Abstract

Prior to 1984, human rights documentation consisted of eyewitness and victim testimony. Since then forensic science has become a staple of human rights investigations. The resurgence of positivism consequence of these institutional and procedural shifts inspired the metaphorical conflation of physical evidence and physical traces with narrative and personal testimony. This thesis considers this tropic drift within human rights discourse as an example and a reflection of the epistemological ambivalence and semiotic confusion that still surrounds the indexical sign both outside and within critical theory. This thesis argues first that traces constitute non-linguistic sign-events whose formal properties motivate anecdotal and narrative modes of explanation and second, that the growing cultural importance of forensic science reifies a form of paranoic knowledge at the heart of western subjectivity.