Lars Iyer says that both Levinas and Blanchot share a concern with language and a witnessing of traumatic experience at the root of language that cannot be translated into the calmer conceptual discourse of philosophy. The issue between two is the way in which both trauma and witnessing bear upon, or determine, the structure of language and experience.

Language witnesses trauma. I'll put that to one side for the moment.

It suggests the Holocaust voices of testimony; deportees surviving in the concentration camps of the Nazis, or the prisoner working to death in the camps of the Gulag, or the killing fields of Cambodia. The very phrase "to bear witness" suggests the singular unspeakable traumas of the 20th century. That kind of trauma unsettles our everyday understandings and our ways of being in the world. Itleaves us with 'the unsaid' because the grand discourses of modernity do not make sense of that suffering.

It is hardly possible to assign a meaning to suffering of being worked to death in the Gulag in terms of a freedom to come,. as held by the labor of the dialectic of freedom. That means the equation of work and freedom, that characterize the great philosophical discourses of political modernity, are no longer tenable.There seems to be a gap between the bodily experience of those in the concentration camps and the Gulag and language.

As Lars says:

"The survivor cannot find the right words; the experience remains trapped in a body that can never narrate and thereby synthesize what happened. It is not a question of retrieving a memory, but of bearing witness to a trauma that was borne in common by the survivors."