” does not name a canon or stable inheritance of ideas. It names a recurring orientation to history that emerges in moments of danger, when the past is seized not as completed or redeemed but as unfinished and unresolved. This tradition is composed not of authoritative texts but of fragments, defeats, and silenced struggles—what history leaves behind as wreckage. It recurs wherever suffering is naturalized as progress and where the dead are asked to authorize the present. In this sense, tradition for Benjamin is not transmitted through continuity but flashes up through interruption, demanding that history be read against itself and that the past’s unresolved claims be taken up in the present without being reconciled to futurity. Thus Benjamin’s concept of constellation is a different starting point for historical materialism. It is grounded not in continuity, but in rupture where the past flashes up and reveals precisely those unassimilated projects which historicism seeks to contain or narrate, such as the Paris Commune, liberation movements, or Indigenous refusal.
For Benjamin, “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins”—and the enemy, he reminds us, keeps winning (Thesis VI). Witnessing, then, is not about closure but interruption. It is an ethical practice oriented toward what remains unresolved in the present.
This approach diverges from more ontological theories of witnessing that locate ethical force in mute affect alone. While Giorgio Agamben rightly warns against collapsing suffering into identity or totality, his elevation of the silent witness as remnant risks severing testimony from historical and political analysis. Benjamin’s “tradition of the oppressed” is not silent. It demands interpretation, material analysis, and political responsibility.
False Witnesses and the Weaponization of Memory
The dangers of redemptive witnessing are nowhere more apparent than in the contemporary mobilization of trauma for ethnonationalist ends by the state of Israel. Memory can become a moral shield. “Never again” is transformed from a universal ethical injunction into a justification for new forms of violence.
As I was writing Theopolitics and the Era of the Witness, the memory of the Shoah was repeatedly invoked to legitimate the ongoing destruction of Palestinian life (see, for example, reporting by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on Gaza since October 2023). This is not a failure of memory, but a failure of witnessing. When testimony is pressed into the service of state violence, it ceases to honor the dead and begins to betray them.
The problem is not that trauma is remembered, but that it is remembered without political coordinates. Trauma discourse detached from historical and material analysis flattens asymmetries of power and renders radically unequal suffering morally equivalent. Witnessing becomes competitive, and moral authority accrues not to justice but to those with military, economic, and symbolic power.
When testimony is pressed into the service of state violence, it ceases to honor the dead and begins to betray them.
A particularly stark example of trauma discourse operating in this way occurred when Israeli UN ambassador Gilad Erdan appeared before the General Assembly wearing a yellow Star of David badge, explicitly invoking the Shoah in defense of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. The gesture collapsed radically unequal positions of power by casting a nuclear-armed state as the perennial victim, while rendering Palestinian civilians as existential threats rather than contemporary subjects of state violence. Here, memory functions not as lament or warning but as moral armor: the past is mobilized to foreclose political analysis, immunize the present from critique, and transform historical trauma into authorization. This is trauma discourse at its most corrosive—not because the Shoah is remembered, but because it is instrumentalized to justify new forms of domination.
As Robert Jay Lifton once observed, false witnesses resolve their own death anxiety by designating others as expendable. In this way, trauma itself becomes an alibi for violence.
Remnant Solidarity
Remnant witnessing does not belong to a single people, nation, or identity. It cuts across them. For this reason, contemporary Jewish movements that oppose Israeli apartheid and genocide do not stand outside Jewish memory; they stand within it while refusing its conversion into political authorization. Their significance lies not in representing a new moral subject, but in exposing the instability of ethnonational claims over trauma itself. By refusing to allow Jewish suffering to be redeemed through state violence, these movements demonstrate that witnessing does not “belong” to a people in the sense required for domination. Memory here is neither denied nor universalized, but de-captured: detached from sovereign justification and reoriented toward solidarity with those presently subjected to violence. In this refusal, witnessing appears not as inherited entitlement but becomes an ethical practice—one that can be taken up, contested, and shared across radically unequal positions and among radically different political identities.
Here, the remnant “flashes up,” to use Benjamin’s phrase—not as shared identity, but as shared refusal: refusal to let suffering become justification, refusal to allow history to close over its dead.
What Remains
Remnant witnessing asks less of testimony, but more of us. It asks us to remain with unresolved grief rather than convert it into meaning; to situate suffering within political and economic structures rather than psychologize it away; to organize, resist, and—crucially—to renounce our own causes when they begin to mirror the violence they oppose.
Witnessing without redemption offers no catharsis, no moral victory, no clean future. But it may be the only form of witness that does not repeat the catastrophe it seeks to remember.
The remnant does not promise salvation. It demands renunciation. Or, as Benjamin put it: “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”
