“Past things have futurity.”
Walter Benjamin, “The Metaphysics of Youth” (1914)
“It became obvious to me that the relationship of Palestinians to the visible and the visual was deeply problematic. In fact, the whole history of Palestinian struggle has to do with the desire to be visible.”
Edward Said, After the Last Sky (1986)
“In 1948, the
Israelites walked in the water towards the Promised Land. The Palestinians
walked in the water to drown. Shot and reverse shot. The Jewish people join
fiction. The Palestinian people, the documentary.”
Jean-Luc Godard,
Notre Musique (2004)
“The history-writing subject is, properly, that part of humanity
whose solidarity embraces all the oppressed. It is the part which can take the
greatest theoretical risks because, in practical terms, it has the least to
lose.”
Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to Theses on the Concept of
History” (1939)
“The disaster is related to forgetfulness—the forgetfulness
without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated—the
immemorial, perhaps. To remember forgetfully: again, the outside.”
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (1995)
“History therefore begins where memory is endangered, during the
flash that marks its emergence and disappearance. It begins where the domain of
the historical cannot be defined by the concept of historicality—where
representation ends. As Nancy puts it: ‘The historian’s work—which is never a
work of memory—is a work of representation in many senses, but it is
representation with respect to something that is not representable, and that is
history itself. History is unrepresentable, not in the sense that it would be
some presence hidden behind the representations, but because it is the coming
into presence, as event.’”
Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Philosophy of
History (1997)
“To defend the disappeared in their non-irruptive absence-hood
one must learn to converse with silence rather than in silence. Such a
conversation is not a soliloquy. Silence is the presence of another who has yet
not answered; one tangibly unavailable because at last exceedingly physical,
namely interred.”
Walid Sadek, “Collecting the Uncanny and the Labour of the
Missing” (2012)
“The past presents itself as a time-lapse document—unveiled
posthumously, unsigned and undated, but for this reason all the more binding in
the exorbitance of its demand.”
Rebecca Comay, “Testament of the Revolution (Walter Benjamin)”
(2017)