Suchergebnisse

International audience ; Ce texte est un extrait (pp. 140-156) traduit du livre "Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism" de Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, publié chez Verso en 2019 : L'art devrait être compris comme un ensemble d'activités, qui participe à la construction du monde, irréductible à la fabrication d'objets isolés. Ces activités façonnent la place de chacun.e dans un monde partagé et ses droits en ce lieu. Dans les chapitres précédents du livre, j'ai tenté d'exposer le fait que le pillage impérial des « meilleurs échantillons » des objets d'art des peuples autochtones est inséparable, d'une part, de la destruction des structures politiques et culturelles des peuples par leur inclusion forcée au sein de systèmes politiques dans lesquels ils étaient gouvernés par des législations spécifiques, et d'autre part, de l'institutionnalisation de l'art en tant que domaine d'activités distinct invitant certain.e.s citoyen.ne.s à être actif.ve.s, tandis que d'autres sont privé.e.s du droit de s'y adonner librement

More than once Arendt denied being a public figure and added that she did not entertain any "ambition to become one." This poses a challenge to any filmmaker seeking to portray her character, as Margarethe von Trotta found when she contradicted Arendt's self-perception to inquire who was this public figure at the center of one of the most important political-intellectual controversies of the twentieth century. Von Trotta's cinematic inquiry is in some ways justified by Arendt's insights into how the who is revealed to others. Hannah Arendt gives us an opportunity to follow Arendt while thinking and to reconfigure this activity with or against Arendt. The challenge of depicting thinking is one that Pamela Katz, the screenwriter, and Margarethe von Trotta, the director, confronted in the making of the film. Had they followed Arendt's own arguments about herself and about the invisibility of thinking, the making of a film about her would have amounted to a dark screen most of the time. Cinematic portrayal enhances the intrusive quality inherent in human relationships: being with others is always also watching and observing them, as well as memorizing how they are revealed to us, which is often different from how they intend to appear.

Azoulay argues that human rights discourse is based on a separation between a closed past, in which what was robbed is no longer contested because the violent dispossession has been legalized and naturalized, and an indefinite future in which the rights of "everyman," as it were—the typical protagonist of a common declarations of rights—would not be violated. This separation is at the basis of the common discourse of human rights and justifies us calling such a discourse a sovereign discourse of rights. For this sovereign discourse, the state of historical inequality as well as people's coming together in public to perform their rights are neither points of departure nor concrete bids for reparation and compensation. When people perform their rights in concrete situations of harm and deprivation their performance is usually interpreted as a protest, and they are often blamed with the disturbance of public order and are responded to in kind. Based on Azoulay's work on revolutionary moments, the essay works to reconstruct a civil discourse of human rights from these sites where people perform together.

The civil awakening in the Middle East and all over the world reveals more and more facets of regime-made disasters, and the extent to which democracy itself, rather than being their foil, is one of the regime forms wherein such disasters actually take place. This museum, inspired by the Arendtian effort to analyze totalitarian regimes, adopts the widely accepted claim that totalitarian regimes of the kind analyzed by Arendt are a thing of the past, but insists on understanding the disasters afflicting various populations in the world as regime-made ones. The museum follows the way in which such disasters take place and are interlaced in a democratic fiber of life, while being perceived as external to the regime that generates them. This museum is a layout, an outline for visual studies of regime-made disasters and the condition for the emergence of the civil language of revolution.

The point of departure of Berger and Mohr's Another Way of Telling (1982) is what they call the discovery that 'photographs did not work as we had been taught'. Since their book was written, the same feeling of 'discovery' has been expressed in other writings on photography. Often, these 'discoveries' have been linked with the way 'ordinary' people have been using photography. This paper addresses this recurrence and asks what are the discursive conditions under which this understanding of photography has been perceived as a 'discovery' whenever it has surfaced in the last 30 years. The paper analyzes the conceptual grid within the hegemonic discourse on photography that has contributed enormously to the marginalization of this new understanding of photography — the common opposition between the 'aesthetic' and the 'political', and accordingly between two seemingly contradictory judgments: 'this is too political'; 'this is too aesthetic'. These judgments, applied frequently to photographs taken in zones of 'regime-made disaster', usually differ and sometimes completely prevent the possible encounter with the photographed people who, through the photograph, are co-present with the spectators in the event of viewing the photograph.