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Just Images Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2003).
"Pour savoir, il faut s'imaginer." (To know, one must be able to imagine.)
-Georges Didi-Huberman
"J'adore les gens qui cherchent la vérité, et j'ai peur des gens qui pensent avoir la vérité." (I love people who look for the truth, and I am afraid of those who think they have the truth.)
-Hans Blix
Images malgré tout is the most recent book of French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, a Renaissance specialist. This elegantly written text is divided into three movements, and the first part is a reprinting of Didi-Huberman's article that first appeared in the exhibition catalogue, Mémoires des camps. Photographies des camps de concentration et d'extermination nazi 1933-1999, edited by C. Chéroux (Paris: Marval, 2001). Therein, the author constructs a phenomenological reading of four photographs taken at Auschwitz in August 1944.
First published at the Liberation, the photographs were taken by a Greek Jew remembered today only by the first name of Alex. Alex belonged to the Sonderkommando, those Jews who were selected to oversee the rounding up of the unsuspecting victims, the gassing of them, and then the burning of their bodies in a mass grave. The Sonderkommando, meaning literally "special command," were forced to secrecy in their terrible work, and knew too that they would most likely never escape alive. The first part of Didi-Huberman's study thus consists of a painstaking and thoroughly convincing interpretation of the probable and altogether exceptional circumstances under which Alex took these images. One of the photos shows a group of naked women being led to the gas chamber, while two other photos show the Sonderkommando burning the bodies. Considering what these images depict and the considerable risk at which they were taken, Didi-Huberman rightly calls them "images pulled out of hell" that merit our attention.
The publication of this exhibition catalogue, and Didi-Huberman's text in particular, prompted a swift and unequivocal polemic in the pages of Les Temps modernes (March-May 2001), the French intellectual journal founded at the Liberation by Sartre. The second part of Didi-Huberman's oeuvreconsists of summaries and responses to these two articles by Gérard Wajcman and Elisabeth Pagnoux, epigones of Claude Lanzmann. The ensuing debate on the nature and...