Testifying for the Pylos Disaster: Who/What “bears witness for the witness?”

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Published: Dec 31, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.44015
Keywords:
Deconstruction Deconstruction at large Testimony Metonymy Witness Shipwreck Disaster Mediterranean Poetics Pylos shipwreck Adriana shipwreck Refugee crisis Europe Derrida Paul Celan Bearing Witness Trauma Silence Survivor Testimony Survivance Visual archives Necropolitics Hiroshima Auschwitz Spectral Witnessing Representation
Elpida Ziavra
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0165-537X
Abstract

In his two seminars on Le Témoignage (1992-1994) and in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (2005), Jacques Derrida provides a rich archive on the politics and poetics of testimony and the question of who or what can testify for the disasters of the human in the past and the present, and what language can be adequate to the task. Derrida deconstructs the idea of a transparent and pure testimony, which, he suggests, is by default contaminated by silences, breaks, cuts, incoherences, lacunae as well as the hesitation and traumatism of the witnesses that cannot fully translate their experience, bound on their senses and visceral responses, into rational logos. Derrida dramatizes the potential of poetic discourse to inherit, inscribe and disseminate a testimony that does not correspond to the common understanding of legal testimony or of a coherent, chronologically linear narrative. Reading Derrida’s archive on testimony in apposition with selected poems by Paul Celan, this article aims to testify for a contemporary disaster, namely the shipwreck of the Adriana trawler carrying refugees from Africa to Europe, a few miles from the Greek city of Pylos, on June 14th, 2023, in order to probe the possible and impossible witnesses of the disaster and what their testimonies can flesh out about a historical and political reading of the catastrophic event. The paper constellates a series of fragments, that is, media coverage of the shipwreck, photographs before and after the disaster and survivors’ testimonies, in order to suggest that not only humans, but also poems and (audio)visual materials should be taken as witnesses for this unique event that tends to occur again and again in the Mediterranean and other sea and land crossings around the globe.

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Author Biography
Elpida Ziavra, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Elpida Ziavra is a PhD Candidate at the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and a Fulbright fellow. Her doctoral thesis “Poetics and Politics of Mourning in Trans-Canadian Literature in the 21st Century” examines the ways in which a series of contemporary poetic and visual texts by Afrosporic and Indigenous authors and artists develop strategies of mourning for the past and present catastrophes as a politics of survival, resistance, and resurgence. Her interdisciplinary academic interests employ Derridean deconstruction, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives to research literature, as well as art, and more specifically photography.

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