No One's Witness: A Monstrous Poetics

Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study

by Syd Zolf

In No One's Witness Rachel Zolf activates the last three lines of a poem by Jewish Nazi holocaust survivor Paul Celan—“No one / bears witness for the / witness”—to theorize the poetics and im/possibility of witnessing. Drawing on black studies, continental philosophy, queer theory, experimental poetics, and work by several writers and artists, Zolf asks what it means to witness from the excessive, incalculable position of No One. In a fragmentary and recursive style that enacts the monstrous speech it pursues, No One's Witness demonstrates the necessity of confronting the Nazi holocaust in relation to transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. Thinking along with black feminist theory's notions of entangled swarm, field, plenum, chorus, No One's Witness interrogates the limits and thresholds of witnessing, its dangerous perhaps. No One operates outside the bounds of the sovereign individual, hauntologically informed by the fleshly no-thingness that has been historically ascribed to blackness and that blackness enacts within, apposite to, and beyond the No One. No One bears witness to becomings beyond comprehension, making and unmaking monstrous forms of entangled future anterior life.

192 pages, Hardcover

Published August 13, 2021

Reviews

[michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a dense read because it is so theoretical. i feel like i would've been able to enjoy it more and better understand the monstrous poetics she was trying to establish if i was better acquainted with the previous scholarship she built off of. she invokes some really great theory, especially that of Black scholars, that are intertwined and exist in an intimate dialogue with each other and the world. nevertheless, i do love what i think she was attempting to do.

the structure of this book is also wonderful. i love that it is based in paul celan's last line of his poem concerning the Holocaust, which she deconstructs so precisely and incisively. she derives and ascribes paramount meaning to the phrasing and construction of this line that births this idea of a monstrous witness, someone beyond No One. also loved how she brought up frankenstein and his monster because SO true.

i will say that sometimes it was hard to follow aside from the multitude of scholars she invokes due to the language. it was more poetic in nature, which is only natural, as she is a creative writer, but i find that writers who first and foremost belong to the literary sphere write more unclearly, which makes difficult the establishment of their theory.

all in all, for what i was able to really glean from this read (and which i will revisit in the future), i really liked the chapters: No, [], and For.