When the French edition of _Confronting Images_ appeared in 1990, it won immediate acclaim because of its far-reaching arguments about the structure of images and the histories ascribed to them by scholars and critics working in the tradition of Vasari and Panofsky. According to Didi-Huberman, visual representation has an “underside” in which seemingly intelligible forms lose their clarity and defy rational understanding. Art historians, he goes on to contend, have failed to engage this underside, where images harbor limits (...) and contradictions, because their discipline is based upon the assumption that visual representation is made up of legible signs and lends itself to rational scholarly cognition epitomized in the “science of iconology.” To escape from this cul-de-sac, Didi-Huberman suggests that art historians look to Freud’s concept of the “dreamwork,” not for a code of interpretation, but rather to begin to think of representation as a mobile process that often involves substitution and contradiction. _Confronting Images_ also offers brilliant, historically grounded readings of images ranging from the Shroud of Turin to Vermeer’s _Lacemaker_. (shrink)

The article presents some notes for an anthropology of the gestures of uprising [soulèvement]. It argues that, just as sounds always come out of the mouth of the demonstra- tors, images of all kinds are also brandished at the end of their arms. Based on this the article raises the question of the very notion of a desire for uprising.

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played (...) by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries. (shrink)

Images in Spite of All reveals that these rare photos of Auschwitz, taken clandestinely by one of the Jewish prisoners forced to help carry out the atrocities there, were made as a potent act of resistance.

"Nous avions beaucoup enduré et puis, un jour, nous nous sommes dit que cela ne pouvait plus durer. Nous avions trop longtemps baissé les bras. A nouveau cependant - comme nous avions pu le faire à l'occasion, comme d'autres si souvent l'avaient fait avant nous - nous élevons nos bras au-dessus de nos épaules encore fourbies par l'aliénation, courbées par la douleur, par l'injustice, par l'accablement qui régnaient jusque-là. C'est alors que nous nous relevons : nous projetons nos bras en (...) l'air, en avant. Nous relevons la tête. Nous retrouvons la libre puissance de regarder en face. Nous ouvrons, nous rouvrons la bouche. Nous crions, nous chantons notre désir. Avec nos amis nous discutons de comment faire, nous réfléchissons, nous imaginons, nous avançons, nous agissons, nous inventons. Nous nous sommes soulevés." Ce livre est un essai de phénoménologie et d'anthropologie - voire une poétique - des gestes de soulèvement. Il interroge les corps avec la psyché à travers le lien profond, paradoxal, dialectique, qui s'instaure entre le désir et la mémoire. Comme il y a "ce qui nous regarde" par-delà "ce que nous croyons voir" ; il y aurait peut-être "ce qui nous soulève" par-delà "ce que nous croyons être". C'est une question posée en amont - ou en dedans - de nos opinions ou actions partisanes : question posée, donc, aux gestes et aux imaginations politiques. Question posée à la puissance de se soulever, même lorsque le pouvoir n'est pas en vue. Cette puissance est indestructible comme le désir lui-même. C'est une puissance de désobéir. Elle est si inventive qu'elle mérite une attention tout à la fois précise (parce que le singulier, en l'espèce, nous dit plus que l'universel) et erratique (parce que les soulèvements surgissent en des temps, en des lieux et à des échelles où on ne les attendait pas). (shrink)

On s’interroge, dans ce livre, sur la façon dont les peuples sont représentés : question indissolublement esthétique et politique. Les peuples aujourd’hui semblent exposés plus qu’ils ne l’ont jamais été. Ils sont, en réalité, sous-exposés dans l’ombre de leurs mises sous censure ou – pour un résultat d’invisibilité équivalent – sur-exposés dans la lumière artificielle de leurs mises en spectacle. Bref ils sont, comme trop souvent, exposés à disparaître. À partir des exigences formulées par Walter Benjamin (une histoire ne vaut (...) que si elle donne voix aux « sans noms ») ou par Hannah Arendt (une politique ne vaut que si elle fait surgir ne fût-ce qu’une « parcelle d’humanité »), on interroge ici les conditions d’une possible représentation des peuples. Cela passe moins par l’histoire du portrait de groupe hollandais et des « portraits de troupes » totalitaires que par l’attention spécifique accordée aux « petits peuples » par les poètes (Villon, Hugo, Baudelaire par exemple), les peintres (Rembrandt, Goya ou Gustave Courbet), les photographes (Walker Evans, August Sander ou, pour un exemple contemporain, Philippe Bazin). Le cinéma, quant à lui, nomme figurants ces « petits peuples » devant lesquels agissent et s’agitent les « acteurs principaux », les stars comme on dit. D’où que les figurants incarnent un enjeu crucial, historique et politique, du cinéma lui-même, depuis sa naissance – La Sortie des usines Lumière – jusqu’à ses élaborations modernes chez Eisenstein et Rossellini, et bien au-delà encore. Une longue analyse est ici consacrée au travail de Pier Paolo Pasolini, à sa façon de retrouver les « peuples perdus » dans leurs « gestes survivants », selon un processus que permettent d’éclairer les analyses d’Erich Auerbach (pour les formes poétiques), d’Aby Warburg (pour les formes visuelles) et d’Ernesto De Martino (pour les formes sociales). Sans oublier quelques exemples plus contemporains, tel que le film du Chinois Wang Bing intitulé, précisément, L’Homme sans nom. (shrink)

This article deals with the genesis of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, composed by Aby Warburg between 1927 and 1929 as a response to the Great War. His reaction to the war was both pathetic (even pathological) and epistemic (which is to say, methodological). If the history of culture amounted to a great psychomachia of the astra (concepts) and the monstra (chaos), as Warburg said, the war was for him a direct test of his theory (or Kulturwissenschaft). It should be no surprise, (...) then, that between 1914 and 1918 he should assemble a large iconographic collection of materials from and about the war. This essay compares that collection and its theoretical foundations with similar projects of Warburg's contemporaries in France and Germany (notably those of the historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch). (shrink)

Sur quels critères Malraux a-t-il bâti ses associations d'oeuvre de cultures différentes dans son "Musée imaginaire"? Une question d'actualité à l'heure où les musées mêlent oeuvres occidentales et arts primitifs ou arts contemporains et arts anciens dans une même présentation. Georges Didi-Huberman, philosophe et historien de l'art, enseigne actuellement à l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales de Paris. 0Avec plus d'une trentaine de livres publiés depuis 1982, il est aujourd'hui l'un des théoriciens les plus actifs dans (...) le paysage contemporain des recherches sur l'image. Les conférences de la Chaire du Louvre et le livre qui les accompagne concernent le Musée imaginaire d'André Malraux. Il s'agira d'interroger le travail d'André Malraux sur les illustrations de son Musée imaginaire, travail explicitement inspiré par le Benjamin de la "reproductibilité technique" et de "l'auteur comme producteur. (shrink)

Choses vues, non, pas même vues jusqu'au bout. Choses simplement entrevues, aperçues. Etres qui passent, souvent au féminin pluriel, comme la Béatrice de Dante, Laura de Pétrarque, la " nymphe " d'Aby Warburg, la Gradiva de Jensen et de Freud ou la " passante " anonyme des rues parisiennes selon Charles Baudelaire. Créatures ou simples formes qui surgissent ou qui tombent. Instants de surprise, ou d'admiration, ou de désir, ou de volupté, ou d'inquiétude, ou de rire. Impressions enfantines, deuils. Colères (...) aussi. Réflexions esquissées. Instants critiques. Ou descriptions, tout simplement. Phraser le passage des aperçues? Comme un recueil de circonstances, de visions en bribes, d'émotions inattendues, de pensées qui s'inventent devant des choses ou des êtres apparaissants, apparus et, très vite, disparaissants, disparus. Une phénoménologie, une poétique, une érotique du regard s'esquissent. Tout cela devenu, sans crier gare, un journal sans continuité, un ensemble de récits sans personnages bien définis, un autoportrait sans visage unique. Remonter ce journal en désordre. Découvrir, alors, qu'il était fait d'occasions (où les temps passent vite), de blessures (où les temps frappent fort), de survivances (où les temps reviennent toujours) et de désirs (où les temps adviennent pour un futur entraperçu). (shrink)

Phalènes (le mot se dit au féminin comme au masculin) : ce sont des papillons nocturnes qui apparaissent depuis l’obscurité et, lorsqu’ils n’y retournent pas, viennent s’aventurer près d’une chandelle pour s’y consumer brusquement et ne laisser, sur la table, qu’un petit tas de cendres. Ils ou elles traversent ce recueil de textes comme une figure destinée à penser, à repenser l’image. À interroger, plus précisément, l’apparition comme réel de l’image. Les phalènes sont beauté faite de fragilité, forme faite d’informe, (...) au terme de son état larvaire et de sa métamorphose, la chrysalide ne se nomme-t-elle pas imago?, symétrie faite de brisure, luxe fait d’altération, mouvement fait d’errance autant que d’obstination, désir fait de consumation. Battements d’ailes, battements du visible et battements du temps. Les phalènes emblématisent un genre nécessaire, nécessairement papillonnant, fatalement réglé sur l’imagination, du savoir à se faire sur les images. Quels rapports faut-il construire entre connaître et regarder? Est-ce reconnaître ou pas? Des hypothèses sont ici formulées à travers quelques études sur l’"image-sillage" selon Bergson, le "savoir-mouvement" selon Warburg, le "regard des mots" selon Rilke, la notion d’"image-dépouille" selon Blanchot, ou encore la façon dont Deleuze a voulu penser l’acte, faussement simple, de "faire une image". On découvre aussi comment apparaître et ressembler se nouent, mais sans se rassembler, dans le vol d’un papillon, la danse d’un psychotique, la trace d’un suaire, le moulage d’une jeune fille qui frissonne ou le coloris en grisaille d’un tableau de paysage. On tente de mieux regarder une chronophotographie de Marey, une planche du test de Rorschach, un détail de Velázquez, une draperie de Loïe Fuller, un diagramme de Beckett, une cire anatomique, un châle de prière juif ou une oeuvre d’art contemporain dédiée au génocide rwandais... On s’interroge sur le fait que l’image brûle d’apparaître, et qu’ainsi sa contribution à notre connaissance de l’histoire soit aussi problématique que nécessaire. (shrink)

What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to (...) create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations. Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj i ek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time. (shrink)

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929) is a prescient work of mixed media assemblage, made up of hundreds of images culled from antiquity to the Renaissance and arranged into startling juxtapositions. Warburg’s allusive atlas sought to illuminate the pains of his final years, after he had suffered a breakdown and been institutionalized. It continues to influence contemporary artists today, including Gerhard Richter and Mark Dion. In this illustrated exploration of Warburg and his great work, Georges Didi-Huberman leaps from (...) Mnemosyne Atlas into a set of musings on the relation between suffering and knowledge in Western thought, and on the creative results of associative thinking. Deploying writing that delights in dramatic jump cuts reminiscent of Warburg’s idiosyncratic juxtapositions, and drawing on a set of sources that ranges from ancient Babylon to Walter Benjamin, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science is rich in Didi-Huberman’s trademark combination of elan and insight. (shrink)

“Reading Anew” was originally presented as a speech at the awards ceremony for the Warburg Prize in Hamburg, 26 October 2021.

This essay, in the form of a letter written to director László Nemes in the immediate aftermath of viewing Son of Saul, is at once a critical reading of the film within a larger theoretical framework and a subjective emotional response to seeing on the screen something of the author’s own “most harrowing nightmares.” While bringing Nemes’s film into conversation with Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, the Hassidic tale and ancient myths, Georges Didi-Huberman returns to his (...) reflections in Images in Spite of All (2008) on the four photographs taken clandestinely of the gas chambers in Auschwitz by one of the Sonderkommando. Son of Saul presents the allegory of Saul whose job as a Sonderkommando is to drag countless corpses to the crematorium where they will be reduced to ashes but who sets out on a mad, single-minded quest to give a proper burial, complete with the recitation of kaddish, to the body of one boy. According to the author, the film marks the invention of the “documentary tale” genre, combining Benjamin’s notions of montage based on the document, as manifested in the work of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Alfred Döblin, and that of the dying art of storytelling, intimately bound up as it is with the authority of the dying. Thus, the dead child drowning at the end of the film stands as an inversion of the story of Moses, a living child saved from drowning, just as the real historic death of the Jewish people reverses the mythical Biblical birth of the Jewish people. (shrink)

Our paper deals with the work of André Malraux on the illustrations for his Musée imaginaire from the point of view of visual and cognitive experimentation. This work is explicitly inspired by the Benjamin of the »technical reproducibility« and the »author as producer.« We examine the opening of the imaginary field, as it is suggested by the praxis of the art book – an album of images that is supported by a certain kind of expressivity of framing, illumination and montage (...) – in Malraux. Through this praxis of montage, Malraux constructs the authority of his visual style and the closure of the literary field. Above all, however, we discuss critically the anti-historical and anti-political destiny of his aesthetics, which in the end is quite far from Benjamin’s, and we conclude with a comparison between two contemporary artworks, namely Malraux’ Le Musee imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale and Les Statues meurent aussi, a film by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. (shrink)

Un’analisi del film di Ejzenštejn La corazzata Potëmkin – e in particolare della scena della lamentazione funebre del popolo di Odessa attorno al corpo del marinaio Vakulinčuk – offre l’occasione di riflettere intorno a una dialettica fondamentale che si instaura nella teoria e nella pratica filmica del regista russo: la dialettica fra montaggio ritmico e montaggio tonale, fra immagine-taglio (obraz-obrez) e immagine-atmosfera (obraz-sreda). Sreda significa «milieu» in tutti i sensi del termine: ciò che costituisce l’elemento materiale, seppur diafano, del visibile (...) (il medium, quindi); ciò che instaura un campo (Feld) percettivo; ciò che disegna l’ambiance nella quale abitiamo (la nostra Umwelt, o mondo-ambiente), cioè lo spazio emozionale (Stimmung) che ci sollecita dinnanzi a un’immagine. Nel caso particolare analizzato, alla lamentazione funebre dei piangenti attorno al cadavere del marinaio, che viene dettagliata dal montaggio ritmico dell’obraz-obrez, risponde quel che Ejzenštejn chiamava il «lamento delle nebbie» nel porto di Odessa: tramite un montaggio tonale, l’obraz-sreda del paesaggio si fa «risonatore psichico» che consuona e amplifica il lutto degli esseri umani, istituendo con questo una peculiare «somiglianza». L’istituzione di tale somiglianza consente a Ejzenštejn di mettere al contempo in discussione (in sintonia con le riflessioni sviluppate negli anni Venti da teorici formalisti quali Šklovskij, Ėjchenbaum, Kazanskij, Piotrovskij) la presunta specificità del medium filmico, a tutto vantaggio di un’interazione fra differenti paradigmi mediali – pittoricità, musicalità, poeticità – che si illuminano a vicenda, mostrandosi come altrettante articolazioni del ritmo. (shrink)

From his very earliest writings, art was always important for Georges Bataille. Rather than something static, art, for Bataille, always involves an experience and an exigency towards freedom and even the impossible. It was apparent from the very form of Bataille’s art review Documents, which juxtaposed heterogeneous images, texts and topics, that art was intended as an experience. Bataille found in Andalusia the kind of art that triggers an exigency, an excess or a form of ecstasy in the viewer (...) or the participant, from the paintings of Picasso to flamenco performances. Art that evokes the potency for interior uprising is given form in the various figures of fleeting spirits, such as the will-o’-the-wisp or the genie called duende, as described by Lorca in “Play and Theory of the Duende” and illustrated in Calderón’s La dama duende [The Phantom Lady]. Bataille, who was moved by a performance he had witnessed at the Moulin Rouge, compared the spirited dance of the performers to the will-o’-the-wisps, the spirits that suddenly appear to unsuspecting wanderers, luring them off their path. Born in the marshes where the dead are buried, will-o’-the-wisps flare up, evoking an exigency in whoever beholds them. Thus, the will-o’-the-wisp or the duende exemplifies the potency of images, their flaring and fading away, and their ability to move us. (shrink)

Que ce soit dans la vie quotidienne ou dans l'art, le geste se confronte toujours à l'œuvre dont il est la cause. Or que se passe-t-il quand le geste est œuvre? Quand œuvrer n'est plus réduit à un résultat objectif mais maintenu intact dans son état de faire? Une ouverture sur une complexité théorique du geste et de ses possibilités chorégraphiques s'affirme. Les textes réunis dans ce recueil défendent la pertinence de l'idée de geste et en décrivent la méthode: l'intempestif, (...) l'impersonnel, l'incidence. Geste à l'œuvre maintient les gestes dans leur caractère intrinsèquement pluriel: un geste se compose en effet d'une myriade de micro-gestes, d'une somme incalculable d'ajustements corporels qui viennent former imperceptiblement ce qui apparaît comme un geste. L'unité fragile de ce dernier se dissout dans une infinitude potentielle de petits gestes. Ces essais explorent ce potentiel en pratiquant le croisement de multiples, pratiques gestuelles dans le champ de l'art et de la théorie philosophique. Quand le geste est œuvre cette dernière ne disparaît pas pour autant: elle existe en tant que processus et expérience. Ainsi les différentes disciplines convoquées ici placent l'œuvre dans le geste et mettent le geste à l'œuvre. Voici donc ce qui constitue à la fois la problématique et le parti de cet ouvrage: rendre compte des gestes, de l'actualité tangible du faire et de l'identification possible entre le concept de geste et celui d'œuvre d'art. (shrink)

In this text, Georges Didi-Huberman responds, in letter-form, to the critical reflections about his work formulated by Jacques Rancière in “Images Re-read: Georges Didi-Huberman’s Method.” Didi-Huberman disagrees with Rancière’s analysis that images are “passive” and that the words which accompany them are “active.” Instead, he agrees with Merleau-Ponty’s view, which postulates that any analysis of images that seeks to disentangle its elements will render the image unintelligible. In opposition to Rancière’s presentation of (...) his work, Didi-Huberman argues that his method is one of tracing the mutually entangled implications of images. Furthermore, Didi-Huberman challenges Rancière to articulate what exactly “the sensible” means when he uses the phrase “distribution of the sensible.” While Rancière distrusts the reliance on pathos and emotions when it comes to analysing images, Didi-Huberman argues that “the sensible” will always involve the body with all its pathos, emotions and gestures. (shrink)

In his private life, as well as in his work and political attitudes, Michel Foucault often stood in contradiction to himself, especially when his expansive ideas collided with the institutions in which he worked. In Francois Caillat's provocative collection of essays and interviews based on his French documentary of the same name, leading contemporary critics and philosophers reframe Foucault's legacy in an effort to build new ways of thinking about his struggle against society's mechanisms of domination, demonstrating how conflict within (...) the self lies at the heart of Foucault's life and work. (shrink)

En 1990, Georges Didi-Huberman, filósofo e historiador del arte contemporáneo, anuncia que va a elaborar una «estética del síntoma». La expresión está cargada de consecuencias epistemológicas. Nos proponemos exponer aquí las claves de tal filosofía del arte y aclarar los problemas que plantea. ¿Cuáles son, según Didi-Huberman, los síntomas de las imágenes? Antes de responder a esta pregunta es preciso hacer un rodeo por el pensamiento crítico de Freud mostrando lo que es para él un (...) síntoma y evocando sobre todo la figura de la histeria. El concepto de síntoma, tomado en su acepción freudiana y reactualizado en los confines de la obra de arte, permite a Didi-Huberman hacer ver de qué forma compleja significaciones heterogéneas pueden resumirse, articularse en una imagen. Designa esta articulación de sentidos mediante la noción de síntoma, cuyo «pan» es una circunstancia particular. Retomando los análisis de Didi-Huberman sobre la pintura de Fra Angelico, mostramos todo el poder de los síntomas de la pintura y la apertura epistemológica que imponen a los teóricos del arte. (shrink)

Ninfa moderna : Essai sur le drapé tombé, Georges Didi-Huberman; Publisher - Gallimard; ISBN - 978-2070763757L'image survivante: Histoire de l'art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg, Georges Didi-Huberman; Publisher - Éditions de Minuit; ISBN - 9782707317728.

Nell’estate del 1944 alcuni membri del Sonderkommando di Auschwitz, il “comando speciale” composto da prigionieri costretti al più infame dei lavori, quello nelle camere a gas e nei crematori, riescono a strappare quattro fotografie a quella terribile realtà. In due delle quattro foto si vedono i cadaveri ammassati a bruciare, in un’altra, delle donne nude correre, spinte verso le camere a gas, mentre nell’ultima distinguiamo appena dei rami. Ma c’è molto altro in queste foto, dalle quali Did...

This article is an attempt to circumscribe Georges Didi-Huberman’s inimitable practice of theory. It argues that Didi-Huberman’s ethics of looking represents a decided shift away from the traditional position of the critic as a dispassionate, objective observer. A Copernican revolution looms, which inverts the Kantian one: no longer are things adapting to their conceptual scheme, no longer is it the adaequatio rei ad intellectum, but its opposite. Didi-Huberman’s “discourse on method” is to be (...) found in the book Phasmes, where such an “inverted intentionality” is described in terms of the mimicry of the phasmid insects: instead of assimilating the environment to himself, the subject assimilates himself to the environment. Phasmid thinking is the thought of disparateness, i.e., of dis-paring. This means to un-learn or, as it were, to un-prepare oneself in order to see what we believed we were seeing and which we in fact saw precisely because we knew. In drawing comparisons to similar methodological considerations in Adorno’s “snuggling up to the object,” the article attempts to locate Didi-Huberman’s critical epistemology at the intersection of French and German intellectual traditions. (shrink)

Georges Didi-Huberman, Uprisings (Paris: Gallimard, 2016), 232 pp, ISBN 9782072697296 Georges Didi-Huberman's Uprisings is at once heavy and light. It weaves complex (and sometimes burdensome) political traditions and histories of thought concerned with uprising, rebellion and revolution, with bursts of poetry which, it seems, are meant to take flight off the page like the butterfly tracts that Didi-Huberman so admires. It is also vast in its scale and depth, tracing histories of uprising (...) and rebellion from Atlas, Prometheus and Eve, through to future uprisings which are as yet unknown and, as the author reminds us, endless: 'the uprising is a gesture without end' (p. 17). (shrink)

This paper is located at the threshold between aesthetics and politics in order to interrogate the most recent works by Georges Didi-Huberman. It is argued that his “thinking of images” implies not only a politics of art, but also an art of politics, i. e., an aesthetic politics that lead us to the arena of actual political debate, showing not only the political implications of images but, much more decisively, the figural assumptions of politics. We discuss the (...) main features of this program, before showing the scope of montage as an aesthetic and political articulation of the common, and as the culmination of Didi-Huberman’s intervention. (shrink)

This article was inspired by Georges Didi-Huberman’s keynote lecture “Que ce qui apparaît seulement s’aperçoit” delivered in 2015 at Charles University in Prague during the “Dis/appearing” conference organized by the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie. Didi-Huberman’s lecture consisted of various reflections concerning the meaning of the image as instances of flaring up and fading away. During his talk, Didi-Huberman used evocative images – recollections – which he had collected over the years; impressions (...) while walking in the streets, melancholic musings about love, and thoughts gathered from literature en route. From this, the article identifies seven cases through which Didi-Huberman has conceptualized images; the nymph, the butterfly, the passer-by, the surface, the dance, the silence, and sophrosyne. These cases attest to the influence of Aby Warburg on the writing of Didi-Huberman and, taken together, identify what these cases of the image have in common; namely, that images occupy an interspace: the fleeting instant of appearance/disappearance. Didi-Huberman explains images – “Dante’s Beatrice and Baudelaire’s fleeting beauty” as “the paradigmatic ‘passer-by.’” Through these cases, this article poetically draws the reader’s attention to what Didi-Huberman calls “non-knowledge”; those fleeting, mobile, paradoxical aspects of images that resist clear categorization and can be thought of as fireflies against the night sky. The article asks: is it possible to characterize this genre? To denominate the collection of thoughts that welcome the image as a witness to the history of thought? The study of images can be understood, following Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Aby Warburg’s oeuvre, as “the nameless science.”. (shrink)