Lecture Overview:

In Le Témoin jusqu'au bout (Les Éditions de Minuit, 2022), Georges Didi-Huberman explores what emotion is and how the language that bears witness to such emotion can be understood. He argues that emotion is inherently linked to a certain kind of division—a “sharing” or partitioning—and demonstrates this by analyzing the secret diary of Victor Klemperer, a German-Jewish philologist who documented his life under the Nazi regime. Through this analysis, Didi-Huberman shows that the “concrete dictatorship” of totalitarianism operated alongside an “emotional dictatorship” by controlling language to suppress the sharing of emotions, allowing only isolated, disconnected feelings to exist. In this context, Klemperer’s writing—undertaken at the risk of his life—becomes an act of resistance against the emotional dictatorship of totalitarianism, a persistent attempt to bear witness to the truth of repressed emotions. In other words, to bear witness to the emotions of history is to capture the moments in which suppressed feelings emerge as symptoms and to transmit them through narrative. How, then, is this discourse on language and emotion connected to Didi-Huberman’s long-standing interest in images and montage?