Aesthetic Witnessing: Mazen Kerbaj’s Starry Night

Abstract

This essay investigates Mazen Kerbaj’s Starry Night – a recording of a trumpet improvisation performed in response to Israeli airstrikes on Beirut in July 2006 – as an instance of aesthetic witnessing. I argue that the piece, rather than representing historical actuality, transforms it by means of aesthetic action: the act of recording and posting the track online constitutes a unified gesture whose aspectual irresolution between historical and aesthetic action is its defining feature. Through this irresolution, Kerbaj’s performance turns exposure to violence into a form of empowerment, reclaiming agency where none seems possible. The aesthetic action reconfigures the relation between performer and aggressor, transforming non-communication into communication, and reinstating the performer’s belonging in humanity. In doing so, Starry Night articulates a politics of life as such – a politics grounded not in determinate identity or collective difference, but in the universal and precarious activity of life that aesthetic action uniquely makes manifest.