Returning dignity to the victims by ‘rendering history legible’: Georges Didi-Huberman, dialectical montage and the question of the archive

This text examines Georges Didi-Huberman's philosophy of visuality, focusing on the use of archival images of mass atrocity, partly in response to the ethical and political problem of engaging with photographs taken by perpetrators of violence. Challenging commentators on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah who argued for the unrepresentability of historical trauma, Didi-Huberman famously argued that images constitute vital historical events in their own right and that their meanings are plural and not predetermined by the intensions and contexts of their creation. Drawing on psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas about visuality, the gaze and the archive, Didi-Huberman develops an approach to montage dialectics that 'renders history legible’, which he identifies in films of Jean-Luc Godard, Harun Farocki, and László Nemes. In their own ways, these filmmakers pluralize and 'dehisce' images, disarticulating the purported unity of archives. ‘Rendering history legible’ advances a method of looking at archival images that refuses to locate them firmly in the past or to accept that their meaning has been stabilized through power; instead, it recognizes that the past continues to imprint and haunt the present, and that it touches the viewer today. We argue that while key to Didi-Huberman’s critique of the archive is a dialectic orientation that borrows from Walter Benjamin to 'explode' the image from within and bring to the fore hidden relations between its constituents, his approach to the aesthetics of cinematic montage braids with a deep ethical concern about the dignity of those who feature in these images. We show that already in his writings on the Sonderkommando photographs, and especially in his later analyses of films by Godard and Farocki, Didi-Huberman has linked the ethics and politics of the gaze to imagination and to activating the past in ways that inform our understanding of the present and restore dignity to the victims.