EYES WIDE OPEN

Abstract

In this contribution, I plumb the depths of Georges Didi-Huberman’s abiding notion of the “eye of history” and, in particular, I explore to which responsible acts this notion might hold us. Does a reader of texts or viewer of an image have a right to claim a certain status as witness if the experience of being present at the crime is “merely” by the proxy of a text or an image? This is a fundamental ethical question and, consequently, a profoundly political one that Didi-Huberman’s abiding exploration of the “eye of history” asks. I attempt to answer it by reading a variety of texts by the prolific author. In particular, however, I test what Didi-Huberman speculates in Images in Spite of All about what went through the mind of Alex, the Sonderkommando who took four furtive shots from an Auschwitz gas chamber, against what I’ve learned recently after having discovered the Hiroshima photographs made on 6 August 1945 by hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) Yoshito Matsushige.

Keywords:

• photography
• ethics
• bearing witness
• experience by proxy

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Portions of this essay are adaptations from the following books by the author: Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility (New York and London: Continuum, 2010) and Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Many thanks to Haaris Naqvi for kind permission to do this.

1 Quoted in Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All 32.

2 Before Claude Lanzmann’s camera, in very nearly halting phrases, the otherwise almost effusive Filip Müller manages just barely to give halting voice to what is so often left blank on Beckett’s pages: “One never got used to that. It was impossible.” Impossible yet lived (or survived) by the likes of Müller and imaginable by us who enter those words. “Yes. One must imagine,” adds Müller before Georges Didi-Huberman returns, after quoting him, to effect a convergence with the categorical imperative of Images in Spite of All 39 (cf. Harvey, Witnessness 121).

3 Didi-Huberman writes “malaise dans la culture” in a direct reference to Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, mistranslated in the nevertheless famous French and English editions as Malaise dans la civilisation and Civilization and its Discontents.

4 Editors' note: in note 4, page 11 of Didi-Huberman’s Sortir du noir (2015), it is explained that since the publication of Images malgré tout, the photographer of the four images called “Alex” has been, in all probability, identified as Alberto Errera. The note contains more information about Errera.

5 (Editors' note: when there are no existing English translations, the translation is made by the author.) My translation is both truncated and, admittedly, a bit loose. I hope Georges doesn’t mind.

Chaque fois qu’il a du mal à passer – dans notre langage comme dans nos images, dans notre histoire comme dans nos mémoires, dans notre idée de la politique comme dans nos pratiques poétiques–, il se coince dans nos gorges et suture nos paupières. Le passé mal passé, le passé mal vu, devient alors la condition désolante de notre cécité quant au présent, cet état toujours problématique où nous nous débattons entre l’énigme des tenants et le mystère des aboutissants. Le passé mal dit offre aussi la meilleure façon de se tenir dans un état de mutisme ou de cécité quant à notre futur: cécité quant à nos désirs mêmes.

6 From a transcription of oral testimony given by Yoshito Matsushige in 1986 (https://web.archive.org/web/20050811004933/http://www.inicom.com/hibakusha/yoshito.html) (accessed 9 Sept. 2017).

7 The page numbers in this quotation are Taylor’s references to Del Tredici.

8 See Didi-Huberman’s Quand les images prennent position.

9 See Didi-Huberman’s Images malgré tout and Passés cités par JLG.

10 See Didi-Huberman’s Remontages du temps subi.

11 See Didi-Huberman’s Écorces and Peuples exposés, peuples figurants.

12 See my book Witnessness, particularly 30–34 but also 39, 44, 50, 68–69, 84, 96, 115, 131, 133, 135.

13 Greg Mitchell is co-author of one of the foundational books on what Henry A. Giroux, after Georges Didi-Huberman, calls “America’s disimagination machine.” Cf. Lifton and Mitchell; Giroux, Violence of Organized Forgetting; idem, America’s Addiction to Terrorism.

14 Duras did something similar with L’Amante anglaise, the title of a novel of 1967. Literally, “The English Lover,” but suggesting, by homophony, both “English mint” (la menthe anglaise) and “the lover in clay” (l’amante en glaise), it is entirely understandable that Barbara Bray left the title untranslated in her 1968 translation of the text.

15 Yet other titles suggest themselves: Redoing the Montage of Times Suffered etc. (Remontages 11–67).

16 In the documentary that a thirty-three-year-old Sam Fuller narrates while strolling through the ruins of Falkenau, he recalls the “stench,” which he immediately degrades further to a “stink” of all that rots. Everyone who has been to whatever remains of certain SS camps and taken the time to inspect the perimeter cannot but be struck by this proximity and the criminal heights to which human hypocrisy can rise.

17 Almost seeming to concatenate the action of the soldiers in the US Army’s 1st Infantry Division with the action of deportee photographer Centelles, it is Didi-Huberman who invokes this “proper distance” when he writes:

When a camp is opened, the issue is how to stand to look and how to extend one’s look [savoir supporter et porter le regard] [ … ] Afterwards, it will be an issue of something altogether different: determining the point of view, finding the proper distance. (Remontages 58)

In “proper,” here, we can read both topographically appropriate and ethically adjusted.

18 These last few paragraphs are adapted from my book Sharing Common Ground (73–79).

19 This and the following seven paragraphs are adapted from my book Witnessness (11, 32–33, 49, 55, 99, 103, 113–14).

20 Here, I have radically altered the translation offered in Images in Spite of All. It is very tough to translate, given the author’s paratactic language; here is the original: “Ne faut-il pas faire avec les impuretés, les lacunes de l’image, ce qu’il faut faire avec les silences de la parole?” (155). And here is Lillis's attempt: “Should we not treat the impurities, the lacunae of the image, as we have to treat the silences of speech, which is to unravel them, struggle with them?” (124).