Necessary Monsters. Monstrous Narratives. Haunted Images of Our Time
Necessary Monsters. Monstrous Narratives. Haunted Images of Our Time

Summary/Abstract: Between literature (fiction) and testimony, the narratives that attempt to voice and bear witness to the catastrophe dwell, in Jacques Derrida’s terms, on an impossible limit. Bearing witness is thus haunted by two apparently opposed, yet interrelated, unstable functions: on the one hand it is continuously undone by the impossibility to tell its story, to find a language that can comprise and render the catastrophe, on the other hand, bearing witness means to embark on the quest of this possibility of a language that could confess to that which is impossible to grasp entirely. Considering posthumanism in its impossibility to tell its own story and in its quest for a language that would make it possible, our paper investigates the possibility of bearing witness to the unrepresentable. We will revisit the polemic around the images of the Shoah as we will delve into how one can deal with the language that bears witness to the events of a past that is out of reach. We will reconsider the dispute between Georges Didi-Huberman and Claude Lanzmann around the four photographs rescued from Auschwitz as we analyze László Nemes’ film Son of Saul – which Didi-Huberman calls a necessary monster – and other documentary films exploring the possibility of speaking about the catastrophe (Harun Farocki, Rithy Panh, Patricio Guzmán). We will thus observe why and when we can speak of an ethical way to use the images of the Holocaust and why art can and should employ the impossibility of language to imagine the unimaginable in spite of all.

• Details
• Contents