The Importance of Bearing Witness
The Importance of Bearing Witness

Summary/Abstract: This essay considers the notion of bearing witness as an analytical path for assessing and applying the legacy of Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless. Havel’s account of disempowerment is connected to the role of ideology in creating the “environment of power” as a tool that enables participation in one’s own disempowerment. Havel dissects the process of becoming powerless and then reconstructs empowerment by reflecting on the journey of the archetypal post-totalitarian subject, the greengrocer. In Popescu’s view, reconstruction is based on the mechanism of bearing witness to one’s own presence in the world and its constitutive effects on the lives of others. To bear witness requires a search for evidence of the ontological match between world, self, and human meaning. In this context, acts of dissenters are the exemplary manifestation of a potentiality that seems to reside in us all. Dissenters bear witness to alternatives—reflecting what Havel considers a baseline of humanity: the natural multiplicity of human experience.

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