"Where there is proof, there is no testimony". The aporias of the testimony according to Jacques Derrida

The priority classical phenomenology grants the first-person perspective finds itself challenged by a number of post-phenomenological thinkers, including Jacques Derrida. The aim of the article is to circumscribe the strategic function held by the figure of the witness in Derrida's thinking, whether as third party who destabilises the metaphysics of presence in his first writings, or as a speculative trope in his later work, oscillating between faith and knowledge. Drawing together Derrida's scattered remarks on testimony, a small grammar of testimony emerges with its three constitutive paradoxes: (a) the replaceability of the irreplaceable, (b) the foundation of the unfoundable, (c) the repetition of the unrepeatable. By teasing out the constitutive logic of testimony, Derrida shows how the witness calls for a complication of phenomenology, which can be summed up in the notion of re-mediation (transl. J. Dudley).