Prologue The Impregnated Witness

In chapter 10 of the Book of Revelation, St. John of Patmos is made to eat a book he has not read. The witness of the apocalypse is impregnated by an event which he now carries. This essay extrapolates on the condition of the witness who ingests a drastic event and searches for a tongue with which to speak that which he does not fully know. As a ventriloquist, St. John is proposed as someone who is not muted by the event but rather one who finds his tongue forked and capable of speaking much and simultaneously. This essay also argues that such a ventriloquism following a drastic event structures in part the autobiography of the Lebanese political thinker and militant Fawwaz Trabulsi.

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