Georges Didi-Huberman and four photographs from August 1944

Second session of the 2025-2026 CEFRES Francophone
Interdisciplinary Seminar “Dépaysements”: Clues and Trajectories.

Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Friday November 28, 2025, from 10 am
Language: French

Speaker: Marek KETTNER (University of Pilsen)
Discussant: Fedora PARKMANN (Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences / associated at CEFRES)

Abstract

Georges Didi-Huberman conceived of imagination as a montage of images creating complex dialectical images. In his book Images malgré tout (Images Despite Everything), he explores the history of four exceptional photographs of Auschwitz. At the time of writing, these visual traces of the Holocaust are opening up to new interpretations, thanks to new testimonies and archival discoveries, in which imagination plays an essential role. According to the author, there is no historical knowledge without imagination. But imagination alone cannot function without visual traces, understood here as singular moments in a temporal process which cannot be recovered. While it is not possible to reconstruct historical events, it is nevertheless possible to construct dialectical images, montages of individual visual traces that present a given event in a new, often surprising light. With his concept of the dialectical image, Didi-Huberman follows in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin, although differs from him on essential points, as is perhaps best illustrated in his book Images malgré tout.

See the complete program of the 2025-2026 seminar here.