When you are at the lowest ebb, exposed to an eternity of torment inflicted upon you by other human beings, you cherish, as a dream of deliverance, the idea that a being will come who will stand in the light and bring truth and justice for you. You do not even need this to happen in your lifetime, nor in the lifetime of those who are torturing you to death, but one day, whenever it comes, all will nonetheless be repaired […] It is bitter to be misunderstood and to die in obscurity. It is to the honour of historical research that it projects light into that obscurity.
– Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline (1934)
My friend’s echo of these appeals to the judgment of history made me realize how powerful a fantasy the notion is, how strong its messianic promise holds even for skeptical secularists like myself, even in an age when “the end of history” has been declared, and when belief in reassuring progressive master narratives ended sometime in the twentieth century. After all, there is no history (or History), apart from what we make of it; no higher court of judgment than our own moral compass; no way to disentangle moral argument from political purpose.
– Joan W. Scott, On the Judgment of History (2020)
Julien Jeusette. “Montages (I)”. The Reparation Blog, 10 September 2025. https://cure.uni-saarland.de/en/mediathek/blog/montages-i/.
Dr. Julien Jeusette
Julien Jeusette is research programme director at the Käte Hamburger Centre CURE. After completing a joint PhD in modern literature at the University of Paris Cité and the University of Luxembourg (2017), he completed a four-year postdoc at the University of Milan, followed by a two-year postdoc at the Luxembourg School of Religion & Society (affiliated with the University of Bonn). While holding this postdoc, he also served as a seminar director at the International College of Philosophy in Paris (2022–2023) and was a visiting lecturer at the University of Liège (2022–2024). He has undertaken research stays at Harvard University, Yale University and the University of Bologna. His research, situated at the intersection of literary studies, philosophy, and critical theory, has been (or will soon be) published in journals such as Études littéraires, Études françaises, Revue critique de fixxion française contemporaine, Revue ELFe XX-XXI, L’Esprit créateur, Journal of World Literature, COnTEXTES, Revue Captures, and Littérature.