Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Georges Didi-Huberman: the persistence of lost worlds

ABSTRACT

In two striking books released in 2019, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Georges Didi-Huberman explicitly draw a connection between their respective theoretical approaches to images and their family histories. In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Azoulay recounts the suppression of the existence of her Algerian-Jewish grandmother Aïsha by her father, who wanted to hide his Arabic-Algerian origins. Azoulay consequently develops a critical view on the history of photography and its role in the imperialist destruction of entire lifeworlds. In Pour Commencer Encore, Didi-Huberman recounts the story of his mother, who had to hide her Jewishness to survive the Nazi occupation of France, and of his father, who migrated to France as a Jewish Tunisian. In both cases, their relatives’ cultural identity had to remain invisible for various reasons in the countries in which their children grew up. Azoulay and Didi-Huberman present their approaches to images as influenced by the injustices experienced by these relatives and their commitment to them even goes as far as both them of changing their author names: Azoulay added “Aïsha” to her name and Didi-Huberman adopted his paternal (“Didi”) and maternal (“Huberman”) family name. However, this commitment led them to develop vastly different approaches to images and photographs. Whereas Azoulay emphasizes the role of photography in the imperialist destruction of worlds, remaining cautious of even reproducing certain photographs in her book, Didi-Huberman argues that worlds are never completely lost and that traces of these worlds always reappear by means of images. Azoulay aligns photography with imperialism and colonialism, while Didi-Huberman associates photography with migration. In their desire to do justice to the sufferings of their relatives, both influential theorists of images develop strongly diverging views on the politics of photographs and how they can reveal traces of lost worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
• Georges Didi-Huberman
• photography
• images
• imperialism

In two remarkable books released in 2019, the influential theorists of images Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Georges Didi-Huberman have explicitly drawn a connection between their approach to images and their turbulent family histories. In both cases, their family members were exposed to persecution and the large-scale destruction of the worlds in which they lived. Furthermore, some of these relatives were also born in specific cultural contexts which for various reasons were not accepted or wilfully forgotten in the countries in which their children grew up. Azoulay and Didi-Huberman present the erasure of the worlds of their relatives as the impetus for their specific ethical and political approach to images. This impetus, however, has led them to develop starkly different theoretical projects and though they both share the same strong commitment to do justice to worlds lost and destroyed, as well as to the victims of imperialist conquering and oppression, the way they respectively theorize the politics of the image seems worlds apart.

In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Azoulay brings together a variety of related topics, some of which she has also explored in her previous writings, into a book that is overwhelmingly rich in its subject matter (Azoulay 2019). In the book she outlines the vast task of unlearning all the consequences of centuries of imperialist and colonialist destruction. These consequences are thoroughly analysed in the use of photographs, museum practices, the art world, the rhetoric of legal rights and so much more. Her strong commitment to unlearning imperialist modes of thinking leads her to a refusal to take for granted various common practices, from accepting the moment captured by the shutter of a camera in a photograph to the privilege of a scholar to access and study archives. While writing this book, Azoulay added “Aïsha” to her name. Aïsha was the name of her paternal grandmother, of whose existence she was unaware and whose Algerian-Arabic-Jewish culture had to be completely forgotten when her father first adopted French and then Israeli citizenship.

In Pour Commencer Encore, Didi-Huberman engages in a dialogue with Philippe Roux about the intertwinement of his personal history growing up in the mining town of Saint-Etienne and his vast oeuvre, now consisting of over fifty books, out of which some crucial passages are reprinted in this volume (Didi-Huberman 2019). From the outset, he remarks that talking about Saint-Étienne will take them away from his town of birth to the dispersed origins of his family. His father grew up in a Tunisian-Arabic-Jewish cultural context and his mother narrowly escaped the Nazi occupation of France. The persecution and discrimination they suffered strongly marked Didi-Huberman’s theoretical development, adopting both the family name of his father (Didi) and of his mother (Huberman) as his author’s name. Though their theoretical projects seem to be vastly different, both of them have set out to show the persistence of worlds that have been destroyed or deemed lost and forgotten, such as those of their own ancestors, and the role images play in this process of both forgetting and recognizing these lost worlds.

While writing Potential History, Azoulay discovered for the first time the name of her paternal grandmother. When her father passed away, she noticed on his birth certificate that his mother was listed as Aïsha. Her father had never once mentioned this name to his children, nor the fact that his mother was from Algeria and that she was both Arabic and Jewish. If she was mentioned at all, she was referred to as “grandmother” with no further details provided (Azoulay 2019, 13–15). Discovering this name, which Azoulay describes as “unruly”—it suddenly turns up on a document, refusing to remain silent—and the existence of Arabic-Algerian relatives in her family felt to her like a treasure (Azoulay 2019, 15).

When her father moved from Algeria to France he wanted to hide the fact that his mother was from Algeria in order to pass for a “good French citizen”, in a time when Algerians were the despised and colonised. Azoulay accuses her father of adopting a “passing scheme”, which included marrying a women with a pale skin to “whiten” his children. She compares her father to the soldiers in Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, who turn their backs to their own family to pledge allegiance to the conquering troops (Azoulay 2019, 13). Only now did she realize that her father’s peculiar accent when he spoke French was a North-African accent. Despite the fact that the Crémieux Decree of 1870 had granted citizenship to Jewish people from Algeria, distinguishing them from the Arabic-Muslim population, her father’s citizenship was taken away during the Vichy regime for being Jewish and he was imprisoned. When he fled to what would become the state of Israel, hoping to find again a homeland he could pledge allegiance to, he tried his best to appear as a Jewish-French citizen rather than Arabic-Algerian. Now, he found himself in a state whose national identity construction systematically downplayed the existence of people who were both Jewish and Arabic, emphasising an antagonism between the Jewish and Arabic world.

Georges Didi-Huberman was born as Georges Didi in the mining town of Saint-Étienne. Didi was the family name of his father, who came from the island of Djerba. Similar to Azoulay’s grandmother, he grew up in the specific Jewish-Arabic culture of Tunisia. He grew up speaking Arabic, not Hebrew. In Djerba, the local Jewish community co-habited relatively well with the rest of the population. When talking about the island of his youth, Didi-Huberman’s father always evoked a paradise-like island, with large white sandy beaches and a lot of sun (Didi-Huberman 2019, 43).

While his father’s world was one of white beaches drenched in sunlight, his mother’s world was marked by darkness. Her Jewish family, the family Huberman, had moved from Poland to Saint-Étienne to work in the mines. When Didi-Huberman’s father moved to Saint-Étienne to live with his wife, he was struck by the black dust that lay all over the town, giving it a permanently gloomy look. The Polish-Jewish settlements that his wife’s family came from were now scorched earth, burnt and destroyed in the vortex of the Second World War. Didi-Huberman’s maternal grandparents were reported to the Gestapo for being Jewish, subsequently deported and ultimately perished in Auschwitz. Almost nothing remains of the grandparents. Hardly any images or documents have survived the erasure of their world (Didi-Huberman 2019, 41–42).

Didi-Huberman’s mother managed to escape the same fate, with the help of the French resistance. The resistance gave her a new name, forged papers and a host family of farmers. She survived by hiding her Jewishness and this instilled in her the survival technique of giving her children French names rather than openly Jewish sounding names. Didi-Huberman’s second name, Jonas, named after his Jewish grandfather, became Jean. Even though his mother’s library was filled with books about the horrors of the Second World War, she systematically refused to speak about the past when asked about it. These things are too unimaginable to tell, would be her answer when the young Georges wanted to know what happened to his grandparents and asked which people had reported them to the Gestapo, people who still lived in Saint-Étienne. She would also refuse to speak German, even though Didi-Huberman would later find a notebook in which his mother wrote down her favourite German poems, such as Goethe’s Erlkönig. When his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, succumbing to the illness when Didi-Huberman was 17, she was similarly hiding her deadly condition from her children. Her world was marked by suffering and total silence about this suffering. When he started to write and publish books, Didi-Huberman chose to add the family name of his mother to his paternal family name (Didi-Huberman 2019, 66–77).

If the library of the mother was filled with books about the horrors of history, the library of his father, located inside the bright space of his atelier, was filled with books about art. His father was a painter, friends with Asger Jorn when the latter lived in Djerba. At some point, he became a full-time painter, dedicating all his time to his passion, though the lack of a regular job decreased the financial situation of the family. His father wanted to exude optimism and a sunny mood, always laughing and remarking “how beautiful!” when he saw things, but Didi-Huberman knew that this relentless optimism and good mood was a way of hiding his sufferings (Didi-Huberman 2019, 110). During the second world war he had voluntarily joined the French army and was part of the landings in Normandy. Several of his friends died on the North-African front and his brother was killed in the Alsace. After hearing the news of his death, Didi-Huberman’s grandfather reportedly died from grief. Didi-Huberman’s father too had suffered a potentially lethal pulmonary disease, requiring an operation that had to be done in suboptimal conditions, something he later never spoke about to his children. Furthermore, Didi-Huberman experienced himself what it meant to live in Catholic France with the family name Didi. This common family name in Djerba triggered scorn from his classmates and teachers alike, calling him “pipi” or “zizi” (Didi-Huberman 2019, 141).

The tendency to hide his suffering by choosing to be optimistic and well-tempered struck Didi-Huberman as naïve. He even calls it a kind of “moral weakness” on the part of his father (Didi-Huberman 2019, 110). He writes that his father reminded him of the Franciscan monks depicted by Rossellini in The Flowers of St. Francis who cry out “que bello!” at everything they see (Didi-Huberman 2019, 111). Though it always verged on naiveté, Didi-Huberman’s father wished to transform feelings of suffering into an affirmative project, and, for his father, this project was painting. When growing up, Didi-Huberman regarded his father’s total devotion to painting in the remarkable space of the atelier as a way to experimentally transform suffering into the desire to create works of art.

The relatives of Azoulay and Didi-Huberman grew up in worlds that were forgotten or erased. They were part of cultures that were disavowed or unwanted in the countries where their children grew up. With their vast, rich work, both these theorists wanted to respond to the ethical and epistemological issues that the experiences of their relatives provoked. More specifically, Azoulay and Didi-Huberman aim to analyse the complex role that images play in the forgetting and destruction of entire worlds, but also how images can be used to show that nevertheless these worlds persist in spite of all attempts to destroy, pillage and forget them. The particular politics of images they end up developing, however, and the theoretical conclusions they draw from the experience of their relatives are vastly different, with Azoulay placing more emphasis on the way images are used to destroy worlds and to perpetuate power imbalances, while Didi-Huberman focuses on how traces of these worlds continue to appear by means of images, in spite of all attempts to completely erase them.

In Potential History, Azoulay sets out to analyse extensively how imperial forms of thinking and destruction continue in various practices, from photography to legal rights. She calls this persistence of imperial ways of seeing “imperial retentiveness” (Azoulay 2019, 12). Her book is presented as a call to unlearn these imperial ways of thinking, which means learning to not accept manifestations of imperialism in diverse practices and to refuse various privileged positions that perpetuate imperialist inequality, such as the position of the scholar or the photographer. In the first pages of the book, she connects this with the discovery of her grandmother’s name. Growing up in Israel meant growing up in a country in which being Arabic and Jewish, or Algerian and Jewish, was disavowed. She states that the book was written in part by her refusal to identify with the ways of seeing of her predecessors who founded the nation of Israel on principles that foreclosed the world of her grandmother Aïsha, as well as the world of the Palestinians. Azoulay refuses to see the world through the eyes of the founders of the nation (Azoulay 2019, xiii–xiv). Instead, she wants to see “with her Aïsha’s eyes” (Azoulay 2019, 15), which means seeing the world as it was and would have been if the imperialist carving up, plundering and partially silencing of the world had not happened. Similarly, even though she holds a position at Brown University, she pleads for the refusal to exercise one’s privileged scholarly access to archives while others are systematically denied access to them (Azoulay 2019, xv). This radical process of unlearning and refusing to normalize imperialist privileges and practices leaves an openness for what she calls “potential history”: the way the world would be if we no longer see the world through imperialist eyes.

The imperialist conquering of the globe divided the world into people who are exploited and those benefitting from that exploitation. This division is continued in various ways, such as between, on the one hand, those people called illegal immigrants, stateless persons or trespassers, and, on the other, those who have the privilege to study others, photograph others, access archives and expect full protection by the legal system. Azoulay calls these manifold ways in which the imperialist division of the world is perpetuated today the “differential principle” (Azoulay 2019, 34–37). This unequal distribution of rights and privileges is also perpetuated by acts that are generally associated with good liberal citizenship: being charitable towards others, documentary journalism, etc (Azoulay 2019, 11). Unlearning imperialism means ceasing to find the unequal distribution of privilege that comes with these acts normal. It also means ceasing to find various common concepts unproblematic, such as “progress”, “citizenship” or what is deemed to be “art”.

A large part of the book is devoted to problematising the notion of “art”. When we marvel at the artefacts on display in a museum, we are generally unaware of the context that they were taken from. Many objects now presented as “African art” were part of religious, cultural and daily life practices. They were not regarded as “art”. Azoulay cites Kwame Anthony Appiah, who writes that “there is no old word in most of the thousand or so languages still spoken in Africa that well translates the word 'art'” (Azoulay 2019, 60). After the cultural practices of people were ridiculed, forbidden and utterly destroyed, artefacts were taken out of the context in which they were used and placed on display in another part of the world. Azoulay calls this “the Congo condition” (Azoulay 2019, 112–118). In Congo, many cultural practices were forbidden by the colonial authorities and the locals were taught in missionary schools how to make “proper” artefacts that a Western audience might like (Azoulay 2019, 74–75). Unlearning imperialism involves learning to see the connection between the complete destruction of entire worlds and the displaying of artefacts in museums as “art”.

As a scholar of photography, Azoulay singles out photography as one of the main mechanisms by means of which imperial retentiveness is perpetuated. From the moment photography was first developed in the early-nineteenth century, it was used to affirm, facilitate and normalize an imperialist outlook on the world, as well as to entrench a division of people marked by stark inequality. When Dominique François Arago presented the technique of the daguerreotype to the French chambre des députés in 1839, he enthusiastically pointed out to the audience how useful this new technique would have been for Napoleon during his campaign in Egypt (Azoulay 2019, 3). Instead of slow drawings, Egyptian temples and monuments could have been reproduced in an instant—with the implication that this would have greatly facilitated the plundering of these valuable objects. Azoulay remarks that the world from that moment on is regarded as a place in which everything can be photographically reproduced without any further question (Azoulay 2019, 3–5). Even Walter Benjamin took this for granted in his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Azoulay 2019, 4). Azoulay argues that the advent of photography did nothing to alleviate imperialist and colonial destruction, but, on the contrary, that it was instrumental in the imperialist process. She asserts that photography did not offer a new outlook on the world, starting in the early-nineteenth century, but rather affirmed an outlook on the world whose year of origin is 1492 (Azoulay 2019, 2–3). 1492 is not only the year of Columbus’ voyage to America, but it was also the year in which Jewish and Muslim people were violently expelled from Catholic Spain and their belongings stolen and confiscated to fund colonial endeavours such as that of Columbus. 1492 is a landmark year in the establishment of the differential principle in the world along imperialist dividing lines (Azoulay 2019, 22–30). It was because of this expulsion that there was a Jewish-Arabic community in Northern Africa, in which Azoulay’s grandmother Aïsha and Didi-Huberman’s father grew up.

A photograph has the capacity to freeze people into a certain situation, hiding to the viewer how this situation came to be. The shutter of a camera can present a person as a criminal, a victim or a terrorist and freeze them permanently in that label (Azoulay 2019, 6). The camera’s shutter, Azoulay claims, functions as a verdict. It normalizes a certain situation rather than questioning how that situation was created. Photography plays a crucial role in normalizing the consequences of imperialist conquering. Azoulay writes: “This brief operation can transform an individual rooted in her life-world into a refugee, a looted object into a work of art, a whole shared world into a thing of the past, and the past itself into a separate time zone, a tense that lies apart from both present and future.” (Azoulay 2019, 6) The photographic shutter presents a situation as a fait accompli and naturalizes exploitation: “The camera’s shutter is not a metaphor for the operation of imperial power, but it is a later materialization of an imperial technology. Photography developed with imperialism; the camera made visible and acceptable imperial world destruction and legitimated the world’s reconstruction on empire’s terms.” (Azoulay 2019, 6–7)

This capacity to freeze people into a label, to make stolen objects seem acceptable and to make a stark division between the past and the present, was put into question by the complaint filed by Tamara Lanier against Harvard University and the Peabody Museum on 20 March 2019. Lanier demanded the restitution of a daguerreotype depicting her ancestor Renty Taylor, whose image was captured in 1850 and henceforth put on display by the Peabody Museum as a photograph of a slave. The fact that Renty Taylor’s rights were violated, that he was forced to be a slave and his image taken against his will and put on display for the next 169 years, by a University museum who claims sole ownership of the photo and the sole access to the use of this archive of daguerreotypes, is all put into radical question by the complaint (Azoulay 2019, 9). Tamara Lanier refuses to accept historical acts of violence, to relegate them to the past and to continue them by means of photography and institutional practices. She refuses to accept the separation between past violent conditions in which the daguerreotype was taken and the current display and institutional ownership of the picture. Lanier also demands to participate differently in this situation and not to regard the imperialist violation of rights as the normal basis for museal practices and ownership. In the words of Azoulay: “To refuse the shutter is to begin to practice potential history.” (Azoulay 2019, 10)

The refusal of Azoulay to accept photographs at face value, to “refuse the shutter”, or, as she also puts it, “to refuse to be the photographer”, leads to some remarkable consequences. Every photograph reveals more than it intends to reveal. It always contains “undercurrent photographic data”, an “excess of information not processed” (Azoulay 2019, xvi). To access this undercurrent of data, Azoulay, however, does not turn to the all-too-familiar repertoire of concepts and strategies of critical theory. The critical theorist adopting his or her critical skills to look at photographs in a new manner simply continues the differential dichotomy between people who are in the privileged position to be able to access archival material, albeit to show concern for other people, and the people who are the object of such a critical study. She writes: “When research focusses mainly on the most oppressed groups, I argue, it contributes to the socialization of citizens to act as privileged subjects who can afford to care about what is done to others, thus reproducing the radical difference between them, rather than as cocitizens who care for the common world they share with those others and are committed to dismantling the principle of differentiality that organizes it.” (Azoulay 2019, 37) It is the ethical wager of the book that these practices, even in the guise of critical theory, concerned scholarship or social documentary, should be refused. Throughout the book a series of interludes are inserted in which Azoulay militantly calls for, among others, museum workers, photographers and historians to go on strike. In the call to photographers, she implores photographers to stop traveling to conflict zones and take pictures in the name of critical journalism (Azoulay 2019, 281–285). With these radical refusals and strikes, she aims to affirm every human being as an equal, a co-citizen, and to no longer perpetuate the differential principle according to imperialist fault lines.

Refusing the privileged access of the scholar makes Azoulay sceptical about the predictable gestures of artistically reframing images, to present alternative readings of images or to construct alternative archival practices, even though she does occasionally adopt these strategies after all, as we will see further. Imperial retentiveness “cannot be countered with alternative data or memories, but rather continuous processes of unlearning through which the very structures can be undone that articulate violence as firm data and fixed memory” (Azoulay 2019, 12–13). She not only refuses the privileged access of the scholar to archival material and to study oppressed groups of people, but she refuses to see people only as mediated through an archive (Azoulay 2019, 41). One of the striking strategies she adopts to access the “undercurrent photographic data” in images is redrawing photographs with a pencil instead of simply printing reproductions of the photographs in the book. Throughout the book we can hence find mostly redrawn versions of the photographs she comments upon, refusing to take their reproducibility for granted. Photographs do play a crucial role in unlearning imperialism, but in Azoulay’s view, this is only possible by refusing to accept the camera’s shutter.

The discovery of the existence of her grandmother Aïsha instigates Azoulay to develop an ethics of refusing to perpetuate imperial modes of division, which results in giving up the privilege of the scholar, the refusal to accept the framing of photographs and scepticism about the value of critical theory. The plight of his parents and other relatives has marked Didi-Huberman’s views equally strongly, but it has sent him on a very different theoretical course, one that at first seems to be almost the direct opposite of Azoulay’s approach. Didi-Huberman’s mother kept her traumas under a tomb of silence. She refused to speak about the murder of her parents by the Nazis, about the French townspeople, still alive, who denounced her family to the Gestapo, about her own escape and survival by hiding her identity, or even about the Holocaust in general. She refused to speak German or admit that she ever loved German poetry and literature. In the last years of her life, she refused to speak about her own life-threatening and ultimately deadly illness. The world of his mother is one of vast destruction, murder, entire towns wiped away without objects or images that could be salvaged. His father, on the contrary, is characterized by a certain optimism. He turns to his passion for painting in his atelier. He prefers to see the beauty of things and, almost naively, smile about the world, even though Didi-Huberman knows that his father too was marked by the negative experience of being Arabic-Jewish-Tunisian in France and of having served as a soldier in the French army. Didi-Huberman undoubtedly sees a connection between his father’s love for painting and the traumatic experiences that he too does not mention. His father’s painting acted as something which Didi-Huberman’s friend and influence, the French psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida, called an objeu (a neologism made from the French words for “object” and “game”). An objeu was for Fédida an object that helps to put someone’s mourning “into motion” (mettre le deuil en movement) (Didi-Huberman 2019, 81–83). As opposed to the wall of silence of his mother, his father used his painting to turn his sadness into work.

In the face of the fate of his mother’s family, Didi-Huberman refuses to accept that worlds are ever completely lost without any remnant, however minimal. His entire oeuvre is based on the belief that nothing is ever completely lost without any trace and, if we learn how to see them, these traces can be found “in spite of all”. In the book with this expression in the title, Images in Spite of All, Didi-Huberman refuted the fact that there were no visual traces from Auschwitz-Birkenau (Didi-Huberman 2008). The four photographs that were taken by prisoners, part of a Sonderkommando, and smuggled out to the Polish resistance, were deemed a failure. They were too blurry, badly focused, with too many parts entirely black or grey. Sometimes they were cropped to focus on the piles of bodies and to remove the parts in which there is “nothing to see”. As opposed to those who claim that the horrors of Auschwitz can never be visualized, Didi-Huberman argues that these four photos are important traces and that we have to use our imagination when looking at them (Didi-Huberman 2008, 3). Photos such as these of course never tell the “whole truth”, they are always incomplete and have to be placed next to other images, documents and testimonies, but they are crucial images that have survived Auschwitz in spite of all. If nothing else, the photos attest to the will of the prisoners to resist their situation and to document the horrors they saw on a daily basis and make them known to the world outside the camp. They went through the unimaginable effort to smuggle a camera into Birkenau, take four photos in impossibly dangerous circumstances and then smuggle the camera out of the camp. The fact that the images are blurry and off-focus attests to the fact that the photographer had to act quickly, while hiding himself. The grey is due to the smoke and the black edges in the photographs reveal that the photographer was hiding inside a building, quite likely the building with the gas chamber.

Furthermore, Didi-Huberman always defends the critical importance of images. Contrary to people who reject images because they are only simulacra or because they never reveal the whole truth, he argues that a critique of images can only be done by means of images (Didi-Huberman 2017). Images are crucial for any critical practice and it would be a mistake to dismiss them for “being on the side of enemy” (Didi-Huberman 2010). His entire oeuvre is dedicated to learning to see such traces in images in spite of all, for which he deploys a vast series of metaphors, from fireflies to butterflies (Didi-Huberman Didi-Huberman, 2018b). By “putting images into motion”, by placing them next to other documents, texts and sources, we can learn to see these traces, which, in the poetic parlance of Didi-Huberman, “burn with desire” like embers flaring up when one blows into ashes; they burn with a desire, attesting to horrors and suffering, but also revealing the desire to resist (Didi-Huberman 2007). The latter part of Didi-Huberman’s work reveals the influence of his father’s experience. Images contain traces of the people’s desire to resist a certain situation, to revolt against oppression, and in his recent work, especially the exhibition Soulèvements, co-curated by Didi-Huberman, he is exploring visual manifestations of the desire to rise up against oppression (Didi-Huberman 2016). The images not only have a historical value, to show suffering and resistance in the past, but Didi-Huberman believes that such images can help to flare up similar desires in contemporary viewers and help to give form to the viewer’s desire to resist oppression. In this view we can discern the influence of Walter Benjamin, who believed that old uprisings can help to inspire uprisings in the present (Benjamin 1968), and the influence of Aby Warburg and his theory of Pathosformeln, visual forms that act as an energetic reservoir across various time periods and places. But the key influence here is Freud and his view that people have an indestructible desire, as well as his observation that our feelings can be reversed into the opposite, turning from a state of mourning into the desire to resist one’s situation, like Didi-Huberman’s father in his painting atelier.

The capacity to transform feelings of sadness, trauma and oppression into the desire to overcome these feelings, by means of images, art and other practices, is central in the work of Didi-Huberman and it recurs in various forms in Pour Commencer Encore. He finds this transformation in the notion of duende, as theorized by Lorca and expressed in the canto profondo of Andalucía (Didi-Huberman 2019, 105). He also finds this in the notion that Pasolini used to describe his work, namely abgioia (Didi-Huberman 2019, 102, 104), the combination of suffering and joy at the same time, or as Didi-Huberman phrases it: “It is the joy of play in spite of all.” (Didi-Huberman 2019, 105)¹ Yet the most moving example of this is a personal anecdote of Didi-Huberman, which directly connects this phenomenon with his mother (Didi-Huberman 2019, 62, 63). When Didi-Huberman was seventeen years old, his mother succumbed to the cancer she had suffered from for years. He recalls going to the hospital and walking down a corridor in distress, towards the room where his recently deceased mother was lying, as if walking towards a death sentence. He felt that this seemingly unending walk presented a stark breach between the past and future. However, to his surprise, the rhythm of his walk engendered a melody in his mind. The young Didi-Huberman was a fan of John Coltrane and the melody that was forming in his mind, that he was humming internally, was Coltrane’s tune Olé. This seems to him at first almost a form of madness, even scandalous; singing when one walks towards one’s deceased mother, and a song called Olé nonetheless. Later he discovered that Olé was inspired by the Andalusian canto profondo. He felt he was saying Olé to two things: “Yes, the pain is there and it will mark the rest of your life.” But at the same time, he was saying: “Yes, I will go on in spite of all.” He was putting the mourning to work, and even turning it into play (Didi-Huberman 2019, 62).

From his friend Fédida he would later learn the importance of “putting mourning into motion”, but also the fact that “mourning puts the world into motion” (Didi-Huberman 2019, 64). Didi-Huberman describes how there were at least four ways in which the death of his mother had set his world into motion. He devoted himself more seriously to his study of philosophical texts, and later chose to study philosophy at the university. He devoted himself more to his passions, such as jazz, art and cinema—a love he shared with his father. He devoted more time to activities in the museum of Saint-Étienne and, finally, there was a brief love story. Also for him, the arts, music and cinema were crucial to cope with the loss of his mother (Didi-Huberman 2019, 65). When asked about the art-historical approach that he would gradually develop in the beginning of his academic career, he singles out yet another art form that he regards as crucial for his art-historical practice: photography.

In an interview with Arno Gisingerl for the Brazilian photography magazine Zum, reprinted in the book, Didi-Huberman calls his approach to works of art “photographical” (Didi-Huberman 2019, 162–163). From the very beginning of his academic research, he has relied on taking photographs for his research. When he conducted research in the Bibliothèque Charcot on the photographic work of Charcot for what would become his book The Invention of Hysteria (Didi-Huberman 2003), he took a volume of Charcot’s work to his home, without permission, and took photographs of certain images (Didi-Huberman 2019, 162). Taking photographs in this sense is of course an entirely different practice than the ones described by Azoulay. Here, photography is a way to bypass the attempts of institutions to control the access and the interpretation of their archive, giving a young scholar the opportunity to write a critical study of the archive’s material.

Later, Didi-Huberman would learn from other art historians, such as Bernard Berenson, the value of taking photographs of paintings. At that time, universities in France did not yet have multimedia libraries. In Florence, he took photographs of Fra Angelico’s frescoes for his book on the subject (Didi-Huberman 1990), asking a colleague of the Villa Medici to take diapositives of a better quality (Didi-Huberman 2019, 163). Didi-Huberman makes an explicit connection between understanding (com-prendre) and taking a photograph (prendre un photo), in the sense that understanding something requires making a choice about framing one’s object of study. Framing is both an aesthetic and an epistemological choice, and, as he writes, “a question you want to address to the visible.” (Didi-Huberman 2019, 163) For his study of the Fra Angelico frescoes, Didi-Huberman made the choice to frame lower than usual, not only directing his focus to the figurative parts, but also to the more abstract sections below them. The framing that one adopts initially is not something set in stone. When returning home, Didi-Huberman clarifies, the photographs can be confronted with other sources, documents and images, as well as new theoretical concerns, requiring him to return to the paintings and adjust his frame. He regards photographs as what Foucault called hypomnemata, mnemonic and heuristic tools for thinking (Didi-Huberman 2019, 163). In situations where he is unsure what to do or say, such as when he was invited to the atelier of Gerhard Richter in which he was faced with four empty canvasses, Didi-Huberman often turns to his camera for help (Didi-Huberman 2019, 163). On the cover of Pour commencer encore, a photo of Didi-Huberman is printed while he is looking out of the window of the museum in Saint-Étienne, taking a photograph. Photography here is a means to understand and photographic reproduction is a way to take something out of a limited context so it can enter a fruitful dialogue with other sources, images and theoretical questions.

Another moment when Didi-Huberman turned to his camera was during a visit to the Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro, a visit that is described multiple times in the book and which serves as perhaps the best image for his theoretical approach (Didi-Huberman 2019, 182–185, 197). When he was in Rio in 2013, Didi-Huberman was eager to visit Parque Lage, because this was the location where Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe was filmed, a film he much admires. He was mesmerized by the lush vegetation of the park, especially the large and sprawling roots that seem to burst out of the soil everywhere, forming obstacles on the path. Again, he took his camera to take pictures of these strange shapes, bifurcating everywhere, ripping open the ground. These sprawling roots inspired Didi-Huberman to a reflection on what it means to be “radical” (in French, there is a similarity between the adjectives radicale and radiculaire) (Didi-Huberman 2019, 185). He remarks that when one thinks of a radical thinker, one often thinks of somebody who makes deeply pessimistic and negative statements about the present, lamenting that a certain situation is completely lost. These thinkers seem to long for a lost past, a “root”, untainted by the present situation. Being radical, for Didi-Huberman, does not mean longing for a “pure past” or for a “root”, but seeing the radiculaire, all the bifurcating rhizomes that unexpectedly appear out of the ground, popping up in unexpected places, intertwined and enlaced with the surfaces that they tear open. These rhizomes are not in some kind of a past that we no longer are able to see in the present, but they keep on appearing as obstacles, making us trip up on our path, forcing us to reconsider our track. Being radical is learning to become attuned to the bifurcating roots that suddenly appear to us, stopping us in our steps, and allowing them to rethink our frameworks of thought (Didi-Huberman 2019, 185).

When Heidegger travelled to Greece, he was disappointed because he recognized nothing of the ancient Greece he romanticized in the present nation. He longed for a “root” that was now in a remote past or that one could only await to arrive in a remote future (Didi-Huberman 2019, 183–184). Didi-Huberman is in Rio de Janeiro, a city which is a melting pot of people from the most diverse backgrounds, a riot of diversity (Didi-Huberman 2019, 183). Learning to read the intertwinement of things is what is crucial in Didi-Huberman’s entire approach, learning to see all the traces of lost worlds, past sufferings and resistance, appear to us in the present, even if it is briefly and in contexts that seem to stifle them. Being radical means being attuned to seeing these intertwinements, seeing the Terra em Transe, Didi-Huberman writes, the earth beneath our feet tremble with bifurcating roots, coming to us from places that at first are not visible to us (Didi-Huberman 2019, 185).

Just as roots keep on appearing in unexpected places, images appear in unexpected places, transporting traces of the past. Images, for Didi-Huberman, are hard to contain; they can reappear in new and different contexts, and they can be reframed and be seen in a new light when confronted with other images, documents and testimonies. This leads Didi-Huberman to an analogy which is almost the opposite of Azoulay’s stance. Whereas Azoulay emphasizes that photography is first and foremost an imperialist instrument, a “synecdoche for the operation of the imperial enterprise altogether” (Azoulay 2019, 2), Didi-Huberman compares photographs with migrants. He writes: “There is no image which is not a migrant. Every image is a migration. Images are never autochthonous.” (Didi-Huberman 2019, 132). Under the influence of Warburg, Didi-Huberman argues that images should not be studied in terms of foundations, but in terms of migrations (Warburg spoke of Wanderungen), across both space and time (Didi-Huberman 2019, 136). Throughout Pour commencer encore, as well as in some other recent works, he reveals a strong interest in, and identification with, the plight of immigrants. Being from a family of immigrants, born in a mining town whose inhabitants are various generations of immigrants, he writes: “I was born an immigrant even there where I was born. This is the first part to be taken into consideration in this story.” (Didi-Huberman 2019, 131)

Azoulay and Didi-Huberman seem to come to vastly different views about photographs. For Azoulay, they continue imperialist framing and exploitation and should be treated with caution, even refusing to reproduce them in her book. For Didi-Huberman, photographs can never be contained by imperialist institutions or archives. They can always be taken out of their context and reconsidered, reappearing in unexpected places, bringing us traces of worlds that were deemed to be lost, “in spite of all”. One associates photography with imperialist power, the other with what resists imperialist power, namely migration.

Despite of their differences, both of them are strongly influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin and they have extensively engaged with his work. For Didi-Huberman, Benjamin has taught him how to see images at the same time as a “trace-image” and a “disappearance-image” (Didi-Huberman 2008, 167). Containing traces of various temporalities, images reveal their use in the destruction of worlds, but they also reveal to us traces of these worlds at the same time, however incomplete and fragmentary: “Something […] remains of a process of annihilation: that something, therefore, bears witness to a disappearance while simultaneously resisting it, since it becomes the opportunity for its possible remembrance.” (Didi-Huberman 2008, 167) These fragments show “a world proliferating with lacunae”, while simultaneously instructing us about the destruction of these worlds (Didi-Huberman 2008, 167). What he takes from Benjamin is that these “singular images which, placed together in a montage, will encourage readability, an effect of knowledge” (Didi-Huberman 2008, 167). To perform the necessary task of getting a better understanding of the destroyed worlds that the fragmentary images reveal, they have to be placed into a montage together with other sources

Even though Azoulay reproaches Benjamin in Potential History for taking reproducibility for granted, she too has been greatly influenced by his work. One of her films is titled The Angel of History (2000) and in the book Aïm Deüelle Lüski and Horizontal Photography she credits Benjamin for having provided an early outline of “potential history” as she regards it (Azoulay 2014). She does not, however, agree with Benjamin completely; she also critiques his intention to write a history of the oppressed as opposed to a history of the victors, as if the two can be separated and reversed. History is not partitionable and the “history of the oppressed” only exists within the power relations that attempted to fully erase it (Azoulay 2014, 25). Potential history, according to Azoulay, “enables that which could not be seen or heard at a given moment to appear at a different time” (Azoulay 2014, 25). Thus far, Azoulay and Didi-Huberman would be largely in agreement with each other. In “The Darkroom of History”, Azoulay has provided a close reading and interpretation of Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” which might help to clarify better why they ended up developing such divergent approaches to images. In this text, she regards Benjamin’s famous angel of history as “a paradigm of the image as transmission, as the transmission of an image from addresser to addressee” (Azoulay 2005). However, this addressee is not a “rescuer, savior or preserver—of a closed and sanctified image, relic or word” (Azoulay 2005, 72). On the contrary, the image places the addressee in “the active role of a destroyer, traitor, obliterator; someone intent on destroying the frozen image, which preserves the power balance and relations of the present; someone seeking to betray its standing and sources (Azoulay 2005, 72).” Words such as “destroyer”, “traitor” and “obliterator” sound remarkably brutal and irreverent, even aggressively militant. What Azoulay’s “addressee-as-traitor” wants to destroy are the power relations that images are embedded in and that can be perpetuated if we use the images, however well-intended. Azoulay sees this irreverence of the angel in his averted gaze, which “signals his lack of assent to the limits of the image” (Azoulay 2005, 72). Instead, the angel invites the spectator to overcome these limits, “to give it a voice, to resist the prescription proposed for it”, “to replace it with a new image, and to constantly make its silence speak out” (Azoulay 2005, 72). In Azoulay’s reading, the angel of history is much more militantly irreverent of the image as it has been transmitted and attuned to the demands of the various victims of imperial violence: “The angel dips his ear outside the frame, listening to the voices that emanate from there, and training his lips to serve as their mouth.” (Azoulay 2005, 72)

Though to a certain extent, Azoulay and Didi-Huberman could find much to be in agreement about, Azoulay ends up pleading for a much more politically militant stance. One can easily imagine what they would object to each other’s approach. Didi-Huberman would argue that Azoulay longs for a pure world, completely untainted by imperialism, instead of seeing the world as consisting of both imperialist frameworks ánd people resisting and developing alternatives—the latter intertwined with the former. People constantly develop pockets of resistance within or on the edges of contexts shaped by imperialist power. Azoulay’s stance is marked by wholesale refusals, following Audre Lorde’s adage that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Azoulay 2019, 31), instead of focussing one’s attention to the various ways in which people develop alternatives within the prevailing structures. For Azoulay, doing “rehearsals” in unlearning imperialism amounts to harsh refusals such as the following: “Who would dare, for example, say ‘no’ to funds to replace an old school building with new ‘smart’ rooms that are well-equipped with the latest technologies, or to rescue a community archive about to perish by integrating it within an innovative architectural environment that would provide its documents—as if they alone were the archive’s raison d’être—with better preservation conditions and the most advanced digital humanities platforms?” (Azoulay 2019, 40) By taking this view, is Azoulay not ignoring the situation of all the people who devote their lives every day to important work, educating children from disadvantaged backgrounds, documenting forgotten people and offering crucial forms of aid, and do so both within, and critical of, the prevailing imperialist structures and power play, not having the option to wait for a context untainted by imperialism? Does this also not amount to neglecting what Stuart Hall described as “cultures of survival” (Hall Hall, 2016): the hybrid cultural practices that people living in oppressive colonial situations developed, using elements of the colonial cultural forms imposed on them, as a survival technique? Furthermore, is it not precisely a sign of privilege to be in a situation in which one can refuse to conduct scholarship, to exercise one’s profession, to refuse certain forms of citizenship? A tenured professor at Brown University can make such claims, but not academics, cultural workers and social workers in precarious working conditions and financial need. Finally, in contexts in which the funding of the arts, museums and academia in general is slashed, such as we have seen in various countries the past years, how wise is such a strategy of refusal, as opposed to making concrete proposals for the better and more ethical functioning of these institutions, as many of the collectives urging to decolonize museums do? (Azoulay 2019, 100)²

Azoulay would find the work of Didi-Huberman too politically inconsequential, lacking in an adequate analysis of the power imbalances that his source material cannot be detached from. She would question how open Didi-Huberman really is to having his way of thinking changed and challenged by others. Furthermore, Didi-Huberman advocates a love and admiration for scholarship, libraries, archives and museums without taking into account that these resources are only accessible for some and often perpetuate imperialist power inequalities (Didi-Huberman Didi-Huberman, 2018a).³ Significantly, Didi-Huberman makes a distinction in his work between “taking sides” (prendre partie) and “taking position” (prendre position), pleading for the latter as opposed to the former (Didi-Huberman Didi-Huberman, 2018c). Montage requires carefully bringing images in a constellation with other images, texts and documents to see glimpses of both the worlds destroyed and the attempts of people to resist this destruction. For him, what matters is the form or the poetics of critique, the aesthetic sensibility one adopts to bring images into motion. In his book about Jean-Luc Godard, Didi-Huberman praises films such as Histoire(s) du cinéma, in which Godard makes an extensive montage of images and words, and critiques other work of Godard in which he uses images to make political statements that lack nuance (Didi-Huberman 2015). Too much haste to “take sides” makes one loose the care that images require and increases the risk of seeing in them only what one wants to see. This view is also emphasized by the fact that Didi-Huberman claims that images as such “take position” and not so much the artist engaging with the images (Didi-Huberman 2015).⁴ This distinction between “taking position” and “taking sides” seems overly formalistic, as if the subjects of Didi-Huberman’s work, artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Harun Farocki and Jean-Luc Godard, were not strongly committed to taking sides. Furthermore, given his clear psychoanalytic influence, where does one draw the line between having one’s desires entangled with the images one sees and explicitly “taking sides”, especially when he selects images from situations that relate to his own life story, such as migration or the Holocaust? In the end, Didi-Huberman remains first and foremost an art historian and philosopher, interested in the form of critique, devoted to writing his ever-expanding corpus of books, and not a political activist, deriving from his work a clear demand to change things in the present.

Even though their theoretical approaches to images seem at times to be widely different, there are moments in Azoulay’s work, whether in Potential History or in her artistic work, where she too regards photographs not only as operators of imperialist oppression but as revealing traces of the worlds lost and destroyed by imperialism. It is in the way one responds to the photographs that their views differ. While Azoulay chose in Potential History to maintain a critical distance from photographs, not to accept the verdict of the shutter as a fait accompli, by redrawing them, she does use photographs in her art works, such as the installation in the Errata exhibition in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2020.⁵ The installation, fully titled Errata—Imperial Publications, 2015–2020, aims to “intervene in the imperial grammar of photographic archives“⁶ by showing the connection between the forced migration of people and objects. People can only be regarded as ‘undocumented’ after their worlds have been plundered. The installation shows approximately 50 items, including photographs, postcards, scholarly books, art catalogues, videos and statues depicting colonizers. These items have been provided with critical commentaries by Azoulay. Questionable statements in books are highlighted with critical notes in the margins. Photographs and postcards are shown along with a caption text providing a critical interpretation of what is shown, sometimes with phrases written on the photographs. The aim of Azoulay is not only to show the colonial practices and frames of legibility, but also to affirm that this violence is reversible, contrary to what many would claim. She also shows traces of resistance, such as in the photograph by Timothy O’Sullivan, which is one of the few images of the general strike described by W. E. B. Du Bois, during which 250.000 slaves fled. She places the photo onto Du Bois' book, with sentences highlighted, and writes on the photo “imagine 250.000 pictures like this”. In works such as these, Azoulay engages critically with the photographs to make the viewers understand their continued role in imperialist violence, as well as to see traces of resistance against this process

In one section of Potential History, Azoulay describes the destruction of Jaffa Street in Jerusalem (Azoulay 2019, 276–280). Before the foundation of Israel, Jaffa Street was the heart of photographic practices in Jerusalem. It contained various photographers’ studios, both local ones and the studios of international agencies. Jaffa Street was also a street in which people from various ethnic and religious backgrounds mingled. In the fighting during the foundation of Israel, old Jaffa Street was destroyed and became a no-mans-land. The destruction of Jaffa Street meant the destruction of an important part of the history of photography in the Middle East, as well as the destruction of a form of multi-ethnic and multi-religious co-habitation that was taboo for the national identity narratives of the state of Israel, which henceforth also gained absolute control over the photographic archives from the region and the access to them. The title of this section is, however: “The Commons is Never Irremediably Lost” (Azoulay 2019, 276). Azoulay regards the worlds destroyed during, for example, the foundation of Israel never as completely lost, and the remaining traces form a “common” attesting to the “potential history” of the region. Furthermore, she includes two redrawn photographs: a photograph from the collection of the American Colony of Jaffa Street when it was still intact and another one of the street in rubble. Though still with the caution of using redrawn versions, she nevertheless shows us a photographic trace of Jaffa Street as it existed before its destruction, along with a photograph of its destruction. The destruction of Jaffa Street is, according to Azoulay, part of every photograph taken in the region: “The ruination of the nonpartitioned photographic field that was active in Palestine until 1948 is encoded, I argue, in any portion of light manipulated and processed by a camera in the Palestine-that-became-Israel. Old Jaffa Street still lives in every photograph of the region.” (Azoulay 2019, 280) Who can do the “decoding” and interpretation is, however, crucial for her.

The most striking analysis of a photograph can be found in the very last pages of the book (Azoulay 2019, 575–581). Azoulay concludes the book by commenting on a photograph that is captioned as “slave market, Louisiana, 1844”. The photograph is once again included in a redrawn version. With the help of specialists (in spite of her reservations about doing that), Azoulay argues that the photo was probably not taken in Louisiana and the people in the photo were not from Africa but more likely to be from India. They were not “slaves”, but so called “free laborers”. Azoulay clarifies that the practice of so called free labour was simply a continuation of the slave system by other means, a practice that would not have been possible if slavery had been abolished with the proper reparations. The lack of reparations made it possible to continue slavery-like exploitation of people, even though now there were no visible signs of violence such as chains

What is generally not visible in photographs of slaves is the violent process that led to the situation depicted in the photo: the destruction of worlds, the capturing and trafficking of people, the extreme violence involved in forcing people into slavery and the entire infrastructure that made this possible. Azoulay is of the opinion that this photograph comes as close as possible to showing this process, the “violence of the archival shutter that by nature escapes registration” (Azoulay 2019, 575). It shows the human trafficking involved in so called “free labour”. Azoulay asks us to use our imagination. Which worlds were these people taken from? Did they or their families resist? What did they have to leave behind? Several people in the picture, who were likely told to stand still for the photograph to be taken, seem uneasy with the situation, crossing their arms in front of their chests, including some of the children. Azoulay writes: “Crossing their arms on their chests, they form a barrier to protect themselves from the worldless world of their contractors. We should side with them.” (Azoulay 2019, 579) In her view, we do not have to interpret this gesture, the real meaning of which we can never really know, but nonetheless we should explicitly take sides with them. In their crossed arms, Azoulay sees an opening however small. Taking sides with the people in the photograph means giving power to their “no” and recognizing in the present the need for reparations: “The call for reparations is to hold the shutter open.” (Azoulay 2019, 580) The space created by this defiant gesture of crossed arms reveals a potential to unlearn imperialist violence: “A space was opened between them and this camera. In this looser moment they are not being forbidden from standing still and crossing their arms to make a certain distance, a refusal, a barrier between themselves and the violent world they are forced to inhabit. The camera made the potential for freedom visible.” (Azoulay 2019, 581)

Just like Didi-Huberman, Azoulay asks us to use our imagination when we see the gestures of the people in the photographs. Their gesture transmits their desire to resist, in spite of all the imperialist efforts to erase their worlds and to silence their voices. For Azoulay, however, seeing the image and the crossed arms of the people must lead to a clear political demand in the present. Indignation is what drives every sentence of Azoulay’s work and the impressive detailed analysis of the various manifestations of imperialist violence cannot remain inconsequential, merely an academic book or an art work like any other. Azoulay argues that “no further archival information is needed to” to recognize the demand to repair their world (Azoulay 2019, 579). Seeing the crossed arms must lead to the viewer explicitly “taking sides” with them, demanding fundamental reparations in the present, while Didi-Huberman is cautious of such political zeal, at the risk of remaining too focused on the aesthetics of critique. Though, in the end, Azoulay and Didi-Huberman have a different view on how to ethically and epistemologically approach images, both believe that the worlds destroyed are never completely lost and that traces of these worlds persist in photographs and other documents. In the crossed arms of the people in the photo, we see both the violence committed to them as their attempts to resist it, a gesture that lives into the present, demanding to be acknowledged. If we learn to be attentive to such gestures, the Algerian-Jewish-Arabic world of Azoulay’s grandmother Aïsha, the Tunisian-Jewish-Arabic world of Didi-Huberman’s father and the Polish-French-Jewish world of his mother, smothered by the violence of history, still live on.

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Leanne Rae Darnbrough for her helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All English translations from this book are by the author.

2. The collectives calling for the decolonizing of the Brooklyn Museum, for example, have formulated very concrete proposals: https://decolonizebrooklynmuseum.wordpress.com. Azoulay briefly mentions this specific initiative, but she does not discuss their proposals.

3. His love for libraries and archives is repeatedly exclaimed by Didi-Huberman. In Aperçues, he recounts one of his dreams. He dreamed he was able to enter the perfect library, which reminded him of all the great libraries and archives that he conducted research in, such as the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, Villa I Tatti in Florence and the Warburg Library in London. As soon as he enters, to his horror, the library is about to close and it announces its closure in a remarkable manner: every time Didi-Huberman opens the pages of a promising book, the words vanish one by one from the pages. Not being able to access the perfect archive is his worst nightmare. (Didi-Huberman 2018a, 32)

4. The original French title, Quand les images prennent position, expresses this view more clearly.

5. Errata was on display from 11 September to 18 October 2020, in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

6. From one of the information panels of the exhibition.