Enunciazione malgrado tutto. Ancora su “problemi di enunciazione astratta”

Abstract

The strategies of visual enunciation were the focus of one of the most significant debates on the testimonial power of photographic images in the twentieth century, although the question was not overtly defined in explicitly semiotic terms. I am referring to the discussion raised by the four wellknown photographs taken in August 1944 by a member of the Sonderkommando inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and published, edited, shown in exhibitions ever since. Georges Didi- Huberman emphasized the crucial importance of the framing devices in those photos, thus provoking very harsh reactions against the application of general analytical tools to those documents. After briefly retracing the terms of the debate the article takes into account the 2014 work by Gerhard Richter, Birkenau, where the four pictures were transposed on canvas and then covered with a thick layer of 'abstract' painting. This work of art will not be called into question only by virtue of its explicit link with those documents, but because it turns out to be a pictorial reflection on the enunciational marks at play in those photos. If read through the prism of a theory of visual enunciation in the terms defined by Louis Marin, as the work itself invites us to do, Birkenau will allow, on the one hand, to fully acknowledge the testimonial power of the enunciational marks present in the photographs and, on the other hand, to get out of those interpretations which, by ignoring the possibility of transmedial comparison between enunciative strategies, simply considered those abstract paintings as a far too literal gesture of effacement of the subject - in the double meaning of sujet of the painting and inscription of a point of view.