Sublime Images and the Temporalities of Trauma in Georges Didi-Huberman: Imagining the Unimaginable
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1590/1517-106X/2025e72791Abstract
The essay analyzes the relationship between the sublime and trauma in the work of Georges Didi-Huberman, focusing on his defense of the images of Auschwitz against the concept of the “unimaginable”. In Imagens apesar de tudo, Écorces, Blancs soucis and Sortir du noir, he values four photographs of the Sonderkommando as visual testimonies that would refute Nazi denialism, also using them to criticize the taboo of representation defended by Lanzmann and Wajcman. Didi-Huberman rejects Lyotard’s sublime as “negative aesthetics,” but the essay argues that his approach incorporates the sublime by treating temporal silences and fractures as hallmarks of trauma. The essay critically reads the paradoxical absence of the concept of the sublime in the midst of a profusion of montages of sublime images, interpreting Didi-Huberman’s work as a “dialectical image” that faces the historical catastrophe of the Shoah.
Keywords: Sublime; trauma; Shoah; testimony; memory.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
THE AUTHOR/S confirm/s his, her or their participation in all stages of work preparation: 1) Conception, project, bibliographical research, analysis and interpretation of data; 2) Writing and reviewing the manuscript; 3) Approval of the final version of the manuscript for publication; 4) Responsibility for all aspects of the work and guarantee for the accuracy and integrity of any part of the work. The submission of works implies the immediate cession, without onus, by all authors, of publication rights to the journal Alea, licensed under CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The authors are fully responsible for the content of the article and continue to hold all copyrights for subsequent publications of it, and should, if possible, include the reference to the first publication in the journal. Alea does not commit to returning received contributions. Authors of articles, reviews or translations will receive a copy of the journal.
