BARK by Georges Didi-Huberman, Samuel E. Martin (Trans) ( 9780262036849 )

Item Details

Title:

BARK

By:

Georges Didi-Huberman, Samuel E. Martin (Trans)

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£15.99

Our price:

£11.67

Discount:

27% off

You save:

£4.32

ISBN 10:

0262036843

ISBN 13:

9780262036849

Availability:

Usually dispatched within 1-2 days.

Delivery rates

Stock:

Currently 3 available

Publisher:

MIT PRESS LTD

Pub. date:

25 August, 2017

Series:

Bark

Pages:

136

Translated from:

French

Description:

"Bark, originally published as aEcorces by Les aEditions de Minuit in 2011, is a photographic and literary essay by leading French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (winner of the Adorno Prize in 2015), documenting the author's visit to the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in the summer of that year. The book comprises some 10,000 words, as well as 19 photographs taken by Didi-Huberman, which punctuate the text and serve both as signposts to the reader and as focal points for the tension between individual acts of looking and the construction of collective memory. Didi-Huberman refuses to consider Auschwitz as the name and site of some unimaginable, metaphysical absolute; rather, he advocates what he calls an archaeological point of view, attentive to the material details of the site as well as to the phenomenology and history of the images that have emerged from it. Unlike his previous work, however, Bark is less an academic study than a personal and literarily inflected meditation. The three strips of birch bark torn from a tree at the Birkenau site, laid out on a table in the book's opening photograph, appear to the author like 'the beginning of a letter to write.' While by no means an autobiographical text, Bark does lay bare the fact that Didi-Huberman's grandparents died at Auschwitz. The understated poignancy of the text is reinforced by the author's photographs, whose power could be said to lie precisely in their banality, as they make tangible the various features of the present site (walls, floors, fences, even flowers) and invite readers to look more closely in their effort to imagine the reality of the camps"--Provided by publisher.

Synopsis:

I walked among the birches of Birkenau on a beautiful day in June.-- BarkOn a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman tears three pieces of bark from birch trees on the edge of the site. Looking at these pieces after his return home, he sees them as letters, a flood, a path, time, memory, flesh. The bark serves as a springboard to Didi-Huberman's meditations on his visit, recorded in this spare, poetic, and powerful book. Bark is a personal account, drawing not on the theoretical apparatus of scholarship but on Didi-Huberman's own history, memory, and knowledge. The text proceeds as a series of reflections, accompanied by Didi-Huberman's photographs of the visit. The photographs are not meant to be art -- Didi-Huberman confesses that he "photographed practically everything without looking" -- but approach it nevertheless. Didi-Huberman tells us that his grandparents died at Auschwitz, but his account is more universal than biographical. As he walks from place to place, he observes that in German birches are birken; Birkenau designates the meadow where the birches grow. Didi-Huberman sees and photographs the "reconstructed" execution wall; the floors of the crematorium, forgotten witnesses to killing; and the birch trees, lovely but also resembling prison bars. Taking his own photographs, he thinks of the famous photographs taken in 1944 by a member of the Sonderkommando, the only photographic documentation of the camp before the Germans destroyed it, hoping to hide the evidence of their crimes. Didi-Huberman notices a "bizarre proliferation of white flowers on the exact spot of the cremation pits." The dead are not departed.

Illustrations:

19 b&w illus.

Publication:

Imprint:

MIT Press

Returns:

Non-returnable

Some other items by this author:

A DISSERTATION ON THE NATURE, EFFECTS, A (HB)

A DISSERTATION ON THE NATURE, EFFECTS, AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE BLASPHEMY AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST. TO WHICH IS ADDED, A REVIEW OF THE REASONINGS IN MONSIEUR BAYLE, ON THE ENTRANCE OF SIN AND MISERY INTO THE WORLD. ... BY S. MARTIN, ...

A FEW THOUGHTS AND MATTERS OF FACT CONCE (HB)

A FEW THOUGHTS AND MATTERS OF FACT CONCERNING METHODISM. OFFERED TO THE CONSIDERATION OF THE PEOPLE WHO ATTEND, ENCOURAGE, AND SUPPORT METHODIST TEACHERS. TO WHICH IS SUBJOINED, AN ANSWER TO A LATE PAMPHLET OF MR WESLEY AGAINST MR ERSKINE.