Abstract
This article investigates the fundamental paradox of traumatic testimony within the judicial process: the law demands from the witness precisely what trauma renders neurobiologically impossible, namely a coherent, linear, and stable account of an experience that has, by definition, destroyed the possibility of organized representation. Drawing on Derrida's conceptualization of the event as "unappropriable" and Lacan's notion of the phantasm as the apparatus mediating the subject's relationship with reality, the text demonstrates how traumatic breach disrupts the conceptual framework that normally enables the symbolization and narration of experience. Neuroscientific findings on traumatic memory – from hippocampal dysregulation to the production of dissociated sensory traces that resist narrative structure – empirically confirm the impossibility of symbolization theorized by psychoanalysis. The article then examines "normal" memory, showing, through the work of Bartlett, Nader, and the DRM paradigm of Deese-Roediger-McDermott, that even non-traumatized memory is intrinsically reconstructive, selective, and fallible, and that forgetting, as Marc Augé has argued, constitutes one of its enabling conditions. On this basis, the text analyzes the paradoxes of testimony – from the logical condition illustrated by Lyotard to the epistemological one highlighted by Agamben in his commentary on Auschwitz – and the role of Trauma Studies and Cathy Caruth in situating the impossibility of traumatic representation within a broader crisis of truth. Drawing on Foucault and his concept of the archive as "the law of what can be said," the text shows how justice operates as a translation device that transforms traumatic experience into juridical fact, determining which aspects of experience may access the status of truth and which remain excluded. The conclusion proposes that the impossibility of traumatic testimony does not represent a deficiency to be corrected but a truth to be recognized, calling for a form of justice capable of receiving the fragmentation of the account as an authentic expression of traumatic experience.