Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Georges Didi-Huberman: the persistence of lost worlds

Abstract

ABSTRACT In two striking books released in 2019, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Georges Didi-Huberman explicitly draw a connection between their respective theoretical approaches to images and their family histories. In Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Azoulay recounts the suppression of the existence of her Algerian-Jewish grandmother Aïsha by her father, who wanted to hide his Arabic-Algerian origins. Azoulay consequently develops a critical view on the history of photography and its role in the imperialist destruction of entire lifeworlds. In Pour Commencer Encore, Didi-Huberman recounts the story of his mother, who had to hide her Jewishness to survive the Nazi occupation of France, and of his father, who migrated to France as a Jewish Tunisian. In both cases, their relatives’ cultural identity had to remain invisible for various reasons in the countries in which their children grew up. Azoulay and Didi-Huberman present their approaches to images as influenced by the injustices experienced by these relatives and their commitment to them even goes as far as both them of changing their author names: Azoulay added “Aïsha” to her name and Didi-Huberman adopted his paternal (“Didi”) and maternal (“Huberman”) family name. However, this commitment led them to develop vastly different approaches to images and photographs. Whereas Azoulay emphasizes the role of photography in the imperialist destruction of worlds, remaining cautious of even reproducing certain photographs in her book, Didi-Huberman argues that worlds are never completely lost and that traces of these worlds always reappear by means of images. Azoulay aligns photography with imperialism and colonialism, while Didi-Huberman associates photography with migration. In their desire to do justice to the sufferings of their relatives, both influential theorists of images develop strongly diverging views on the politics of photographs and how they can reveal traces of lost worlds.