What remains striking in this barely sketched picture is that all these thinkers made images the privileged operators ( or crystals ) of the historical and political dimension as such . They put time at the heart of the image and the image at the heart of time . Having all read Freud carefully , they understood that whether mental , literary or plastic , an image not only represents someone or signifies something , but manifests a desire . Yet this is a desire like all desire , meaning one complicated by memory . Thus , the images manifest : they lift themselves up and they also sometimes lift us up . They make it clear that politics is first and foremost a matter of subjectification and imagination , of desire and memory . That they do so acting as a symptom , as often happens , does not prevent them from being fundamentally political , for the very reason that , voluntarily or not , they take a position between one thousand and one possible things : reminiscence and forgetting , wish and refusal , a public place and a private space , reasoning and fantasy , a feeling of solidarity and a solitary gesture , knowledge and non-knowledge …
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7 | 8 . The participants of the second edition of the project Route to Exile visit the Memorial Passages to Walter Benjamin in Portbou ( Alt Empordà ). The monument is a work by Dani Karavan . Picture by the project Route to Exile , 2022 .
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Observing Memories Issue 7