by Jon Lackman | 14 April 2006 | Books, Theory
In honor of Wayne Dynes’s recent apologia for German art-history scholarship, today we feature a 100% Germanocentric set of posts. [By the way, we're always looking for more foreign correspondents -- email us if you're interested.] For starters, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Peter Geimer has returned to the question of iconoclasm. First tackling the recent Mohammed-cartoons controversy, he contends that the Islamic interdiction on images doesn’t reflect contempt for images but rather awe of their power. He then considers the Nazi death camps, traditionally considered unrepresentable (see, for example, Claude Lanzmann’s exclusion of images from Shoah), introducing three recent texts that take a contrary view: Jean-Luc Nancy interrogates the moral principle that forbids representation; Jacques Rancière warns against the creation of a sacred aura around such experiences; and Georges Didi-Huberman argues for the importance of three photographs smuggled out of Auschwitz in a toothpaste tube, in spite of their incommensurability with what they depict.
