TOWARDS A POLITICS OF MEMORY. WALTER BENJAMIN AND GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN'S PERSPECTIVES ON THE IMAGE

Abstract

The following article aims to analyze the proposal of a politics of memory around the thought of Walter Benjamin and George Didi-Huberman. For this reason, we try to think about how the images fulfill a role of remembrance of past struggles through the montage device. A history readability matrix that operates against the grain of the fundamental idea of progress in historicism and a position about the task of the historian who interprets history by the margins, outside the usual regulatory frameworks. The historian must be aware that there is no total knowledge of the images, but instead, it is the images that question and teach to see. The images have a theoretical and historical notability since, being fragmentary, partial, and instantaneous, they cannot capture totality. On the one hand, by analyzing the dialectical image that Benjamin uses as an axis of work, the significance of the past and memory in the historian’s interpretation is broadened, and on the other, it makes it possible to articulate the various temporalities that Didi-Huberman works from anachronism of images to think about a politics of memory.