Court Testimony and the Mimesis of Process: A Phenomenological Exploration of Disqualified Witnesses in Roman and Talmudic Law

I will argue that the underlying rationale for both the list of professions that fall under the Roman legal category of Infamia, and its (probable) legal transplant - the Talmudic list of trades disqualified from legal testimony - was not moral, as Malka has argued, but rather aesthetic. These trades involved professional dissimulation, which as such ironically permitted less, rather than more, mimesis required for adequate testimony. In the Talmudic case it incapacitated what Neis has termed “homo-visuality” or self-referential witnessing of an event. Reading Talmudic laws of conjoined testimony and induction of witnesses in light of Deleuze’s and Blanchot’s philosophy, I will argue that homovisuality entailed the witness’s reincarnating into the subject of the event, thus re-signifying rather than reporting the event before court. The judge thus turned witness could capture the truth of the event at a glance, prior to, and irreducible to trial procedures.