This conversation examines the ethical and psychological dimensions of bearing witness to atrocity, featuring Professor Jacqueline Rose and Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Through insights grounded in psychoanalysis, history and ethics, the discussion interrogates the meanings of victimhood, the limits of remorse, and the moral obligation to recognise and respond to human suffering. From the Holocaust to apartheid, and from Gaza to South Africa, the speakers reflect on how we carry history and trauma into the present and the future, asking what it means to truly bear witness. The conversation also confronts the spectacle of violence, the repetition of historical trauma, and the challenge of acting ethically in the face of injustice. This is a moving and urgent dialogue on justice, memory and the body as a site of history.
Prof Rose is internationally renowned for her writing on feminism, literature, psychoanalysis, and political conflict, particularly in Israel/Palestine and South Africa. She is Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and a regular contributor to The London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, and The Guardian. Her books, including The Question of Zion and On Violence and On Violence Against Women, examine the intersections of trauma, history, and representation. In 2020, she delivered the annual Freud lecture, `To Die One’s Own Death – Thinking with Freud in a Time of Pandemic’, livestreamed from the London Freud Museum to the Freud Museum in Vienna. She is a co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices in the UK and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.