A Double 'Double Take'

Abstract

Where does a picture, a visual depiction of an act of violence, locate us, the observers? Whose perspective do we adopt and/or perform, when we are confronted with an image of the tormented body, the object of pain and suffering of a vulnerable victim, with or without the presence of the perpetrators? In what follows, we start with discussing the propensity to adopt certain positionalities in facing these questions, and their analytic and ethical implications, to suggest a reading that could unsettle this familiar repertoire – a double ‘double take’. The insights of Carolyn Dean in discussing Daniel J. Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) seem relevant here, despite of the different medium of expression they address.1 In reviewing the book’s many critics, Dean points to Goldhagen’s attempt to uncover the brutality of the perpetrators by providing extensive and detailed descriptions of their violence against Jews, which ‘transforms sadistic and voyeuristic impulses into a virtuous quest for truth’. But, at the same time, this voyeuristic logic ‘also identifies the reader with the perpetrators, contaminating any pure identification with victims’2 – whatever ‘pureness’ is to mean in this context. In other words, the moral indignation that propels the historian’s wish to expose the criminals’ motivations by focusing on a minute portrayal of their crimes, so goes the argument, ends up replicating both victims’ and perpetrators’ perspectives and experiences: ‘The reader is thereby identified both with the perpetrators’ shameless, objectifying, morally numb gaze and with the moral outrage proper to witnessing atrocities against innocents.’3 Dean sees the emerging conundrum as going beyond the problematic features of Goldhagen’s or any other specific historical representation, thus pointing to an