Georges Didi-Huberman: "Today, politics and ethics are completely separated, and this is a catastrophe."

BarcelonaAt the exhibition In the moved air... French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (Saint-Étienne, 1953) proposes taking a critical step back and stopping to read, allowing images to move us, but also to ask us questions. He does this by following in the footsteps of some of Lorca's verses and through three hundred works by artists such as Goya, Dalí, Giacometti, Miró, Picasso, Colita, and Rodin. The exhibition, which begins and ends with the gaze of children, is a co-production of the CCCB, where it can be seen until September 28, and the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, where he was present last year. Didi-Huberman has a long body of work dedicated to the uses and meanings of images and has never tiptoed around some highly controversial topics.. Among his works are: Images despite everything (2004; Images despite everything: visual memory of the Holocaust in the Spanish edition of Paidós), When images take position (2008; When images take position to Antonio Machado Books) and Passer, what is the cost? (2017; Pass, whatever the cost in Shangrila)

The exhibition explores the utopian potential of images and emotions and pays homage to Federico García Lorca. In the Romance of the Moon, Moon, of the Gypsy balladsThe poet speaks of a child who is moved by looking at the moon. Do you remember any images that made you rethink things?

— It's an intellectual and poetic exhibition, and narcissism has no place there. I don't want to answer that question. There's Goya, Picasso, Dalí, Giacometti, Goethe, Colita, Miró... They're all much more important than my little story.

They are artists from different historical periods and countries. What do they have in common? Why did you choose them to talk about the utopian potential of images?

— Can you answer the question I asked at the beginning. In the Gypsy Ballads Is emotion in the moon, in the child looking at the moon, or, as Lorca wrote, in the emotion between the two, in the air they share? I have refused to answer the first question, because it assumes that everything is in the subject. And that's not the case; emotion is in the air. Air is a very beautiful word; it is everything.

It's also what we share...

— Yes, absolutely.

To see, do we need to educate the gaze?

— I don't much like the word "educate." I prefer Nietzsche's concept: gay knowledge. The important thing is knowing how to ask the right questions. Questions that shake all certainties. Self-knowledge, the ability to learn for oneself, is freedom.

There's a lot of image and information overload. Does this overload rob us of our freedom?

— Absolutely. If you see 5,000 images every day, you should choose the right one and dedicate time to it. The proliferation of images isn't the fault of the images themselves, but of those who display them. Capitalism, propaganda, and advertising are what put so many images on a screen that you end up seeing nothing. Furthermore, we end up thinking that everything is in the present, and precisely one of the freedoms we have is being able to look at the past in order to fulfill a new desire for the future. History is the most important discipline. You should study history.

Speaking of history, you published Images despite everything, which features images captured by a Greek Jew from the inside of a crematorium. Survivors of the Nazi camps made a desperate effort to represent and convey what they experienced to others. Is it possible to convey such horror?

— Horror is constantly represented. You turn on television and see Gaza. And Gaza is absolute terror. Representation doesn't mean we can understand it. You can't understand the Holocaust with an image. Even so, the image remains very important. In the West, we have an anthropological relationship with horror. We have Jesus Christ nailed to the cross.

And have we understood the Nazi genocide? I say this because the ideas that brought Hitler to power in the 1930s are...

— It's what I was saying before: if we don't study history, we won't be able to understand anything. Fascist ideas are returning because many people haven't understood what historical fascism was.

How is this possible with everything explained through books, movies, photographs, series...?

— It's propaganda's fault. They make us believe that philosophers speak in an incomprehensible language. If I watch a soccer game, the first time I don't understand anything because they use very technical language. I have to watch more games to understand it. Why isn't political history, aesthetics, or philosophy interesting? Because we live in a society where there's a lot of censorship and propaganda. Jean-Luc Godard said it. The Taliban censored images, but so did the US with 9/11, with the corpses. There's a photograph in which we see the pieces of Rodin's sculptures that have fallen, but not the corpses. Capitalism makes us believe that through a device we can see everything, and that's absolutely false. Political powers constantly try to tell us what we should look at and what we shouldn't. They always try to censor both the image and the word.

Shouldn't there be any censorship?

— It's complicated. Nothing should be censored, but hate speech should be judged. We had that debate with the satirical magazine. Charlie HebdoIn France, there's no censorship of religions; we can criticize all religions. But if you single out a specific Muslim and unleash all your hatred, there's legislation against it. And I think that's fine.

You've mentioned that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, images of dead bodies were censored. Yet, we see images of Gaza every day.

— The class struggle also occurs with the dead. Walter Benjamin, whom I admire, wrote it months before committing suicide: with fascism, not even the dead are safe. There is Gaza, but also Sudan, Aleppo, Mariupol... Crimes against humanity have been normalized. Today, wars are not army against army, but army against the civilian population. Returning to the exhibition, which talks about emotions, I have a book in which I reflect on the emotions of fascists. There's the story of a young man who attends a Hitler rally and is moved. A few months later, he's in the SS and writes a letter to his wife, with whom he has two children. He explains that they throw babies in the air and shoot them, and that they do it to protect their children. What has happened to emotions? One tentative answer is that emotions toward others have been repressed. There are many Israelis today who can't imagine that Palestinians need a country; they can only imagine that Palestinians hate them. They can't imagine that they want the same thing they want. Their emotions are repressed.

Is it a lack of empathy?

— No, because empathy is about identifying with someone. If the other person is hurt, you are too. And that's not it. More than empathy, it's about ethics.

And how can images be used as a political tool against fascism?

— We do it constantly.

We have all the images of Netanyahu's massacre of Palestinians, and for now, he remains unpunished.

— It uses a very American strategy. It's the same thing the Americans did in Vietnam. If they locate a Hamas member, they bomb and kill everyone around them. Today, politics and ethics are completely separated, and this is a catastrophe. Politics has all the power, and ethics is weaker.