From Jane Kilby "Carved in Skin: Bearing Witness to Self-Harm"

• demand to bear witness to pain that is un-witnessable
• resistance to bearing witness
  • defies empathy as reading response (where empathy appopriates with embrace)
  • keeps reader at arm's length
  • anger/ aggression and pain in the telling, where blood and wound become language
  • indecipherability of wound; & "the reader is inaugurated by the scream of self-harm. t is the sense of shck and experience of dissonance of disjuncture between who the reader is before encountering the testimony of traumatised skin and who they are after reading that serves as its occasion for possibility . . . . the appeal made by self-harm can be read as nothing more than a willingness to be open to this moment of loss" (130).

What is the responsibility of the witness to the testimony of self harm? How does the testimony of self-harm, the cut on the skin, testify to what is not speakable in language?

Janice McLane "The Voice on the Skin: Slef-Mutilation and Merleau-Ponty's Theory of Language"

• Abuse, pain, and language marking body as site of pain, rupture
• "pain refers to the disintegration of the wounded person and to her need for reintegration, ande xpress the value of the person harmed, her wholeness, and her wished-for unwounded conntection to the world" (109)
• "Moreover, and surprisingly, injuring herself shows the self-mutilator that she can care for herself. She dows so insofar as self-mutilation allows her to finally create and express feelings -- relief, pain, anger, concern for self, and so on. That is, to connect with the self is to care for the self, even if the connection is made through self-attack. . . . Here, the death of feeling needed to survivi extreme abuse can only be undone by the most graphic means" (113).

pp. 115 - end -- pick two most important quotes and explain.