L’homme qui en vint à voir avec les yeux du régime Une enquête sur la conversion du regard sous le Troisième Reich, 1933-1939

Details

Supervisors

Roucloux, Joël

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en histoire de l'art et archéologie, orientation générale, à finalité spécialisée: iconologie et études des cultures visuelles

Abstract

enThat a man could read Goethe in the evening and remain susceptible to the inhuman the following day is more than a moral scandal. Shifted from his inner life to his gaze, and then from his gaze to the world that helped shape it, this troubling question becomes a historical one, concerning how a cultivated man could come to see through the eyes of the regime. Focusing on Germany between 1933 and 1939, the study follows the forms encountered in everyday life rather than approaching propaganda simply as a message to be believed or rejected. Works of art, printed material, films, exhibitions, objects, documents and built spaces are not separated according to medium, since they entered experience together and could reinforce one another. These relays are central to the enquiry. Antiquity could lend the new order the depth of a return, while a single figure could concentrate an authority capable of operating even in its absence. Admired bodies, classifications and law could meanwhile make certain ways of recognising the similar and its countertype increasingly familiar, until a category could precede the person encountered. None of this proves that an image produced adherence, and individual interiority remains beyond reach. The “conversion of the gaze” describes a progressive and uneven transformation of the conditions under which certain distinctions become familiar, until what has been constructed can appear given, without this familiarisation ever abolishing responsibility for one’s actions. The enquiry therefore seeks less to bring the present closer to the past than to deprive retrospective knowledge of its reassuring function. We can recognise yesterday’s certainties because we know what followed, but that knowledge offers no guarantee that we can recognise those through which we ourselves see today.