The Bilingualism of the Language of the Victim and the Language of the Victimizer

Inspired by a panel which took place at the 2018 IARPP conference in New York - this paper, which deals with the bilingualism of the language of the victim and the language of the perpetrator, offers a close reading of the panel's three papers, trying to characterize their unique poetics of testimony through a differentiation between four modes of traumatic testimony which are distinguished from one another by the degree of the psychic motility they succeed to form in relation to traumatic memories: the "metaphoric", the "metonymic", the "excessive" and the "Muselmann" testimonial modes. The last part of the paper suggests a link between the testimonial language of the victim and the testimonial language of the victimizer, trying to understand these polarized languages as two variations of the refusal to mourn.