A systematic study of testimony rooted in contemporary continental philosophy and drawing on literary case studies.From analytic epistemology to gender theory testimony is a major topic in philosophy today. Yet one distinctive approach to testimony has not been fully appreciated the recent history of contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony. In this book GertJan van der Heiden argues that a continental philosophy of testimony can be developed that is guided by those forms of bearing witness that attest to limit experiences of human existence in which the human is rendered mute speechless or robbed of a common understanding. In the first part Van der Heiden explores this sense of testimony in a reading of several literary texts ranging from Platos literary inventions to those of Kierkegaard Melville Soucy and Mortier. In the second part based on the orientation offered by the literary experiments Van der Heiden offers a more systematic account of testimony in which he distinguishes and analyzes four basic elements of testimony. In the third part he shows what this analysis implies for the question of the truth and the truthfulness of testimony. In his discussion with philosophers such as Heidegger Derrida Lyotard Agamben Foucault Ricoeur and Badiou Van der Heiden also provides an overview of how the problem of testimony emerges in a number of thinkers pivotal to twentieth and twentyfirstcentury thought.