Lived Experience Testimony and Engaged Intellectuals

Insights from the Archives of French Philosophical Activism

by Naomi Waltham-Smith (University of Oxford)

Four years ago on the blog of the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (MS PEC), an anonymous survivor had written a post for Anti-Slavery Day making the case that meaningful inclusion requires ensuring that the voices of those with lived experience are heard in policy design and implementation.^[1] “It comes down to really listening,” they summed up. Drawing a distinction between being “generous” and “meeting the needs” of the person one is trying to support, they argued that

listening is one of the most important elements of any response to modern slavery and day-to-day support to people who are affected by it. But, listening to people like me is not yet embedded in the policy and programmes designed to address the problem. . . . This keeps me wondering. . . . When the voices of the very people that the policies are trying to protect are not heard, how can these policies be effective?

Fast forward to March 5, 2025 when the MS PEC held an event at the British Library to mark “Ten years on from the Modern Slavery Act” and to renew the question: “Where next for modern slavery law and policy?” The Minister for Safeguarding Violence Against Women and Girls, Jess Phillips, vowed in her keynote address to put “the experience of survivors and expertise of those working with them” at the heart of “an improved response.”^[2] In her speech, the UK’s Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, welcomed “some more positive murmurings about survivor engagement from the government.”^[3] However, alongside the increased numbers of National Referral Mechanism (NRM) case workers and the repeal of the harmful provisions of the Illegal Migration Act cited by Phillips, these positive steps, she argued, represented no more than a return to “a weak baseline,” setting back efforts to restore the UK’s position as a leader in the fight against modern slavery.

The failure meaningfully to engage those with lived experience has in particular put a brake on progress. Back in 2020 a review by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) found that, despite prioritizing tackling modern slavery in the wake of the 2015 Act coming into force, the UK had not done enough to strengthen its evidence base, which remained weak to no small degree due to insufficient inclusion of those with lived experience. The government acknowledged “the need to improve the integration of survivor voices into the design, implementation and review of the HMG modern slavery portfolio.”^[4] In response to the criticism in the report, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office commissioned the MS PEC to assess the most promising existing practice for engaging and involving survivors. The MS PEC is a site of experimentation, innovation, and advocacy in this area, much of its work in partnership with lived experience experts devoted to elaborating what this attentive listening entails. It has established a Lived Experience Advisory Panel to advise on all aspects of its work from funding calls and research ethics to policy engagement and public communications, it works with lived experience experts as peer researchers, and it provides a platform share their expertise and tell their stories in their own words. Opening the event in March 2025, Director Murray Hunt explained how the MS PEC sees lived experience as “a unique form of expertise.”^[5] “Policymaking is always improved,” he continued, “if it listens attentively to the voices of those who are directly affected by modern slavery policy.”

The metonymy of storytelling for experience-by-expertise remains one of the most problematic issues haunting the challenge of equitable inclusion. The anonymous blogger articulates a common critique when they argue that, for survivors’ testimony to be empowering, it must go beyond storytelling:

Let’s get them involved in decisions and policy-making because they are experts through experience. That’s what meaningful inclusion would mean: listening to us as experts, rather than asking us to re-tell our stories of exploitation to pull people’s heart strings and catch their attention.^[6]

A report written for the MS PEC by Chris Ash, Survivor Leadership Program Manager at the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, interrogates the value of narrative testimony, underscoring both its potential and its dangers. The report warns against a reductive conception of storytelling that trades in attention-grabbing, sensationalized stories for their “shock value” and risks degenerating into “entertainment,” as one interviewee put it, if it fails to translate into raising awareness of the action that needs to be taken.

In addition to sharing stories about how their personal trauma experiences connect to larger issues, interviewees wanted opportunities to share their experiences of services and their full journey (rather than just their extracted trauma), stories that fill gaps in knowledge or challenge assumptions, and stories that highlight systems gaps, structural violence, and societal vulnerabilities.^[7]

Existing practical guidance tends to work from an assumption that storytelling represents a benefit for external audiences but a harm for survivors to be mitigated. The evidence from lived experience experts gathered in Ash’s report, though, suggests that there are also powerful motivations for storytelling falling into two main categories: education and community care. Stories can be powerful ways to disrupt existing narratives and challenge stereotypes, but this only works if they are not limited to stories deemed safe or acceptable to audiences. Telling stories in lived experience-only spaces can also support healing, growth, and connection, but less so if they are relayed by others without lived experience or as cautionary tales that entrench paternalist stereotypes. Whether storytelling empowers or not turns to a large degree on how it is listened to.

In light of these risks, there has been a move away from storytelling towards co-production as a model for best practice. The MS PEC report commissioned by the FCDO noted that

until recently, evaluation mechanisms have almost exclusively used extractive methods that position people with lived experience as research participants offering data input in the form of testimony, rather than working with them as research partners or project leaders to shape the agenda of evaluations or the analysis of gathered evidence.^[8]

To avoid extractive listening, the report recommends a shift in the conception of lived experience testimony away from singular stories to be extracted and fetishized—generating surplus value through the abstraction of testimonial labour—to actively putting to work the thinking that arises in and out of lived experience within the horizon of collective action. Co-production throughout research and decision-making processes are now widely recognized as best practice.

Ash’s report, however, suggests that a shift from storyteller to expert will not be sufficient in itself to combat extraction if the fundamental assumptions about lived experience expertise and in particular its affinity with testimony and narrative are not put in question. The need for ethical storytelling, long recognized by those working in areas with vulnerable or marginalized groups, is especially acute now that listening to those with lived experience has moved from being a demand among progressive advocates to an orthodoxy of mainstream policymaking. If it is now widely acknowledged that “it is #TimetoListen,” as the MS PEC blog post has it, it is less clear whether the work has been done to follow its injunction to “stop, take stock, and think how to do it meaningfully and effectively.” A recent MS PEC report on the ethics of modern slavery research suggests that, despite survivor-led coalitions promoting ethical storytelling practices, survivors continue to encounter harmful approaches to listening to their stories and experiences.^[9]

In framing the MS PEC’s FCDO report recommendation as a shift from exceptional stories to collective action, I do not intend to downplay the danger of exploitation. Rather, I seek to bring more clearly into view a challenge that persists even if the extractive disposition were minimized: how to go from singular, and thus to some extent unrelatable, lived experience to the level of generality that has impacts at policy level? If, as I shall suggest, there is an irreducible first-person testimony in all expertise by experience, even when it does not take the explicit form of a story, we need not to shy away from inquiring about its power and its limits. In emphasizing this movement from the singular in the direction of the universally transmissible—a movement which must be negotiated for lived experience to shape policy—I displace the terrain on which the ethics of lived experience expertise plays out from a problem of unwarranted extraction to one of necessary abstraction. The question is how to generalize lived experience evidence without taking away agency over testimony or diminishing its credibility as evidence.

“Lived experience” has become so ubiquitous a term in public policy settings that its significance is arguably worn thin, its specificity effaced the more it enters into circulation. Its currency is so assured, its insertion into policy discourse so frictionless that we rarely stop to ask what this concept means. Those who have paused to wonder have traced this notion back to a German phenomenological tradition with its provenance in the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer and received into French philosophy via Maurice Merleau-Ponty, later to be taken up in different forms by anti-colonial and feminist scholars including Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, and Patricia Hill Collins.^[10] It is beyond the scope of this essay to interrogate this genealogy. Instead of looking for origins and inheritance, what follows turns to a juncture in the history of French thought at which experience was supposed to be in decline but in fact remakes itself at the limits of the dialectic between immediacy and alienation. By asking after the generalizability of such evidence I seek to raise some questions about the fundamental propriety on which this entire economy of experience is seemingly predicated. In effect, what I shall be suggesting is that commodification is not the only form of abstraction; its seeming necessity is itself a function of capitalism. Seen through the prism of another kind of generalizing force, lived experience becomes nether fetish nor the inalienable property of a sovereign subject.

Insights from the philosophical-activist archive

Lyons in her speech acknowledged both the wealth of grassroots action that had led to advances in this area and the significant work that remained to be done to ensure the vital inclusion of lived experience expertise in shaping interventions and support systems. Citing her proposal submitted to the Home Office to establish a fully funded Survivor Advisory Council and noting that “their lived experiences are our most valuable resource,” she said:

Whilst I’m really pleased to hear the Minister and the Home Office commit more resource and thinking to survivor engagement, I’m aware that thinking about incorporating survivor voices has been a holding line for many years now. Now is the time for action.^[11]

Regrettably, all I am going to offer is yet more thinking about listening to survivor testimony. However, my intention is to illuminate how certain distinctive features of lived experience pose a challenge for genuine listening and so tend to leave us stuck thinking about listening without actually listening. Research shows that listening to lived experience brings benefits both for developing effective policies and for empowering affected communities. In what follows I put current work by the MS PEC and grassroots advocates in dialogue with two examples from the French philosophical-activist archive to draw out insights for how scholars can work ethically and productively with those directly affected to develop other ways of generalizing lived experience for policy impact that do not go by way of capitalist abstraction. The aim is not to substitute the insights of white European intellectuals but to complement survivor-led work by looking at how these philosophers struggled, and often failed, to put lived experience expertise on an equal footing. They were also astute observers of the problematic dynamic that arises when professional intellectuals seek to work collaboratively with or platform organic intellectuals. Three key conundrums emerge in their thought which, if reckoned with seriously, provide insights for academics working with affected communities today seeking to maximize their influence and avoid the various traps of exploitation and epistemic injustice.

1. What gives lived experience testimony its value as expertise at the same time erodes its status as evidence.
2. Testimony requires the ear of another, but no other can testify for the witness.
3. Lived experience testimony is irreducibly singular but must be generalized to have any policy impact.

Both examples, in different ways, sharpen the focus on the entanglement of theory and practice, and what role public intellectuals and institutions such as the MS PEC can play in enabling greater audibility for lived experience expertise. The first example is the ambitious yet not uncontroversial work of Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP), which is now fairly well known after the publication, first in French in 2013 and then in English translation in 2021, of a dossier of materials from the project, together with related texts and interviews.^[12] The GIP launched a series of inquiries into prison conditions one of whose primary ambitions was to “let those who have an experience of prison speak” through questionnaires and eyewitness accounts. Nonetheless it would be panned by postcolonial critics in particular for being yet another exercise in white European intellectuals ventriloquizing the subaltern while denying that they were speaking for them. The GIP came in the wake of significant government repression of radical activist groups and, more immediately, a series of hunger strikes by imprisoned ex-militants of the by then proscribed Gauche prolètarienne, and it was moulded to a large extent on the model of workers’ inquiry. Without repeating the commonplace if erroneous reduction of the GIP to the thought of Michel Foucault (who was but one of a number of academics, writers, public intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, social workers, psychiatrists, and current and former prisoners involved), I am going to read Foucault’s reflections on escaping the extractivist approach towards lived experience testimony alongside materials from the GIP dossier. Refuting some of the most dismissive critiques of the GIP, he sees in its aspirations and methods an alternative way of generalizing lived experience without commodifying it. Far from being subordinated to theory, lived experience is itself understood as a site of theoretical production whose dissemination via the GIP’s “relay” mechanism forges solidarities across class and other divides.

The second example, the set of unpublished seminars Jacques Derrida devoted to testimony in the between 1991 and 1995, is more remote from social movement activism, but I want to suggest that the arguments advanced there be read in tandem with, and as a kind of methodological reflection on, the philosopher’s public engagement and political interventions. From the early 1980s until his death in 2004 Derrida was a signatory to a wealth of letters and petitions on political issues ranging from education through refugees and housing to the Palestine question and apartheid in South Africa. Moreover, in the years running up to the seminar Derrida had gained a taste of the inevitable frustrations and compromises of policy engagement when he was appointed in 1988 by Lionel Josquin to co-head the Commission on Philosophy and Epistemology to look at educational reforms; this culminated in an irate letter in the press from the Commission’s members after two of their key recommendations were ignored by ministers. As the seminar’s focus turned to testimony, Derrida co-founded with Pierre Bourdieu two counter-institutions designed to defend the audibility of dissenting intellectuals and writers: the Comité international de soutien aux intellectuels algériens (CISIA) and the Parlement international des écrivains (PIE). In 1998 Derrida went to South Africa to participate in a project with academics and archivist practitioners amid vibrant debates about the role of lived experience in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,^[13] and he visited Jerusalem and Ramallah for the second time, deploring the violence, expulsions, and refugee camps.

As Cillian Ó Fathaigh observes, Derrida’s political engagements are characterized by an attempt to navigate the position of the public intellectual between the old Sartrean engaged intellectual who espouses universal ideals and the Foucauldian specific intellectual who intervenes in local struggles.^[14] Geoffrey Bennington argues that Derrida’s “many more or less visible interventions in concrete political situations” are

not merely the circumstantial acts of a philosopher elsewhere, and more importantly, developing theories or knowledge, but continuous with each act of deconstruction from the start, always more or less obviously marked by a strategic event of decision in a given context. This does not provide a theoretical model for politics so much as it strives to keep open the event of alterity which alone makes politics possible and inevitable, but which political philosophy of all colours has always tried to close.^[15]

Neither Foucault nor Derrida was content to fire noisy warning shots or conjure up dreams of new worlds from their armchairs. In their own styles, their engagements extended beyond expressing outrage or opinions on particular issues to grappling more concretely with matters of government, policy, and law. Of Derrida’s interventions on education, the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique (GREPH) sought to bring about practical changes in the teaching of philosophy in secondary schools and the États-Généraux targeted government reforms eroding working conditions—a dimension Derrida stressed when he came under fire from teaching unions in the wake of the Commission report in 1990. The PIE, lending its ear to the “cri du monde,” provided refuge to scholars and writers at risk through an international network of sanctuary cities in a kind of counter-mapping to the state’s exclusionary policies.^[16] Many of these interventions speak of ambitions to build counter-institutions and alternative spaces of collective action and inquiry that resonate with the Du Boisian notion of abolition democracy—a task not merely of dismantling but of building new, more equitable institutions. One reason for selecting Foucault and Derrida in the 1970s and 1990s respectively is that these junctures find each of them turning their critical interest in institutions to the question of lived experience testimony. If the predominant view imagines poststructuralist thought to be disdainful of lived experience and the interest of someone like Jean-François Lyotard in testimony an index of its withering, Foucault comes closer to the radical interest in this category in the 1970s and Derrida does not so much dispatch lived experience as pry it away from a selfsame authentic subjectivity.^[17] Far from reinstating the reduction of expertise by experience to storytelling, an encounter with their work and its limits helps us with reconfiguring the testimonial paradigm in the present.

Experience as evidence

In his preface to Serge Livrozet’s memoire and manifesto, De la prison à la révolte, Foucault writes astutely and in a rather acerbic tone about the risks of doubly confining prisoners’ voices by restricting them to a genre of vivid storytelling.

The condemned have no grounds for complaint; from the moment they could speak, they have had the chance to say what they needed to say. The attention we lend them honors them—and flatters us . . . We have only one condition for such authors: that they recount their lives. They must recount their lives. Beneath the façade of tolerance, this is a strict rule. What does it impose? In the first place, that the criminal and the time in prison appear to be singular adventures.^[18]

“The habit of listening to [their] memories” thus restricts the person with lived experience to being the subject of a hard-luck tale, reassuring that their fate was merely “an incredible combination of circumstances” unfortunate and exceptional.^[19] They can have only singular memories, feelings, impressions, and expressions but no thoughts or ideas. If they are to be more than “the simple subject of [their] adventures,” it falls to social scientific disciplines and institutions (sociology, psychology, etc.) to do the work of theorizing lived experience so that its singularity be generalized:

You, you are the individual, the adventure, the memory; you will speak in the first person, but only under the conditions of a kind of writing whose laws we alone possess; for this price, you will be heard and pardoned. We, we will listen to the fictive stories (disturbing-reassuring) in which your irregular adventure will be continued, reconstructed, captured, mastered by a certain rational calculus that will triumph over your ruses and solve the riddle with an ingenious discovery. And while we delight ourselves with these fictions, you others, you experts, you will be the only ones capable of transforming the singular adventure that recounts an individual memory into a general phenomenon.^[20]

The terms on which the survivor can testify are thereby determined by a listening regime that silences as it extracts by disconnecting story from theory.

Regardless of the extent to which the GIP managed in practice to avoid this model (the booklets produced included responses to a questionnaire designed by academics as well as narrative accounts from prisoners), Foucault’s critique of the political economy of testimony resonates with survivors’ observations today about commodification and unjust enrichment. He describes the terrible bargain whereby the condition of making lived experience known to others is to deprive the person with such experience of the means and standing to testify themselves to that experience. The experience becomes audible and relevant to policymakers and the public only once it is translated by generalizing theory. A hint of this opposition between experience and expert evidence, and a persistent hesitation to value the former as a unique form of the later, could be detected when the Safeguarding Minister called for a “nuanced approach which places the experience of survivors and expertise of those working with them at its heart.”^[21] This alienation of lived experience locks the survivor into a dilemma: the singular experience that makes their insight valuable, that makes it expert, must be overcome in a more general theory if it is to be deemed expertise, at the same time thereby sacrificing something of what gave it its expert value in the first place. Even if the answer is to democratize the evidence and pluralize what counts as “evidence,” the question of how research and policymaking processes generalize or abstract from lived experience cannot simply be set to one side. This is because of the unique nature of that expertise: on the one hand, it is so exceptional that “it must only be lived, then recalled” and yet on the other, there is the urgent question of how it can become a “truth that could be the truth of several.”^[22]

Even in examples at the top end of the Lived Experience Inclusion Ladder,^[23] it remains an open question how to make experience the truth of more than one, and thus a spur to action, without falling back into inequitable ways of working among those whose authority comes from institutional legitimacy (academics, policymakers) and those whose authority derives from life. Consider the opening challenge laid down at the British Library event by Jane Lasonder who was trafficked at a very young age and is now Vice Chair International Survivors of Trafficking Advisory Council (ISTAC) at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), a member of the Interparliamentary Taskforce on Human Trafficking, and a consultant for UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), as well as the Founder of the Red Alert Task Force and a member of the MS PEC Lived Experience Advisory Panel. “Survivors are more than just a walk-in story on legs. We have expertise, we have experience, we have insights.”^[24] Telling her own story, she elaborated:

I had no voice. My voice was completely stolen. A few streets away [from the British Library] I would sleep on the streets with no voice, and today I’m standing here with a big voice. . . . I was fighting for my voice to be heard. I want to use my expertise and my knowledge. . . . I don’t like numbers. I like to think, if we help one person, that’s somebody’s daughter or somebody’s son . . . it’s about that one person.”

How, then, to maintain the singularity of individuals’ lives while enabling the amplification needed to create that “big voice”? Lasonder’s exercise of personal testimony points in a particular direction, illustrating that storytelling need not be opposed to theorizing but can be its very medium. It is in this sense that Foucault assesses Livrozet’s book as “less the first person of memory than the first person of theory.”^[25] His memoires break, moreover, with the extractive division of labour between storytelling from within and analytical reflection from outside in their capacity to promote collective action. Before turning to that aspect, I examine a primary source of friction with conventional notions of evidence: namely, that lived experience exceeds the order of proof.

True to experience

It is not only testimony that militates against the general principles and consensus on which policymaking thrives. A key learning from the MS PEC’s Equity in Evidence Conference in 2023 was for researchers to challenge their preconceptions of what counts as evidence, recognizing that there are different kinds of knowledge that different people have.^[26] The conference final report, though, observes that “in many cases, reliable, verifiable—and highly valuable—evidence is maintained in other formats, such as life stories.”^[27] This suggests that the standards of reliability and verifiability remain as arbiters, even if value is technically an independent category marked off as a surplus parenthesis. Whether testimony is amenable to such forms of verification is a central question that animates the second year of the four-year seminar that Derrida gave at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and at Irvine and NYU in the US, in the early 1990s.

To understand why this question should preoccupy Derrida, it is helpful to contextualize the seminar sessions given in 1992–93 within the overarching theme of “Questions de résponsabilité” to which Derrida devoted his seminar in the decade starting in 1991. From 1995 the seminar was focused in paired years on questions that came to be associated with his later overtly political thinking: hos(ti)pitality, perjury and pardon, and the death penalty. But he initially approached the question of responsibility from a more literal horizon: that of responding. Testimony was not the initial focus; the first year starts from the secret, which then comes to be conceptualized in its inextricable entanglement with testimony over the next three years. That the editors of the Derrida bibliothèque at du Seuil gave the general title Secret et témoignage to the four-year stretch, while retaining Derrida’s individual titles for each year, reflects remarks he offered in 1993–94 on the previous year: “we had begun to resituate secrecy at the heart of testimony, or perhaps the opposite.”^[28] Further, a note in the typescript for the final year of this part of the sequence reads:

(Comment on the words and the sequence of the title: is secret testimony possible? Isn’t testifying making something public? What would a testimony be that escaped the public sphere? Can one witness a secret without breaking it? etc. Responsibility. Commitment to keep secret-commitment to testify-commitment to keep secret.^[29]

Derrida’s suggestion in the first year is that responsibility entails the possibility of responding and of not responding. This response-ability draws in a certain secrecy, however counterintuitive that may seem. In the second year Derrida will argue that firsthand testimony is responsible precisely and only to the extent it attests to singular lived experience that is by definition unknowable as experience to anyone else, including those who are listening. On the one hand, in telling their story, the witness reveals the secret but, on the other, keeps the secret insofar as it necessarily remains in part inappropriable. I think it is fair to say that a logic of this kind is at work in the recent surging interest in lived experience expertise, even if it is not framed in these terms.

One of the ways in which lived experience testimony remains secret is that, in the first instance, it must be taken at its word if it is to be accepted at all. Derrida proceeds by setting out this (provisional) distinction between the theoretico-constative character of demonstration and proof, on the one hand, and the performative nature of the testimony which resembles an oath. The groundwork for this argument had been laid in the ninth session of the first year where he had set out his stall that every performative, as exemplified here by the oath or the promise, is “a promise of a secret and made in secret.”^[30] Derrida offers two reasons for this: “First, because it always commits the singular to the singular only once and allows no generalization. Then, because it states nothing of the order of observation, that is to say, nothing that we know, nothing that, at the heart of the promise, is of the order of knowledge.” There is no promise if what is promised is already fact; a promise must be capable of being broken. Derrida argues that “this irreducibility, this heterogeneity to knowledge or theory . . . already inscribes an indestructible secret at the heart of the performative structure.” This singularity gives witnessing an “essential solitude” or “secrecy” which is nonetheless distinct from the classic form of secrecy that takes place in not speaking. Derrida’s interest is in the secret less as something hidden away in seclusion than as what circulates in public while nonetheless remaining in some sense inaccessible or resistant to appropriation.

A witness undertakes to tell the truth, they vouch for it and are responsible for it, they respond, they undertake to answer for [à répondre de] what they say where they are the only ones to know, to see, to feel, to hear, or to have seen, felt, or heard. They swear, thus they are responsible.^[31]

This feature of testimony, which Derrida will also liken to the untranslatable idiom in the second year of the seminar, entitled “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” poses a particular challenge for enabling lived experience to shape policy. At first blush, the first-person perspective sets lived experience evidence apart from the “expert” evidence of academics or think tank researchers: this having-been-present gives it its unique value. As Derrida says, the witness says: I was there, I was present at the event, I saw it with my own eyes, I heard it with my own ears. This is what makes it singular, and secret. The implicit promise to tell the truth about what they experienced relies on two presuppositions: First, it assumes that the person with lived experience was present not only to that which they experienced but also to themselves at that moment; to be a reliable witness they must first of all be able to testify before themselves, and thus to their self-consciousness.^[32] Second, it elicits in the listener an act of faith that “presupposes the lack of intuitive and direct access by the other” who can at best have analogical knowledge.^[33] Derrida therefore questions whether it would still be testimony if it were absolutely “transparent to translation” or whether its irreplaceability means that it “resists the test of translation and therefore risks not even being able to cross the frontier of singularity.”^[34]

On account of this inaccessible singularity, Derrida therefore suggests, in the first instance, that testimony is “heterogenous to the administration of proof or the exhibition of evidence,” to the order of “demonstration” and “the theoretico-constative.” Rather, it consists in a performative that “appeals to an act of faith,” like an oath sworn before the law: I swear that I saw, I heard, I touched, felt, I was there.^[35] Questioning whether lived experience testimony can be submitted to the test of reliability, he doubts that “the concept of testimony is compatible with any value of certainty, assurance, or even knowledge as such”; as soon as it is assured, it ceases to be “assured as testimony.”^[36] Even if someone’s story may be “cross-checked with others to become proof, to become probative in a system of verification,” it remains “singular and irreplaceable.”^[37] Without endorsing the distinction (and he will in fact go on to complicate it), Derrida suggests that there are two different orders of truth or veracity at work—something we see in the qualifications and circumscriptions often made around expertise by experience. If a syllogism or demonstration persuades me to adopt its conclusion, it is not because I believe, whereas if a witness’s promise to tell the truth about what they have experienced is to be convincing it will be because it inspires my confidence and belief. This puts tremendous pressure on the credibility of the expert by experience. The result is a compounded epistemic injustice whereby the hermeneutic injustice that marginalizes their experience for want of sufficient shared resources to understand it is further exacerbated by exposing them to greater risk that their credibility is underestimated as a result of identity-based prejudice.^[38] Inevitably lived experience testimony runs the risk of being erroneous or misleading because perception is inevitably finite.^[39] Derrida thus distinguishes false testimony, which happens to be in error despite good faith, from false witness, which engages in lying and perjury in bad faith.

Derrida’s analysis poses a significant challenge to those whose arguments in favour of lived experience turn on reducing uncertainty. He insists that the risk that stems from an irreducible secrecy in singular lived experience cannot be eliminated. In the third session he asks repeatedly to the point of exhaustion whether testimony can become incontestable beyond all doubt and still in fact remain testimony. Testimony is beyond contestation on the contrary because it can be neither contestable nor incontestable; it is simply not of the order of contestation. Its responsibility derives from the presence of the self to itself coextensive with the presence to what is experienced and in the act of attesting to it. Even when, beyond storytelling, a survivor’s insight and expertise is put into action less tokenistically in the whole research process, its indispensable authority is still drawn from some firsthand experience, not of trauma, but of, say, public services or systems. The fixation on self-identical presence cannot be right. It is hard to square with the tremendous vulnerability required for survivors to share their experience. If this self-presence were truly the sine qua non for credible expertise by experience, it would be all too easy to discredit those who have endured trauma.

There is no question that survivors’ insight must be recognized as expertise of no less value for having been acquired through experience rather than education or training, but there is also a danger in attempting to achieve this by making it conform to the standards of the latter, whether to undermine or defend it. Over the course of the seminar, Derrida makes some headway with the quandary by putting the provisional opposition between performative and constative into deconstruction, showing how they tend towards converging such that it is impossible to draw a bright line between them. On the one hand, insofar as that testimony contains an implicit aim to give a true-to-life account—and one with sufficient validity to inform effective policymaking—it strives for the status of the demonstrable, the provable. It is interesting to note that Foucault, when attesting to the authenticity of the prisoners’ testimonies unadulterated by theoretical knowledge (“we added nothing, fabricated nothing”), immediately appeals to its verifiable accuracy (“we had practically no lies; there were some errors, but a very limited number of them”).^[40] For Derrida, the implied promise to do everything one can to give an accurate account also means that these two finitudes that threaten testimony (good faith error and false witness) are “indissociable.”^[41] There is a sense in which testimony becomes the singular, irreproachable, incontestable thing that it is precisely in its asymptotic approach towards the realm of knowledge and fact, which threatens to erode the very thing that gives it unique value. On the other hand, there is an irradicable performative dimension or structure of the oath even when the underlying material to which one attests is a matter of knowledge or theory, rather than experience. When a scientist or medical practitioner serves as an expert witness before a court or parliamentary inquiry, even though the content of their testimony is grounded in fact, knowledge, or logical deduction, their appeal to a listener who is in no position to verify or contest that testimony means that they are asking to be taken at their word when they vouch for their expertise.^[42]

On this reading the expert by experience emerges not as another category of expert altogether but a limit case that exposes the testimonial stratum undergirding all evidence giving (Derrida goes as far to say “the concept of testimony is co-extensive with the concept of the performative”).^[43] When it comes to their credibility as a function of their sincerity (do they believe what they say is true?), the expert by experience is in no different position to the scholar or practitioner. It is also accepted that the scholar “supposed to know” may err in good faith. To mitigate the risk—and this idea is at the core of academic research—their claims are submitted to scrutiny by other experts in their area. Such disputes are structurally capable of being settled, even if some obstacle prevents it in practice. What distinguishes the limit case of lived experience evidence is that it radicalizes this contestability so that it is infinite and structurally, not only contingently, unamenable to resolution. If, on the face of it, everything hangs on a self-presence and authenticity that belongs to the one giving evidence alone, Derrida’s effort will help not simply to expose but to put pressure on every performative and everything that resembles the capacity of a self-possessing subject. On the logic of authentic self-presence, there is a very real danger that trauma becomes the guarantor of unimpeachable truth—with all the harm this can have for those called on to assume this responsibility. Even when we quite rightly argue that those with lived experience should be recruited for the skills they have or will acquire, to the extent that their inclusion remains principally or exclusively tethered to some inalienable experience, we run the risk of fetishizing and commodifying trauma albeit at one remove. In arguing (quite rightly) for the necessity of involving the voices of those with lived experience and in arguing (again quite rightly) for multiple and diverse voices since one survivor’s lived experience cannot stand for another’s, we make a repeated claim that such experience is in some way unsubstitutable and incomparable.

Derrida’s analysis—unlike Foucault’s “first person of theory”—threatens some of these orthodoxies in ways that are profoundly disconcerting. The intention is clearly not to devalue lived experience in favour of that authorized by institutions of education and accreditation. This much is clear from the page appended to the typescript for the third session to be inserted at the start, where Derrida (one suspects only half-teasingly) leaves as an open question whether the risks of lying and perjury, and hence the possibility of authentic testimony, are really excluded from the classroom.^[44] It is hard to know what the aporias Derrida teases out mean for the use of lived experience expertise in research and policymaking, specifically whether they might be reconciled, if only as reflections on the shortcomings of public intellectuals, with the recommendations that survivor groups are making. Perhaps the clearest insight that arises from his rather tortuous interrogation of testimony, which resonates with the anonymous blogger’s injunctions at the start of this article, is that listening is a pre-condition for testimony—which means that it cannot simply be contained within a solitude of authenticity.

This observation has significant implications for the association of lived experience with storytelling, which was our starting point. Derrida drops several tantalizing references to narrativity in the first few sessions in late 1992, at one point suggesting that testimony need not “manifest itself essentially in the form of story or narration.”^[45] In the fifth session in early 1993, he takes up the problem in greater detail, starting by observing that there is a gap between experiencing or witnessing something, on the one hand, and testifying to having experienced or witnessed it on the other. Being present (in a moment past) to what one attests is a necessary but insufficient condition for bearing witness (in the present). Hence “we tend to temporalize or narrativize” to transform a difference between experience and testimony into a temporal one; in this way, “the gap opens the narrative space.”^[46] Derrida will argue that testimony presupposes a conceptual distinction between “two modes of presence”: the being-present of immediate experience, in which one participates in the space or time witnessed, and the being-present of bearing witness which requires a “capacity to abstract oneself sufficiently from it.”^[47] Even if these two presences cannot be cleanly separated (which Derrida doubts), the fact that they remain a background organizing principle for lived experience testimony shows that the expert by experience is never a closed self-identical presence. They have already, in this “objectifying gap,” begun to grow outside “themselves” and differ from the person present to experience. All this because there is no testimony without listening, without experience being heard by another, who in the first instance, is the other in the self.

For the other

If listening is an essential condition for testimony, this raises another challenge: if it is to impact policy, lived experience must come, in some form or another (not necessarily a story), to be heard by others, and yet it is a cardinal sin against listening to speak for those with lived experience. This is a constant danger against which all those involved in co-producing research and policy need to remain vigilant. The work of the GIP is instructive not simply in that it has been harshly criticized for its failings in this regard but because it failed while being acutely aware of these issues. The GIP’s rallying cry was “la parole aux détenus,” its ambition to illuminate from within and below rather than from without and above by platforming those with direct experience of life in prison rather than academic celebrities interested in theorizing them.^[48] It is worth quoting at length the GIP’s self-understanding, in the words of Foucault in an oft cited discussion with Deleuze in 1972, better to understand the postcolonial and other critiques, and also to situate Derrida’s analysis of the “third” or the witness to testimony. Foucault reflects on the transformation of the role of the intellectual in relation to social struggles:

The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence. In the most recent upheaval, the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power that blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power—the idea of their responsibility for “consciousness” and discourse forms part of the system. The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself “somewhat ahead and to the side” in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge,” “truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse.” In this sense, theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional . . . and not totalizing. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to “awaken consciousness” that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance.^[49]

Foucault could hardly be accused of being unaware of what Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak in her sweeping critique of the GIP calls “the ventriloquism of the speaking subaltern [as] the left intellectual’s stock-in-trade.”^[50] Foucault himself considered the GIP to have failed because it disbanded in favour of ex-prisoner-led organizations without having brought about any meaningful change. The Comité d’Action des Prisonniers (CAP), one of two prisoner-led organizations that co-signed the final Intolérable report as the GIP dissolved itself, was co-founded by Livrozet upon his release in 1972, along with Michel Boraley and Claude Vaudez who had also participated in the Melun Prison revolt. They set up Le Cap, a very popular newspaper created by prisoners for prisoners to help break down barriers between common-law and political prisoners. Some would argue that this withdrawal of traditional intellectuals, though not without tensions over agency during the transition, marked a “productive failure” that paved the way for the platforming of lived experience to which the GIP aspired; at the same time, this shift exposed the advantage that scholars’ social position accorded them for public impact, allowing Foucault’s theoretical legacy to overshadow the social struggle.^[51] His partner, sociologist Daniel Defert, detected a more intrinsic flaw in the GIP’s method, concluding that the group of specific intellectuals, with the exception of a prison psychiatrist, Édith Rose, whose report cost her her job, had failed in their goal of “subverting their position of knowledge and power in knowledge.”^[52]

In their introduction to the English translation of the GIP dossier, editors Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn offer a more positive assessment, highlighting in particular how the GIP’s vision represented a shift in the dynamic between public intellectuals and social struggles:

The GIP’s militancy thus contributed to a decisive shift in France and beyond in the very conception of what it meant to be an intellectual and the responsibilities that come with this status. Its centering of prisoners, their testimony, and actions in their work and its scholarly and even bodily commitment to forging spaces in which those voices and acts could begin to be heard displayed a fundamentally different way of being an intellectual. It was no longer to lead by being the spokesperson of the universal, but to make use precisely of one’s specificity—one’s expertise and the authority granted by one’s position—to create various forums in which the voices and works of the oppressed could be heard and the broader carceral system problematized.^[53]

One of Spivak’s main lines of attack is, in effect, that the GIP did not go far enough in shrugging off this universalist ambition of the traditional intellectual. Its appeals to a Maoist framework divorced from the specificity of the Chinese Maoism and the workers’ struggle are symptomatic of the project’s smuggling tacit reintroduction of an undivided subject, the Subject of Europe and its unnamed Other.^[54] Lyotard makes a related point in a text reacting to a plea from the Socialist government for support from its “intellectuals”: not only does the universalist standpoint have little value for concrete policymaking (he suggests that the call is more properly addressed to experts who seek to optimize performance in their field), moreover there is no longer (if there ever was) any universal disadvantaged or oppressed subject with whom to identify in a struggle for emancipation.^[55] Spivak for her part brings out the Eurocentric and colonialist implications of a posture inattentive to the international division of labour.

Spivak’s other main argument concerns a related reduction. For all its pious claims to displace the intellectual in favour of the unheard, the GIP’s self-reflexivity on this point—and this is what the makes the criticism so devastating and still so pertinent today—authorizes or becomes the alibi for “a transparency by denegations” whereby the intellectuals imagine themselves to be a mere “relay station [relais]” that listens and amplifies what it hears.^[56] On a generous reading, as former prison doctor Antoine Lazarus put it during a roundtable reflection in 1979, the GIP “made use of intellectuals, their speaking ability, and their knowledge of how to be heard in order to get information out, but they were only the amplifiers of a sincerity and of a conviction provided by the presence of prisoners.”^[57] However, what is erased in this “only” and in Foucault’s insistence that it was a theory of rather than about the prisoners is the “for” at work in this prosthetic relay of amplification—a “for” the other whose multiple senses Derrida dissects in his seminar.

In the next section I shall consider the counterarguments that the analysis should move onto another terrain beyond that of “letting speak” or “giving the floor” if we are to contend with the need to generalize the singularity of lived experience for policy or broader societal impacts. For now, though, I want to focus on problematizing the GIP’s notion of relay or amplification. Cecile Brich echoes a familiar argument made by survivor groups in claiming that the GIP failed to let the prisoners speak to the extent that the intellectuals determined the investigative methodology (in particular the use of questionnaires and elicitation of first-person narrative) and thereby determined the very conditions of their audibility.^[58] In taking the prisoners as sources of information and failing to give them control over the research design or over how the data was used, the GIP severely constrained the prisoners’ expression. Derrida’s analysis of testimony, however, points to a structural problem that cannot simply be resolved through methodological amelioration. No-one else can testify for the witness, and yet as testimony it always seeks a companion or witness—it seeks to be heard. For there to be testimony, there must be a listening ear to address, or at least that would be pricked up in that address—the ear apostrophized. “He can therefore testify,” Derrida summarizes, “only by calling as witnesses those who listen to him, who must understand him and accept . . . what the performative testifies to.”^[59]

Derrida’s analysis speaks to something that emerges in Lasonder’s account. Even as she stresses the singularity of survivor stories and support over the levelling effects of statistical knowledge, Lasonder attests to the importance of her story attaining a degree of generalizability so that it might be used to protect others from similar experiences. Reflecting on her struggle to secure a job, she explained:

I felt so discouraged and invisible yet again. I don’t want that to happen to anybody else. So then I decided: I’m not standing for this. I’ll do it myself. So I wrote my story with an author, who wrote my story. And then suddenly the media opened up. People were interested, and I was invited to different parliaments.^[60]

Of course, Lasonder is not talking about this as an extractive experience of the kind that Foucault lampoons in his preface in Livrozet’s book: “You’re asked for the writing of your own lived experience? No matter. We’ll get a tape recorder, you’re going to recount your life. We, we are going to write it. We’ll split the profits.”^[61] What she says, however, does partake of this interesting equivocation between writing her story with someone else, and that someone else writing her story for her. This suggests that there is a kind of writing with-cum-for that would not be a prosthetic extraction of lived experience. As Derrida asserts repeatedly throughout the second year of the seminar, there is no witness for the witness if this “for” means to witness “in their place.” This follows from the singularity of lived experience which means it is defined as first-person testimony. And yet, for it to be a testimony—for it to be known even that there is this secret singular experience—there must also be a second who receives the testimony or even a third who witnesses the testimony of one to another. Derrida considers two other possible ways of understanding the “for.” This other might testify for the witness in the sense of testifying in their favour, supporting their testimony. By itself, this “for” remains external and accidental to the performative singularity of testimony. It can only take the form of an “I believe” which will return, in Derrida’s analysis, on condition of a more structural “for” whereby testimony is irreducibly to testify “before,” “in front of” of the other. This then subjects testimony to the test of credibility. This “for the other” assumes the form of a juridical scene in which the other is cast as a judge or arbiter who cannot be a first-order witness but becomes a second-order one. They cannot be a witness to or participant in the events under examination, but they necessarily become a witness to the witness’s testimony, and it is on this basis that they exercise, justify, and become responsible for their judgment as something more than the mere predictable application of a rule.^[62]

The judge-arbitrator-historian, even though he cannot be a witness, must also bear witness, if only to what he has heard from the witness(es); he must bear witness to the experience during which, having been present, been put in the presence of the testimony, he was able to hear it, understand it, and can still reproduce its essence, etc. There would be here, therefore, a third party and testimony of the testimony, witness of the witness.^[63]

While this paints a sobering picture of an all-too-common situation in which lived experience testimony depends on, and hence risks being subordinated to, some quasi-legal expert judgement which risks reproducing all manner of epistemic injustice, in the next session Derrida offers a more attractive relation between witness and the witness of the witness.

No one testifies for the witness. And yet, we always choose a companion: not for ourselves, but for something within us, beyond us, which needs for us to fail ourselves in order to cross the line that we will not reach.^[64]

To cross the frontier of singularity, for the experience that is at once most intimate and to which the person cannot be reduced and so is in some sense outside or beyond them, the self-possessed subject of testimony has to give way. This may seem like a challenge to the sound advice to give survivors agency over their testimony, but it also opens other doors to look at lived experience in non-extractive ways if we think of it, counterintuitively and with a leap of faith, as always already exceeding the person in whose singular possession we imagine it to vest. It has the potential to liberate lived experience from a liberal-capitalist model of possessive individualism and the regime of private property.

In order to flesh out this deconstruction of firsthand testimony, at several key moments of in late 1992 Derrida refers to the myth of Echo and Narcissus, which he had analysed at length in the previous year.^[65] In Ovid’s telling of the myth, Echo is denied, by Juno’s jealousy, the responsibility of speaking in her own words or responding in her name, condemned to re-sound the final fragments of another’s speech and hence to a kind of secrecy. Derrida describes how she retakes the initiative, exploiting this echo-logical technique to which she is doomed in order to be able to address Narcissus. The mechanics of the secret—which take the form of an iterability, a reproducibility of testimony by another—become the means to undo the secret that imprisons her. In a mirror image of this punishment, Narcissus, having rejected her advances and withdrawn into himself, is now condemned by the jealousy of the nymphs to suffer this same unanswered love, doomed to fall only for his only specular reflection which he cannot reach beyond the frontier of the water’s surface without destroying it. On Derrida’s reading, Echo’s unworking of the secret by means of the secret destines Narcissus to a triple secret: First, he is closed off in the secret of a relationship with only himself. Second, he is cut off from himself, unable to reunite with himself in his reflection. Finally, there is the secret of his desire by which he could dissociate himself from himself and which requires the beloved to be “absent and distant, transcendent, in short, inaccessible, to finally be the other who makes me emerge from myself.”^[66] As Derrida observes, the third secret is a repetition and transformation of the first. What I am proposing is a similar transformation within the singularity of lived experience, whereby the impossibility of speaking for the other means one is always speaking for the ear of an other: rather than replacing one voice with another, the displacement, always already underway, from voice to ear.

Concentrated listening

The issue, if survivor testimony is to be more than rhetorical persuasion and assume the force of expert evidence, is how its singularity may be generalized, given that its expertise consists to some degree in unrepeatable, incontestable experience. Insofar as it demands faith and credibility, this performative always already calls another to witness. This address, this audibility, is not supplemental but of the very nature of testimony as such. Hence the generalization of lived experience is not simply the movement by which something ostensibly private, if not secret, becomes public but, moreover, the movement by which something as eminently singular and unique as lived experience assumes the form of a more general principle of application, so as to have force in a policymaking or implementation setting. Giving survivors the power to shape this generalization does not in itself solve the challenge of how to generalize what is valued precisely for its ungeneralizability. There may be no straightforward guide to getting this right, but it is clear that learning how to listen will play a key part.

This is not an argument for needing traditional intellectuals or professional practitioners to translate to wider publics. Let us return to Lasonder’s account of how her story was generalized. Its reverberations resonate with Derrida’s speculation that, even where there appears to be me alone or just two of us in the sharing of my experience, there is always a third, a witness, another other to that act of testifying to the other. Having written her story with an author who wrote her story, Lasonder’s experience re-sounds in a visit to Amsterdam’s red-light district:

Somebody had read my book, sitting there in their underwear, crying, reading my book, having someone translate it to them for their language. And they asked to speak to me. And the organization said for five years we can’t reach this person, but they want to speak to you because they relate, so I walked into that window and this girl hugged me and was crying, and she told me an horrific story about being kidnapped.^[67]

Here again there is a theme of secrecy, of inaccessibility, not this time of Lasonder’s but that of the young girl unreachable except by Lasonder’s story. The singularity of Lasonder’s testimony—already written and translated, so already retold, iterable, addressed—allows the young woman to emerge from the secrecy of her trauma, providing an address for what by all accounts has been stowed in secrecy. This intensely intimate moment is certainly one of disclosure from one person exclusively to another, of a secret response from one to the other, a scene of reciprocal responsibility. But Lasonder also goes on to describe how it was witnessed by passersby who could not comprehend its significance and how that prompted her to write about her experiences in Amsterdam. What she recounts, then, is a relay of experiences and stories, reverberations of one another that do not remain enclosed within the solitude of an echo but disperse into the world.

To deepen the analysis of this relay, we might compare the scene that Lasonder recounts with that described by Derrida when two people declare “I love you” which he takes as a limit case of the performative’s heterogeneity to proof.

Whoever says “I love you” testifies, in the performative sense we have set out (he speaks in the first-person present tense and produces, in an act of promise, an event, the thing of which he speaks). By testifying in this way, and like every witness, he calls the other to witness his testimony. But by saying “I love you,” he enrols in the secrecy of a face-to-face or tête-à-tête that annihilates the universe and excludes, or in any case takes account of, the absence of any witness. The witness, the witness as third party . . . is at once summoned and excluded. The role of the witness, if there is one, is thus that of an excluded third party (there is no place for the witness) but an excluded third party included as excluded, cited in his exclusion, called to testify, even to inherit his exclusion, to survive as the witness-inheritor of the exclusion that instituted him as a witness to that in which he had no place, as if a will entrusted the inheritor with the mission of keeping the testimony and the secret of a scene that ultimately excluded him, could have done without him . . . this structural exclusion that at once allows him to bear witness, to have been able to observe, see, listen, but prohibits him from bearing witness because this exteriority precisely prevented him from accessing the secret of the secret, the singularity or the singular duality of the first two witnesses.^[68]

Earlier in the first session Derrida had described how the “monadic” singularity of witnessing in effect generalizes once shared with another. That becomes a singular secret which, as soon as there is more than two, separates each pair of singularities from any other: “the se-cernere of the secret, the partition or the division that secretly brings A and B together cannot be accessible to C,” the same for A and C, and B and C; even if there is no grave secret shared, no great oath to betray, “each dual relationship is singular in the trio.”^[69] Referring to the myth of Echo and Narcissus, he hints that he will begin to put some pressure on the idea that there is no room for a third.

The avenue via which Derrida develops this thought that “even if there are only one or two of us in the moment of pure testimony, a third is there” is fascinating. Listening is exposed as technological prosthesis.^[70] Mechanisms of technological reproducibility (audio recordings, photos, film) that turn the “who” of testimony into a “what” seem to make for more reliable witnesses.

These images or these prostheses, these repetitive doubles, are quite incapable of this original performative commitment which consists of saying “now I’m speaking to you,” which nonetheless encourages us to treat them as “witnesses” when they are only clues, signs, or hypotheses of proof, or evidence. It is precisely their power of reproduction, the reserve of iterability in them that allows them to remain the same, identical to themselves, indefinitely repeatable in principle as the same, therefore endowed with an objectivity and a neutrality accessible to all, in a public space, removed from subjective distortion and offering from the outset this dimension of the neutral third party, impassive and incorruptible observer, that we attribute to the witness or that we expect from him. ^[71]

This prosthetic iterability, though, starts from the fact that the promise inherent in testimony implies, if it is to inspire any faith, a promise to repeat the same story again. When it comes to thinking about the impact of lived experience in policymaking, it is notable that a technological, if not technocratic, neutralizing is said to make testimony publicly accessible.

To promise to tell the truth, in whatever sense of the term, is to promise to be able to sign it, countersign it, say it again a moment later and even indefinitely, and even to have been able to say it even before the first moment when I say it. This iterability which introduces reproducibility and archivability precisely where there is not yet, seemingly, a machine, a machine-thing external to speech, a technical prosthesis, this iterability which seems to threaten the originary “who” of testimony in the “what” of the technical-thing, in sign, index, piece of evidence, etc., is an irreducible threat only insofar as it is also a chance, namely the condition of possibility of testimony.^[72]

Derrida thus suggests not only that lived experience testimony already contains this reverberative force that takes it outside its singularity but moreover that it is precisely this which gives it the chance of entering into the public imagination. Wherever there is reproduction there is the threat of corrupting testimony, of it turning into a mere simulacrum and thereby sacrificing something of its incalculable value as it enters the economy of evidence. However, this generalization turns out to be both its necessary condition and, more than any unrepeatable act of authenticity, the source of its trustworthiness.

It is also for this reason that “testimony does not consist essentially or exclusively in narrativity.”^[73] Far from being solely a performative in the past present (I pledge to tell the truth about what I saw, heard, touched), lived experience testimony commits itself, leaving as a guarantee some thing (la “chose”) that is not a story—unless, wonders Derrida,

the thing were always a concentration or precipitation of history, an essence of narrative as one speaks of an essence for the distilled concentration of a perfumed substance, a solidified story, infinitely abbreviated and contained, confined within the compactness of the mute thing, unless the repetition were already the implementation of the “once upon a time” and the commitment to tell the truth about something not presently present to the addressees were irreducibly to install both the testifying witness and the witness called to witness in a narrative scene.^[74]

If lived experience expertise has an affinity with storytelling, it is less, on this reading, because it tells stories than because it opens onto the telling and re-telling of stories, experience taken up and echoed by others—not those “qualified” to interpret, theorize, and subsume it under a generalizing concept but those who will generalize it because it resonates with them.

Lasonder’s account suggests that there must be ways to listen to those with lived experience and allow it to reverberate publicly without doing violence to its singularity, to what ultimately remains theirs alone to share and decide how to share, in short, to its secrecy. In the first year of the seminar, Derrida notes that, even when there is a certain publicity “indispensable to the daylight of every promise,” it nonetheless does not preclude the promise from “retaining the secret within itself” and even “from promising to keep a secret.”^[75] His argument is that the oath-structure of testimony does not so much guard the secret jealously to oneself as it creates an exclusive secret shared among a community that commits them to a future that cannot be prescribed in advance by any of them. Derrida’s remarks here come in the context of marriage, but he also speaks of this exclusive, inappropriable trust as something shared among a larger community (“shared between two or a few” or even circulated around a whole country).

This furthermore shows that when Derrida says that the promise inherent in testifying is the “promise of a secret and made in secret . . . because it always commits the singular to the singular only once and admits no generalization,” he is not speaking of an absolutely isolated witness without relation.^[76] The thrust of Spivak’s critique of the GIP turns on an argument about representation: even as they disavow their status as proxies who speak for, Foucault and Deleuze fail to recognize the part they play in constituting what appears in the portrait, thereby doing violence to its particularity. The singular, as Derrida develops the idea in the seminar on testimony, turns out not to be entirely cut off, but it can be no more reduced to a specified particularity than subsumed under an abstract generality. It is this totalizing subsumption that Derrida rejects when he says that testimony admits of no generalization. In the final year of the seminar he will speak of the “possible and necessary universalization of this singularity,” and of testimony’s promise that its truth is “absolutely universalizable, and therefore translatable without remainder.”^[77] Then in the final session, he turns to the question of the community of listeners, as it were. “You have to know how to make yourself heard,” he comments. Then, recapitulating the theme of irreplaceability, he argues:

This irreplaceability must be replaceable, that is to say, by saying: I swear to tell the truth where I was the only one to see or hear this, and where I am the only one who can attest to it, it is true to the extent that anyone in my place, at that moment, would have seen or heard or touched the same thing, and where I could repeat exemplarily, universally the truth of my testimony.^[78]

That the singular must be universalizable, he asserts, “that is the testimonial condition.” In the moment of testifying, the instant already divides itself. This is the source of its generalizability: a relational or prosthetic substitutability, singular to singular, rather than a subsumptive or representative one, singular to empty universal. The question of testimony’s publicity and of public space comes into sharper focus in the final year, where this understanding of generalization leads Derrida to suggest that, while not all testimony is public and not all lived experience seeks the minimal publicity inherent in the testimonial declaration, the res publica presupposes a call to testimony.^[79] This would suggest that lived experience expertise ought to be less of a strange or special case in the policymaking sphere than the emphasis on demonstrable evidence typically implies.

Notwithstanding its rhetorical emphasis on donner la parole, this logic of universalization was arguably also the ambition of the GIP. If for Bernard Harcourt, the GIP archive affords a new lens through which to rethink for transformative justice projects today “how we tell the stories . . . without eliding the voices of the people so often marginalized in the telling of those histories,”^[80] it also reminds us of the challenge of how to “transform into a discourse graspable by everyone what can be unbearable for the least favored classes.”^[81] Foucault’s argument in the preface to Livrozet’s book is that the extraction of singular stories works to isolate the one with lived experience, foreclosing the possibility of any collective experience, understanding, and action. Against this, the GIP sought to forge a collectivity by linking singular experiences:

We want to break down the double isolation in which prisoners find themselves confined: we want to enable them, through our inquiry, to communicate among themselves, to transmit what they know, and to speak from prison to prison, from cell to cell. We want them to address the population and we want the population to speak to them. These experiences, these isolated revolts must be transformed into common knowledge and coordinated practice.^[82]

Alberto Toscano argues that an “emphasis on the irreducible singularity of which the GIP is supposed to be the bare repeater or relay” comes at the expense of grappling with the project’s more antagonistic dimensions.^[83] The working methods of the GIP embodied a desire to break down divides and bring different fractions of the oppressed together against the backdrop of divide-and-rule tactics that aimed to split the popular classes between those with a relation to the factory and those without. The initial instinct of imprisoned GP members no longer able to establish themselves to organize in factories was to separate. However, Foucault’s goal was to combat the way in which the penal system isolated a fraction of the working class. On Toscano’s analysis, the aspiration to engender an active intolerance was “doubled by a different kind of alliance-building.”

What has become “intolerable” to “new social strata (intellectual, technicians, doctors, journalists, etc.)” about the ruling order is connected to what has always been intolerable in the experience of the exploited class. “Intolerance” is thus framed not (just) as a humanist cry, but as a project for unifying struggles against capitalism—not by providing them with a “thinking head” but by allowing them to communicate with one another beyond their enforced isolation.^[84]

To conclude, I want to consider how this bid to generate a common sense of purpose—a collective will to action, if you like, on modern slavery—derives not from a dispersive generalization of stories but from a “concentration” of narrativity that Derrida invokes in the passage cited earlier when describing how testimony counterintuitively comes to vest in a mute “what” or the “thing-witness.” What does it mean, though, to speak of “an absolute condensation or concentration, an infinite reduction of narrativity”?^[85] Far from being spread far and wide, the story is here precipitated into a distillate likened rather poetically to the essence of a perfume. If it is not already clear from these two passages, in the next year of the seminar Derrida underscores that narrativity, “despite appearances and the statistical frequency of its association with testimony, does not belong to the essence of testimony.”^[86] I want to resist the conclusion that this concentration of stories into a mute thing represents a critical reflection on the objectification and fetishization of survivor expertise. Instead, I want to suggest that this concentration points to a centripetal force of justice that opposes itself to the centrifugal force of representation whose duty is to the diverse and differentiated particularity of positions, interests, and experiences in society. It is not because of a commitment to pluralism that we should include survivor voices but because the force of conviction in such expertise’s testimonial structure solicits trust and has the power to concentrate otherwise scattered power and resources. A representative politics of survivor inclusion risks diluting the momentum for action. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed, “the people’s force acts only when concentrated: it evaporates and is lost as it spreads.”^[87] Noting the power assembled in the room, Lasonder offered “the gift of partnership,” describing it as concrete that needed to be reinforced with the steel of survivors’ voices. With a listening to one another that concentrates, the call for action can resonate more concertedly, more penetratingly—a concentrating ear for a truly big voice.

I am grateful to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for funding that enabled the archival research on Derrida’s unpublished seminars to which I refer in this article.

1. “It’s time to listen to people with lived experience of modern slavery: An Anti-Slavery Day blog from a person with lived experience of modern slavery.” Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (MS PEC), October 18, 2021, https://www.modernslaverypec.org/latest/listening-to-people-with-lived-experience. ↑

2. Keynote address by Jess Phillips, Minister for Safeguarding Violence Against Women and Girls, at “Ten years on from the Modern Slavery Act: Where Next for Modern Slavery Law and Policy?” British Library, London, March 5, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942v2wq4c2Q. ↑

3. Speech by Eleanor Lyons, UK Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, at “Ten years on from the Modern Slavery Act,” London, March 5, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMI0uYysVkk. ↑

4. HMG Response to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact recommendations on: UK’s approach to tackling modern slavery through the aid programme, October 2020, November 24, 2020, https://icai.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/Government-Response-ICAI-Modern-Slavery-24_Nov2020.pdf. ↑

5. Opening by Murray Hunt, at “Ten years on from the Modern Slavery Act,” London, March 5, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh4LZnnTXxw. ↑

6. “It’s time to listen.” ↑

7. Chris Ash, “Whose story, whose benefit? Returning (to) the power of authentic narrative,” MS PEC (December 2023, 12–13, https://files.modernslaverypec.org/production/assets/downloads/MSPEC_StoryTelling_Report.pdf?dm=1736268038. ↑

8. Wendy Asquith, Allen Kiconco, and Alex Balch, A Review of Promising Practices in the Engagement of People with Lived Experience to Address Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, MS PEC (October 2022), https://files.modernslaverypec.org/production/assets/downloads/Engagement-lived-experience-full-report.pdf?dm=1736268031. ↑

9. Wendy Asquith, Bethany Jackson, Kimberley Hutchison, Helen Stalford, and Edmira Bracaj, Ethics in Modern Slavery Research: Review of the Current Landscape and Evaluation of Research Ethics Appropriateness, MS PEC, (December 2024), 26–8. https://files.modernslaverypec.org/production/assets/downloads/Ethics_Report_final.pdf?dm=1736268032. ↑

10. See, for example, Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (University of California Press, 2005); A. J. Smith. “The Conceptual History of Erlebnis: Lived-Experience from Dilthey to Fanon,” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics (2025), https://doi.org/10.55016/ojs/jah.v2025Y2025.81041; Kristie Dotson, “Inheriting Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Epistemology,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 13 (2015): 2322–28. ↑

11. Lyons at “Tens years on.” ↑

12. Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds., Le Groupe d’Information sur les prisons. Archives d’une lutte, 1970–1972 (Éditions de l’IMEC, 2003). Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980), ed. Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, trans. Perry Zurna and Erik Beranek (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). ↑

13. A South African PhD student involved in the project, Brent Harris, used the phrase “lived experience” when describing testimony of a member of the Daveyton Youth Congress seeking amnesty that “I lived there, I felt it and when it happened, I was there” (“Commissioning the South African Past: the Truth Commission and Public History,” 19^th International Congress of Historical Scientists, Oslo 2000, http://www.oslo2000.uio.no/program/papers/m3c/m3c-harris.pdf.) “Experience” was a central category for the TRC, and “personal and narrative truth” numbered among the key concepts and principles cited in the report; the phrase “lived experience” was used in the Research Department’s description of methodology (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, October 1998, Vol. 1, 376). ↑

14. Cillian Ó Fathaigh, “‘The New Bourdieu’: The Public Intellectual in the Shared Interventions of Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2025), https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2025.2519267. ↑

15. Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2000), 33. ↑

16. Clément Laurelli, “« Écoutons le cri du monde »: Retour sur l’itinéraire relationnel du Parlement international des écrivains (1993–2003),” Francosphères 12, no. 2 (2023): 121–40, https://doi.org/10.3828/franc.2023.10. ↑

17. See Rei Terada’s remarks on Derrida’s reference to a “critical experience” of the cogito (Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” [Harvard University Press, 2001], 22–24).Descartes is a touchstone, as is Husserl, as the subject of testimony is put in deconstruction in the seminar. ↑

18. Michel Foucault, “Preface to Serge Livrozet’s De la prison à la révolte,” in Intolerable, 346. ↑

19. Foucault, “Preface,” 347–48. ↑

20. Foucault, “Preface,” 349. ↑

21. Jess Philips at “Ten years on” (emphases mine). ↑

22. Foucault, “Preface,” 347. ↑

23. Chris Ash and Sophie Otiende, Meaningful Engagement of People with Lived Experience: A framework and assessment for increasing lived experience leadership across the spectrum of engagement. Global Fund to End Modern Slavery and National Survivor Network (2023). https://nationalsurvivornetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2023-Meaningful-Engagement-of-People-With-Lived-Experience-Toolkit.pdf. ↑

24. Opening challenge by Jane Lasonder at “Ten years on from the Modern Slavery Act,” London, March 5, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sxElA9wb9k. ↑

25. Foucault, “Preface,” 351. ↑

26. Sofia Gonzalez De Aguinaga, “Equity in Evidence conference: three key takeaways for researchers,” August 8, 2023, https://www.modernslaverypec.org/latest/equity-evidence-conference-three-key-takeaways-researchers. ↑

27. “Equity in Evidence: fusing lived experience and community knowledge into research to end human trafficking,” final report of the conference, MS PEC (2023), 13 (emphases mine) https://files.modernslaverypec.org/production/assets/downloads/Equity-in-Evidence-post-conference-report-September-2023.pdf?dm=1736268032. ↑

28. Jacques Derrida, “Le témoignage,” Unpublished seminar, 1993–94. 219DRR/234/1, Archive-Derrida, IMEC, Séance 7, February 2, 1994: 6–7. ↑

29. Jacques Derrida, “Secret témoignage,” Unpublished seminar, 1994–95. 219DRR/234/2–3, Archive-Derrida, IMEC, Séance 1, November 9, 1994: 1. ↑

30. Jacques Derrida, Répondre—du secret. Séminaire (1991–1992) (Seuil, 2024), 412. ↑

31. Jacques Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Unpublished seminar, 1992–93. 219DRR/233/3–4, Archive-Derrida, IMEC, Séance 2, November 25, 1992: 17. ↑

32. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1, November 4, 1992: 12. ↑

33. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 3, December 2, 1992: 9. ↑

34. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1: 3. ↑

35. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1: 9. ↑

36. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1: 2. ↑

37. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1: 10. ↑

38. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007). ↑

39. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1: 10. ↑

40. François Colcombet, Antoine Lazarus, and Louis Appert [Michel Foucault], “Struggles around the Prisons,” in Intolerable, 368. ↑

41. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1: 11 and Séance 2: 15–16. ↑

42. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 2: 12–14. ↑

43. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 2: 1. ↑

44. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 3: 21. ↑

45. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 3: 8. ↑

46. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 5, January 6, 1993: 2. ↑

47. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 5: 2–3. ↑

48. Foucault, “The Great Confinement,” in Intolerable, 275; GIP, “GIP Manifesto,” in Intolerable, 64–65; GIP, “On Prisons,” in Intolerable, 66. ↑

49. Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Intolerable, ↑

50. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. (Harvard University Press, 1999), 255. ↑

51. Perry Zurn, “Work and Failure: Assessing the Prisons Information Group,” in Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition, ed. Zurn and Andrew Dilts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 75–91. ↑

52. Daniel Defert, “The Emergence of a New Front: The Prisons,” in Intolerable, 38. ↑

53. Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, “Introduction,” in Intolerable, 19. ↑

54. Spivak, Critique, 249, 254, 265. ↑

55. Jean-François Lyotard, “Tomb of the Intellectual,” in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings with Kevin Paul Geiman (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3–7. ↑

56. Spivak, Critique, 264. Michel Foucault and Pierre-Vidal Naquet, “Inquiry on Prisons: Let Us Break Down the Bars of Silence,” in Intolerable, 110. ↑

57. Colcombet, Lazarus, and Appert [Foucault], “Struggles around the Prisons,” in Intolerable, 367 (my emphasis). ↑

58. Cecile Brich, “The Groupe d’information sur les prisons: The Voice of prisoners? Or Foucault’s,” Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 27. ↑

59. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 3: 2. ↑

60. Lasoner, Opening challenge at “Ten years on.” ↑

61. Foucault, “Preface,” 348. ↑

62. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1: 20–23. ↑

63. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1: 21. ↑

64. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 2: 7. ↑

65. Derrida, Répondre—du secret. Séminaire (1991–1992), 480–96. ↑

66. Derrida, Répondre—du secret. Séminaire (1991–1992), 496. ↑

67. Lasonder, Opening challenge at “Ten years on.” ↑

68. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 4, December 9, 1992: 8. ↑

69. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 1: 30–31. ↑

70. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 3: 5. ↑

71. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 3: 3–4. ↑

72. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 3: 4. ↑

73. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 4: 10. ↑

74. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 4: 10–11. ↑

75. Derrida, Répondre—du secret. Séminaire (1991–1992), 412. ↑

76. Derrida, Répondre—du secret. Séminaire (1991–1992), 412. ↑

77. Derrida, “Secret témoignage,” Séance 1: 5; Séance 4, December 7, 1994: 3. ↑

78. Derrida, “Secret témoignage,” Séance 1 (part 2), November 9, 1994: 8. ↑

79. Derrida, “Secret témoignage,”: Séance 2, November 23, 1994: 7–8. ↑

80. Bernard E. Harcourt, “‘Let Those who Have an Experience of Prison Speak’: The Critique & Praxis of the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980),” Foucault Studies 64 (2021): 66. ↑

81. Michel Foucault, “The Penal System is a Problem that has Interested me for Some Time,” in Intolerable, 82 (my emphasis). ↑

82. Michel Foucault, “On Prisons,” public announcement first published in J’accuse on March 15, 1971, in Foucault and the Prison Information Group, Intolerable, 66. ↑

83. Alberto Toscano, “The Intolerable-Inquiry: The Documents of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 25, 2013, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/25/the-intolerable-inquiry-the-documents-of-the-groupe-dinformation-sur-les-prisons. ↑

84. Alberto Toscano, “The Intolerable-Inquiry: The Documents of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 25, 2013, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/25/the-intolerable-inquiry-the-documents-of-the-groupe-dinformation-sur-les-prisons. ↑

85. Derrida, “Répondre du secret—témoigner,” Séance 2: 23. ↑

86. Derrida, “Le témoignage,” Séance 3, Decembre 1, 1993: 16. ↑

87. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge University Press, 2019 [1997]), 107. ↑