The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions (RIC BOOKS (Ryerson Image Centre Books))

This book is a detailed study of Bertholt Brecht during the 1930s and 1940s. It is a study of his idea of 'taking a position' - refusing impersonal and disinterested art for impassioned and partisan art. This comes across most in his work with photography and epigrams - both of which feature the then-fashionable montage technique (I like the description of this in ch.3 as 'dys-posing of images').This book reminded me a bit of the author's earlier book on Georges Bataille - a sustained and detailed analysis of the work of a specific author. Both studies are really focused on a particular method that the writer deploys and develops. For Bataille it was his radical materialism (l'informe); here it is Brecht's discovery of partisan realism.There is plentiful reference to Walter Benjamin, Carl Eisenstein, Sigmund Freud and Aby Warburg (all of who are constant reference points for Didi-Huberman). The final chapter (no.6) was my favourite - exploring Brecht's 'ABC of War'. Didi-Huberman reflects on the use of child-like language in this text: education is where the forces of subjection and liberation intersect. Somehow this is best illustrated with a description of the bit in Chaplin's Hard Times where he accidentally takes lots of cocaine in prison. But apparently, the idea of exalted truth appealed more to Benjamin than Brecht, who preferred his political engagement to be a bit more sober and clear-sighted.