Quotes from Georges Didi-Huberman

We must know how to look into images to see that of which they are survivors. So that history, liberated from the pure past (that absolute, that abstraction), might help us to open the present of time.

I]n the face of every image we have to choose whether, or how, to make it participate in our knowledge and action. We can accept or reject this or that image; take it as a consoling object or as a worrying object; make it ask questions or use it as a ready-made response.

If Auschwitz is unthinkable, then we must rethink the bases of our anthropology (Hannah Arendt). If Auschwitz is unsayable, then we must rethink the bases of testimony (Primo Levi). If Auschwitz is unimaginable, we must give the same attention to an image as we do to what witnesses say.

se rejoue, à travers tous ces conflits, ce que Warburg nommera le Nachleben, la "survivance" d'une instabilité déjà centrale à la culture classique elle-même et que Nietzsche, dans La Naissance de la tragédie, avait déjà bien repérée : c'est le conflit de l'"éthos apollinien" et du "pathos dionysiaque". "Le Quattrocento, conclut Warburg, savait apprécier cette double richesse de l'Antiquité païenne.