The Mystery of the German Writer’s Vessel: provocations from literary and film montage to research in Human Sciences

Abstract

This article investigates the politics of the image and montage in the literature and filmmaking as an experimentation with an ethical bet on research in Human Sciences. In the light of Walter Benjamin’s concept of montage, as well as DidiHuberman’s analysis of image as taking a position, it problematizes the insurmountable distance between the subject and the object, the fracture between form and content, ethics and aesthetics in research in the face of the intolerable of an ordinary world. The questions are presented through fragments that deal with the intertwining between body, memory, revolt, and creation, to emphasize the ethical bet of the montage not only as a balm for the body suffocated by the abject, but as the oxygen necessary for the multiplication of paths, senses, overcoming limits for the creation of resistance to the numbness of thought.