Images malgré tout, Georges Didi-Huberman
(Part of Catherine Millet’s theme: History)

In August 1944, members of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau succeeded in secretly photographing the extermination process in which they were trapped. Four photographs remain of this moment. We attempt here to retrace the events, to produce a phenomenology, to grasp the necessity of it yesterday as well as today. This analysis supposes a questioning of the conditions in which a visual source can be used by the historical discipline. It also leads to a philosophical critique of the unimaginable that this history, the Shoah, is often qualified as. We try to measure the imaginable part that the experience of the camps arouses in spite of everything, in order to better understand the value, as necessary as incomplete, of images in history. It is a question of understanding what "despite everything" means in such a context.

Les Éditions de Minuit, 2018
Text in French
Soft cover
22.5 x 13 cm
235 pages
ISBN: 978-2-7073-1858-9