Didi-Huberman

"The grandeur and misery of the historian: his desire will always be suspended between the tenacious melancholy of the past as an object of loss and the fragile victory of the past as an object of recovery, or object of representation. He tries to forget, but cannot, that the words “desire”, “imagination”, “fantasy” are there precisely to remind him of a fault that makes constant demands of him: the past of the historian – the past in general – stems from the impossible, stems from the unthinkable. We still have some monuments, but we no longer know the world that required them; we still have some words, but we no longer know the utterances that sustained them; we still have some images, but we no longer know the gazes that gave them flesh; we have descriptions of rites, but we no longer know either their phenomenology or either their exact efficacy value. What does this mean? That everything past is definitively anachronistic: it exists or subsists only through the figures that we make of it; so it exists only in the operations of a “reminiscing present”, a present endowed with the admirable or dangerous power, precisely, of presenting it, and, in the wake of this presentation, of elaborating and representing it”

Confronting Images, p.38