Les Choses Dans Les Musées : Faire Revenir Le Temps

Abstract

In the communities we believe we inhabit, there are things we imagine can only be passed on from hand to hand. The gesture, real or imagined, undoubtedly verifiable in all places and times, is reassuring. Through it, at least, we think, things gain access to a time separate from a use and a concern limited to the cycle of a single life. This gesture allows them to enter a longer, or at least longer, life. The transmission can be public and the subject of ceremonies. It can also be hidden from view and only presupposed by the community that witnesses the operation. The fact remains that through it, it is not only the transmitted object that survives, but also the community, united by the signs it conveys, that is reconstituted. An example of such a transmission would be the scene in which a father entrusts his weapons to one of his sons. An example to which one could, among others, lend a Greek setting, that of the famous arms of Achilles, provided that it is immediately compared with other scenes of acquisition