Chaouat B Diacritics

8/19/2019 Chaouat B Diacritics

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IN THE IMAGE OF AUSCHWITZ

BRUNO CHAOUAT

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The Twilight of the Iconoclasts

In 2001 in Paris, an exhibit displayed photographs of Nazi concentration and extermina-

tion camps.1 Among them were four snapshots secretly taken in August 1944 by members

of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz’s crematory V.2 The lm survived its authors by

being successfully conveyed outside the camp in a toothpaste tube. It eventually reached

the Polish Resistance. Two pictures, taken from within the crematory, show the incinera-

tion of gassed bodies. The next two pictures are taken as the unidentied photographerwalks out of the crematory and snaps two shots without looking. The rst one is disori-

ented and shows in one corner a group of naked women waiting for their turn in the gas

chamber. The second is unfocused, dazzled by the light coming through the branches of

a tree and blinding the photographer.

For having proposed a phenomenological reading of these four previously published

photographs, the art historian and leading Renaissance scholar Georges Didi-Huberman

stirred up a violent outburst in Les temps modernes, a journal currently edited by ClaudeLanzmann. Because the gruesome snapshots were taken despite SS prohibition of photo-

graphs and lms, in a desperate effort to rescue a visual fragment of the event and to warn

the world of Nazi barbarity, Didi-Huberman entitled the catalogue of the exhibition Im-ages malgré tout ( Images in Spite of Everything).3 The deliberately polemical conclusionreached by Didi-Huberman in his commentary is that, far from being “unimaginable,”

Auschwitz is only “imaginable.” While admitting that images, like words, will never

fathom the reality of Auschwitz, Didi-Huberman claims that trying to imagine it remains

necessary. In fact, it is to the extent that one can pretend to nothing other than to imagine

Auschwitz that images, although constitutively lacking, are indispensable:

Faut-il redire . . . qu’Auschwitz est inimaginable? Certes non. Il faut même direle contraire: il faut dire qu’Auschwitz n’est qu’imaginable, que nous sommescontraints à l’image et que, pour cela, nous devons en tenter une critique interneaux ns même de nous débrouiller avec cette contrainte, avec cette lacunaire

For François Legrand, unrepentant iconophile. 1. “Mémoire des camps,” directed by C. Chéroux.

2. The members of the Sonderkommando were forced to feed the gas chambers and the crema-tories with gassed bodies. 3. The catalogue forms the rst section of the book Images malgré tout, published two yearsafter the exhibition. The second section of the book, entitled “Malgré l’image toute,” is a long andscrupulous response to the accusations launched in Les temps modernes. Didi-Huberman usesthe polemical responses to the catalogue of the exhibition “Mémoires des camps” to elaborate asophisticated ontology of images that, as we will see, builds upon twenty years of intense reec-

tion on the visible. Although these accusations were formulated by Elisabeth Pagnoux and GérardWajcman, it is worth noting that the editor of Les temps modernes, Claude Lanzmann, initiated the

l i i i t i bli h d i L M d t th ti f th hibiti [S “E t é i


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nécessité. [Must we say again . . . that Auschwitz is unimaginable? Certainlynot: one must, on the contrary, say that Auschwitz is only imaginable, that weare bound to images and that, for that very reason, we must endeavor to makean internal critique of images, to make do with such a constraint, with such alacunary necessity.] [ IMT 62]

For this essay and its deant conclusion—a denitive blow against the “iconoclastic”

trend in the history of Holocaust representation since the 1980s—the art historian was ac-cused of voyeurism, pagan idolatry, irresponsible aestheticism, and fetishistic perversion.

Last but not least, he was implicitly suspected of Holocaust denial and of Christianizing

the Holocaust. In the opening of the catalogue, Didi-Huberman claims: “Pour savoir, il

faut s’imaginer [To know, one must imagine oneself]” [11]. How are we to read this pre-

scription, which seems to predicate historical knowledge upon imagination? If knowing

the Holocaust entails a work of the imagination, why use the reexive voice “s’imaginer”

instead of “imaginer”? Why not simply use the transitive form, “il faut imaginer”? Does

this use of the reexive voice suggest an exploitative identication with the victims, as

in the French expression “s’y croire”? Or does it point to a more elaborate modality of

imagination that remains to be explored?Before going further, I will summarize Georges Didi-Huberman’s phenomenologi-

cal reading of those images. First, photographs are not static but dynamic. They do not

merely mirror the real by freezing it but empathically4 convey an experience of history.What matters for the art historian and archive reader is the eventfulness of the photo-

graphs. Seeing the snapshots means thus reading the urgency and the risk that they bring

forth by preserving zones of shade: a failed snapshot carries with it the moment and the

movement of history—history’s mo(vi)mentum. By their very lack of focus, these particu-lar snapshots focus on the happening of history. This is why Didi-Huberman objects to

the reframing, refocusing, and even embellishing that have taken place in their editorial

history.

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Reframing and refocusing suppress the zones of invisibility that obfuscate thevisible and which are part of the historical experience of witnessing. The experience of

taking those photographs is thus as relevant to historical truth as the scene that they pres-

ent. The way we see or do not see is historically as critical as what we see. The phenom-enologist will need to see not only what the photographs present, but also the story that

they tell by what they do not or cannot present.

Didi-Huberman’s critics perceived the claim that there are images of Auschwitz as

the newest form of Holocaust denial. While traditional Holocaust deniers claim that gas

chambers did not exist because no one who saw a gas chamber rsthand has ever re-

turned to bear witness,6 the new Holocaust denial would consist in holding that there are,

4. The notion of “empathy” should be understood in the sense developed in Didi-Huber-man’s magnum opus devoted to Aby Warburg—a work toward which all of his previous booksseem organically to converge and which can be read as the author’s summa aesthetica [L’imagesurvivante—Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg]. “Empathy” refers toWarburg’s concepts of Pathosformel and Nachleben. See further, my (too-)brief discussion of Didi-

Huberman’s L’image survivante.5. Didi-Huberman reproduces in his book an embellished and shamelessly romanticized snap-

shot of women running toward the gas chamber as an example of Holocaust kitsch and of ethicallyunacceptable images. Most of the photographs can be found in Jean-Claude Pressac’s Auschwitz:Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. See also, by Pressac, Les crématoires d’Auschwitz:La machinerie du meurtre de masse.

6. See Robert Faurisson’s notorious sophism in his paranoid self-apology, Mémoire endéfense: Contre ceux qui m’accusent de falisier l’Histoire, La question des chambers à gaz. (Oneh ld t th t thi b k b f d b N Ch k h d t t di ti i h


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indeed, visual traces of the genocide. Conversely, denying that there are images of the

extermination constitutes the ultimate refutation of Holocaust denial. Not only must a

“true believer” in the Holocaust deny that there are images; he or she must also believe

that even if there were images, they would have to be dismissed as irrelevant to historical

truth. The quest for images will be dogmatically stigmatized as morbid curiosity, dubi-

ous skepticism, and virtual Holocaust denial. Why search for images if not because one

does not genuinely believe in what happened? Why look for evidence if not because one

is indifferent to the visual negativity resulting from the systematic erasure of images bythe perpetrators? Does not an exhibition of death camp photographs suggest that gas

chambers did not exist? After all, photographs do not show the gas chambers and cre-

matories in action. And if the photographs do not show the whole thing, namely the gas-

sing of thousands of people, do they, indeed, show anything at all? Didi-Huberman was

thus accused of nurturing Holocaust denial by investing too much faith in the historical

relevance of the visual medium. Likewise, in 1998, the lmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was

suspected of virtual Holocaust denial by Gérard Wajcman (one of those accusing Didi-

Huberman) for having somewhat thoughtlessly declared: “Je pense que si je m’y mettais

avec un bon journaliste d’investigation, je trouverais des images des chambres à gaz au

bout de vingt ans [I think that with the help of a good reporter, it would take me no morethan twenty years to nd images of the gas chambers].”7 To the extent that he does not

dismiss the power of images, Godard the iconophile was suspected of Holocaust skepti-

cism. If images constitute the ultimate proof, then what if one could not unearth enough

convincing and irrefutable images, after twenty years of systematic investigation?

Instead of endlessly hunting for more images, Claude Lanzmann chose, we could

argue, to show nothing at all in his lm Shoah. For Didi-Huberman’s critics, showingnothing at all amounts to telling it all, while showing something amounts to telling noth-

ing. Photographs, archive footage, documents, for Lanzmann, constitute “images sans

imagination [unimaginative images].” By contrast, one is led to infer that Shoah presents

nine-and-a-half hours of imaginative images. But what are imaginative images? Grantedthat “images sans imagination” are images as such—prints, documents, photographs,

have not returned to report how they were killed—Jean-François Lyotard had proposed a responsein Le différend. One could even argue that Le différend is itself a lengthy attempt at responding toa historical positivism that can lead, ironically enough, to the denial of reality. Yet Didi-Hubermandeems Lyotard’s response no less sophistic than the Holocaust deniers’ arguments [IMT 12]. Avery different response to Faurisson’s allegations, grounded on empirical evidence rather than ona philosophico-transcendental, antipositivistic argument, will be found in works by Pierre Vidal-

Naquet and Deborah Lipstadt, among many others. On the shortcomings of postmodern responsesto Holocaust denial in general and of Lyotard’s response in particular, see Elizabeth Jane Bellamy,“‘Laboratories’ against Holocaust Denial—Or, the Limits of Postmodern Theory.”

7. See Gérard Wajcman, “’Saint Paul’ Godard contre ‘Moïse’ Lanzmann?” In the core of Im-ages malgré tout, Didi-Huberman will in fact, and as a provocative response to Wajcman’s attackagainst the lmmaker, engage at length with Jean-Luc Godard’s ontology of images and reinscribe

Histoire(s) du cinéma within a philosophy of history inherited from the German Jewish, early twen-tieth-century reelaboration of the concept of redemption. According to this reelaboration, imagessalvage the real, which is not to say that the Holocaust will ever be redeemed, but that a memoryof it must nonetheless be recalled by fragmentary, lacunary, perhaps hopeless images. In fact, thisredemption is not, in principle, soteriological. For Godard, and for Didi-Huberman, at least to acertain degree, the task of the lmmaker and of the art historian is historical and ethical more than

soteriological or apocalyptic. This is not to say that history—art history, the art of history, and artas history—is not ultimately contaminated by the apocalyptic, Christological motif, as I will fur-

ther surmise. The contentious point was Didi-Huberman’s use of Jean-Luc Godard’s aphorism asan epigraph to Images malgré tout: “[. . .] même rayé à mort/un simple rectangle / de trente-cinq/ millimètres / sauve l’honneur / de tout le réel [even entirely crossed out / a mere rectangle / of


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archives, and so forth—we may assume that imaginative images are negative images

or counterimages, images that present the actual, historical lack of images and the onto-

logical deciency inherent in all images. It thus appears that Lanzmann does not dismiss

imagination as such, nor indeed images per se. Otherwise, he would not have chosen the

lm medium to transmit the Holocaust. If there are “images sans imagination,” there must

be acceptable, even desirable, images. But the only “good” images are the ones that point

to the inherent inability of all images to bear witness to the Holocaust. A photograph, an

archive, or a document, for Lanzmann, betray the historical truth, because they purport torepresent the past instead of acting it out in the present. By representing the past, “bad”

images cover it up instead of recovering it. Instead of securing memory, images further

oblivion.

Such is the ethical and aesthetic premise that Didi-Huberman’s essay dismisses, by

using Lanzmann’s lm against its author, by using Shoah against the discourse that thelm has bolstered for the past twenty years. Indeed, for Didi-Huberman, the lm Shoahdoes not invalidate the historical value of photographs. Rather, and depending on the way

they are edited and read, documents and archives complement Lanzmann’s historical,

philosophical, and aesthetic endeavor. In fact, in 1995, Didi-Huberman had devoted an

essay to Lanzmann’s lm entitled “Le lieu malgré tout” (“The Site in Spite of Every-thing,” in Phasmes). That Images malgré tout was to be read as an echo of this previousessay indicates that the catalogue was clearly not written against Lanzmann’s lm but

certainly against the pious and at times mystical readings that the lm has fostered in

France and, perhaps differently, in the US. For Didi-Huberman, Lanzmann’s masterpiece

fullls Walter Benjamin’s critical demand addressed to the artwork: the artwork must

constitute itself as a dialectical image, that is, it must produce a collision of the Now

and the Then. Speaking of Lanzmann’s lm, Didi-Huberman quotes Benjamin’s formula:

“Une image . . . est ce en quoi l’Autrefois rencontre le Maintenant dans un éclair pour

former une constellation [An image . . . is that in which the Then encounters the Now

in a ash to form a constellation]” [qtd. in Didi-Huberman, Phasmes 240–41]. Such isLanzmann’s lm to the seer/reader: a visible site in spite of the invisible dead, a materialtrace hinting at the disappearance of millions of people. Less a “non-lieu de mémoire

[nonplace of memory],” as its author had it, than a “lieu malgré tout,” a place of redemp-

tion via an aesthetic, imaginative relation to history—despite the Nazi attempt at destroy-

ing the places of memory and the memory of the places. The site, like the image, survives

despite the human desertion to which it stubbornly, posthumously bears witness.

Didi-Huberman responded to his critics in 2003 with another essay, wittily entitled

“Malgré l’image toute.”8 The core argument of this essay is that not only do images

remain in spite of the notorious Nazi attempt at erasing all traces of the extermination,

but perhaps more importantly, from a phenomenological perspective, the available vi-

sual fragments are compelling even though there can be no total image (“image toute”)

of Auschwitz. To the accusation of fetishism, Didi-Huberman retorts that believing that

images show nothing at all, as do Lanzmann’s proponents, is no less fetishistic than to

believe that images can show the whole thing. Both positions are grounded in a fetishisticfaith in the power of images. Likewise, it is certainly a form of fetishism to consider that

if images do not show everything, showing something amounts to showing nothing at all.

The dialectical and phenomenological reading of four snapshots rescued from Auschwitz

is less fetishistic, Didi-Huberman argues, than Claude Lanzmann’s obsession with an

imaginary lm that would show the absolute moment of the Holocaust, namely the gas -

sing of thousands of people [ IMT 101]. Lanzmann’s main reason for rejecting archivefootage and for denying that there are images of Auschwitz is precisely the absence of

8 “In Spite of the Total Image ” This essay constitutes the second section of the book Images


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such a total image. If this total image does not exist, then there should be no images

at all—or only “good” images, that is, images that present the failure of all images. In

other words, there should be no image because there is no image, and there is no imagebecause there should be none. Didi-Huberman’s detractors’ reasoning is circular: there isno image of Auschwitz because Auschwitz exceeds imagination, and Auschwitz exceeds

imagination because there is no image of it.

Yet images, like language, Didi-Huberman argues, drawing on the Lacanian para-

digm, are ontologically fallible and can present only bits and pieces of the real. Didi-Hu-berman rejects both absolute views as adialectical and antiheuristic: (a) the overestima-

tion of the power of images which arguably characterizes our iconophilic and consumerist

culture, (b) the dogmatic rejection of images as a priori incapable of conveying historicaltruth—what Didi-Huberman identies as the dogma of the “unimaginable.”

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Art as History: Prints and Afterlives

Such a dehistoricization of the Holocaust is far removed from Didi-Huberman’s thinking.

First, the art historian, whose hermeneutics of images is inherently dialectical, dismisses

Lanzmann’s “all or nothing” logic. His premise is that images show neither everything

nor nothing. Instead, they delineate the fragile place of a eeting encounter between then

and now, between there and here, between the invisible and the visible. Such a dialectic

of the visible arguably constitutes the keystone of Didi-Huberman’s history of art history,

from the publication of his 1982 landmark Invention de l’hystérie, with its inscriptionof the birth of psychiatry in art history, to his recent study of the Italian artist Claudio

Parmiggiani—a phenomenology of dust and shade, haunted by the traumatic memory of

Hiroshima. Didi-Huberman’s work is situated at the crossroads of knowing and seeing, ofepistemology and phenomenology. It invites his reader on a journey at the connes of art

history and of history as aesthetic experience. The Holocaust was a predictable if perilous

stop on this journey—perilous because to inscribe the Holocaust in a theory of images

can only raise suspicion of aestheticizing and fetishizing death and trauma.

Interestingly, the title of the 2001 book on Parmiggiani is Génie du non-lieu. Thistitle can hardly fail to evoke Claude Lanzmann’s own phrase about his lm, “non-lieux

de la mémoire” [see “Les non-lieux de la mémoire” 290], as though a certain reading of

the “disaster,” be it Auschwitz or Hiroshima, that I will here risk labeling “French,” were

secretly informing Didi-Huberman’s reading of art, history, and of art history. One should

read in this light the intriguing book that the art historian devoted to the Hungarian artist

Simon Hantaï in 1998, L’Étoilement. This book examines the work of an artist who bur-ies his canvasses into the earth and digs them out years later once they have decomposed.

Difcult not to think of the famous Rouleaux d’Auschwitz, buried by the victims next tothe crematories and described by Didi-Huberman in Images malgré tout as “rongés parl’humidité [gnawed by humidity]” [ IMT 15]. Asked what he felt while unearthing his owncanvasses and putting his hands in the “fumier de sa propre peinture [manure of his own

painting]” on which appear, as if on a palimpsest, fragments of writing, Hantaï answers:

“C’était comme déterrer des cadavres [It was like digging out corpses]” [ Étoilement 108].The task of the artist resembles that of a morbid, Lazarus-like archaeology haunted by the

memory of modern wars and disasters—an archeology that strives to dig up the cadavers

of history.

While he was working on Images malgré tout and photography as a form of post-


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of modern art history, L’image survivante. This monograph, begun in 1990, elaboratesa theory of images heuristically understood as afterlife, or Nachleben. The concept of Nachleben informs an anthropology of art of which the early twentieth-century art histo-rian Aby Warburg is a ghostly and repressed founder.9 Here is Didi-Huberman’s descrip-

tion of Warburg’s Nachleben:

La forme survivante, au sens de Warburg, . . . survit, symptomalement et fanto-

malement, à sa propre mort: ayant disparu en un point de l’histoire; étant réap- parue bien plus tard, à un moment où, peut-être, on ne l’attendait plus; ayant, par conséquent, survécu dans les limbes encore mal dénies d’une “mémoire

collective.” [IS 67]

[The surviving form, in Warburg’s sense, . . . survives its own death as a symp-tom and a phantom: having vanished at one point in history; having reemergedmuch later, at a time when, perhaps, one had ceased to expect it; having, there- fore, survived in the still poorly dened limbo of a “collective memory.”]

Nachleben is to art and cultural history what the print is to mimesis and what trauma and Nachträglichkeit are to the time of consciousness. The concept of Nachleben unsettles theteleology of art history in the same way as the print (“l’empreinte”) unsettles our reading

of images. Drawing on Benjamin’s reections on art and history, Didi-Huberman claims

that images present a ash of history and history as mere ash. This unsettling concep -

tion of representation can be best understood in the light of the paradigm of the print, by

which Didi-Huberman means any likeness produced through contact—footprint, nger-

print, photographic print, and so forth.

What are the epistemic and aesthetic stakes of a print? What do we see in a print, and

what do we learn from it about our relation to the past? Didi-Huberman writes in his study

of Claudio Parmiggiani’s art:

en toute procédure d’empreinte, le lieu s’instaure forcément d’un retrait . . . il faut bien le déplacement du pied—il faut que le marcheur s’en aille—pour queson empreinte nous soit rendue visible [in any process of print, the site is neces-sarily established through a retreat . . . the motion of the foot is indispensable—the walker must move away—for his print to become visible to us]. [GNL 36]

The process of print (“procédure d’empreinte”) embodies the dialectical synthesis of

presence and absence, of visibility and invisibility, of the now and the then. If a footprint

undeniably manifests a phenomenon, at the same time it indicates the retreat of that of

which it remains nonetheless a material inscription. Absence, here, is the necessary con-

dition of presence. By the same token, presence is, as it were, hollowed out by absence.10

Such is the way in which Didi-Huberman reads the Auschwitz snapshots—as prints of

the extermination, as an irrefutable if eeting coming forth of the past despite its having

already receded.

9. It could be argued that Didi-Huberman’s relation to Warburg is one of melancholic iden-tication and incorporation—which would allow us to read his general aesthetic theory as a form

of Trauerspiel, and which also accounts for the feeling of structural endlessness that his book onWarburg prompts in the reader.

10 hi d l i f idi b ’ di f i i i’ k i h d dl


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Ad imaginem Auschwitzi

Yet if one can easily hear in this paradigm an explicit echo of Benjamin’s dialectical im-

age and fragmentary philosophy of history, it also suggests a tricky Christological reading

of the Holocaust. In his 1990 book on Fra Angelico [48–49], Didi-Huberman resorted to

Aquinas’s opposition between likeness of trace (repraesentatio vestigii) and likeness ofimage (repraesentatio imaginis):

Any effect somehow copies its cause, yet variously. For some represent the cau-sality [causalitatem] alone of the cause, not its form [formam], thus smoke [fu-mus] and re [ignem]. This is called a likeness of trace [repraesentatio vestigii]; for a trace or footprint [vestigium] shows that somebody has passed that way,but not what manner of person he was. However, there are some effects thatrepresent their cause in the likeness of its form [ad similitudinem formae ejus],thus a ame [ignis] and the re [ignem] that sets it alight, or an efgy of Hermes

[statua Mercurii]; this is the likeness of image [repraesentatio imaginis]. [Aqui-nas 1a.45.7]

The re/smoke causal relation is especially resonant with the reading of the Auschwitz

photograph in which the smoke, although it hides the cremation and the pits, hints at

them in the guise of a trace—vestigium. If the “Holocaust”—literally, the burning out, ortotal cremation—is the cause of the smoke, the smoke is not a representation of image of

the Holocaust but merely a vestige or a print—a remainder and a reminder of the event.

Such are, for Didi-Huberman, the epistemological and ethical stakes of the photographs

commented on.

However, this semiotic paradigm will be better understood if we turn to Aquinas’s in-scription of it within the Christian narrative of the fall and redemption. In his book on Fra

Angelico, Didi-Huberman had framed sacred art within the neo-Platonic and medieval

topos of the region of dissemblance where the postlapsarian creature wanders. Here, henoticed that for Aquinas, the image of God bestowed upon Adam is not aspectual or ex-

tensive but intensive, not physical but metaphysical, not corporeal but immaterial: Adam

does not look like God, but he is nonetheless in the image of his Creator—ad imaginem Dei. In contrast, all creatures and creations, besides the creature endowed with reason,all artistic production, for example, will pertain to the broken, merely physical image,

or vestigium. Devout art, insofar as it acknowledges the postlapsarian condition and theontological dissemblance, will not resemble by means of the image but by means of the

trace. Thus, Didi-Huberman writes:

. . . the art of painting, inasmuch as its stakes are given as “devout,” transcen-dent, does not proceed by means of the image but by means of the vestige. Thisis the fundamental and very simple consequence of the fact that God is not, forany painter whatever, “the Being to be seen.” [FA 49]

This is not to say that the Christian artist does not strive for this “Being to be seen.” In

fact, Didi-Huberman adds that although “the painted world must accept its poverty, which

is to be able to produce only an aesthetics of the vestige,” the artist is also aware that “in

spite of everything”—and here we come across, ten years earlier, an occurrence of the

controversial “malgré tout” of the essay on the Auschwitz snapshots—“‘man walks in the


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Structurally, we can juxtapose the dialectical argument on the Auschwitz snapshots—

that is, Auschwitz is less unimaginable than only imaginable, at once necessary and im-

possible to imagine—with the argument on devout art: in both cases, the art historian and

the Christian artist yearn for the image in spite of everything, be it for the invisible imageof God as arch-Image or for Auschwitz as the limit of human imagination. One should

also read in this light Didi-Huberman’s recourse, in Images malgré tout, to Georges Ba-taille’s 1947 statement about human likeness after Auschwitz, “L’image de l’homme est

inséparable, désormais, d’une chambre à gaz [The image of man is henceforth insepa-rable from a gas chamber]” [qtd. in IMT 42]. Clearly, Bataille did not mean that man,after Auschwitz, looks like a gas chamber, but that he is in the image of Auschwitz, adimaginem Auschwitzi, in the same way as he was, for Aquinas and the Christian artist, adimaginem Dei.

The recourse to the Christian paradigm has not escaped Gérard Wajcman’s critique.

At the end of his essay in Les temps modernes, Wajcman recalls that the origin of photog-raphy in the nineteenth century is symbolically concomitant with the rediscovery of the

Shroud of Turin and its photographic resurrection in 1898. It is worth noticing that the

image of Christ imprinted on the Holy Shroud is not properly speaking a representation,

an image, or a portrait. It is rather supposed to be a print produced by the physical con-tact between the face of Christ and the piece of linen, the shroud, or sudarium—perhapsbetter called a “sweater” as in the French “suaire” [see Didi-Huberman, L’empreinte 51].A phenomenological paradox, the Holy Face is at once present and absent. As such, it

subverts resemblance and representation. As Didi-Huberman had noted in the catalogue

of a 1997 exhibition devoted to all forms of print from prehistory to modern art, the Holy

Shroud accomplishes the dialectical synthesis between the Judaic prohibition of images

and pagan idolatry. The visual regime of the Holy Shroud sublates the opposition between

the invisibility of God and his visible incarnation, thus enacting the Christian synthesis of

Judaism and paganism [ L’empreinte 51].

Didi-Huberman’s symbolic investment in the power of the photographic image asemblem of the print and as allegory of history may thus be haunted by a Christian theoph-

any, namely, the revelation in absentia of the Holy Face—the Print par excellence of the

one whom Paul called “the image [eikon] of the invisible God” [Colossians 1: 15]. TheHoly Shroud emblematizes the encounter between the visible (the icon) and the invisible

(the God). Although disingenuous and ill informed of Didi-Huberman’s previous work,

Gérard Wajcman’s essay may nonetheless carry an insightful intuition. In the reading that

Wajcman proposes of Didi-Huberman’s essay, Auschwitz appears as a gure of Christ,

whose shroud as photograph/print would be displayed religiously as a sacred relic in ac-

cordance with the Eucharistic ritual of the ostension. The victims would thus be turned

into Christic, sacricial gures, and the Holocaust dubiously changed into a martyrdom

potentially leading to redemption. Lanzmann’s proponents reject in principle what they

perceive as the redemptive temptation at work in the excessive care for images.

4

“S’imaginer”: From Auschwitz to Mount Sinai, and Back

In order better to understand Didi-Huberman’s symbolic engagement with the photo-

graphic medium, I will now turn to a peculiarly lyrical essay written in 1990.11 In this

11. This essay, “Celui qui inventa le verbe ‘photographier’ [The One Who Invented the Verb


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essay, Didi-Huberman had identied the man who coined the verb to photograph as an

obscure anchorite named Philotheus of Sinai, popular in the Christian Orthodox Church

and who presumably lived between the ninth and twelfth centuries on Mount Sinai. Didi-

Huberman recounts that Philotheus once dived into a basin made of red marble and from

this baptismal immersion emerged with the certainty of having been “revealed” in the

water as what he essentially was, that is, to kat’eikona, “the being-in-the-image.”

This allegory lays out nothing less than the becoming icon of the human creature

and, for Didi-Huberman, the myth of the origin of photography. The water into whichPhilotheus dives functions as a lm developer. The French uses the word révéler to de-

scribe the chemical operation of the apparition of the latent image. This term points to the

apocalyptic and theophanic tradition which survives as a cultural vestige or Nachleben

in modern photography. In Philotheus’s allegory, the photograph or print is none other

than the hermit himself. Being according to the image (kat’eikona) signies that baptism,

rather than natural birth, is what makes the creature in the likeness of God. Baptism en-

dows the creature with the arch-image, the Image of images. However, Philotheus does

not resemble God; his body and soul merely reect the divine light which is itself less an

image than the pure possibility of all images, visibility as such, to the extent that visibility

cannot be seen. Born again by immersion, the Christian and only the Christian is in thelikeness of God; only he bears the seal of the divine light. To become a diaphanous, dis-

incarnate image of God is thus what the Christian strives for. Baptism reveals the iconic

essence of the Christian in the same way as the lm developer reveals the image on the

lm. The Christian appears as a print of God. Didi-Huberman further recounts that the

saint felt his body and soul as though they were a pool of bleeding wax waiting for the

stamp:

C’est là en moi, pensa-t-il, que le Dieu lumineusement s’empreint, phôteino-

grapheisthai, se “photographie” [It is here, within me, he thought, that the God

luminously imprints Himself, photeinographeisthai, “photographs” Himself].[Phasmes 54]

Philotheus’s invention of this Greek verb that combines the adjective phôteinos, “lumi-

nous,” and the verb graphein, “to write,” has led modern philologists to coin the phrase

“mystical photography.”12

The body of the sainted martyr has morphed, in this allegory, into a contact sheet

on which the divine light has imprinted its stamp. This contact sheet functions as a trope

for the martyros, or witness. Blood, indeed, is part of this scenario via the red color and

the bleeding wax. If we consult Philotheus’s original text, we discover that the divine

light wounds (blesse) and blesses (bénit ) the one who experiences it and who is burnt, as

it were, by the sun of God. Photography is here dened by Didi-Huberman through his

reading of Philotheus’s allegory as the stamp of God, the divine proof—both “preuve”

and “épreuve” as ordeal, risk, danger, or experience—which writes itself on the body and

the soul of the Christian in the same way as a seal inscribes the red wax on a letter. The

martyr/witness is the one who is engraved with phôs, or light, inscribed by the divine

light, literally photographed.

In view of this allegory, how can one not be tempted to reconsider more critically

Didi-Huberman’s reading of the Auschwitz photographs? How can one not at least won-

der whether this reading does not turn Auschwitz into a secular theophany? How are

we, indeed, to read the opening statement of Images malgré tout —“Pour savoir il faut

s’imaginer [To know one must imagine oneself]”? Does this not mean that to know, one

12 See the entry “Philothée de Batos” in the Dictionnaire de la spiritualité ascétique et mys


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must actively morph into an image? To know Auschwitz as the medieval anchorite knew

God, should one be burnt by its sun, photographed by the Shoah, stamped by the blindinglight of the Holocaust? “To imagine oneself” would thus mean to become the seer, wit-

ness, and martyr of the blinding light of a historical disaster. This recourse to the mystic

motif and this apocalyptic drama of guration resonate with the later works of Maurice

Blanchot devoted to writing and catastrophe. Blanchot, indeed, has also helped to es-

tablish “the dogma of the unimaginable,” saying that “Dans les camps l’invisible s’est à

jamais rendu visible [In the camps the invisible has forever rendered itself visible]” [qtd.in IMT 41–42],13 a statement that uncannily echoes Paul’s phenomenological and dialec-tical characterization of Christ. The “French” grappling with the Holocaust, whether it

promotes or demotes images, seems doomed to perpetuate an apocalyptic, allegorical and

ultimately sublime reading of Auschwitz.

WORKS CITED

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. London: Burns, Oates, &Washbourne, 1921.

Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane. “‘Laboratories’ against Holocaust Denial—Or, the Limits ofPostmodern Theory.” Parallax 10.1 (2004): 88–99.

Blanchot, Maurice. L’écriture du désastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.________. L’entretien inni. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

Creech, James. “De la honte à la théorie.” Proceedings of “Lire, écrire la honte.” Cerisy-

la-Salle colloquium, June 2003. Forthcoming.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. L’empreinte. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997.________. L’étoilement: Conversation avec Hantaï. Paris: Minuit, 1998.________. Fra Angelico—Dissemblance and Figuration. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. Chicago:

U of Chicago P, 1995. Trans. of Fra Angelico: Dissemblance et guration. Paris:

Champs-Flammarion, 1995. [FA]________. Génie du non-lieu: Air, poussière, empreinte, hantise. Paris: Minuit, 2001. [GNL]________. Images malgré tout. Paris: Minuit, 2003. [ IMT ]________. L’image survivante—Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg.

Paris: Minuit, 2002. [ IS ]________. Invention de l’hystérie. Paris: Macula, 1982.________. Phasmes: Essais sur l’apparition. Paris: Minuit, 1998.Faurisson, Robert. Mémoire en défense: Contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsier l’Histoire,

La question des chambers à gaz. Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980.Godard, Jean-Luc. Histoire(s) du cinéma. Paris: Gallimard-Gaumont, 1998.Lanzmann, Claude. “Entre mémoire et histoire des camps, le rôle de la photographie,

Claude Lanzmann, écrivain et cinéaste.” Le Monde 19 Jan. 2001.________. “Les non-lieux de la mémoire.” Au sujet de Shoah: Le lm de Claude Lanzmann.

Ed. Michel Deguy. Paris: Belin, 1990.________, dir. Shoah. Video-recording. Coproduction of les Films Aleph and Historia Films

with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture. Hollywood, CA: Paramount

Home Video, 1986.

13. This quote belongs to L’écriture du désastre. For a discussion of Blanchot’s relation to the Holocaust in terms of the “unimaginable,” see rst his 1969 essay on Robert Antelme, published

in L’entretien inni, and James Creech’s yet unpublished discussion of Blanchot’s reading [“De

la honte à la théorie”]. Apparently, James Creech’s anti-iconoclastic position is close to Didi- Huberman’s, except that, as I have tried to show in this paper, the “unimaginable” returns in Didi-Huberman’s argument in the form of the arch Image of a pure visibility of that which cannot be


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Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.

New York: Plume, 1994.

Lyotard, Jean-François. Le différend. Paris: Minuit, 1983.

“Mémoire des camps,” directed by C. Chéroux. Paris: 2001.

Pagnoux, Elisabeth. “Reporter photographe à Auschwitz.” Les temps modernes 613

(2001): 84–108.

“Philothée de Batos.” Dictionnaire de la spiritualité ascétique et mystique. Paris:

Beauchesne, 1983. Fascicules 76–77.Pressac, Jean-Claude. Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. New

York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989.________. Les crématoires d’Auschwitz: La machinerie du meurtre de masse. Paris: CNRS,

1993.

Wajcman, Gérard. “De la croyance photographique [On the Faith in Photography].” Les

temps modernes 613 (2001): 47–83.________. “‘Saint Paul’ Godard contre ‘Moïse’ Lanzmann?” Le Monde 03 Dec. 1998.

Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Les assassins de la mémoire. Paris: La découverte, 1987.

All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.


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Artist

James Siena (b. 1957, California) received his BFA from Cornell University, New York,

in 1979. Siena’s work has been featured in over 55 group exhibitions, including the

2004 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. The recipient of multiple honors and

awards, Siena lectures and teaches at numerous institutions throughout the United States,

including the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio (2004); San Francisco Art Institute (2003);

School of Visual Arts, New York (2003); Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York

(2000); and the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond (1999, 2002). James

Siena currently lives and works in New York City.

“Artist’s statements” are inherently contradictory things. I make visual art. It, and not

this, is the statement. There was a time when I placed limitations, emphatic ones, on my

work.

Procedures were proscribed.

From 1997: “I don’t make marks, I make moves. The reality of abstraction is my

primary point of engagement. When I make a painting, I respond to parameters, like a

visual algorithm”.

It is now 2007, and I make marks that, while constituting actions and the following

of procedures, contain explicit emotion and impulsive, contrary action. At this middle

stage of my life I have become the artist that I am, and the rules, idioms, and other toolsare automatic. Hence there is no longer a need to be self-aware.

Indeed, there’s no need for an “artist’s statement.”

Contributors

Bruno Chaouat teaches French literature at the University of Minnesota. He has pub-

lished a book on Chateaubriand and autobiography ( Je meurs par morceaux: Chateaubri-

and, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999) and more recently has edited a volume

of essays on shame and literature ( Lire, écrire la honte, Presses Universitaires de Lyon,

2007).

Pedro Erber is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Literature at CornellUniversity and author of Politics and Truth: Martin Heidegger’s Political Philosophy

(São Paulo: Loyola, 2004).

Stewart Martin is a member of the editorial collective and review editor of the journal

Radical Philosophy and Lecturer in Modern European Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art

Theory at Middlesex University.

Carrie Noland teaches in the Departments of French and Comparative Literature at the

University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics

and the Challenge of Technology and numerous articles on avant-garde art and literature.

She recently completed The Gestural Performative and coedited with Sally Ann Ness an

interdisciplinary volume entitled The Migration of Gesture: Dance, Film, Art, Writing.

Erik M. Vogt teaches philosophy at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) and at the University

of Vienna (Austria).

Kirk Wetters is an Assistant Professor of German Literature at Yale University. A book

focusing on literary elaborations of the concept of opinion is forthcoming from Fordham

University Press.


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