ABSTRACT
This chapter develops an existential ethics of reading and writing about the past. The chapter comprises examples of witnessing to absent others and to the afterlife of events, as well as of the problems of absence-presence in memory and history. The chapter also discusses Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of witnessing and asks what meaning absence and presence can have for ethical responsiveness, in order to advance an ethical responsibility for persons and beings who are absent or not contemporary with myself.
