Approches du regard-image dans Auschwitz et après, Aucun de nous ne reviendra de Charlotte Delbo 
et Écorces de Georges Didi-Huberman
Charlotte Delbo’s and Georges Didi-Huberman’s works are related to each other in some aspects. In Aucun de nous ne reviendra, the poetic testimony attests to Delbo’s experience at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, as well as it specifies in an unique way what to see and perceive. At the very heart of Delbo’s situation as a concentration-camp victim lies the question of knowing how to set up space and perspective. Should one look around and understand (and consequently survive)? Or not to look around and not see one’s fellows (thus also oneself) die? In Écorces, a work punctuated by photographs, the historian of art and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman peers around, searching for traces from the past that have survived, looking for “the” place where his grand-parents were executed. He compares what he can see today to what he knows could be seen yesterday. It is also from four photographs taken by members of the Sonderkommando, a group of Jewish prisoners assigned to the crematoria as forced laborers, and themselves dead men on leave, that Didi-Huberman challenges our minds. Because of their overriding importance, the photographic heritage as well as what these images show, hide or unveil, open up our thinking. By questioning the scope of both poetical testimonies, and the creative use of the imagination in aesthetics, we aim at closely examining how looking at these images produce image-based literary or pictorial forms which turn out to be key threads in recollecting and transmitting the past.
Charlotte Delbo Georges Didi-Huberman Shoah Auschwitz mémoire image testimony memory gaze 20th century French Literature