IN THE IMAGE OF AUSCHWITZ

BRUNO CHAOUAT

The Twilight of the Iconoclasts

In 2001 in Paris, an exhibit displayed photographs of Nazi concentration and extermination camps.1 Among them were four snapshots secretly taken in August 1944 by members
of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitzs crematory V.2 The film 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 incineration of gassed bodies. The next two pictures are taken as the unidentified photographer
walks out of the crematory and snaps two shots without looking. The first one is disoriented 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 Claude
Lanzmann. Because the gruesome snapshots were taken despite SS prohibition of photographs and films, 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 Images malgr tout (Images in Spite of Everything).3 The deliberately polemical conclusion
reached 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 . . . quAuschwitz est inimaginable? Certes non. Il faut mme dire
le contraire: il faut dire quAuschwitz nest quimaginable, que nous sommes
contraints limage et que, pour cela, nous devons en tenter une critique interne
aux fins mme de nous dbrouiller avec cette contrainte, avec cette lacunaire
For Franois Legrand, unrepentant iconophile.

1. Mmoire des camps, directed by C. Chroux.

2. The members of the Sonderkommando were forced to feed the gas chambers and the crematories with gassed bodies.

3. The catalogue forms the first section of the book Images malgr tout, published two years
after the exhibition. The second section of the book, entitled Malgr limage toute, is a long and
scrupulous response to the accusations launched in Les temps modernes. Didi-Huberman uses
the polemical responses to the catalogue of the exhibition Mmoires des camps to elaborate a
sophisticated ontology of images that, as we will see, builds upon twenty years of intense reflection on the visible. Although these accusations were formulated by Elisabeth Pagnoux and Grard
Wajcman, it is worth noting that the editor of Les temps modernes, Claude Lanzmann, initiated the
polemic in an interview published in Le Monde at the time of the exhibition. [See Entre mmoire
et histoire des camps, le rle de la photographie, Claude Lanzmann, crivain et cinaste.]

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ncessit. [Must we say again . . . that Auschwitz is unimaginable? Certainly

not: one must, on the contrary, say that Auschwitz is only imaginable, that we
are bound to images and that, for that very reason, we must endeavor to make
an internal critique of images, to make do with such a constraint, with such a
lacunary necessity.] [IMT 62]
For this essay and its defiant conclusiona definitive blow against the iconoclastic
trend in the history of Holocaust representation since the 1980sthe art historian was accused 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 simaginer [To know, one must imagine oneself] [11]. How are we to read this prescription, which seems to predicate historical knowledge upon imagination? If knowing
the Holocaust entails a work of the imagination, why use the reflexive voice simaginer
instead of imaginer? Why not simply use the transitive form, il faut imaginer? Does
this use of the reflexive voice suggest an exploitative identification with the victims, as
in the French expression sy 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-Hubermans phenomenological 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 photographs. 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 historyhistorys mo(vi)mentum. By their very lack of focus, these particular 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.5 Reframing and refocusing suppress the zones of invisibility that obfuscate the
visible 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 present. The way we see or do not see is historically as critical as what we see. The phenomenologist 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-Hubermans 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 firsthand has ever returned 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-Hubermans magnum opus devoted to Aby Warburga work toward which all of his previous books
seem organically to converge and which can be read as the authors summa aesthetica [Limage
survivanteHistoire de lart et temps des fantmes selon Aby Warburg]. Empathy refers to
Warburgs concepts of Pathosformel and Nachleben. See further, my (too-)brief discussion of DidiHubermans Limage survivante.

5. Didi-Huberman reproduces in his book an embellished and shamelessly romanticized snapshot of women running toward the gas chamber as an example of Holocaust kitsch and of ethically
unacceptable images. Most of the photographs can be found in Jean-Claude Pressacs Auschwitz:
Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. See also, by Pressac, Les crmatoires dAuschwitz:
La machinerie du meurtre de masse.

6. See Robert Faurissons notorious sophism in his paranoid self-apology, Mmoire en
dfense: Contre ceux qui maccusent de falisifier lHistoire, La question des chambers gaz. (One
should note that this book bears a foreword by Noam Chomsky, who does not seem to distinguish
between condemning censorship and condoning historical lies.) To this sophismthat the dead

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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, dubious 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 by
the 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 crematories in action. And if the photographs do not show the whole thing, namely the gassing 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 filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard was
suspected of virtual Holocaust denial by Grard Wajcman (one of those accusing DidiHuberman) for having somewhat thoughtlessly declared: Je pense que si je my mettais
avec un bon journaliste dinvestigation, je trouverais des images des chambres gaz au
bout de vingt ans [I think that with the help of a good reporter, it would take me no more
than twenty years to find 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 skepticism. 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 film Shoah. For Didi-Hubermans critics, showing
nothing at all amounts to telling it all, while showing something amounts to telling nothing. 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? Granted
that images sans imagination are images as suchprints, documents, photographs,
have not returned to report how they were killedJean-Franois Lyotard had proposed a response
in Le diffrend. One could even argue that Le diffrend is itself a lengthy attempt at responding to
a historical positivism that can lead, ironically enough, to the denial of reality. Yet Didi-Huberman
deems Lyotards response no less sophistic than the Holocaust deniers arguments [IMT 12]. A
very different response to Faurissons allegations, grounded on empirical evidence rather than on
a philosophico-transcendental, antipositivistic argument, will be found in works by Pierre VidalNaquet and Deborah Lipstadt, among many others. On the shortcomings of postmodern responses
to Holocaust denial in general and of Lyotards response in particular, see Elizabeth Jane Bellamy,
Laboratories against Holocaust DenialOr, the Limits of Postmodern Theory.

7. See Grard Wajcman, Saint Paul Godard contre Mose Lanzmann? In the core of Images malgr tout, Didi-Huberman will in fact, and as a provocative response to Wajcmans attack
against the filmmaker, engage at length with Jean-Luc Godards ontology of images and reinscribe
Histoire(s) du cinma within a philosophy of history inherited from the German Jewish, early twentieth-century reelaboration of the concept of redemption. According to this reelaboration, images
salvage the real, which is not to say that the Holocaust will ever be redeemed, but that a memory
of it must nonetheless be recalled by fragmentary, lacunary, perhaps hopeless images. In fact, this
redemption is not, in principle, soteriological. For Godard, and for Didi-Huberman, at least to a
certain degree, the task of the filmmaker and of the art historian is historical and ethical more than
soteriological or apocalyptic. This is not to say that historyart history, the art of history, and art
as historyis not ultimately contaminated by the apocalyptic, Christological motif, as I will further surmise. The contentious point was Didi-Hubermans use of Jean-Luc Godards aphorism as
an epigraph to Images malgr tout: [. . .] mme ray mort/un simple rectangle / de trente-cinq
/ millimtres / sauve lhonneur / de tout le rel [even entirely crossed out / a mere rectangle / of
thirty-five millimeters / saves the honor / of all the real] [Godard, Histoire(s) du cinma 86].

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archives, and so forthwe may assume that imaginative images are negative images
or counterimages, images that present the actual, historical lack of images and the ontological deficiency 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
film 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 to
represent 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-Hubermans essay dismisses, by
using Lanzmanns film against its author, by using Shoah against the discourse that the
film has bolstered for the past twenty years. Indeed, for Didi-Huberman, the film Shoah
does not invalidate the historical value of photographs. Rather, and depending on the way
they are edited and read, documents and archives complement Lanzmanns historical,
philosophical, and aesthetic endeavor. In fact, in 1995, Didi-Huberman had devoted an
essay to Lanzmanns film entitled Le lieu malgr tout (The Site in Spite of Everything, in Phasmes). That Images malgr tout was to be read as an echo of this previous
essay indicates that the catalogue was clearly not written against Lanzmanns film but
certainly against the pious and at times mystical readings that the film has fostered in
France and, perhaps differently, in the US. For Didi-Huberman, Lanzmanns masterpiece
fulfills Walter Benjamins 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 Lanzmanns film, Didi-Huberman quotes Benjamins formula:
Une image . . . est ce en quoi lAutrefois rencontre le Maintenant dans un clair pour
former une constellation [An image . . . is that in which the Then encounters the Now
in a flash to form a constellation] [qtd. in Didi-Huberman, Phasmes 24041]. Such is
Lanzmanns film to the seer/reader: a visible site in spite of the invisible dead, a material
trace hinting at the disappearance of millions of people. Less a non-lieu de mmoire
[nonplace of memory], as its author had it, than a lieu malgr tout, a place of redemption via an aesthetic, imaginative relation to historydespite the Nazi attempt at destroying 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
Malgr limage 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 visual 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 Lanzmanns proponents, is no less fetishistic than to
believe that images can show the whole thing. Both positions are grounded in a fetishistic
faith 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 Lanzmanns obsession with an
imaginary film that would show the absolute moment of the Holocaust, namely the gassing of thousands of people [IMT 101]. Lanzmanns main reason for rejecting archive
footage 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
malgr tout.

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such a total image. If this total image does not exist, then there should be no images
at allor 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 image
because there should be none. Didi-Hubermans detractors reasoning is circular: there is
no 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 paradigm, are ontologically fallible and can present only bits and pieces of the real. Didi-Huberman rejects both absolute views as adialectical and antiheuristic: (a) the overestimation 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 historical
truthwhat Didi-Huberman identifies as the dogma of the unimaginable.
2
Art as History: Prints and Afterlives
Such a dehistoricization of the Holocaust is far removed from Didi-Hubermans thinking.
First, the art historian, whose hermeneutics of images is inherently dialectical, dismisses
Lanzmanns all or nothing logic. His premise is that images show neither everything
nor nothing. Instead, they delineate the fragile place of a fleeting 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-Hubermans history of art history,
from the publication of his 1982 landmark Invention de lhystrie, with its inscription
of the birth of psychiatry in art history, to his recent study of the Italian artist Claudio
Parmiggiania phenomenology of dust and shade, haunted by the traumatic memory of
Hiroshima. Didi-Hubermans work is situated at the crossroads of knowing and seeing, of
epistemology and phenomenology. It invites his reader on a journey at the confines of art
history and of history as aesthetic experience. The Holocaust was a predictable if perilous
stop on this journeyperilous 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 Gnie du non-lieu. This
title can hardly fail to evoke Claude Lanzmanns own phrase about his film, non-lieux
de la mmoire [see Les non-lieux de la mmoire 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-Hubermans 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 Hanta in 1998, Ltoilement. This book examines the work of an artist who buries his canvasses into the earth and digs them out years later once they have decomposed.
Difficult not to think of the famous Rouleaux dAuschwitz, buried by the victims next to
the crematories and described by Didi-Huberman in Images malgr tout as rongs par
lhumidit [gnawed by humidity] [IMT 15]. Asked what he felt while unearthing his own
canvasses 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, Hanta answers:
Ctait comme dterrer des cadavres [It was like digging out corpses] [toilement 108].
The task of the artist resembles that of a morbid, Lazarus-like archaeology haunted by the
memory of modern wars and disastersan archeology that strives to dig up the cadavers
of history.

While he was working on Images malgr tout and photography as a form of posthumous testimony, Didi-Huberman was concurrently completing a monumental history

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of modern art history, Limage survivante. This monograph, begun in 1990, elaborates
a 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 historian Aby Warburg is a ghostly and repressed founder.9 Here is Didi-Hubermans description of Warburgs Nachleben:
La forme survivante, au sens de Warburg, . . . survit, symptomalement et fantomalement, sa propre mort: ayant disparu en un point de lhistoire; tant rapparue bien plus tard, un moment o, peut-tre, on ne lattendait plus; ayant,
par consquent, survcu dans les limbes encore mal dfinies dune mmoire
collective. [IS 67]
[The surviving form, in Warburgs sense, . . . survives its own death as a symptom and a phantom: having vanished at one point in history; having reemerged
much later, at a time when, perhaps, one had ceased to expect it; having, therefore, survived in the still poorly defined limbo of a collective memory.]
Nachleben is to art and cultural history what the print is to mimesis and what trauma and
Nachtrglichkeit are to the time of consciousness. The concept of Nachleben unsettles the
teleology of art history in the same way as the print (lempreinte) unsettles our reading
of images. Drawing on Benjamins reflections on art and history, Didi-Huberman claims
that images present a flash of history and history as mere flash. This unsettling conception of representation can be best understood in the light of the paradigm of the print, by
which Didi-Huberman means any likeness produced through contactfootprint, fingerprint, 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 Parmiggianis art:
en toute procdure dempreinte, le lieu sinstaure forcment dun retrait . . . il
faut bien le dplacement du piedil faut que le marcheur sen aillepour que
son empreinte nous soit rendue visible [in any process of print, the site is necessarily established through a retreat . . . the motion of the foot is indispensable
the walker must move awayfor his print to become visible to us]. [GNL 36]
The process of print (procdure dempreinte) 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 condition 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 snapshotsas prints of
the extermination, as an irrefutable if fleeting coming forth of the past despite its having
already receded.

9. It could be argued that Didi-Hubermans relation to Warburg is one of melancholic identification and incorporationwhich 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 on
Warburg prompts in the reader.

10. This model informs Didi-Hubermans reading of Parmiggianis work with dust. Needless
to say, it is perfectly fitted to Parmiggianis historic and aesthetic endeavor.

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3
Ad imaginem Auschwitzi
Yet if one can easily hear in this paradigm an explicit echo of Benjamins dialectical image and fragmentary philosophy of history, it also suggests a tricky Christological reading
of the Holocaust. In his 1990 book on Fra Angelico [4849], Didi-Huberman resorted to
Aquinass opposition between likeness of trace (repraesentatio vestigii) and likeness of
image (repraesentatio imaginis):
Any effect somehow copies its cause, yet variously. For some represent the causality [causalitatem] alone of the cause, not its form [formam], thus smoke [fumus] and fire [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 that
represent their cause in the likeness of its form [ad similitudinem formae ejus],
thus a flame [ignis] and the fire [ignem] that sets it alight, or an effigy of Hermes
[statua Mercurii]; this is the likeness of image [repraesentatio imaginis]. [Aquinas 1a.45.7]
The fire/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 tracevestigium. If the Holocaustliterally, the burning out, or
total cremationis the cause of the smoke, the smoke is not a representation of image of
the Holocaust but merely a vestige or a printa 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 Aquinass inscription 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, he
noticed that for Aquinas, the image of God bestowed upon Adam is not aspectual or extensive 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 Creatorad 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 the
ontological 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, transcendent, does not proceed by means of the image but by means of the vestige. This
is the fundamental and very simple consequence of the fact that God is not, for
any 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 everythingand here we come across, ten years earlier, an occurrence of the
controversial malgr tout of the essay on the Auschwitz snapshotsman walks in the
image. The devout artwork will thus strive to be the invisible image of God [FA 50].

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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 impossible to imaginewith 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 image
of God as arch-Image or for Auschwitz as the limit of human imagination. One should
also read in this light Didi-Hubermans recourse, in Images malgr tout, to Georges Batailles 1947 statement about human likeness after Auschwitz, Limage de lhomme est
insparable, dsormais, dune chambre gaz [The image of man is henceforth inseparable 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, ad
imaginem Auschwitzi, in the same way as he was, for Aquinas and the Christian artist, ad
imaginem Dei.

The recourse to the Christian paradigm has not escaped Grard Wajcmans critique.
At the end of his essay in Les temps modernes, Wajcman recalls that the origin of photography 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 contact between the face of Christ and the piece of linen, the shroud, or sudariumperhaps
better called a sweater as in the French suaire [see Didi-Huberman, Lempreinte 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 [Lempreinte 51].

Didi-Hubermans symbolic investment in the power of the photographic image as
emblem of the print and as allegory of history may thus be haunted by a Christian theophany, namely, the revelation in absentia of the Holy Facethe Print par excellence of the
one whom Paul called the image [eikon] of the invisible God [Colossians 1: 15]. The
Holy Shroud emblematizes the encounter between the visible (the icon) and the invisible
(the God). Although disingenuous and ill informed of Didi-Hubermans previous work,
Grard Wajcmans essay may nonetheless carry an insightful intuition. In the reading that
Wajcman proposes of Didi-Hubermans essay, Auschwitz appears as a figure of Christ,
whose shroud as photograph/print would be displayed religiously as a sacred relic in accordance with the Eucharistic ritual of the ostension. The victims would thus be turned
into Christic, sacrificial figures, and the Holocaust dubiously changed into a martyrdom
potentially leading to redemption. Lanzmanns proponents reject in principle what they
perceive as the redemptive temptation at work in the excessive care for images.
4
Simaginer: From Auschwitz to Mount Sinai, and Back
In order better to understand Didi-Hubermans symbolic engagement with the photographic 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
to Photograph], was published in Phasmes: Essais sur lapparition, the volume that culminates
in the Benjaminian reading of Claude Lanzmanns Shoah.

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essay, Didi-Huberman had identified 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. DidiHuberman 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 kateikona, 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 which
Philotheus dives functions as a film developer. The French uses the word rvler to describe 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 Philotheuss allegory, the photograph or print is none other
than the hermit himself. Being according to the image (kateikona) signifies that baptism,
rather than natural birth, is what makes the creature in the likeness of God. Baptism endows the creature with the arch-image, the Image of images. However, Philotheus does
not resemble God; his body and soul merely reflect 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 the
likeness of God; only he bears the seal of the divine light. To become a diaphanous, disincarnate image of God is thus what the Christian strives for. Baptism reveals the iconic
essence of the Christian in the same way as the film developer reveals the image on the
film. 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:
Cest l en moi, pensa-t-il, que le Dieu lumineusement sempreint, phteino
grapheisthai, se photographie [It is here, within me, he thought, that the God
luminously imprints Himself, photeinographeisthai, photographs Himself].
[Phasmes 54]
Philotheuss invention of this Greek verb that combines the adjective phteinos, luminous, 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 Philotheuss original text, we discover that the divine
light wounds (blesse) and blesses (bnit) the one who experiences it and who is burnt, as
it were, by the sun of God. Photography is here defined by Didi-Huberman through his
reading of Philotheuss allegory as the stamp of God, the divine proofboth preuve
and preuve as ordeal, risk, danger, or experiencewhich 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 phs, 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-Hubermans reading of the Auschwitz photographs? How can one not at least wonder whether this reading does not turn Auschwitz into a secular theophany? How are
we, indeed, to read the opening statement of Images malgr toutPour savoir il faut
simaginer [To know one must imagine oneself]? Does this not mean that to know, one

12. See the entry Philothe de Batos in the Dictionnaire de la spiritualit asctique et mystique.

94

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 blinding
light of the Holocaust? To imagine oneself would thus mean to become the seer, witness, and martyr of the blinding light of a historical disaster. This recourse to the mystic
motif and this apocalyptic drama of figuration resonate with the later works of Maurice
Blanchot devoted to writing and catastrophe. Blanchot, indeed, has also helped to establish the dogma of the unimaginable, saying that Dans les camps linvisible sest
jamais rendu visible [In the camps the invisible has forever rendered itself visible] [qtd.
in IMT 4142],13 a statement that uncannily echoes Pauls phenomenological and dialectical 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 DenialOr, the Limits of
Postmodern Theory. Parallax 10.1 (2004): 8899.
Blanchot, Maurice. Lcriture du dsastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.
________
. Lentretien infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.
Creech, James. De la honte la thorie. Proceedings of Lire, crire la honte. Cerisyla-Salle colloquium, June 2003. Forthcoming.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Lempreinte. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997.
________
. Ltoilement: Conversation avec Hanta. Paris: Minuit, 1998.
________
. Fra AngelicoDissemblance and Figuration. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1995. Trans. of Fra Angelico: Dissemblance et figuration. Paris:
Champs-Flammarion, 1995. [FA]
________
. Gnie du non-lieu: Air, poussire, empreinte, hantise. Paris: Minuit, 2001. [GNL]
________
. Images malgr tout. Paris: Minuit, 2003. [IMT]
________
. Limage survivanteHistoire de lart et temps des fantmes selon Aby Warburg.
Paris: Minuit, 2002. [IS]
________
. Invention de lhystrie. Paris: Macula, 1982.
________
. Phasmes: Essais sur lapparition. Paris: Minuit, 1998.
Faurisson, Robert. Mmoire en dfense: Contre ceux qui maccusent de falsifier lHistoire,
La question des chambers gaz. Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Histoire(s) du cinma. Paris: Gallimard-Gaumont, 1998.
Lanzmann, Claude. Entre mmoire et histoire des camps, le rle de la photographie,
Claude Lanzmann, crivain et cinaste. Le Monde 19 Jan. 2001.
________
. Les non-lieux de la mmoire. Au sujet de Shoah: Le film 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 Lcriture du dsastre. For a discussion of Blanchots relation to the
Holocaust in terms of the unimaginable, see first his 1969 essay on Robert Antelme, published
in Lentretien infini, and James Creechs yet unpublished discussion of Blanchots reading [De
la honte la thorie]. Apparently, James Creechs anti-iconoclastic position is close to DidiHubermans, except that, as I have tried to show in this paper, the unimaginable returns in DidiHubermans argument in the form of the arch-Image, of a pure visibility of that which cannot be
seenvia Blanchot, Godard, Bataille, and what I have attempted to trace as the vestigial motif.

diacritics / spring 2006

95

Lipstadt, Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.
New York: Plume, 1994.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. Le diffrend. Paris: Minuit, 1983.
Mmoire des camps, directed by C. Chroux. Paris: 2001.
Pagnoux, Elisabeth. Reporter photographe Auschwitz. Les temps modernes 613
(2001): 84108.
Philothe de Batos. Dictionnaire de la spiritualit asctique et mystique. Paris:
Beauchesne, 1983. Fascicules 7677.
Pressac, Jean-Claude. Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. New
York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1989.
________
. Les crmatoires dAuschwitz: La machinerie du meurtre de masse. Paris: CNRS,
1993.
Wajcman, Grard. De la croyance photographique [On the Faith in Photography]. Les
temps modernes 613 (2001): 4783.
________
. Saint Paul Godard contre Mose Lanzmann? Le Monde 03 Dec. 1998.
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. Les assassins de la mmoire. Paris: La dcouverte, 1987.
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

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Contributors
Bruno Chaouat teaches French literature at the University of Minnesota. He has published a book on Chateaubriand and autobiography (Je meurs par morceaux: Chateaubriand, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999) and more recently has edited a volume
of essays on shame and literature (Lire, crire la honte, Presses Universitaires de Lyon,
2007).
Pedro Erber is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Literature at Cornell
University and author of Politics and Truth: Martin Heideggers Political Philosophy
(So 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.
Artist
James Siena (b. 1957, California) received his BFA from Cornell University, New York,
in 1979. Sienas 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.
Artists 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 dont 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 tools
are automatic. Hence there is no longer a need to be self-aware.

Indeed, theres no need for an artists statement.
James Siena, November 2007
Cover: Seventeen Combs, 2006, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 8 x 6 1/4, Photo credit:
Anthony Cunha, James Siena, courtesy Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles
Back cover: Three Personages, Interpenetrating, 2007, enamel on aluminum, 19 1/4 x 15 1/8, Photo
credit: Joerg Lohse/PaceWildenstein, New York, James Siena, courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.