Abstract

RAMOS MOLLA, Paula. The Sonderkommando photographs: a possibility for reconciled commemoration of a sublime historical event. Estud.filos [online]. 2022, n.65, pp.192-204.  Epub Mar 25, 2022. ISSN 0121-3628.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ef.345415.

In this paper I consider the four images from Auschwitz analyzed by Didi- Huberman in Images in Spite of All -the so-called Sonderkommando photographs- through the lens of the “historical sublime” as proposed by historian Eelco Runia. These photographs are taken as an example of a possible reconciled aesthetic experience with an “unimaginable” past that horrifies us. Moreover, I argue that aesthetic depictions are able to champion a model of historical commemoration which makes these events imaginable again. In order to show this, I will first employ the concept of the “sublime historical event” which Runia proposes to interpret the Holocaust’s historical catastrophe. Runia’s “historical sublime” provides a framework to understand the process of becoming what “we are no longer” through the invention of new identities that defy our former ones and explain historical discontinuities. Secondly, I will examine the Sonderkommando photographs by applying Runia’s notion of commemoration to the viewer’s aesthetic experience of these images. I will finally suggest the possibility of a reconciliation with our former identities, those who committed sublime historical acts with which we no longer identify, thanks to this aestheticized experience of commemoration.

Keywords : historical sublime; Eelco Runia; Didi-Huberman; aesthetic experience; identity; historical reconciliation.

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