The Didi- ­H u b e r m a n D i ct i o n a r y

Th e D id i-­H u b e r man
D ic t i o n ar y

Edited by Magdalena Zolkos

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 C on te n ts

Acknowledgementsvi
List of Abbreviations for Translated Works by
Georges Didi-­Huberman vii

Introduction: How to Read Dictionaries Diagonally, or

‘The Secret Relations of Things’ 1
Magdalena Zolkos

Entries A–Z 7

List of Works by Georges Didi-­Huberman 227

List of Scholarly Publications on Georges Didi-­Huberman
in English 246

Notes on Contributors 250

 A c kn ow l e d ge m e nt s

I extend thanks to the dictionary’s contributors; it has been a pleasure and

privilege to work with you all, and I thank you for your time, generosity,
and patience. To the editor of the philosophy subject area at Edinburgh
University Press, Carol Macdonald, and the assistant commissioning
editor, Sarah ­Foyle – ­thank you for all your support for this project.
Nigel Saint has undertaken extensive and meticulous corrections of the
final version of the manuscript and offered precious advice throughout the
project; Chari Larsson has provided valuable feedback on the introduction
to the dictionary; Stijn De Cauwer and Tomasz Swoboda offered advice
in the initial planning of the ­project – ­I gratefully acknowledge their help.
To Jeanne Bertola, Joose Kokko and Miia Tikka I offer thanks for dedi-
cated assistance in the preparation of the manuscript and in the composi-
tion of the bibliography. Their research assistance was made possible by a
grant from the University of Jyväskylä.
Shane Lillis translated entries written by Maud Hagelstein, and it has
been a privilege working with him. The translation was made possible
through financial assistance from Edinburgh University Press, Maud
Hagelstein’s research grant from the University of Liege, and Magdalena
Zolkos’s administrative grant from the Humboldt Foundation.
Chari Larsson’s entry on Michel Foucault incorporates extracts from
her book Didi-Huberman and the Image (Manchester University Press,
2020) under the fair use provision.
Unless otherwise specified, translations of quotations from Didi-­
Huberman’s untranslated works have been made by the authors of indi-
vidual entries. Unless otherwise specified, all emphases are in original.
 List of A b b re vi a ti on s f o r Wo r k s
b y G e orge s D i d i -­H u b e r man

AA Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, trans. S. B. Lillis, University of

Chicago Press, 2018.
AH Atlas: How to Carry a World on One’s Back, trans. M. D. Aguilera
and S. B. Lillis, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia,
2010.
AI ‘The Album of Images According to André Malraux’, trans.
E. Woodard and R. Harvey, Journal of Visual Culture, 14(1)
(2015), 3–20.
AN ‘The Art of Not Describing: Vermeer – the Detail and the Patch’,
trans. A. C. Pugh, History of the Human Sciences, 2(2) (1989),
135–69.
AS ‘Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism
of Impure Time’, trans. V. Rehberg and B. Belay, Common
Knowledge, 9(2) (2003), 273–85.
B Bark, trans. S. E. Martin, MIT Press, 2017.
BI ‘Before the Image, Before Time: The Sovereignty of
Anachronism’, trans. P. Mason, in C. Farago and R. Zwijnenberg
(eds), Compelling Visuality. The Work of Art in and Out of History,
University of Minnesota Press, 2003, 31–44.
BL ‘The “Blancs Soucis” of Our History’, in Esther Shalev-Gerz,
exhibition catalogue, JRP/Ringier, 2012, 57–62.
BS Being a Skull: Site, Contact, Thought, Sculpture, trans. D. S. Burk,
Univocal, 2016.
CD ‘Constructing Duration’, in Pascal Convert: Lamento [1998–
2005], exhibition catalogue, Musée d’Art moderne Grand-­Duc
Jean, 2007, http://www.pascalconvert.fr/histoire/lamento/la​
mento-­didi-­huberman-­en.html.
CF The Cube and the Face: Around a Sculpture by Alberto Giacometti,
trans. S. B. Lillis, Diaphanes, 2015.
CG ‘Conflict of Gestures, Conflicts of Images’, trans. D. Maruzzella,
The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 55–56 (2018), 8–22.
CI Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of
Art, trans. J. Goodman, Pennsylvania State University Press,
2005.
CIIC ‘Critical Image / Imaging Critique’, trans. C. Miller, Oxford Art
Journal, 40(2) (2017), 249–61.
viii l i s t o f a b b r e v i a t i o n s

DD ‘La Dama Duende [The Phantom Lady]’, trans. C. Woodall,

Angelaki, 23(4) (2018), 25–41.
DM ‘Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the Symptom
Paradigm’, Art History, 24(5) (2001), 621–45.
DT ‘Disparate Thoughts on Voracity’, in Catalogue XXXIV Bienal
de Sao Paulo, exhibition catalogue, A Fundaçao, 1998, 197–203.
ED ‘Emotion does not say “I”. Ten Fragments on Aesthetic Freedom’,
trans. J. Hayward, in N. Schweizer and L. Bovier (eds), Alfredo
Jaar: la politique des images, exhibition catalogue, JRP Ringier,
2007, 57–69.
EH The Eye of History. When Images Take Positions, trans. S. B. Lillis,
MIT Press, 2018.
EV ‘Ex-­ Voto: Image, Organ, Time’, trans. G. Moore, L’Esprit
Créateur, 47(3) (2007), 7–16.
FAD Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, trans. J. A. Todd,
University of Chicago Press, 1995.
FH ‘Fragments of Humanity’, in T. Keenan and T. Zolghadr (eds),
The Human Snapshot, Sternberg Press, 2013, 269–84.
FI ‘The Figurative Incarnation of the Sentence: Notes on the
Autobiographic Skin’, trans. C. Davidson, Journal: A
Contemporary Art Magazine, 5(47) (1987), 66–70.
GAD ‘Glimpses. Between Appearance and Disappearance’, Zeitschrift
für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 7(1) (2016), 109–25.
HT ‘How to Open Your Eyes’, trans. P. Kremer, in A. Ehmann,
K. Eshun and N. M. Alter (eds), Harun Farucki: Against What?
Against Whom?, Koenig, 2009, 38–50.
HVP ‘From a High Vantage Point’, trans. L. Garmeson, Eurozine,
12 October 2018, https://www.eurozine.com/high-­vantage-­
point/.
IA ‘The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)’, trans.
T. Repensek, October, 29 (1984), 63–81.
IB ‘The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento’,
Journal of Visual Culture, 2(3) (2003), 275–89.
IH Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of
the Salpêtrière, trans. A. Hartz, MIT Press, 2003.
II ‘Of Images and Ills’, trans. C. Shread, Critical Inquiry, 43(3)
(2016), 439–72.
IL ‘Image, Language. The Other Dialectic’, trans. E. Woodard,
J. R. Solorzano, S. De Cauwer and L. K. Smith, Angelaki, 23(4)
(2018), 19–24.
ISA Images in Spite of All. Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans.
S. B. Lillis, University of Chicago Press, 2008.
 list of abbreviations ix

KWC ‘Knowing When to Cut’. trans. D. Homel, in F. Caillat (ed.),

Foucault Against Himself, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2015, 77–109.
LL ‘Light against Light’, trans. L. S. Mitchell, in La Disparition des
lucioles: collection Lambert en Avignon, prison Sainte-Anne, exhibi-
tion catalogue, Actes Sud, 2014, 46–60.
MC ‘Mortal Cadencia or Gravity Danced’, in Pilar Albarracin: mortal
cadencia, exhibition catalogue, Fage/La Maison rouge, 2008,
95–103.
MI ‘The Matter-­Image: Dust, Garbage, Dirt, and Sculpture in the
Sixteenth Century’, Common Knowledge, 6(1) (1997), 79–96.
MIG ‘The Molding Image: Genealogy and the Truth of Resemblance
in Pliny’s Natural History, Book XXXV, 1–7’, in C. Douzinas
and L. Nead (eds), Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and
the Aesthetics of Law, University of Chicago Press, 1999, 71–88.
MM ‘Modest Masterpiece: Bertolt Brecht, War Primer (1955)’, trans.
C. Penwarden, Art Press Trimestriel / Art Press Quarterly, 2 (May–
July 2007), 17–19.
MWC The Man Who Walked in Color, trans. D. S. Burk, Univocal, 2017.
OCCE ‘Opening the Camps, Closing the Eyes’, trans. Cadenza Academic
Translations, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 61(5) (2006),
1011–49.
OD ‘Out of the Dark’, trans. G. Walker, Critical Inquiry, 47(1) (2020),
149–71.
OM ‘The Order of Material: Plasticities, Malaises, Survivals’, trans.
J. Matlock, in B. Taylor (ed.), Sculpture and Psychoanalysis,
Ashgate, 2006, 195–212.
OP ‘Out of the Plan, Out of the Plane 2: Stripping, Fourth Letter
to Gerhard Richter’, in N. Chare and D. Williams (eds),
Testimonies of Resistance. Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
Sonderkommando, Berghahn Books, 2019, 247–65.
PEPE ‘People Exposed, People as Extras’, Radical Philosophy, 156
(2009), 16–22.
PIS ‘The Portrait, the Individual and the Singular: Remarks on
the Legacy of Aby Warburg’, in N. Mann and L. Syson (eds),
The Image on the Individual: Portrait in the Renaissance, British
Museum Press, 1998, 165–88.
PNT ‘“The Potential Not To”: Or the Politics of Inoperativity’, trans.
S. B. Lillis, in R. Görling, B. Gronau and L. Schwarte (eds),
Aesthetics of Standstill, Sternberg Press, 2019, 192–210.
PP ‘Photo-­papers’, trans. M. Wawrzyńczak, in A. Duńczyk-­Szulc
(ed.), Dispersed Contact. Photographs from the Ringelblum Archive
Reinterpreted, Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, 2019, 8–41.
x l i s t o f a b b r e v i a t i o n s

PPH ‘The Paradox of the Phasmid’, trans. A. Hartz, Tympanum, 3

(1999), http://underconstruction.wdfiles.com/local--files/imp
r​int-­reading/huberman_paradox.pdf.
PS ‘Photography – Scientific and Pseudo-­Scientific’. trans. J. Lloyd,
in J.-C. Lemagny and A. Rouille (eds), History of Photography:
Social and Cultural Perspectives, Cambridge University Press,
1987, 71–5.
RFSH ‘The (Re)foldings of Simon Hantaï’, trans. J. Branlat, Journal of
Contemporary Painting, 1(2) (2015), 225–8.
RI ‘Returning an Image’, in O. Enwezor, P. Dander and D. Levi
Strauss (eds), Image Counter Image, Walther König, 2012, 85–95.
SA ‘The Supposition of the Aura. The Now, the Then, and
Modernity’, in A. Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and History,
Bloomsbury, 2005, 3–23.
SF Survival of the Fireflies, trans. L. S. Mitchell, University of
Minnesota Press, 2018.
SG ‘Surviving Gestures, Political Bodies’, Centquatrevue, 1 (2009),
161–2.
SI The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms,
trans. H. Mendelsohn, Pennsylvania State University Press,
2017.
SIW ‘The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology’,
Oxford Art Journal, 25(1) (2002), 59–69.
TB ‘Torrents and Barricade’, in E. Alloa and C. Cappelletto (eds),
Dynamis of the Image: Moving Images in a Global World, Maison
des sciences de l’homme/De Gruyter, 2020, 141–57.
TBRB ‘Time in Between, Ritournelle de Bâmiyân’, in P. Convert and
G. Didi-­Huberman, Antres-Temps (Ritournelle de Bâmiyân), art-
ist’s book, 2017.
TRS ‘To Render Sensible’, trans. J. Gladding, in Alain Badiou et al.,
What is a People?, Columbia University Press, 2018, 65–86.
U Uprisings, Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 2016.
VS ‘Viscosities and Survivals. An Art History Put to the Test by the
Material’, in R. Panzanelli (ed.), Ephemeral Bodies. Wax Sculpture
and the Human Figure, Getty Research Institute, 2008, 154–70.
WF ‘Wax Flesh, Vicious Circles’, in Encyclopedia Anatomica: A
Complete Collection of Anatomical Waxes, Taschen, 1999, 64–74.
WH ‘Warburg’s Haunted House’, trans. S. B. Lillis, Common
Knowledge, 18(1) (2012), 50–78.
WI ‘Worrying about Each Image. Interview with Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, Vacarme, 37 (October 2006), https://vacarme.org​
/article1352.html.
 In tro d u c ti on : H ow to R e ad Di c t i o nar i e s
D i ago n al l y, or ‘ Th e Se c re t R e l at i o ns o f T hi ng s ’

A project of composing a philosophical dictionary on the work of Georges

Didi-­Huberman immediately runs into trouble. To fit into an encyclopae-
dic form his voluminous, highly diverse and multifaceted writings in art
history, image philosophy, photography, cinema, critical aesthetics and
psychoanalysis, to name only the key areas, risks becoming reductive and
clichéd.1 What is more, any reference guide to Didi-­Huberman’s work
that seeks to systematise or offer a comprehensive overview of his ideas
will inevitably jar against his philosophical (and perhaps also ethical) com-
mitment to the plurality and irreducibility of visual f­orms – p ­ aintings,
photographs, ­films – w ­ hich challenges attempts at systematisation or
linear sequencing. Such an encyclopaedic undertaking would contrast
with Didi-­Huberman’s attention to modes of viewing, reading and listen-
ing that resist the paradigm of masterful gaze, of object appropriation
and of the certainty of knowledge. Rather, he explores relational and
non-­appropriative modes of engagement with images, texts and ­sounds
– ­a fleeting glimpse; ‘a new inflection of the gaze’ (BL, 58); a sudden stir,
movement or affect; a surprising occurrence, chance encounter, ‘intri-
cation’ (SI, 325) or ‘implexity’ (IL, 24). The subject finds themselves
regarded, touched or ‘rubbed’ (frotté) by the image (BS).
Didi-­Huberman helps to articulate what is troubling about the ency-
clopaedic project when he unfavourably compares dictionaries and
archives to atlases (see AH; AA). While an atlas embodies visual epistemic
form that is multifaceted, juxtapositional, non-­linear and ‘impure’, a dic-
tionary, in its classical form, sets out to classify and organise the world,
and to compress a philosophical body of work into absorbable and self-­
contained information units. This model of reading a text or of viewing
an image is akin to an act of absorbing and ‘metabolising’ the object and
is utterly foreign to Didi-­Huberman’s project (see Hagelstein’s entry on
phantom). For Didi-­Huberman, images (and texts) defy the subjective
urge for appropriation. Instead, they are capable of exerting effects in and
upon the world; of intruding, incriminating or demanding a response
from the viewer/reader. Images and words alike, Didi-­Huberman writes,

1 For comprehensive introductions to Didi-­ Huberman’s work in English, see De

Cauwer and Smith, 2018: 3–10; Larsson, 2020a: esp. 1–23; Saint, 2004; 2013: 219–38;
Smith, 2020: 1–18.
2 i n t r o d u c t i o n

‘brandish and position themselves like weapons in a battleground’ (FH,

277).
Didi-­Huberman writes that while a dictionary ‘dreams of being [the]
catalogue [of words and images], ordered according to an immutable and
definitive principle’, an atlas ‘is guided only by changing and provisional
principles, ones that can make new relations appear inexhaustibly [. . .]
between things and words that nothing seemed to have brought together’
(AA, 5). Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – the subject of Didi-­
Huberman’s influential analyses (see DM; AS; SI; AA) – exemplifies this
montage-­logic of simultaneous ‘assembly and disassembly of objects’,
which Didi-­Huberman describes in reference to another key concept in
his oeuvre, a ‘symptomatic detail’ – the ‘almost-­nothing’ of an image,
which is produced not ‘by enlargement’, but ‘by displacement’ (SI, 325).
The effect of the encyclopaedic attempt ‘to contain the world’ is that, as
the dictionary sets out to inform and to elucidate meaning, it inadvertently
exhausts the reader’s curiosity, eliminates adventurousness and extin-
guishes imagination. By contrast, the viewing/reading of an atlas encour-
ages and spurs imagination. To borrow from the Baudelairean notion of
imagination, cited by Didi-­Huberman (AA, 4–5), such viewing/reading is
premised upon the subject’s openness to ‘the intimate and secret relations
of things’. In contrast to the indexical model of knowledge, what comes to
the fore is the ‘arborescence of associations’ and the ‘labyrinthine trajec-
tories of meaning’ (CI, 19, 21). This inexhaustible meander of manifesta-
tions is associated in Didi-­Huberman’s work with a ‘diagonal force’, which
proceeds not alongside pre-­existing guidelines or signposts, but against and
across them. Diagonality helps to pose a question of reading that is inex-
tricable from traversing ‘borders, walls and other obstacles’, and from the
effect of deterritorialisation, which Didi-­Huberman sees as a key feature
of images (KWC). Approaching dictionaries as fragmentary compositions
is not necessarily a flaw or an obstacle, but an acknowledgement of the
incompleteness and intermittence of knowledge (Didi-­Huberman, 2018a;
see also Larsson, 2020a).
How can one read a dictionary differently, t­hen – d ­iagonally, as
a mosaic of fragments and an assemblage of ‘snippets’ or ‘splinters’
of knowledge (cf. GAD, 109)? Something unexpected and surprising
happens, Didi-­ Huberman suggests, when the viewer’s/reader’s gaze
drifts and wanders o­ ff – ­when the gaze goes astray or takes a wrong turn
and refuses to follow the superimposed linear and unidirectional ­logic –
­when the viewing and reading prove undisciplined or ungovernable by
the encyclopaedic form. The wandering gaze notices cracks in the inven-
torial and cataloguing frame of the dictionary, discovering rhizomatic
or labyrinthine assortments of meanings. Didi-­Huberman likens what
 introduction 3

ensues to child’s play: a practice (and a pleasure) of reading diagonally,

by cutting across designated pathways or previously established con-
nections. A child opens a dictionary and engages with it not in a ‘strict
way of reading’, which is to say by ‘searching for the messages’, but in
‘an imaginative way’ of ‘searching for montages’ (AA, 6). This resonates
with a thinking of Hannah Arendt (1978; 1992) for whom the defining
element of imaginative faculty was the retrieval, and the act of make-­
appearing, of what is, in a given historical and political moment, unseen
and indiscernible. The Greek word for imagination, phantasia (‘coming
into view’, ‘appearing’), helps to distinguish between imaginative acts of
reading and the certainty of knowledge. Arendt’s reading of the Kantian
notion of Einbildungskraft as the intuitive and spontaneous act of re-
presenting what has become inaccessible to experience resonates with
Didi-­Huberman’s preoccupation, which he expresses in his reflections on
Foucault: how does an unrecognised ‘emergence’ come to appear; ‘[how]
is an object born?’ (KWC, 87). What Didi-­Huberman adds to Arendt’s
insights is that this capacity to call forth an image is antagonistic and
driven by unobliterable desire. Desire is a force that resists the violence
of erasing or ‘disimagining’ history (ISA, 46–7). In her lectures on Kant,
Arendt quotes Anaxagoras’s definition of imagination as a ‘glimpse of
the invisible’ (1992: 80). Didi-­Huberman has used the term ‘glimpse’ in
a series of reflections on looking at an object in a kaleidoscopic motion,
such as the flickering of glow worms or the fluttering of butterflies’
wings (SF; 1998a). The imaginal ‘[s]nippets, splinters of the world,
[the] flotsam and jetsam that comes [and] goes’ invoke Freud’s concept
of dream-­images, called (with reference to Heinrich Heine) ‘shreds and
patches’ (Fetzen und Flicken): they embody overlapping yet incongruous
temporalities, and follow the distinct rhythm of ‘flaring up’ and ‘fading
away’ (GAD, 109).
The figure of a child playing with their toy, rotating it in their hands,
viewing it from different angles and seeking to open it as an inspiration
for imaginal phenomenology (and, perhaps, also a figure of inspiration for
what a ‘playful’ reading of a dictionary could look like) features in Aperçues
(Didi-­Huberman, 2018a; GAD; see Copuroglu’s entry on literature).
This is articulated in relation to images of playing children by the pho-
tographer Henri Cartier-­Bresson, as well as to Baudelaire’s essay ‘The
Philosophy of Toys’, which not only closely aligns childhood play with
imagination, but pays close attention to the desire to probe and open the
toy. ‘[T]his desire’, Baudelaire writes, ‘fills [the child’s] fingers and nails
with extraordinary agility and strength [as he] twists and turns the toy,
scratches it, shakes it, bangs it’ (2012: 20), before the child realises that the
toy is lacking a soul. The figure of the playing child in Atlas, or the Anxious
4 i n t r o d u c t i o n

Gay Science is also reminiscent of Freud’s grandson, Ernst, and his fort–da
game, initiated in response to maternal disappearance and described by
Freud in the well-­known passage in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The
child’s back-­and-­forth reeling of a toy accompanies the mournful sound
‘O-­o-o-­o!’ and is followed by his jubilant exclamation ‘Da!’, by way of
effectuating the mother’s departure and arrival. The game is not only
highly imaginative, but it also has at its c­ ore the fluctuating rhythm of
imaginal appearance and disappearance. As her image comes in and out
of vision, a crucial element in the psychoanalytic process is revealed:
the dialectic relation between disappearance and appearance, as well as
between mourning and affirmation of living (cf. Fédida, 1978). Drawing
the reader’s attention to the element of visuality in the repetition process,
Stephen Frosh suggests that the fort–da game is a synecdochic figuration
of the psychoanalytic practice as a whole: the ‘throwing something out of
sight, [and then] drawing it back again. Now we see it, now we don’t; an
infantile game that can sum up a whole lifetime’ (2019: 35).
Underpinning that interplay between disappearance and reappear-
ance, and between repression and return, is Freud’s insistence on the
‘indestructible desire’ (unzerstōrbaren Wunsch) – Didi-­Huberman’s key
take from The Interpretation of Dreams, which has inspired his more recent
writings on images of protest and uprising, and refugee camps (U; SF).
It suggests a dual character of images as both different (‘new, native,
unexpected, unpredictable’) and repetitive or recurrent (‘moved accord-
ing to the “eternal return” of our most fundamental desires’) (U, 313; SF,
83; see also Freud, 1953). Finally, it also implies that bound up with the
philosophy of the visual is a question of ethical commitment – not to allow
to disappear those on the precipice of retreat or withdrawal into darkness
and invisibility, the ‘firefly-­people’ (SF, 84); those enclosed in camps and
ghettos, the nameless relegated to the background of history, the extras on
a cinematic set, the vagabonds and homeless, but who nevertheless emit
‘flashes’, visualising their history and experience.
Diagonal reading, then: a movement across and against established
trajectories; an act of making-­appear and making-­reappear; attunement
and attention to ‘what appears, what emerges, what suddenly comes to
light’ (KWC, 83). The link between knowledge and cutting is articulated
throughout Didi-­Huberman’s oeuvre – starting from his many engage-
ments with Aby Warburg, through his discussions of the montage of war
and camp photography, to his reflections on Michel Foucault (see DM,
621–45) – and the notion of diagonality attests to the political and ethical
dimensions of his writings. While a dictionary cannot do justice to the
richness and heterogeneity of the philosophical and literary project at
hand, and while it shies away from any encyclopaedic ambitions or from
 introduction 5

the production of masterful knowledge, I hope that readers will approach

this dictionary with curiosity, imagination and playfulness, and that by
engaging with it, they will get a sense of the many gestures, emergences,
archaeologies and exorcisms constantly at work in Didi-­ Huberman’s
philosophical uncovering of the ‘secret relations of things’.
The dictionary offers eighty-­five entries written by thirty experts from
around the world from different academic backgrounds and disciplines,
which shows that, as the translations of Didi-­Huberman’s writings into
English and other languages gathers pace, the recognition of his work has
become both global in reach and multidisciplinary. The entries in the dic-
tionary range from 500 words long to 1500 words long. Didi-­Huberman’s
texts that have been translated into English are given in an abbreviated
form in the prelims. The full list of his original publications can be found
in the closing section of the dictionary. The dictionary also includes a list
of scholarly texts on Didi-­Huberman in English.
Magdalena Zolkos

Works Cited
Arendt, H. (1978). The Life of the Mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arendt, H. (1992). Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. University of
Chicago Press.
Baudelaire, C. (2012). ‘The Philosophy of Toys’, in K. Gross (ed.), On
Dolls, 11–21. Notting Hill Editions.
De Cauwer, S., and Smith, L. K. (2018). ‘Critical Image Configurations:
The Work of Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Angelaki, 23(4): 3–10.
Fédida, P. (1978). L’absence. Gallimard.
Freud, S. (1953). The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. IV (1900), ed. J. Strachey, ix–627. Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-­analysis.
Frosh, S. (2019). ‘A Letter Always Reaches its Destination’, in
M. Weegmann (ed.), Psychodynamics of Writing, 29–37. Routledge.
Larsson, C. (2020a). Didi-Huberman and the Image. Manchester University
Press.
Larsson, C. (2020b). ‘Didi-­ Huberman and Art History’s Amicable
Incursions’, Journal of Art Historiography, 22 (June). https://arthistori​
ography.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/larsson.pdf. Accessed 12 April
2022.
Saint, N. (2004). ‘Didi-­Huberman, Georges’, in C. J. Murray (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought, 173–6. Taylor and Francis.
Saint, N. (2013). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman: Images, Critique and Time’,
6 i n t r o d u c t i o n

in N. Saint and A. Stafford (eds), Modern French Visual Theory. A

Critical Reader, 219–38. Manchester University Press.
Smith, A. (2020). Georges Didi-Huberman and Film. The Politics of the
Image. Bloomsbury.
 A
AFTERLIFE

Michaela Bstieler
The afterlife according to Didi-­ Huberman is the memory that is
ingrained in an image. In order to understand an image, one must take
into account its specific historicity, which is conveyed through the paths
and detours of time. Didi-­Huberman shares this conviction with Aby
Warburg, who was interested in the discontinuities and overdetermina-
tions of history throughout his work and tried to consider the ‘powers
of the image’ along the deposited material of an unconscious memory
(Warburg, 1998: 172). Even more firmly than Warburg, Didi-­Huberman
argues for a method of historical reconstruction that deals with the pres-
ence of the past under the sign of a non-­linear temporality. The afterlife
in particular cannot be understood as latently persisting in concrete
images, motifs and paradigms, as if it could outlast the times like a trace
(Derrida, 1982). On the contrary, Didi-­Huberman’s concept of afterlife
emphasises a form of time that disorients past, present and future, opening
them towards anachronism. Thus, the afterlife can only be adequately
grasped if ‘temporal periods are no longer fashioned according to biomor-
phic stages, but, instead, are expressed by strata, hybrid blocks, rhizomes,
specific complexities, by returns that are often unexpected and goals that
are always thwarted’ (SI, 12).
The afterlife refers to a ‘psychological time’ (SI, 178) that always sub-
verts the notion of historical time. This is one of the key theses of L’Image
survivante (2002b; SI), in which Didi-­Huberman examines the affective
aspects of afterlife. Hence, Didi-­Huberman uses the Freudian notion of
the symptom (see Freud, Sigmund; psychoanalysis) as a model to not
only mark an ‘entangled’ temporality, but also to address the plasticity of
a body ‘agitated by conflicts, by contradictory movements: a body agitated
8 a f t e r l i f e

by the eddies of time. It is a body from which there suddenly springs forth
a suppressed image’ (SI, 198). The symptom thus possesses an extreme
mobility: it forms configurations that are subject to repression, that is,
remain latent, and yet retain a capacity to act. In this dialectic between
fixation and distortion, disappearance and emergence, the entire dynamic
of the afterlife is implied. Just like the symptom, the afterlife is to be end-
lessly interpreted (BI) and defies symbolic translation, as Didi-­Huberman
argued in Devant l’image (1990a; CI). Consequently, he accounts for a
psychological apparatus that is subject to the laws of the unconscious,
setting the stage for a different historiography that is receptive to working
with the untimely (cf. SI, 228–30).
Envisaging the afterlife, Didi-­ Huberman starts from moments of
tension that commonly feature in the concept of pathos. In line with
Aby Warburg’s phenomenological maxim ‘not to separate the psyche from
its flesh, and, reciprocally, not to separate the imaging substance from its
psychological powers’ (SI, 197), Didi-­Huberman addresses the unsettling
strangeness that resonates not only with Warburg’s Leitfossil (guide or
index fossil), but also with Freud’s Unheimliches (uncanny). What fuses
the two concepts is the ‘once heimisch, home-­like, familiar’ (SI, 230) that
emerges abruptly in a dimension of the secret or hidden, like a ‘“life asleep
in its form” – which awakens completely unexpectedly’ (SI, 217) (see
form). Suffering from reminiscences would hence be the specific expres-
sion of the afterlife. This corresponds to a notion already put forward in
Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992b): the r­ esearcher – ­according
to the double meaning of the French verb regarder – must allow them-
selves both to be looked at, and to be affected, by the object of the research.
Therefore, the lesson of the afterlife should be seen in the Überbleibseln
[remnants of life] – in other words, survivals, as Freud called them (1964:
75). In Images malgré tout (2003a; ISA), Didi-­Huberman will finally give
an ethical meaning to these resistant remains when he conceives the images
of the extermination process at Auschwitz-­Birkenau taken in August 1944
as ‘flaws’ or ‘splits’, to signal that what once was, has never ceased to be
(see Sonderkommando photographs).
When Didi-­Huberman reflects on the concept of survival roughly five
years later, it is to add a political dimension to the notion of afterlife. In
Survivance des lucioles (2010a; SF), he counterposes, via Pasolini, the great
and unpleasant light (luce) of the kingdom (that is, fascism) with the fragile
lights (lucciole) of the fireflies (sparks of resistance), whose lives seem
uncanny, resembling ghosts in dimly glowing, often greenish shapes (SF,
20; see Pasolini, Pier Paolo). Critically drawing on Walter Benjamin,
Didi-­Huberman argues that images, like fireflies, are in a certain sense
indestructible. For even if images ‘only rarely [. . .] rise toward the still
 agamben, giorgio 9

sky of eternal ideas’ (SF, 63), as in Benjamin’s ‘ball lightning’ (Kugelblitz)

(Benjamin, 2006: 403), they still do not disappear, glowing at least faintly
but insistently, luminescent. Ultimately, Didi-­Huberman’s afterlife also
testifies that ‘in our way of imaging lies a fundamental condition of our
way of doing politics’ (SF, 30).
It is precisely these ‘flash-­images’ (SF, 84) that are significant for a
present understanding of afterlife in Didi-­Huberman’s optics. Indeed,
according to Didi-­Huberman, it is time to cultivate an experience that rec-
ognises the glimmers of light, along with their entire spectrum of ‘loss and
ecstasy, shadows and luminosities’ (SF, 78), and to learn to perceive them
‘even when [they] may well become reduced to survivals and clandestine
moments, to simple glimmers in the night’ (SF, 80). Becoming receptive
to these glimmers, as Didi-­Huberman emphasises, would also mean to
humanly encounter the night, which is permeated with glimmers, and to
take responsibility towards the images by taking a position (see taking
position).

Works Cited
Benjamin, W. (2006). ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’,
trans. E. F. N. Jephcott and H. Eiland, in Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings,
401–10. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass. Harvester Press.
Freud, S. (1964). Moses and Monotheism, trans. K. Jones, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.
XXIII (1937–1939), ed. J. Strachey, 7–137. Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psycho-­Analysis.
Warburg, A. (1998). Grundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer monistischen
Kunstpsychologie (1928–29). Warburg Institute Archive, III, 43.1–2.

AGAMBEN, GIORGIO

Stijn De Cauwer
Given the fact that two of the most important influences on the work
of Giorgio Agamben are Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg and
that his most famous texts reflect on the current state of images, on
the relationship between images and power, and on testimony of the
Holocaust, the work of Agamben and Didi-­Huberman has a lot in
common. While in works such as Images in Spite of All (ISA, 26, 38,
10 a g a m b e n , g i o r g i o

104, 179), Didi‑Huberman briefly engages with Agamben’s writings on

testimony in Remnants of Auschwitz (2002), in various recent texts he has
developed a more detailed critique of Agamben’s theories about images.
In Survival of the Fireflies, Didi-­Huberman compares Agamben’s views
with the opinions voiced by Pier Paolo Pasolini at the end of his life, no
longer believing in the possibility of resistance against a capitalist society
dominated by spectacles (SF, 33–60). Agamben opens up important
discussions which he brings to overly pessimistic conclusions, such as
in Means without End, where he writes that ‘by the end of the nineteenth
century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures’ (2000:
49). Like Pasolini, Agamben has a tendency to present things as ‘defini-
tively lost’ in our present times, which both of them express in terms of
things that can no longer be seen, for example, the glow of fireflies.
Under the influence of Guy Debord and Martin Heidegger, Agamben
associates images with the ‘glory’ of the ‘kingdom’ in The Kingdom and
the Glory (2011). Reducing images to their mediatic forms, images in our
spectacle-­obsessed society, in Agamben’s view, are on the side of power
and deployed to subject people. Didi-­Huberman critiques this one-­sided
equation of images and power, and analyses Agamben’s apocalyptic tone.
Agamben believes that images can only regain their redemptive power in
an unknown future, after the total destruction of the capitalist society.
The ‘big light’ of redemption can only appear again in an eschatological
end time and is currently hidden over the horizon. Didi-­Huberman argues
that such a view hinders Agamben from seeing all the small glowing lights
of counterforce that appear unexpectedly in many places. Images, for
Didi-­Huberman, should not be regarded in terms of redemption, horizons
and apocalyptic eschatology, and they should also not be equated one-­
sidedly with the dominant forms of power. Images are fleeting, incom-
plete, appearing and disappearing, offering glimmers of potentiality,
insight and counterforce.
In the essay ‘Puissance de ne pas, ou la politique du désœuvrement’,
included in Désirer désobéir (2019a: 138–51), Didi-­Huberman develops
his critique of Agamben’s theories further, and specifically Agamben’s
use of the notion of ‘inoperativity’ (désœuvrement). According to Didi-­
Huberman, Agamben is overly sceptical of political activity or any form
of praxis, while stressing the importance of aesthetic phenomena. Didi-­
Huberman emphasises the role of praxis in any form of poiesis, and that
before one can render something inoperative, there has to be an oeuvre or
work. Didi-­Huberman concludes that Agamben takes great texts as his
source of inspiration, only to read them in an overly pessimistic manner,
and in doing so, he is ‘transforming a good wine into vinegar’ (2019a:
142).
 anachronism 11

Works Cited
Agamben, G. (2000). Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti
and C. Casarino. University of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, G. (2002). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive,
trans. D. Heller-­Roazen. Zone Books.
Agamben, G. (2011). The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological
Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. L. Chiesa and
M. Mandarini. Stanford University Press.

ANACHRONISM

Andrzej Leśniak
One of the most important elements of Didi-­Huberman’s intellectual
project is his rethinking of the concept of historical experience. And it
is in this context that he proposes to redefine the notion of anachronism.
Although in the frame of many modern historiographical perspectives
anachronism is considered a methodological flaw (the notion refers to
confusing subjects, objects and actions belonging to different historical
contexts and thus demanding different interpretative frames), Didi-­
Huberman attempts to elicit its positive cognitive value. In this view
anachronism is conceived as the very condition of possibility of historical
experience. In his theorisation of anachronism Didi-­Huberman relies on
Walter Benjamin’s notion of image, Aby Warburg’s conception of sur-
vival, Sigmund Freud’s reflection on dreams, as well as on more recent
French scholarship, notably Jacques Rancière. His attention to the
concept of anachronism can be seen as part of a larger inquiry questioning
the principles of historical research by postmodern historiographers, such
as Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit. In The Surviving Image Didi-­
Huberman underlines the importance of alternative conceptions of time
developed both in art history and beyond its disciplinary limits, especially
in anthropology. He refers to Burckhardt’s vision of the impurity of time
(SI, 44) and to notions created in Darwinian anthropology describing
temporally complex forms of life, such as heterochronies, peramorphoses
or hypermorphoses (SI, 37, 344 n.169).
Didi-­Huberman maintains a critical stance towards the dominant
theoretical positions in the study of history in general and art history in
particular (see art criticism; critique). He questions the assumptions
underlying the epistemological certainties in the disciplines dedicated to
the study of the past (see Panofsky, Erwin). In Confronting Images, his
12 a n a c h r o n i s m

most important work devoted to the epistemological model of art history,

he points to the irreducible uncertainty of the knowledge of the past: ‘[i]t
should go without saying that the element of history, its inherent fragility
with regard to all procedures of verification, its extremely lacunary char-
acter, particularly in the domain of manmade figurative ­objects – ­it goes
without saying that all of this should incite the greatest modesty’ (CI, 2).
For Didi-­Huberman the fundamental lack of certitude concerning the
past defines the historical discipline, as well as inciting the questioning of
the epistemological foundations of research practices.
In Didi-­Huberman’s view, visuality is a privileged field of inquiry into
the nature of time (see visual). His key text devoted to the conditions of
possibility of historical research, ‘Before the Image, Before Time: The
Sovereignty of Anachronism’, starts with an assertion that equates visual
experience with the confrontation with time: ‘[w]henever we are before
the image, we are before time’ (BI, 31). In order to understand images,
one has to recognise their temporal dimension. The notion of anachronism
describes the temporal complexity of images:

We thus find ourselves before the painted surface as an object of complex, impure
temporality: an extraordinary montage of heterogeneous times forming anachronisms.
In the dynamic and complexity of this montage, historical notions as fundamental
as those of ‘style’ or ‘epoch’ suddenly take on a dangerous plasticity [. . .] So to
raise the question of anachronism is to question this fundamental plasticity, and
with it the ­combination – s­ o difficult to ­analyze – ­of the temporal differentiation at
work in each image. (BI, 38; see images; montage)

Anachronism describes the relation between the image and the viewer, as
well as the texture of the visual material. It points to the necessary tempo-
ral discrepancy between the act of looking and the moment in which the
image came into existence; when we look at an image, we are immediately
confronted with something that does not belong to our temporal context
(see gaze). The ensuing incongruity is not considered to be an obstacle to
of through methodological procedures, nor is it a factor that renders art
historical analysis impossible. Instead, Didi-­Huberman defines this tem-
poral incongruity as a condition of knowledge and as a point of departure
for interpretative practices. A striking example of an analysis based on
the principle of anachronism in Didi-­Huberman’s writings is a passage in
which Fra Angelico’s fresco from the convent of San Marco in Florence
is set together with Jackson Pollock’s paintings (BI, 40–1). According to
Didi-­Huberman, even if it is clearly impossible or absurd to try to estab-
lish a relation of direct kinship between an ‘informal’ part of the fifteenth-­
century painting and Pollock’s abstraction, the resemblance between the
 anadyomene  13

two images still poses a problem. The quintessentially modern experience

of abstract expressionism changes the way we look at Renaissance paint-
ing simply because the anachronistic relation connecting the two objects
questions the ‘right distance’ of a scholar dealing with their object of
inquiry (BI, 41). The rethinking of the notion of anachronism leads Didi-­
Huberman to analyse images from different temporal contexts in several
of his texts (2000a; 2001a; 2002a). He has also been interested in modern
forms of creating and presenting knowledge that rely on correlating het-
erogeneous elements, such as atlas (AA; SI) and montage (B; BI; EH;
HT; ISA; SI; 2008a; 2010b; 2015b; 2016).

ANADYOMENE

Magdalena Zolkos
The Greek word anaduoménos (ἀναδυομένος), meaning ‘rising up’ or
‘surfacing’, is immediately associable with Apelles’ painting of the birth
of the goddess A ­ phrodite – ­Venus Anadyomene, the one who emerges
from the sea. For Didi-­Huberman, writing in Confronting Images, the
instance of aphroditic appearance encapsulates a characteristic aspect
of pictorial phenomenology in general; the shape of a female body tran-
spires, where moments before there was only spume, and ‘something
that has plunged into the water momentarily reemerges, is born before
quickly plunging in again’ (CF, 143). The figure of the anadyomene thus
articulates the pictorial rhythm of appearing and disappearing, encap-
sulating the historical dynamic of images as that of coming in and out of
view.
Didi-­Huberman’s notion of the anadyomenic rhythm of images partly
draws on Warburg’s theory of culture, which in the introduction to
the Mnemosyne Atlas is described as the movement of ‘formative oscil-
lation’, or a ‘circuit’, between the Einschwingung (lit. ‘swinging in’) and
Ausschwingung (lit. ‘swinging out’) of cultural forms. The notion of the
anadyomene also follows closely the psychoanalytic logic of dreams
and dream-­work, as well as compromise formation as expressed in, for
instance, Freud’s grandson’s fort–da ­game – t­ he child’s staging of ‘disap-
pearance and return [Verschwinden und Wiederkommen]’ of the mother
(Freud, 1955 [1950]: 14; see psychoanalysis). In The Surviving Image
Didi-­Huberman uncovers the logic of the anadyomene in Freud’s book on
Moses and monotheism, whereby collective Jewish memory is described
as ‘anadyomenic’ (une mémoire anadyomene), rather than linear or chrono-
logical; it is a ‘memory that ebbs and flows’, framed by the dialectic of (in
14 anadyomene 

Freud’s words) ‘latency [and] the emergence of unintelligible manifesta-

tions’ (1964 [1939]: 71; SI, 211; see dialectic). Here the anadyomene
is linked closely to survival as a spectral reappearance of renounced
contents and desires; what is ‘repudiated, even over-­compensated’, Freud
writes (1964 [1939]: 124), ‘in the end again comes to light’.
In The Interpretation of Dreams oneiric images are characterised by
their instability and ­dynamism – d ­ ream-­images ‘surge’ (CI, 144). Freud
depicts dreams not as stable ‘entities’ or ‘products’ of the unconscious,
but, rather, as unconscious events and undertakings that arise and dis-
sipate, rising against repressive structures. Dreams ‘come to us as if
from another place’, writes Burgin (1982: 195). As such, dream-­images
(and images more broadly) are never simply present; rather, they present
themselves. Didi-­Huberman describes this anadyomenic rhythm of his
pictorial material as ‘the materia informis [that] shows through form [. . .]
the presentation when it shows through [affleurer] representation [. . .]
opacity when it shows through transparency [. . .] the visual when it shows
through the visible’ (CF, 143).
Didi-­Huberman’s reference to Jean Starobinski’s 1986 text on Freud’s
epigraph Acheronta movebo in the book on dreams (‘if I cannot bend the
higher powers, I shall stir up hell’) suggests that already in Confronting
Images Didi-­ Huberman was contemplating the insurrectionary and
political implications of the anadyomenic rhythm of images. The rising
up (be it of images, or of the Freudian ‘repressed’, or of the people in
Didi-­Huberman’s later writings) happens against systemic efforts at
‘burying’ or ‘erasing’ images (appearance occurs in spite of attempts at
disimagining the violent past). In Images in Spite of All, the history of the
four Sonderkommando photographs follows a distinct anadyomenic
rhythm of appearing, disappearing and reappearing. Describing the per-
ilous circumstances of the photographs’ creation, against the Bilderverbot
in the camps, and their subsequent hiding and smuggling, their neglect
and forgetting, their post-­war use and mis-use (cropping, editing and
retouching), Didi-­Huberman notes the photographs’ ‘ever so fragile
temporality’ as they ‘flash up’ and ‘spring up’, only to fade again (ISA,
46–7).
In Didi-­Huberman’s more recent writings on the notion of peoples
and uprisings (2009a; 2009b; 2012a; 2016a; 2013b; 2016n; PEPE; TRS;
U), the anadyomene invokes rebellious and subversive political energies
that ‘urge upwards’ against historical disimagining. In turn, in Survival
of the Fireflies anadyomene features implicitly, invoking anti-­apocalyptic
hope and the refusal to accept that the disappearance and fading away
of what we have cherished and loved is (ever) final and complete (2010a;
SF). Coming ‘alive and dancing in the heart of the night’, the fireflies give
 archive  15

an anadyomenic performance, ‘even if that night may be swept by fierce

spotlights’ (SF, 25).

Works Cited
Burgin, V. (1982). ‘Photography, Phantasy, Function’, in V. Burgin (ed.),
Thinking Photography, 177–216. Red Globe Press.
Freud, S. (1953). The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. IV (1900), ed. J. Strachey, ix–627. Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-­analysis.
Freud, S. 1955 [1950]. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. J. Strachey,
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Vol. XVIII (1920–1922), ed. J. Strachey, 1–64. Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psycho-­analysis.
Freud, S. 1964 [1939]. Moses and Monotheism, trans. K. Jones, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. XXIII (1937–1939), ed. J. Strachey, 1–138. Hogarth Press and
the Institute of Psycho-­analysis.

ARCHIVE

Andreas Oberprantacher
If it is the case that Didi-­Huberman’s writings can be read as contributions
to both a critical archaeology and an archeological critique of images,
then it is also the case that his writings revolve repeatedly around the
archive as a problematic index and locus of imagination.
Already his early book Invention de l’hystérie (1982) signals that the
‘visible is a twisted modality’ (IH, 8) insofar as it is mediated through
that what is itself not (as) visible, that what tends to remain invisible to
the eye, not least: archival procedures of imag(in)ing, for example, others
as degenerate or deviant. According to Didi-­Huberman, the Salpêtrière
as the late nineteenth-­century’s ‘mecca of the great confinement’ (IH,
13) of women d ­ iagnosed – ­and ­degraded – ­as ‘hysterical’ was equally ‘an
image factory’ (IH, 30), that is, a laboratory of fabricated images. And
as such the Salpêtrière reflects through its various archives (like photo
albums) the dominant interest in ‘catching’ and studying the image of the
hysterical women by generating series of graphic pictures, photographs
of women routinely pictured as hysterics. These standardised portrayals
disclose all sorts of gestures and poses that eventually became associated
16 archive 

with the literal definition of the hysteric (see hysteria). They simultane-
ously conceal criticises Didi-­Huberman, how they came into effect, how
they were arranged: by a specific and violent ‘clinical gaze’ (IH, 21) that
commands the appearance of those imagined as typical hysterics and that
conditions the archiving of such images for the alleged advancement of
medical reason.
Considering that Didi-­Huberman’s approach to the field of visual
culture follows those passages of Walter Benjamin where he argues that
‘the historical index of the images [. . .] attain to legibility (Lesbarkeit) only
at a particular time’ and that the ‘image that is read (das gelesene Bild) [. . .]
bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment (des
kritischen gefährlichen Moments) on which all reading (Lesen) is founded’
(Benjamin, cited in Didi-­Huberman, 2006c; OCCE; cf. Mirzoeff, 2002:
3–23), it is comprehensible that to begin to read images in other than
uncritical (conformist) terms requires also both returning to and departing
from the archive as a contradictory context. Jacques Derrida remarks in
this respect that ‘every archive [. . .] is at once institutive and conservative.
Revolutionary and traditional’ (1998: 7). Or, to put it in another way: the
archival act of recording and registering images renders a visual account
of that which seems relevant, fitting (by the archive’s own terms), while
discounting that which seems irrelevant, unfitting, the archive thus being
a ‘split’ dispositif.
This double logic or ambivalence of the archive becomes manifest at
various stages of Didi-­Huberman’s research, particularly in Images malgré
tout (2003a). Claude Lanzmann notoriously contended: ‘if I had found
an existing film [as an exemplification of a visual archive] [. . .] made by
an SS [. . .] at Auschwitz [. . .] not only would I not have shown it, but I
would have destroyed it’ (Lanzmann, cited in ISA, 95). In contrast, Didi-­
Huberman calls for a critical revisitation and even reimagination of the
archive as a complex setting that at once collects and disperses, illuminates
and obscures, preserves and devastates images.
­Auschwitz – ­as the epitome of the discourse of the ‘unimaginable’ – is
of special concern for Didi-­Huberman because it poses the very problem
of how to (re-)view archives, since the Nazi camps ‘were laboratories,
experimental machines for a general obliteration’ (ISA, 20). This Nazi
‘cult(ure)’ of obliteration was so pervasive, Didi-­Huberman argues, that
eventually it became directed against the Nazi archives themselves, which
is to say that ultimately ‘the memory of the obliteration [. . .] had to be oblit-
erated’ (ISA, 22) so as to leave no (image) trace. It is as if a twofold oblit-
eration had occurred. First, the Nazi iconography i­tself – r­anging from
the photographs of the ‘identification service’ (Erkennungsdienst) via the
‘office of constructions’ (Zentralbauleitung) to the experiments of ­Mengele
 archive  17

– ­obliterated people by picturing them as ‘subhumans’ (Untermenschen).

And second, this pictorial obliteration prescribed by the Nazi archives of
Auschwitz and related camps was itself obliterated the moment the Nazi
regime lay in ruins and the Nazi officials tried to destroy any compromis-
ing evidence of the atrocities committed.
However, in the face of such multiple obliterations and in spite of the
many histories of visual violence connected to archival procedures, it is
important to note, as Didi-­Huberman suggests, that some images resisted
their appropriation and annihilation. Images can be remarkably obstinate,
defiant; they can indeed bear witness to potentially differing stories, and
alternative trajectories (see witnessing). Such images can thus be read
as ‘remains’ (ISA, 76) and in some cases also as reminders of the courage
of people who held on to them, like the 40,000 archival photographs
from Auschwitz that were saved from strategic destruction by former
camp detainees. Apart from the ‘survival’ (ISA, 25) of all those images
pertaining to the Nazi ‘archives of evil’ (ISA, 98) that changed their
meaning and value the instant they were ‘liberated’ from the dominant
‘framing of violence’ (Butler, 2009: 1) and transferred into the hands of
war crimes prosecutors, it is especially the four ­photographs – ­acting as
visual counter-­archive – ‘snatched from hell’ (ISA, 3) by a member of
the Sonderkommando that motivated Didi-­Huberman to rephrase what an
archive may be (see Holocaust; Sonderkommando photographs).
Contrary to the totalitarian phantasy and phantasm, the ­archive – ­like
the archives of ­Shoah – ­is essentially ‘an incomplete, fragmentary terri-
tory’ (ISA, 23). Or, ‘[t]he essence of the archive is its gap; its perforated
knowledge’ (Didi-­Huberman, 2007g). This is to say, that to put oneself
devant l’image (1990), in front of images, and to try to read them anew,
requires also confronting oneself with the archive as that image (or
imaginary) context which can be partly rewritten at the very moment it is
read not as fixed or static, as if it were a monument, but as changing and
changeable in memory of that which resists and evades its logic.

Works Cited
Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War. When is Life Grievable? Verso.
Derrida, J. (1998). Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, trans.
E. Prenowitz. University of Chicago Press.
Mirzoeff, N. (2002). ‘The Subject of Visual Culture’, in N. Mirzoeff (ed.),
The Visual Culture Reader, 3–23. Routledge.
18 arendt, hannah 

ARENDT, HANNAH

Magdalena Zolkos
Hannah Arendt’s writings are an important reference point for Didi-­
Huberman, and his reflections on Arendt’s conceptions of judgement,
truth and appearance form a connective between Images in Spite of All
and his later writings, including Survival of the Fireflies and The Eye of
History series. Didi-­Huberman draws on Arendt’s wartime publications in
the journal Aufbau (Arendt, 2007a [1942]; 2007b [1942]), proposing that
the Nazis created a ‘machinery of disimagination’ in order to render their
genocidal pursuits ‘unthinkable’ to the international community (ISA,
20–1). Arendt famously stated that the concentration and extermination
camps challenged the boundaries of public comprehension in their bid at
a total domination and dehumanization of persons through terror and the
divestiture of human spontaneity (1962 [1951]: 437–59). As such, they
revealed the limits of rational and utilitarian epistemologies underpin-
ning modern legal and social sciences, requiring a paradigmatic shift in
humanistic knowledge (Arendt, 1950: 53–5). Referencing her insights,
Didi-­Huberman connects the unimaginable with totalitarian aims at oblit-
erating visual representations of the camps, and hence at ‘obfuscating [the
world]’ by rendering it ‘wordless and imageless’ (ISA, 20).
Didi-­Huberman’s interpretation of the Sonderkommando photo-
graphs as a refutation of this ‘machinery of disimagination’, akin to
glimpses of truth into the realities of the camp, also references Arendt’s
reflections on the Auschwitz Trials. In her introduction to the English
translation of Bernd Naumann’s report of the trials, Arendt contrasts the
failure of the legal process to produce ‘the whole truth’ about Auschwitz
with fragmentary, brief and anecdotal ‘moments of truth’, occurring in
the courtroom and illuminating ‘this chaos of viciousness and evil’ (2003
[1966]). There is a philosophical resonance between Arendt’s notion of
testimonial fragments and Didi-­Huberman’s analysis of the photographs
as ‘instants of truth’ (ISA, 31).
Jacques Rancière (2018: 12) argues that Didi-­Huberman’s imaginal
theory of politics is closely aligned with Arendt’s nexus of action, power
and the space of appearance, because for them both, ‘a people is first of all
an appearance, a coming into visibility’ (Arendt, 1998 [1958]: 208; CG,
11; Oberprantacher, 2019). Didi-­Huberman shares Arendt’s view on the
irreducible condition of the plurality of political existence (FH, 278; TRS,
65; Arendt, 2005 [1993]) (see peoples). However, in contrast to Arendt’s
belief in people’s emergence through events of ‘political constitution’, he
thematises ‘conflict [. . .] [as] the primary force of dividing populations’
 arendt, hannah  19

(Schwarte, 2018). Survival of the Fireflies includes an engagement with

Arendt’s ideas about imagination and appearance from her writings on
the life of the mind (1978 [1971]; 1992 [1982]), and for both Arendt and
Didi-­Huberman the capacity to act politically depends on the capacity
to imagine. Imaginative politics fuels resistance against state terror and
fascism and illuminates sites of deliberately instigated epistemic and
ethical obscurity. Didi-­Huberman invokes the notion of ‘diagonal force’
from The Life of the Mind (Arendt’s metaphor for the thinking activity) in
describing the temporality of lucciole. Arendt’s ‘diagonal force’ emerges
at the intersection of past and future, but is irreducible to either; rather, it
is ‘the quiet of the Now in the time-­pressed, time-­tossed existence of man’
(1978 [1971]: 209).
Finally, in the 2019 essay ‘Photo-­papers’ (written for an exhibition by
the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and featuring images from the
Ringelblum Archive of the Warsaw ghetto), Didi-­Huberman references
the controversy caused by Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) as a book that
‘touched a nerve ­centre – ­or a central ­wound – ­of what is meant by the
“Jewish people”’ (PP, 36). Didi-­Huberman’s analysis of the photographs
of the Ringelblum Archive follows a tripartite trajectory that articulates
the concept of the ghetto peoples: ‘the government of the oppressors’, ‘the
government of the oppressed’ and ‘the ungovernable people’ (PP, 35–8).
As such, the essay touches upon a similar wound, perhaps, as Arendt’s
Eichmann book did, insofar as Didi-­Huberman argues that the Ringelblum
images disunify the Jewish people in the Warsaw ghetto. By documenting
the striking inequalities of their life conditions, and by presenting the pre-
carity of the ghetto’s inhabitants as differential and unevenly distributed,
the images show that ‘united in death’, the Varsovian Jews were ‘scattered
in life: plural, divided by breaches, fissures, conflicts’ (PP, 37).

Works Cited
Arendt, H. (1950). ‘Social Science Techniques and the Study of
Concentration Camps’, Jewish Social Studies, 12(1): 49–64.
Arendt, H. (1962 [1951]). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Meridian.
Arendt, H. (1978 [1971]). The Life of the Mind. Harcourt.
Arendt, H. (1992 [1982]). Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. University
of Chicago Press.
Arendt, H. (1993 [2005]). The Promise of Politics. Random House.
Arendt, H. (1998 [1958]). The Human Condition. University of Chicago
Press.
Arendt, H. (2003 [1966]). ‘Auschwitz on Trial’, in Responsibility and
Judgement, ed. J. Kohn, 227–56). Schocken Books.
20 a r t c r i t i c i s m

Arendt, H. (2007a [1942]). ‘The Devil’s Rhetoric’, in The Jewish Writings,

ed. J. Kohn and R. H. Feldman, 156–7. Schocken Books.
Arendt, H. (2007b [1942]). ‘Not One Kaddish Will Be Said’, in The Jewish
Writings, ed. J. Kohn and R. H. Feldman, 162–4. Schocken Books.
Oberprantacher, A. (2019). ‘The Shimmering Phenomenon of
Clandestinity: Political Phenomenology Beside Appearing and
Vanishing’, in T. Bedorf and S. Herrmann (eds), Political Phenomenology:
Experience, Ontology, Episteme, 98–118. Routledge.
Rancière, J. (2018). ‘Images Re-­read. The Method of Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, trans. E. Woodard, J. R. Solorzano, S. De Cauwer, and
L. K. Smith, Angelaki, 23(4): 11–18.
Schwarte, L. (2018). ‘The People-­Image: The Political Philosophy of
Georges Didi-­Huberman’, trans. C. Woodall, Angelaki, 23(4): 80–90.

ART CRITICISM

Vlad Ionescu
An art historian’s involvement with art criticism presupposes a broader
understanding of (contemporary) artistic production. Even Renaissance
historians such as Vasari integrated the work of living artists in their
overviews conceived as the birth, growth and decay of artistry. Yet not all
writing on contemporary artistic production is also art criticism. Modern
art historians only referred to contemporary artists as the afterlife of
certain visual traces. Already Frans Wickhoff had associated impression-
ist visual aspects with the ‘illusionism’ of late Roman art (1895). Aloïs
Riegl intimated a relation between the tactile linearity of Egyptian art and
his contemporary Jan Toorop (1902). Finally, Wilhelm Worringer both
explained expressionism via his psychological aesthetics of the Gothic and
dedicated an essay to the work of Käthe Kollwitz (1931). There is thus an
enduring connivance between how art historians have approached the art
of the past and contemporary artistic production. Art criticism proper is
a discourse that is specific to modernism, an art that was not made with a
specific public in mind. In this case, the ­critic – f­ rom Baudelaire to Lyotard
and ­beyond – ­explores in their writings the meaning of contemporary art
in relation to an emerging public. In the case of Didi-­Huberman, art
criticism is an extension of his art historical writing, more precisely of
two dimensions that systematically return in his work: the notions of
place and time (Hagelstein, 2005; Ionescu, 2017) (see art writing). Before
we address these two dimensions, a note on style is required: like the
rest of his oeuvre, the writings on contemporary art and artists follow
 art criticism 21

Didi‑Huberman’s distinctive style. Seeing takes place through a larger

fabric of visual and bibliographical references that is continuously ‘worked
through’ and woven like a fabric: Steve McQueen’s work is viewed
with reference to Bataille, Benjamin and Warburg (Didi-­Huberman,
2013a), as well as to Sarkis’s film Au commencement, l’apparition (Didi-­
Huberman, 2013b). Didi-­ Huberman’s writings on contemporary art
combine precise phenomenological description with the solid. He looks
at images while associating them with other images and writings. There
is no impression without a historical, literary or philosophical reference.
This allows us to raise the hypothesis that Didi-­Huberman’s art criticism
furthers his work on the notions of place and time.
The list of contemporary artists whose work he has discussed is long and
includes essays on Christian Bonnefoi (1998a: 99–110), Alain Fleischer
(2013c: 152–64), Simon Hantaï (1998b), Pascal Convert (1999b),
Giuseppe Penone (2000b; BS), James Turrell (2001a; MWC), Claudio
Parmiggiani (2001b), Israel Galván (2001c), Alfredo Jaar (2013c: 340–
72), Sarkis and Esther Shalev-­Gerz (2013b), Steve McQueen (2013a),
Miroslaw Balka and James Coleman (2014b). The notion of place is central
to Didi-­Huberman’s understanding of contemporary artists (Hagelstein,
2005). He relies here on the Heideggerian distinction between space
and place. While the measurable space is a generic extension, the place
is space imbued with meaning, a testimony of how Dasein dwells in the
world and arranges it according to its possibilities. The artwork presup-
poses a specific space for which it is made and where it is presented. It
also performs an act of spacing, that is, it allows for a meaningful place to
emerge. Simplifying to the extreme, we could define architecture as this
transformation of a generic space into a meaningful place. Yet the meaning
that Turrell yields is that of a pre-­reflective experience of a place where
colour is in a subtly transient state (Didi-­Huberman, 2001a). It is a work
that concerns the opening up of a place where the viewer temporarily
dwells while the light slowly unfolds.
Significant in Didi-­Huberman’s analysis is the methodology of his
approach: the work of an artist is an occasion to detect other, histori-
cally disparate ‘figures’ with which it fundamentally resonates. That is
why in order to explain Turrell, his work on light and place is related to
Byzantine and gothic windows or the way in which Giotto conceives the
sky at the Scrovegni chapel as an unfolding panel. Art criticism is a ques-
tion of understanding the figural differences that emerge throughout the
history of art and culture. Pascal Convert’s Pièce Rouge (1996) is a place
that mediates a site of memory centred around the moving body and not
just a point in the perspectival representation (Didi-­Huberman, 1999b).
Simon Hantaï’s infinite folds dynamically relate a blank interior to a
22 a r t c r i t i c i s m

painted exterior, colourful abstract paintings divided by grooves (Didi-­

Huberman, 1998b). These places require different types of dwelling that
resist their objectification: the floating gaze in the case of Hantaï’s folds
and the essentially fusional experience of Turrell’s interiors dilute the gaze
into an environment. Instead of the analytic gaze that dissects an image,
the art critic proposes a ‘phasmid style’ (Alloa, 2018) that consists in the
temporary visual immersion into one’s surroundings, disappearing into a
primordial density of experience given to the living ­body – ­if we follow
Merleau-­Ponty and Henri M ­ aldiney – a­ s depth and colour, duration and
movement (see phasmids).
The book on Penone (Didi-­Huberman, 2000b; BS) is essential as it
illustrates both Didi-­Huberman’s bevy of intellectual references when
interpreting a contemporary artist and his exemplary understanding of
the second central notion of his thought, namely time (see temporality).
Penone’s series of Brain Landscapes (1990) represents the ‘skull-­place’ in
its ‘tactile blindness’ as a spot that is unperceivable (see skull). The image
is hereby addressed according to its layered constitution, as a place of
memories and virtual references to other representations of the skull, from
Dürer’s Saint Jerome (1521) to Vesalius’s and Da Vinci’s drawings (see
memory). This associative type of reading images is Didi-­Huberman’s
signature: the contemporary artwork is a point in a constellation of other
artworks pertaining to different regimes of representation and historical
periods. Significant in this case is his wide-­ranging essay on the choreog-
rapher Israel Galván: he underlines the alterations of his tempo in his dance
that establish a sense of place through his solitary moving body. This
image of Galván’s ‘solitudes’ includes the haunting return of other figures,
such as the ballet dancer Nijinsky or the bullfighters Juan Belmonte and
José Tomás. Didi-­Huberman does not interpret images merely accord-
ing to their art historical objectification as an object that has to be dated,
framed and described. He rather approaches them as virtual visual gestures
that return, from flamenco to antique statues and beyond. Instead of just
being a material thing, the image is an active relation that is actualised
through anachronistic associations with other images that testify to the
transformed return of certain motifs (see anachronism). As in the case
of Warburg and Riegl, his studies on contemporary art debate the syn-
chronic potentiality of the visual beyond the diachronic arrangements of
artworks.
Hence, time is a fundamental dimension in his approach: Esther
Shalev-­Gerz’s Between Listening and Telling. Last Witnesses, Auschwitz,
1945–2005 displays the act of testifying and listening in an assemblage
of silent moments, evoking the rhythm of memory at work (2013b) (see
witnessing). The present ­place – ­as in the work of Miroslav Balka on
 art criticism 23

­ reblinka – i­ s also a spatial perseverance (survivance) of the body testifying

T
to the silence of a past when actual survival (survivre) was the main ques-
tion. Yet ‘survival’ also denotes the possibility of representation despite
the ghastly and inhuman nature of a historical event. In a letter to László
Nemes, the director of Son of Saul (2015), the film on the Sonderkommando
at Auschwitz-­Birkenau, Didi-­Huberman interprets the gesture of trying
to bury a dead child while searching for a rabbi to perform the ritual as an
attempt to genealogically pass on this experience, to ‘exit this black hole of
history’ (2015a: 55).
Reviewing the notion of the avant-­gardist artwork, Didi-­Huberman
refers to time as the notion that the masterpiece fractures. The ­masterpiece
– ­from Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) to Pascal Convert’s Le temps
scellé (2009) – breaks the diachronic time of art history and knows neither
beginning nor end, because it neither emerges from an aesthetic consensus
nor do we ever finish debating it. In this fracture that the contemporary
artwork performs, Didi-­ Huberman substitutes categories such as the
‘unpresentable’ (Lyotard) with the ‘inestimable’ and the ‘inexhaust-
ible’ (inépuisable): ‘inestimable’ regarding the invested capital or cultural
consensus and inexhaustible in the relations that the artwork can make
between past memory and future desire. Didi-­Huberman conceives these
relations as fruitful anachronisms that strengthen the realm of representa-
tion. He does this in a kind of writing that replaces the ineffable and the
sublime with an ode to representation that includes immensely loquacious
descriptions and erudite references.

Works Cited
Alloa, E. (2018). ‘Phasmid Thinking. On Georges Didi-­ Huberman’s
Method’, trans. C. Woodall, Angelaki, 23(4): 103–12.
Hagelstein, M. (2005). ‘Art Contemporain et phénoménologie. Réflexion
sur le concept de lieu chez Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Études phénomé-
nologiques, 41–42: 133–64.
Ionescu, V. (2017). ‘On Moths and Butterflies, or How to Orient Oneself
through Images. Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Art Criticism in Context’,
Journal of Art Historiography, 16: 1–16.
Riegl, A. (1902). ‘Objective Aesthetik’, Neue Freie Presse, 13 July: 34–5.
Wickhoff, F. (1895). Die Wiener Genesis, ed. W. Ritter von Hartel and
F. Wickhoff. F. Tempsky.
Worringer, W. (1931). Käthe Kollwitz. Grafen und Unger.
24 art history 

ART HISTORY

Maud Hagelstein
In the city of Lyon, Didi-­Huberman received a university education in art
history, at the same time as he took classes in philosophy, and developed
in the space between them a very keen attention to problems of epistemol-
ogy. To be an epistemologist, especially in a discipline whose claim to
be a science must constantly be defended, has nothing to do with being
a policeman, which would involve establishing norms and reporting any
transgressions of those norms. To write the epistemology of art history
consists, rather, in identifying, during the construction of a ­knowledge –
­and in order to thwart t­ hem – ­any likely effects of authority over the real.
As such, it is more of a counter-policing job. By critiquing the historical
inclination to smooth too much, to synthesise and to fit things into boxes,
Didi-­Huberman – e­ ver sensitive to bastardised images, to events that are
exceptions, to artistic experience that is failing/in default (à l’expérience
artistique en défaut) and always somewhat h ­ eretical – h
­ as shown to his
readers that art history is above all a discourse that claims to be scholarly,
a formidable model of intelligibility, a system of distribution of legitimacy,
and a system of beliefs, with its own totem notions, taboo concepts and
catch-­all terms. For this reason, his fierce and engaged critique of art
history is never plainly aggressive (despite some savage outbursts), for it
leads to practical, heuristic propositions, signalling towards a home-­made,
inventive, poetic art history, one whose strong ethical dimension in fact
became more emphasised with time. If the debate with art history is prac-
tically constant in his works, its two most easily identifiable phases unfold
in Devant l’image (1990a; CI) and Devant le temps (2000a).
Devant l’image challenges the iconological tradition and its humanistic
tones. Beneath the surface, the book is organised around a very serious
problem in art history: the problem of orientation. If art is to be the object of
a history, where should we place ourselves in relation to it, within it? How
should we situate ourselves in the visible and in the vast history (stretch-
ing back at least 30,000 years) of painting? Where should we look? On
what should we focus our gaze? How should we build a history from that?
How should we create its points of reference? How should we avoid the
temptation of an excessively synthetic gaze, or shoulder the incomplete-
ness of the undertaking? Those who have tried to embrace such a broad
reality find themselves obliged to make choices, to select and to classify.
But how then should we justify these choices? How should this m ­ aterial
– ­this infinite ­material – ­be stirred, or how should we propose paths to
the amateur of art? How should we put down milestones? How should we
 art history  25

give it topography? And above all, how should we establish constants – or

construct coherent g­ roups – w ­ ithout proposing a deterministic and tele-
ological view of history, without limiting possibilities, without enclosing
singularities in categories that tend to smooth things out? By establishing
a theory of interpretation of images, of the logic of images, of the non-­
verbal discourse of images, the iconologist classifies, orders and establishes
groups with which we can situate ourselves and, inevitably, he orients the
gaze. In the late 1920s, art historian Aby Warburg constructed an atlas
(the Mnemosyne Atlas) because he was driven by this problem of orienta-
tion. He sought to trace lines, to map the life of images and to determine
migratory trajectories; he identified the highways (or the thoroughfares
– Wanderstrassen) of culture. But Warburg had a very particular sense of
order, and an unwavering attention to irregularities. Other art historians
have hardened the method, and the work of de-­partitioning works that are
documented in this way, read or held in classifications seems endless. For
Didi-­Huberman, this work includes the deconstruction of art history’s
‘magic formulae’, and the invention of an alternative poetics of the image.
Devant le temps initiates a ‘critical archaeology’ of the dominant tempo-
ral models of art history. Some historians have had difficulty dealing with
non-­standard temporalities and have defended an ideal (in other words,
impoverished) conception of history. How did history as a discipline
favour conditions of blindness over the impurity that was nonetheless
characteristic of the temporal phenomena linked with images? Didi-­
Huberman is troubled by the systematic refusal of anachronisms, with
the anachronistic moment appearing to be the pet peeve or the symptom of
time for art historians. From his viewpoint, the anachronism has nothing
to do with the timeless (‘hors du temps’), or with what is the universal (‘de
tous temps’). Instead, it concerns a crossover or an entanglement whose
complexity resists any simple models: ‘The anachronism, according to a
first approximation, is the temporal way to express the exuberance, the
complexity, and the over-­ determination of images’ (Didi-­ Huberman,
2000a: 16). Art history, and especially the history of images, therefore
cannot avoid being anything but anachronistic. It is anachronistic because
of the specificity of its object. For this very singular object transforms
the discipline from inside, and demands its metamorphosis: ‘to make art
history – does this mean to make history, in the sense in which it is normally
made? Or is it not, rather, to modify profoundly the epistemic layout of
history itself?’ (2000a: 27). In order to understand profoundly the aston-
ishing plasticity of time, in order to grasp the unconscious phenomena, the
survivals of repressed elements, the non-­evident links, Didi-­Huberman
focuses on the process of memory, a cognitive function that assembles
and cuts and t­hat – f­earlessly – ‘manipulates’ time, or ‘handles’ time (or
26 a r t w r i t i n g

even ‘kneads’ it like plastic matter): ‘It is memory that filters the past
of its exactitude. It is memory that humanises and configures time, that
intertwines its fibres, ensures its transmissions, devoting it to an essential
impurity. It is memory that the historian convokes and questions, not “the
past” really’ (2000a: 37).
In Didi-­Huberman’s work, the inventing of new modalities of writing
that equal the complexity of images has gained, with time, a political (or
even ethical) dimension. The writing of art history obeys its own neces-
sities, which are not secondary, and which are not merely ‘stylistic’. To
displace the gaze, to grasp the disregarded materialities, to observe those
at the bottom, the extras rather than the main actors, demands a renewal
of art history, an art history taken down from its pedestal, an art history
that might be sensitive to symptoms and to things considered waste. This
required the invention of a new and original way of writing on the relation
with images. Through his chiselled formulae, his patience in conceptual
variations, his indomitable style, and never put off by the play of affects,
with the rhythm of his phrases, his frequent parentheses and his dense
footnotes, Didi-­Huberman has invented a writing of his own, guiding
many readers:

To write art history means, firstly, and I must repeat it, to write. Is it just to describe
what we think we have the skill to see, and what we think we have enough talent to
have understood? Certainly not. The historian must not settle for ­describing – ­in
the basic sense of the ­term – ­any more than the painter should settle for depict-
ing. Describing and depicting are skills: they are acquired through practice. But
writing and painting are re-­enacted each time; they are unlearned and begin with
each stroke. Writing, like looking, is not some kind of know-­how or expertise,
even if it requires a lot of work. It is a doing or a making that challenges the
knowledge in question at every instant, and it is a knowledge that in every instant
challenges the doing or the making. (2018a: 112)
Translated by Shane Lillis

ART WRITING

Andrzej Leśniak
Didi-­Huberman’s questioning of the foundations of art history as
a humanistic discipline (through critical theorising of anachronism,
image, symptom, visuality, etc.), has also influenced his writing and
ideas about the poetics of art writing. His aim is not, however, to break
with art history and to disregard the task of accumulation of knowledge,
 art writing 27

but to introduce into the epistemic practices the possibility of uncertainty

and/or ignorance. Thus, the experience of visuality (i.e. of what is not
fully subordinated to the order of knowledge and visibility) ought to be
transcribed in other ways than in the frame of the dominant discourses
of art history. According to Didi-­Huberman, the discipline of art history
ought to reflect upon its own practices of the construction of knowledge.
Since writing is one of the elements of the epistemic process, it should be
analysed as a condition of possibility of knowing.
Didi-­Huberman’s practice of art writing is rooted in the developments
of the French philosophy of images in the second half of the twentieth
century, especially in the works of Hubert Damisch and Louis Marin, who
developed a poststructuralist version of pictorial semiology. Although
Didi-­Huberman does not refer frequently to these two thinkers, he is
clearly indebted to their poetics of writing, as well as to the notion of ‘theo-
retical object’ (Marin, 1989), which denotes a singular, material object
conceived as a condition of possibility of theoretical reflection. Textual
fragmentation in some of his later writings is indicative of the influences
of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno; the works of the two thinkers
­are – ­together with the psychoanalytical theory of ­association – ­at the root
of Didi-­Huberman’s approach to interpreting as juxtaposing. More gener-
ally, Didi-­Huberman’s position is inscribed in the context of postmodern
developments on the theory and methodology of historical research,
especially Frank Ankersmit’s and Hayden White’s propositions about the
literary nature of historiography.
Didi-­Huberman assigns radical consequences to these assumptions;
from his point of view the work of historians is necessarily literary: ‘[t]he
historian is, in every sense of the word, only the fictor, which is to say the
modeler, the artisan, the author, the inventor of whatever past he offers us’
(CI, 2). Thus, the status of the knowledge they are able to provide ought
to be redefined, as it can only be constituted in the act of construction,
reconstruction or creation. The creative role of the one who tells the story
of the past is not to be underestimated.
The implications of this position are conspicuous in Didi-­Huberman’s
strategies of writing. He not only frequently appeals to the notion of
anachronism, which allows him to recognise the temporal heteroge-
neity of past objects experienced in the present, but he also juxtaposes
objects belonging to different temporalities (see temporality) to generate
unpredictable interpretative effects. His readings are always focused on
particular visual objects that are considered to be both starting points for
interpretative processes and conditions of possibility for theoretical reflec-
tion. Hence, writing is necessarily a response to the theoretical challenge
posed by the object itself.
28 a t l a s

Didi-­Huberman’s texts make recourse to particular images that are

chosen so as to emphasise their reflexive potential. Put differently, the
poetics of his writings underlines and exploits the theoretical fertility of
art and, more generally, of the realm of images. The chapters in Images in
Spite of All take as a starting point the analysis of the material qualities of
four photographs (see photography; Sonderkommando photographs)
in order to articulate a statement critiquing the popular assertion that
aligns the Holocaust with pure negativity and irrepresentability (ISA). In
Confronting Images the detailed interpretations of Johannes Vermeer’s The
Lacemaker (c. 1665) and Pieter Bruegel’s The Fall of Icarus (c. 1560) intro-
duce and exemplify Didi-­Huberman’s key conceptual and philosophical
distinction between the visible and the visual.
In his recent works Didi-­Huberman has transformed his writing even
more. Some of his texts are not only written in the first person, from a
subjective perspective, but also contain autobiographical motifs. They
do not so much offer arguments and precise conceptualisations as create
atmospheres. In Bark, photographs of Auschwitz-­Birkenau concentra-
tion camp taken by Didi-­Huberman are accompanied by a fragmentary
narrative on the possibility of remembering and acknowledging the past.
In turn, Aperçues (2018) is a series of fragments that do not constitute a
coherent discursive whole. In Chari Larsson’s words, ‘this eclectic col-
lection of intimate thoughts and memories, combined with research notes
and observations, self-­consciously draws attention to the traditions and
conventions that continue to determine art-­historical writing’ (Larsson,
2020: 167).

Works Cited
Larsson, C. (2020). Didi-Huberman and the Image. Manchester University
Press.
Marin, L. (1989). Opacité de la peinture: essais sur la représentation au
Quattrocento. Usher.

ATLAS

Maud Hagelstein
Atlas is both the name of the Titan who rose up against the gods and that
of the concrete solution to a central problem in the theory of the image.
In the exhibition in Madrid organised by Didi-­Huberman in 2010, Atlas,
comment remonter le monde? (Atlas, How to Carry the World on One’s Back?),
 atlas 29

the one condemned by Zeus to ‘carry the world on his shoulders’ was
invited by the art historian to give form to the task undertaken by those
who love images. What is to be done with images? How should they be
carried, and how can we let ourselves be carried away by them? How do
we take on the colossal visual material in our culture, deal with it, allow it
to continue to circulate? How do we make images speak, give meaning to
them, articulate them with words? Should we merely collect them, accu-
mulate them, keep in mind their raw and insistent memory, or sort them,
select them, find a new order for them? Obsessed with these questions,
Didi-­Huberman undertook an ­examination – ­a colossal examination in
itself, including more than 12,000 i­mages – o­ f the innovative operations
with which visual culture chooses to display itself. And atlas has become
the generic name for a series of strategies regarding the presentation of
visual documents. At the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, viewers of
the exhibition in 2011 were in this way able to discover multifaceted
atlases, which sought to map the real from objects as distinct from one
­another – ­and as ­troubling – ­as tidal waves (Susan Hiller), water towers
(Bernd and Hilla Becher), disasters (Goya), pieces of lava (Roni Horn) or
smoke trails (Etienne-­Jules Marey). Many organised collections of images
that play with the catastrophe. This exhibition challenged the viewer to
grasp the subversive logic at the origin of these sometimes incongruous
montages for these atlases caused both resemblances and contrasts to
swarm. In his works, Didi-­Huberman patiently describes the heuristics of
montage at work in those who handle and manipulate images. Whether it
is Warburg, whose presence is decisive of course, or Brecht, Blossfeldt,
Marey, Giacometti or Penone, Didi-­Huberman makes room for those
who address, in their work, the issue of the presentation of images and
their placing in a series.
Re-­examined in this way, the atlas becomes a ‘counter-­iconological’
apparatus, in the sense of opposition as well as proximity, for it allows us
to rethink the strictly interpretative function of reading in its complicity
with the order of reasons (see iconology). The atlas introduces mistrust
into our sometimes abstract relations to knowledge. By discarding the
idea of a reasoned decoding, by blocking the impression of too great a leg-
ibility, Didi-­Huberman’s work gives the atlas its full heuristic meaning:
images are to be grasped, assembled and placed in montage, arranged,
moved around and given a new frame, etc. As the fruit of such inventive
handling and manipulation, the creative atlas becomes political, aiming
to transform the narrations to which images are linked, and to produce
new knowledge. The atlas makes it possible to unravel the ideological
effects inherent in the iconosphere and to free itself from them. It has
nothing, therefore, to do with the finalising and smoothing operation that
30 a t l a s

r­edistributes ­scattered elements according to a unique pre-­established

logic. In Farocki’s work, for example, the viewer feels ‘quite obstructed
by a montage that, on the contrary, stopped the story, exposed and showed
it, diffracted it, dialectised it into crystals that responded to one other or
contradicted one another on the spot without any solution, without syn-
thesis, and without pacification’ (Didi-­Huberman, 2010c: 93). The atlas
takes us far away from the classic iconological operation that fluidises,
induces and allows narration.
Before mantling our shoulders with the weight of the world, we begin
by cutting into the world, by dismantling it, in order to invent movements
and an alternative circulation of meaning. This allows to perceive other
connections, to create passages and to cross borders. It is the operation of
démontage – dismantling or disassembling: ‘everything is broken so that
the space between things can ­appear – ­their shared base, the unperceived
relationship that connects them in spite of all, whether it be a relationship
of distance, of inversion, of cruelty, or of non-­sense’ (EH, 70). Having
cut the images (in the broad sense of detailing, isolating, framing, etc.),
having broken their ideological chains, the creators of atlases are free to
reassemble the material according to a different logic. Here dislocation
is inseparable from recomposition; the material is modified. With one of
the atlas’s plates, we can offer multiple interpretations, as is the case with
Mnemosyne:

Looking at the plates of the Mnemosyne Atlas, it is impossible to get a clear sense
of how Warburg intended us to look at them, or of the exact meaning he attrib-
uted to the relationships among the neighboring images. The more one looks, the
denser and more intricated the relationships begin to appear. At the same time,
the images appear to take off in several directions, to stream out everywhere like
fireworks. Even the saturated ‘packets of images’ seem like sprays of light about to
explode. It thus appears that the Mnemosyne Atlas is less the illustration of a pre-
existing interpretation of the transmission of images than a visual matrix meant to
increase the possible levels of interpretation. (SI, 312)

As the formal reconfiguration of a world returned firstly to its own disor-

der, montage leads its creator (and its viewer, ideally) to take a position.
Warburg, Brecht and Benjamin sought to present a very complex view of
history in their works. Obtained by means of disassembling/reassembling
in a montage (démontage/remontage) their atlases are as temporal as they
are geographic:

Montage is valuable only when it doesn’t hasten to conclude or to close: it is valu-

able when it opens up our apprehension of history and makes it more complex,
 aura 31

not when it falsely schematizes [. . .] The image is neither nothing, nor one, nor all,
precisely because it offers multiple singularities always susceptible to differences.
(ISA, 121)

Thus the constitution of an atlas becomes, for the viewers themselves, a

­call – ­or even an ­obligation – ­to situate themselves somewhere, to take a
position. The atlas becomes the theatre for an engagement (something
Brecht would not have denied). It tends to bring about a movement. Not
only the movement of the eyes that circulate between the elements assem-
bled, but the movement of the mind too that creates connections and that
rids itself of unequivocal readings of historical reality.
Translated by Shane Lillis

AURA

Adina Balint
Didi-­Huberman has conceptualised the notion of the ‘aura’ after Walter
Benjamin’s elusive and well-­known rendering of the term, which first
appeared in his Little History of Photography (2005 [1931]), and was
further explored in his ‘Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility’ (2002 [1936]). The Latin dictionary defines ‘aura’ as ‘air,
heaven, breeze, breath, wind’, and as ‘gleam, odor or stench and vapor’
(Olivetti Latin–English Online Dictionary). The first meanings, particu-
larly ‘wind’ and ‘breath’, resonate with the philosophical way in which
Benjamin reflects on the aura of nature (2002 [1936]: 105). In his essay
on Baudelaire, Benjamin notes that the aura is connected to ‘the breath
of prehistory’ (2003 [1940]: 336), meaning that it enables the beholder
to recollect what has been forgotten. If the beholder is an actor in this
experience, then the aura functions in a manner akin to le souffleur, ‘the
prompter’. Benjamin connects both experience (Erfahrung) and involun-
tary recollection with auratic perception as the organ of fulfilling experi-
ence: such perception builds experience from a past that can be neither
exhausted in subsequent experience nor relinquished by a voluntary act
of will. The reference to ‘odor’ helps associate Benjamin’s linkage of the
aura to Proust’s mémoire involontaire, which refers to the springing-­up
of memory triggered by sensory experiences. Didi-­Huberman explores
this definition in ‘The Supposition of the Aura’ (SA, 3–18). In modern
English, aura appears as ‘energy’, ‘a luminous radiation’ (echoing ‘light’),
and most commonly, ‘a special quality or feeling that seems to come from
a person, place or thing’ (Merriam–Webster Dictionary). Benjamin writes
32 a u r a

that ‘[w]hat is lost in the withering of semblance and the decay of the aura
in the works of art is matched by a huge gain in the scope of play [Spiel-
Raum]’ (2002 [1936]: 127), and Didi-­Huberman recuperates precisely this
notion of play in his analysis of secular aura (SA, 3; see also Smith, 2018:
118). Situating his reflections on aura beyond the religious discourse, he
proposes, first, to think aura not as a ‘fact’, but as memory event, and,
next, to consider aura as non-­dogmatically linked to meaning (cf. Didi-­
Huberman, 1992b).
Building upon the secular term ‘cult’ as in cultural phenomenon,
­Didi-­Huberman uses the imaginative world of child’s play as a produc-
tive illustration of the secular aura in terms of the oscillation of appear-
ance and disappearance and as a figure of intermittence (for instance,
in Survival of the Fireflies, he describes phasmids as ‘quiet, passing,
intermittent wonder’, invoking their quality of irregular and interstitial
signalling as a metaphor of political hope and resistance, SF, 1, 18–22).
Regarding child’s play, Didi-­Huberman underlines: ‘[t]he apparition
is [. . .] not the prerogative of ­belief – ­it is because of this belief that
the man who only acknowledges what is strictly visible [l’homme du
visible] encloses himself in tautology. Distance is not the prerogative
of the divine, as we hear all too often’ (1992b: 114). In his analysis of
the works of James Turrell, which display both singular absences and
the secular aura of child’s play, Didi-­Huberman identifies the notion
of distance as essential for the understanding of aura. What Didi-­
Huberman calls a ‘double contradictory distance’ (MWC, 19) relates
to aura in the sense of the proximity-­distance between what appears at
the core of the image as a returning past and what emerges in the very
present, and the paradoxical impression of a proximity which seems to
be the most distant, anachronistic or even archaic. But in proximity-­
distance, it would not be possible simply to deviate from something
that touches us, awakens us, alters us and looks at us: ‘[w]e can only say
tautologically I see what I see if we refuse the image the power to impose
its visuality as an opening, a l­oss – ­even if ­momentary – ­effected in the
space of our cognitive certainty about it. And exactly from there the
image becomes capable of looking at us’ (Didi-­Huberman, 1992b: 76). In
this process, the aura encompasses both a process of symbolization and
the work of memory.

Works Cited
Benjamin, W. (2002 [1936]). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’, trans. E. Jephcott and
H. Eiland, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938,
 bark 33

ed. H. Eiland and M. W. Jennings, 101–33. The Belknap Press of

Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, W. (2003 [1940]). ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. H. Eiland and
M. W. Jennings, 313–54. The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press.
Benjamin, W. (2005 [1931]). ‘Little History of Photography’, trans.
R. Livingstone, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2,
1931–1934, ed. M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith, 507–30. The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Merriam–Webster Online Dictionary, https://www.merriam-­webster​
.com.
Olivetti Latin–English Online Dictionary, https://www.online-­latin-­dic​
tionary.com.
Smith, L. K. (2018). ‘Re-­Imagining the “Loss of Place”: Georges Didi-­
Huberman and the Aura after Benjamin’, Angelaki, 23(4): 113–32.

B
BARK

Rys, Michiel
Bark is far more than merely the title of a book first published in
2011 (Écorces) that collects Didi-­ Huberman’s personal photographs
and impressions after a visit to the concentration camp of Auschwitz-­
Birkenau. Already on the first pages, it becomes clear that bark is a
complex, multilayered metaphor that Didi-­Huberman uses to connect
some fundamental aspects and themes recurrent throughout his works
on the semiotics, materiality and readability of history. Birch bark in
particular bears connotations related to (ancient) practices of writing and
reading, as well as to the name ‘Birkenau’ itself, which in German refers
to the trees typically found in the camp’s natural surroundings. As such,
in Bark birch trees acquire the status of arboreal witnesses to the atrocities
that took place in the camp. Didi-­Huberman is especially attentive to what
he calls ‘the bark of history’ (B, 111) as a form of signification. He uses this
phrase to describe how the cracked concrete floors of the camp’s cremato-
rium V imbue the present moment with the past. In other words, bark is
a metaphor by which Didi-­Huberman draws attention to the importance
34 b a r k

of interrogating how the entanglements of different ‘layers of time’ inform

our image of the past (B, 112–13).
With this set of objectives on the horizon, Didi-­Huberman questions
and distinguishes between the different temporal layers of various mate-
rial signs in and around the site of the concentration camp. For example,
Didi-­Huberman is alarmed by the fact that the barbed wire is not the same
colour everywhere. This visual sign ‘indicates’ that part of it has recently
been renewed, which raises fundamental questions about (in-)authentic-
ity and (in-)visibility. His awareness of the tension between reality and
artificiality (as well as of the radically disjointed temporalities) urges
Didi-­Huberman to question ‘his own acts of looking’ (B, 41). Photography
is also informed by his own (anxious) reactions to the immediate circum-
stances of his visit, a phenomenological position he captures by taking
photos ‘without looking’ (B, 53).
A critical gaze such as Didi-­Huberman’s, attentive to (and deeply
affected by) such seemingly unimportant details, is able to reveal that
‘Auschwitz as Lager, this place of barbarism, has doubtless been trans-
formed into a place of culture, Auschwitz as “State Museum”’ (B, 23).
Each of these institutional and discursive modalities bears its own tem-
poral markers. Auschwitz has become the object of musealisation, which
is the result of a series of decisions and acts that impact how history
‘acquires form and visibility’ in the present (B, 24). In contrast, what
Didi-­Huberman calls an ‘archaeologic gaze’ (a way of looking that is
cognisant of anachronistic survivals of forms) is able to move outside the
arranged frame of musealisation to find the remains of that Auschwitz,
which has not been transformed into a ‘fictitious place devoted to
Auschwitz’s memory’ (B, 36). This also means ‘bestowing the role of a
witness to the vegetative life of trees and flowers’, considering the possibil-
ity of non-­human witnessing and testimony (Gustafsson, 2019: 228; see
also Zolkos, 2021). Such a reframing enables him ‘to elicit traces of their
history in order to decipher them as symptoms, in the Freudian sense, as
memory symbols’ (Weigel, 2018: 44). These concerns inscribe Bark in
Didi-­Huberman’s broader philosophical and aesthetic project, devoted to
re-­examining the deliberate framing of history, in order to find and make
legible traces of another, repressed truth. While this truth necessarily
remains partial, consisting of multiple not fully accomplished testimonies
(cf. Balint-­Babos, 2014), it helps to imagine what is unimaginable, and
conceive what is inconceivable, as images that appear in spite of all.
 bataille, georges  35

Works Cited
Balint-­
Babos, A. (2014). ‘Imaginer, monter: la mémoire inachevée
d’Auschwitz selon Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Voix Plurielles, 11(2):
20–31.
Gustafsson, H. (2019). Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography.
Palgrave Macmillan.
Weigel, S. (2018 [2015]). ‘The Readability of Images (and) of History:
Laudatio on the Occasion of the Awarding of the Adorno Prize (2015)
to Georges Didi-­Huberman’, trans. M. Rys and J. Vanvelk, Angelaki,
23(4): 42–6.
Zolkos, M. (2021). ‘Skulls, Tree Bark, Fossils. Memory and Materiality
in Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Transvaluation of Surface’, Qui Parle,
30(2): 249–91.

BATAILLE, GEORGES

Tomasz Swoboda
Prominent already in the early stages of Didi-­Huberman’s theoretical and
historical reflection, the work of Georges Bataille constitutes, alongside
that of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, one of Didi-­Huberman’s
nearly constant references. At the same time, it has been one of his novel
and far-­reaching rediscoveries. While Bataille’s writings were one of the
major inspirations for both structuralists and poststructuralists, Didi-­
Huberman’s approach has been far more radical and has gone well beyond
their conceptual framework: through his reinterpretations of Bataille’s
work, Didi-­Huberman has shown Bataille to be a central figure in the
aesthetics of modernity, and a figure whose contribution has profoundly
shaped contemporary sensibilities.
In Didi-­Huberman’s works from the 1980s, the presence of Bataille
is rather discreet, but references to his texts testify to Didi-­Huberman’s
growing interest in his work. These include the essay on the mask and on
the practice of joy in the face of death in Invention of Hysteria (IH, 263–4);
the discussion of Bataille’s articles published in the journal Documents
and the study on Manet in La Peinture incarnée (1985); the epigraph in
Confronting Images taken from Inner Experience; as well as references to
Documents in the work devoted to Giacometti (CF, 169–76).
If those references do not yet make Bataille the focal point of Didi-­
Huberman’s reflections, they nonetheless foreshadow the comprehensive
study of the aesthetics of the journal directed by Bataille, Documents.
36 bataille, georges 

The journal only survived for two years (1929–30) and only had fifteen
issues in total; it was, to use the words of Jean Jamin, ‘a laboratory, a
genesis, a melting pot, a rebellion, a “madness”, in short, an avant-­garde’
(1999: 262). It is its motley character of an illustrated ­magazine – ­richly
illustrated with photographs by Jacques-­André Boiffard, Eli Lotar and
Jean Painlevé, and with all kinds of other photographic prints and repro-
ductions of paintings, encapsulated by its subtitle Archaeology Fine Arts
Ethnography Varieties (from the fourth number onwards Archaeology
Fine Arts Ethnography Miscellanies) – that must have attracted Didi-­
Huberman’s attention in his search for other visions of modernity. He
found in Documents numismatic and ethnographic studies from pre-
historic, ancient and contemporary art, from cave painting to works by
Arp, Braque, de Chirico, Dalí, Giacometti, Gris, Léger, Lipchitz, Miró,
including those of Delacroix or Antoine Caron, as well as articles on
jazz and on all kinds of artefacts of material culture. As indicated in an
advertising text disseminated at its launch, the journal was intended to
be a space where ‘the most irritating works of art’ were placed alongside
‘the most disturbing facts, those whose consequences are not yet defined’
(Leiris, 1963: 689), with a slight preference for the heterogeneous and the
monstrous.
Accordingly, during the two years of its existence, the review, to use
the words of Jean-­François Fourny, did ‘not cease hesitating between
an academicism and an academic tone that are all in all fairly flat, and an
outburst that is sometimes filthy in the manner of Bataille’ (1988: 45). And
it is, in a way, both despite this hesitation and thanks to it that Documents
became part of the intellectual history of the twentith century. As Liliane
Meffre summarises it, these were ‘two years of adventure, fifteen issues,
an extraordinary team, heterogeneous and “impossible”, forg[ing] a sort
of monument to the spirit of modern times, often unusual and irreverent,
carrying a new aesthetic and wanting like ethnography to be based on
documents’ (2002: 232).
In an introductory note to La Ressemblance informe, Didi-­Huberman
explains that his book started out as a conference paper that was subse-
quently expanded and refined in a lecture and a series of seminars, all
of which were about a topic that was itself initially considered in terms
of ‘a larger-­scale research project devoted to the notion of resemblance’
(1995a: 6). One of the key concepts underlying resemblance in the work on
Bataille and Documents is montage. As Chari Larsson observes,

Didi-­Huberman points to the montage effect of the curious juxtapositions Bataille

created between images and text. Didi-­Huberman’s close reading of the physi-
cal design and layout of the pages in Documents brings the journal into dialogue
 bataille, georges  37

with other roughly contemporaneous avant-­garde montage projects, Warburg’s

Mnemosyne Atlas and Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. (2020: 153)

Appealing to a theoretical disassembly and a figurative montage, Bataille

set images in motion to reveal their harrowing force, capable of shaking all
stability and all system. This disjunctive rupture in Bataille always begins
with an access and a contact, which transgress the taboo of touch and open
the prospect of knowledge by contact. This is only one of the ­processes –
­alongside those of derision, disproportion, excess or c­ rushing – ­by means
of which Bataille dismantles traditional dialectics. His own dialectic is
not that ‘of the Hegelian verb aufheben, but of the more formidable and
tense v­ erb – ­already Nietzschean, no doubt – zerfallen: to decompose’
(Didi-­Huberman, 1995a: 297). It is a ‘dialectic of attraction and conflict’, a
‘symptomatic’ dialectic, or even ‘accidental’ and ‘without synthesis’ (1995a:
304, 337, 352). Superimposing (somewhat analogously to Adorno) the
reading of Freud on to that of Hegel, Bataille contributes to a ‘return of
the repressed in the difficult thought of the image’ (1995a: 383).
To develop his explanation of Bataille’s anti-­system, Didi-­Huberman
exploits the notion of the formless, proposed by Bataille in a short text
published in Documents (1985: 31). Underlining, after Rosalind Krauss
(1990), that the Bataillean formless is not the opposite of the form,
Didi-­Huberman sees in it, above all, ‘transgressive resemblances’ or
‘resemblances by excess’, in which the form is ‘dialectically denied’ (1995a:
135). Indeed, form is for Bataille inherently accidental, as he pays close
attention to the decomposition of forms, as well as to their ‘anti-­statism
and anti-­substantialism’ (1995a: 201). Such an attitude leads, according
to Didi-­Huberman, to the ‘rejection of the classic distinction between matter
and form’ (1995a: 211), and to a kind of ‘formal cruelty’, present on almost
every page of the journal. This explains the very title of Didi-­Huberman’s
work La Ressemblance informe (formless, or amorphous, resemblance):

it certainly gives form and creates links in knowledge; but it also knows how to
tear contact, break ties and build itself in the very decomposition of the elements
it uses; by means of which it becomes that paradoxical formless resemblance that
Bataille never ceased to summon and produce, in the infernal ­game – ­in the essen-
tial ­dialectic – ­of the similar and the dissimilar. (1995a: 381–3)

Since the reflections developed in La Ressemblance informe, the thought

of Bataille has been reflected through Didi-­Huberman’s various writings.
Whether in the notion of ‘inner experience’ in the work of Simon Hantaï
(1998b) or in the discussion of Botticelli’s torn body of Venus (1999a),
Bataille’s imprint on Didi-­ Huberman’s thought is taken to resonate,
38 b e n j a m i n , w a l t e r

anachronistically, with different moments in the history of art. Didi-­

Huberman is also drawn to Bataille’s thinking about the limit in his reflec-
tions on the disaster of Hiroshima (2001b), and with the ways in which
Bataille insists on recognising Auschwitz as an event located irreducibly
within human possibilities, rather than as an expression of inhumanity
(ISA). Finally, Didi-­Huberman returns to Bataille as the object of his
reflection, addressing what he calls his ‘Spanish tropism’ (DD, 29). It is
Bataille’s link with the duende and with the cante jondo that opens a new
perspective in the analysis of the ‘thinker who went the furthest in con-
tradictions’ (Didi-­Huberman, 2006a: 72) that allows Didi-­Huberman to
rethink the question of the sovereignty of art.

Works Cited
Bataille, G. (1985). ‘Formless’, in G. Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings 1927–1939, 31. University of Minnesota Press.
Fourny, J.-F. (1988). Introduction à la lecture de Georges Bataille. Peter
Lang.
Jamin, J. (1999). ‘Documents revue: la part maudite de l’ethnographie’,
L’Homme. Revue française d’anthropologie, 151: 257–66.
Krauss, R. (1990). Le photographique: pour une théorie des écarts. Macula.
Larsson, C. (2020). Didi-Huberman and the Image. Manchester University
Press.
Leiris, M. (1963). ‘De Bataille l’impossible à l’impossible’, Documents.
Critique, 195–96: 685–93.
Meffre, L. (2002). Carl Einstein 1885–1940. Itinéraires d’une pensée moderne.
Presses de l’Université de Paris-­Sorbonne.

BENJAMIN, WALTER

Miguel Mesquita Duarte

Walter Benjamin figures prominently in Didi-­Huberman’s reflections on
three key domains: the epistemology of history; the dialectical image as a
new methodology of historical interpretation; and the oppression of the
collective subject in political history.
Benjamin’s work explores a new conception of historiography that
breaks with predominant ideas of homogeneous and linear time, offer-
ing an image-­ based interpretation of the rhythms, counter-­ rhythms,
symptoms and survivals of history (Didi-­Huberman, 2000a: 92–3).
The complexity of the image is apprehended by Benjamin in terms of the
 benjamin, walter 39

dialectical relationship between the what-­has-­been and the now, involving

a specific temporality that transforms chronological order. In a passage
from the Arcades Project, frequently cited by Didi-­Huberman, Benjamin
writes:

It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its
light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together
in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics
at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal,
the relation of what-­has-­been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but
figural <bildlich>. (1999a [1982]: 462)

Challenging the axiomatic view of historical time as a continuous and pro-

gressive development of events, Benjamin contends that the interpretation
of the past depends on the immanent actuality of unsuspected constella-
tions of meanings. Historiography originates in this ‘now of recognisabil-
ity’ (Benjamin 1969 [1942]: 463), involving a present conceived of not as
a separated moment from the past, but as a critical moment that opens up
time to a process of becoming and of redemptive (re-)discovery (SF, 63;
Didi-­Huberman, 2000a: 30, 93, 116–17).
Thus, the notion of origin does not refer to a stable source that would
allow ‘knowing how things really happened’ (TRS, 72). It rather refers to
an open-­ended practice that dialecticises the processes of becoming and
disappearing, decline and restoration (see dialectic). Benjamin’s char-
acterisation of the origin as a ‘whirlpool in the river of becoming [that]
pulls the emerging matter into its own rhythm’ encompasses the ‘dynamic
two-­way flow of a historicity’ that must be acknowledged in its ambiguity
and multiplicity (SA, 4).
Benjamin’s Copernican turn of history consists, as Didi-­Huberman
puts it, in a movement of transformation that goes from the understand-
ing of the past as a factual existence, to a conception of the past as a fact of
memory (2000a; SA, 7). This new orientation involves an archaeological
knowledge of two types: 1) a psychic archaeology, related to the survival
of symptomatic appearances that become legible in a belated t­ime –
­incorporating, as in Freud, the principle of afterwardsness, or après-coup;
2) a material archaeology, put to use by Benjamin in the Arcades Project,
encompassing the activity of accumulating fragments of historical experi-
ence dismissed as insignificant or unassimilable (Didi-­Huberman, 2000a:
102–8; TRS, 72).
Benjamin’s analysis of the cultural conditions of nineteenth-­century
Paris in the Arcades Project reveals, in addition, that the archaeological
perspective of history is also profoundly political. The detritus of history
40 b e n j a m i n , w a l t e r

(second-­rate artefacts, rusty furnishings, disjointed mannequins in shop

windows and decayed commodities excluded from the cycles of economic
trade) should be recognised and represented, by way of a process of dialec-
tical reversal, as delusional expressions of collective desires and expecta-
tions no longer incorporated into the triumphant narrative of capitalism.
The ideology of progress and the hegemonic imperatives of high capital-
ism, encoded in the fetish representations of fashion, advertising and
architecture, as well as in the modern technologies of collective distraction
and amusement, are now revealed as a history of compulsive repetition,
violence and denial (Pensky, 2004: 187–8).
Benjamin uses a Marxist-­inspired analysis of modern culture, which,
nonetheless, instead of relying on the more or less abstract schemes
of the structuralist approach (Didi-­Huberman, 2000a: 107), advances
towards a new phenomenological principle of montage, characterised
by the imaginative juxtaposition of apparently unrelated materials (see
imagination). Influenced by the aesthetic of Eisenstein’s montage, the
surrealist montages in Bataille’s Documents and Proust’s literary avant-­
garde, Benjamin introduces, according to Didi-­Huberman, the principle
of a montage-­knowledge into the practice of critical historiography (AH,
119). Under the gaze of the materialist historian, the fragments of culture
(places, styles, commodities and events) are torn away from their original
contexts and reassembled in a tense constellation of meanings and tempo-
ralities, endowed with a politically shocking force.
For Didi-­Huberman, this constellation functions as an apparatus of
reading that orients a new interpretation of historical materials (2011b: 15;
AH, 17). The legibility of the past is now formed in a network of corre-
spondences and analogies that displace both the argumentative model and
the intention of a theorising subject. Thus, the past appears in the form of
an image, apprehended not in the usual sense of a visual illustration, but
as bildlich (Didi-­Huberman, 2010b: 14), that is, a metonymical and heu-
ristic apparatus whose principles are also identified by Didi-­Huberman in
Brecht’s War Primer and Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (see atlas).
In its capacity to produce ‘crystals of historical readability’ (Didi-­
Huberman. 2011b: 15) that provide an insight into the relationship
between the mythical history of capitalism and the subjugation of col-
lectivities, the dialectical image involves a temporal arrest, an interrup-
tion of the existing order. This interruption of the act of thought and
the subsequent emergence of constellations that disrupt the harmonious
visions of history are to be understood as ‘a revolutionary chance in the
fight for the oppressed past’ (Benjamin, 1969 [1942]: 263). This reflects,
as Didi-­Huberman points out (SF, 47), a broader political demand for ‘the
struggle against fascism’ (Benjamin, 1969 [1942]: 257). The time of the
 benjamin, walter 41

dialectical image is for Benjamin a messianic time, the time of redemption,

and only the materialist historian would have ‘the gift of fanning the spark
of hope in the past’ (Benjamin, 1969 [1942]: 255).
In the context of the rise of Nazism, Benjamin identified a decline of
human experience that was most immediately manifested in widespread
poverty and destitution (Benjamin, 1999b [1933]: 731–2). As Didi-­
Huberman reads it, Benjamin’s interest in the techniques of photography
(see photograph) is less related to the aesthetic implications of the aura
than to the media’s ability to create assemblages of perception and witness
fragments of misery and chaotic reality, sinisterly obfuscated by the myth-
ical luminosity of celebrities and dictators (AH, 115) (see witnessing).
The proliferation of images, used as tools of marketing and propaganda
in our contemporary world, assumes a similar function of hegemonic
power and subjugation of peoples. However, Didi-­Huberman is critical
of authors such as Agamben and Debord, for whom the decline of the
image and experience is interpreted in terms of an irreparable process (SF,
53). He turns to Benjamin’s ‘Experience and Poverty’, ‘The Storyteller’
and ‘Paralipomena’ to argue that the decline of the image and the use-­
value accorded to it involves the dialectical persistence of an ‘image space’
(Benjamin, 2006 [1940]: 404), a space of critical thought that allows us to
make a new start from the residues of history (AH, 116). For in its role
as a ‘temporal operator of survivals’, the image space is also a ‘political
operator of protest’, a counterforce of resistance and emancipation that
breaks through, in spite of all, the horizons of totalitarian and hegemonic
constructions (SF, 62, 64–5).

Works Cited
Benjamin, W. (1969 [1942]). ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,
trans. H. Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt,
253–64. Schocken Books.
Benjamin, W. (1999a [1982]). The Arcades Project. The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1999b [1933]). ‘Experience and Poverty’, in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1931–1934, ed. M. W. Jennings,
H. Eiland and G. Smith, 731–6. The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
Benjamin, W. (2006 [1940]). ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept
of History”’, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott and H. Eiland, in Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. H. Eiland and
M. W. Jennings, 401–11. The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press.
42 brecht, bertolt 

Pensky, M. (2004). ‘Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images’,

in D. S. Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin,
177–98. Cambridge University Press.

BRECHT, BERTOLT

Jonathan W. Marshall
Theatre maker and author Bertolt Brecht appears in Didi-­Huberman’s
work alongside Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg in an exem-
plary trio of theorist-­practitioners of montage. Didi-­Huberman’s most
detailed discussion is found in The Eye of History: When Images Take a
Position (EH; see also MM). Didi-­Huberman’s analysis focuses on the
photobook which Brecht published in 1955 with Ruth Berlau, Kriegsfibel
(in English translation as War Primer [2017]). Didi-­Huberman’s analysis
is ostensibly focused on images and the disturbances which Brecht’s juxta-
positions produce; what Brecht calls the ‘jumps’ and ‘justifications’ which
arise in the face of ‘the incongruous, the discontinuity of the ongoing
process[es]’ alluded to by the images (EH, 89). Didi-­Huberman’s atten-
tion to Brecht’s relatively obscure photomedial work demonstrates his
concern with the performative mise en scène of the image, which endows
otherwise flat, static representations with spatial, temporal and gestural
characteristics: ‘seeing and being in time are inseparable’ and hence there
is no clear ‘separation between the “arts of time” and the “arts of space”
(from which pictorial, sculptural and photographic images proceed)’ (EH,
xv). It is the spatio-­temporal nature of Brecht’s w­ ork – ­what Brecht calls
the ‘art of historicization’ (EH, 58) – which provides the War Primer with
its political charge (Marshall, 2017). Didi-­Huberman’s attention to Brecht
also reflects the dramaturg’s shared interest, along with that of Warburg,
in physical gesture. Brechtian acting demands a ‘lyricism’ of conception
and delivery, in which the text is not ‘rhymed harmoniously but rather
[. . .] intensely rhythmed [. . .] [and] that the rhythm itself be “shifting,
syncopated, gestic”’ (EH, 174).
The War Primer grew out of Brecht’s initially unpublished work
journals, Arbeitsjournal (1993), compiled as he moved across Europe and
the US while in exile from Nazi Germany (1938–55). Brecht collected
photographs from magazines and pasted them next to each other, adding
notes and text. For the War Primer, Brecht reorganised these composi-
tions, with the caption from the original publication set against Brecht’s
poetic epigrams. Each page consists of three parts: the often ideologically
loaded caption from the original, Brecht’s own texts alluding to the mate-
 brecht, bertolt  43

rial conditions and human suffering implicated in the image, as well as the
now d ­ issociated – ­or as Brecht would have it, ‘defamiliarised’ – illustration
itself (while the translation of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt is contested,
Didi-­Huberman sees it as interchangeable with the Russian Formalist
phrase ostranenie, or ‘distanciation’). In Journals images ‘speak to each
other’ from across the same page, while in the War Primer relationships
develop from page to page.
Didi-­Huberman argues that Brecht’s status as an exile positioned his
politics close to that of two other émigrés, Benjamin and Warburg. Didi-­
Huberman distinguishes between the more multivalent and ambiguous
act of ‘taking position’, as part of the necessary response to industrialised
warfare and fascism, and ‘taking sides’, in the sense of giving unequivocal
support to one side in the conflict (which Brecht would do as director of
East Germany’s Berliner Ensemble, EH, 99–117). For Didi-­Huberman
the peripatetic exile is not in a position of taking sides, which situates
Brecht the émigré close to Benjamin, Warburg, John Heartfield, Friedrich
Nietzsche and even Georges Bataille.
Didi-­Huberman’s interest in Brecht grew out of the art historian’s study
of the photographs taken by Sonderkommandos, and the iconography of
violence and suffering (EH, xxiii–xxv, 166–70). Didi-­Huberman insists
that to know one must first imagine, yet at the same time recognise that no
single view or image can represent the totality of experience or knowledge
(ISA, 3, 19–34, 58–65). He cites Brecht’s ‘Exercices pour comédiens’:

The dislocation of the world: that is the subject of art [. . .] [W]ithout disorder,
there would be no art, nor [. . .] could be one; we know of no world that is not
disorder [. . .] [Theatre and art] speak [. . .] of wars and whenever art makes a
treaty with the world, it is always signed with a world at war. (AA, 158; translation
modified)

Didi-­Huberman makes a case for art as locked into a conflicted dialectic

with suffering, violence and oppression: ‘[t]here is [. . .] no form that is
not [. . .] [a] response to a war or [. . .] to historical pathos’, which links
Warburg’s and Brecht’s works with ‘Benjamin, who wrote of “history
as the history of universal suffering (Geschichte als Leidensgeschichte der
Welt)”’ (AA, 158–9; translation modified). The role of art becomes to chal-
lenge a deceptive and oppressive ‘harmony’ or sense of completeness by
presenting the true, ‘dislocated’ nature of a ruinous, scarred and conflicted
world. The contradictory fragments assembled by Brecht are exemplars
of how one might visualise these dislocations of the twentieth century,
without contributing to them by making a ‘treaty with [. . .] a world at war’
(quoted in AA, 158).
44 brecht, bertolt 

Brecht’s compositions and their reception are structured through a

number of stages which Didi-­Huberman sees as crucial to montage. There
is ‘an initial act of dismantling (dé-­montage)’, followed by ‘reassembling
(re-­montage)’, which brings sampled objects ‘together from a geographi-
cal distance and also “outside of the time” of their own chronology’ (EH,
87–8). Didi-­Huberman gives the example from the Arbeitsjournal of a
photograph of Pope Pius XII (who reached an agreement with the Axis
powers) making a gesture of benediction, to the right of which is pasted
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel making a gesture across a table of maps,
and an image of what the original caption describes as a ‘Nazi Abattoir’, or
an array of corpses being inspected by Ukrainian Jews (EH, 74; Marshall,
2017: 205–7; Shneer, 2010: 205–32). After placing these photographs
together,

we can no longer say [. . .] that [they] have nothing to do with each other [. . .]
[I]n the midst of such dispersion, human gestures look at one a­ nother – ­confront
one another, respond to one ­another – ­whether over an altar, a military map, or an
open mass grave in the countryside. (EH, 71)

By making a new tableau, Brecht ‘destroyed the linearity of the plot’

within which the images were originally cast and produced a new scene of
potential relations (EH, 75). This disjointed modality echoes the episodic
nature of Brecht’s Epic Theatre, or as Benjamin observes, ‘the interrupt-
ing of action is one of the principal concerns of epic theatre’ (quoted in
EH, 87). The flow of time is suspended (‘delayed’), offering ‘an image of
time that explodes the narrative of history and the arrangement of things’
(EH, 87, 117).
Didi-­Huberman relates these interruptions in the chronology of the
image to Brecht’s staging of Mother Courage, where the protagonist,
hearing of the execution of her son, enacts a series of discontinuous move-
ments which culminate in a silent scream. The pose of the performer
becomes ‘immobile [. . .] exactly like a photographed cry or the cry of a
statue’ such as that on the face of the Uffizi’s statue of Niobe protecting
her children (EH, 158; Marshall, 2017: 200–5). The montages offered
by Brecht’s theatrical and photomedial work represent an instance of
what Benjamin calls ‘dialectics at a standstill’, or in Warburg’s terms an
‘iconology of intervals’ (EH, 70). These ‘intervals’ within Epic Theatre
and the War Primer are ‘reserved for the audience’s critical judgement’
(EH, 117). The space of the page, the cut edge and the gap between it and
the next image or fragment of text are transformed into what Warburg
called a ‘thought space [Denkraum]’ through which iconological, political,
ethical and historical relations might be considered (AA, 158). Brecht
 brecht, bertolt  45

describes such work as ‘putting a message in a bottle’ (EH, 153), which is

an anachronistic cutting into and projection outward of historical time; a
scission followed by a bringing forward of the past to cast it into the future.
Montage produces an impure, compound chronology.
In this intervallic approach to theatre and the image there are historio-
graphic survivals: Mother Courage is styled after a figure who appears
in Pieter Bruegel’s painting Dulle Griet (1562), the protagonist of Galileo
is modelled in part on the character of Everyman from medieval morality
plays, while the distancing effects of Brechtian acting borrowed from early
twentieth-­century Beijing opera (EH, 127–9, 147; Marshall, 2017: 192–6).
These survivals are combined with novel configurations:

the image obtained is historicized – according to Brecht’s own v­ ocabulary – o­ nly

by introducing ‘detachments’ or hiatuses [. . .] [in] the exposition of conflicts
and of montages of time that affect dramatic action. It is then that each gesture
becomes the anachronistic montage of a present capable of exposing both its past
and its future. (EH, 130)

Brechtian montage sets in play the ‘aporias’, ‘disorders’ and dislocations

of pathetic suffering and violence (EH, 101). Didi-­Huberman thereby
reclaims Brecht for a poetic, flexible and yet still critical approach to the
history of war, pathos and iconography to which Didi-­Huberman sees
himself as heir.

Works Cited
Brecht, B. (1993). Journals, ed. and trans. J. Willett and Ralph Manheim.
Methuen.
Brecht, B. (2017). War Primer, ed. and trans. J. Willett. Verso.
Marshall, J. W. (2017). ‘A Dramaturgy of Montage and Dislocation:
Brecht, Warburg, Didi-­ Huberman and the Pathosformel’, in Emer
O’Toole et al. (eds), Translation, Adaptation, and Dramaturgy: Ethics,
187–209. Brill.
Shneer, D. (2010). Through Soviet Jewish Eyes. Rutgers University Press.
46 charcot, jean-martin 

C
CHARCOT, JEAN-MARTIN

Tomasz Swoboda
Jean-­Martin Charcot (1825–93), the founder and head of the neurology
clinic at the Salpêtrière hospital, has been generally credited with isolat-
ing, due to his exhaustive studies and classification genius, hysteria as
a nosological object. In his 1982 book Invention de l’hystérie. Charcot et
l’iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, published in English trans-
lation in 2003, Didi-­Huberman not only acknowledges these ‘scholarly
aspects’ of the career of the great physician, but also goes much further.
Summing up Charcot’s entry to the Salpêtrière, he succinctly concludes:
‘Charcot thus descended into hell; but he didn’t feel so badly there’ (IH,
17). In comparing the hospital with hell, Didi-­Huberman seeks obviously
to reconstruct (in order later to deconstruct) the myth of Charcot as ‘the
uncontested master thinker concerning the functioning of the symptom,
and the uncontested ballet master of the presentation of hysteria as a
spectacle at the end of the nineteenth century’ (SI, 184–5). Accordingly,
Didi-­Huberman presents Charcot as the conductor of an orchestra, Sun
King, Caesar, an apostle, Napoleon and Dante, as well as Father, Judge
and Healer. ‘[H]e displayed all the virtues of the actor’, Didi-­Huberman
writes (IH, 239), ‘in addition to those of the auctor: the author (master and
guarantor of forms), augur (master of time), instigator of acts (the auctor is
he who literally pushes one to act), director of the actresses of Hysteria’. It
is all these roles, first and foremost that of an author endowed with author-
ity, that Didi-­Huberman intends to deconstruct in his analysis, focusing
on the psychoanalytic perspective and Charcot’s complex and ambivalent
legacy in Sigmund Freud’s thinking about the unconscious (see psy-
choanalysis). At the same time, Didi-­Huberman approaches Charcot
from a Foucauldian historiographic perspective, insofar as the concept of
power and the medical gaze described by Michel Foucault resonate with
‘deep structures of visibility in which field and gaze are bound together by
codes of knowledge’ in the clinic (Foucault, 1989 [1963]: 109).
Charcot’s ‘method’ emerges, above all, as an important moment in the
history of photography. If Charcot ‘armed himself with photography’
(IH, 28), that is because, as Cornelius Borck puts it (2006: 322), ‘pho-
tography in general certifies existence and ritualizes this certification’.
 cinema 47

This photographic stance and power allowed Charcot to find an aesthetic

medium capable of accommodating psychopathological concepts. As
Didi-­Huberman puts it in one of the essays included in the Phasmes
collection, ‘Charcot approached mental illness, hysteria in particular,
through visual categories’ (1998a: 77). This is perhaps one of the reasons
for presenting Charcot in Invention of Hysteria as an artist endowed with
an administrative, biological and existential power, whereby ‘the funda-
mental complicity between clinical practice and figurative, plastic and
literary paradigms’ is revealed (IH, 142). It is therefore not surprising
that Charcot returns in Didi-­Huberman’s writings on several occasions,
notably in the work devoted to Aby Warburg. In The Surviving Image,
Didi-­Huberman outlines the affinities between Charcot’s hysterical body
and the Pathosformel as conceived by Warburg, as well as highlight-
ing their differences: while Charcot’s vision is based on continuities and
similarities, the Warburgian perspective embraces discontinuities and
differences (SI, 185–7).

Works Cited
Borck, C. (2006). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot
and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière’ (Book Review),
Transcultural Psychiatry, 43(2): 321–4.
Foucault, M. (1989 [1963]). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of
Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. Routledge.

CINEMA

Alison Smith
Film has long been an essential element in Didi-­Huberman’s philosophy
of the image. It first appears in his texts in 1995, in two different contexts,
both of which marked the emergence of distinct and extremely significant
strands of his work. On the one hand he published a groundbreaking
review of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in that year (1995b; 1998a), a precur-
sor to the essential work on filmic representations of the Holocaust which
run from his polemical engagement with Lanzmann in Images malgré tout
(2004), through several passages of L’œil de l’histoire (notably in volume
2, 2010b) to his essay on László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015a). On the
other, his major work on Georges Bataille’s visual texts, La Ressemblance
informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (1995a), contains a
sustained engagement with the films and theoretical writings of Sergei
48 c i n e m a

Eisenstein which brought modernist film theory firmly into his develop-
ing theory of image dialectic and montage. Eisenstein has remained a
fundamental referent for Didi-­Huberman, perhaps the Ur-­referent for all
his subsequent very varied engagements with filmmakers of both past and
present; the final and most substantial volume of L’Œil de l’histoire returns
to this canonical theorist once more, crystallising in the process a differ-
ence with Jacques Rancière which led to a sharp and very significant
exchange around the ­possibility – a­ nd ­desirability – o­ f visually evoking
political emotion.
Didi-­Huberman’s early texts on the cinema use the medium largely
as either an exemplary case of image-­construction particularly useful
to illustrate a developing theory of dynamic, dialectical image-­reading,
or a reserve of high-­profile texts supporting an impassioned discus-
sion on the proper dissemination of the reputedly unrepresentable.
Increasingly, however, cinema has moved from convenient example to
principal object of Didi-­Huberman’s research, and since 2008 and the
launch of the groundbreaking series of books L’Œil de l’histoire, it has
been central to his conception of image-­work. In European scholarship
Didi-­Huberman’s place as a film theorist is becoming more assured: as
Irene Valle Corpas put it, he has been instrumental in bringing cinema
into the orbit of art history as a moving medium, rather than allowing
the discipline to ‘reconvert’ it into a mere study of ‘the images of History
[. . .] dead and eternal’ (2018: 249). He has also engaged in lively debate,
notably with Jacques Rancière, over the understanding of political
cinema in the context of its potential for influence on an audience, and
he is a frequent interlocutor of contemporary filmmakers such as Vincent
Dieutre, Laura Waddington, Alfredo Jaar and Sylvain George (see SF;
Didi-­Huberman, 2007b).
While the range of contexts in which Didi-­Huberman has made use of
film texts is wide, it is possible to identify three significant currents that
carry his developing engagement with the medium. First, there is the reac-
tive and associative ability of images brought into contact with each other
to generate meaning which diverges from and outstrips that of the originals
taken separately. This exploration of what can be called montage-­practice
began with work on still images, and it led Didi-­Huberman towards
cinema, rather than the other way round; while certainly not the only
medium to use either the term or the process of montage, film has been the
most active user, and theoriser, of it. Inspired not only by Eisenstein but
also by Jean-­Luc Godard’s approach to using archive footage, the fullest
elaboration of Didi-­Huberman’s ideal of cinematic montage can be found
in his extended study of the work of Harun Farocki, in Book 2 of the Œil
de l’histoire series (2010b). Here he discusses in detail the way in which
 cinema 49

Farocki extracts new meanings from pre-­existing images, via a process

of disconnecting ­them – ­sometimes ­violently – ­from their preconceived
contexts, observing at the montage desk how new connections may change
how they are perceived, and then re-­presenting these new connections
while preserving as much as possible their dynamism and potential reso-
nances for an audience (cf. Smith, 2020: 75–112).
Secondly, inseparably connected to the technique of montage is its
purpose, especially when associated with archive footage, and this has led
Didi-­Huberman to extended work on the film medium’s potential both for
accessing the past and for projecting it into the present, through a process
of creative anachronism which gives present motion and life to frag-
ments drawn from the past but ‘emancipated’ from the grip of linear time
(2010b: 131). This is Farocki’s great achievement in Didi-­Huberman’s
eyes; and it is one that he also associates with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s filmic
practice, which he observes is that of ‘taking a ­position – ­effective, disturb-
ing, inventive, ­joyous – ­on the relationship between history [. . .] and the
present’ (SF, 31).
The political implications of this dynamic memory are further devel-
oped, in the course of L’Œil de l’histoire, into a new and distinctive direc-
tion of research, first made explicit in the fourth volume of this series,
Peuples exposés, peuples figurants. This is the question of the visibility
of ordinary, anonymous existence, in a form that is at once individual,
but without exceptionalism, and collective, but without absorption in a
homogeneous mass. In this case, cinematic texts are fundamental to the
development of the theory, as can be seen from the use of the term ‘figu-
rant’ (‘extra’ in the cinematic sense) in the title of this volume. Exemplary,
in Didi-­Huberman’s view, are the strategies to be found in the films of
Roberto Rossellini, Wang Bing ­and – ­especially – Pasolini. Through
the subsequent work on Eisenstein in volume 6 of L’Œil de l’histoire
(2016), Didi-­Huberman develops this political engagement with people(s)
into a search for active images. Whether they be fleeting revelations of
overlooked openings to an alternative future, or physical provocations
to subversive expression, these ideally constitute an uprising of shared
self-­declaration. This search leads him to re-­energise the key concepts of
anachronism and survival that have always been central to his under-
standing of images, and also to engage in detail with the perilous process of
imaging, and politicising, emotions. Following the exhibition Soulèvements
in the Jeu de Paume in Paris in the winter of 2016–17, this thorny issue of
communicating emotion has become the centre of Didi-­Huberman’s latest
projects. The contribution of cinema, with its ability to transmit physical
movement from screen to audience, to the possible active generation of
emotional solidarity is central to this inquiry, and led him to a fruitful
50 convert, pascal 

polemic with Jacques Rancière (see, e.g., Rancière, 2018; IL, 19–24),
described by Irene Valle Corpas (2018) as one of the most important affir-
mations of the political power of art since the days of the New Art History.
Apart from these academic studies, Didi-­Huberman has established
personal contacts with a certain number of contemporary filmmakers, for
the most part experimental documentarists such as Sylvain George and
Alfredo Jaar, whose work he presents and whom he engages in public
conversation (see, e.g., Didi-­Huberman, 2007b). His most sustained pres-
ence in filmic practice is his appearance in Vincent Dieutre’s 2013 film
Orlando ferito – Roland blessé, which takes Survival of the Fireflies as its
guiding text.

Works Cited
Rancière, J. (2018). ‘Images Re-­read. The Method of Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, trans. E. Woodard, J. R. Solorzano, S. De Cauwer and
L. K. Smith, Angelaki, 23(4): 11–18.
Smith, A. (2020). Georges Didi-Huberman and Film. The Politics of the
Image. Bloomsbury.
Valle Corpas I. (2018). ‘Un cine impuro para salvar la Historia del Arte:
algunas notas sobre el pensamiento de la imágenes del cine en Jacques
Rancière y Didi-­Huberman’, Boletín de Arte, 39: 245–54.

CONVERT, PASCAL

Nigel Saint
The contemporary artist whose work Didi-­Huberman has engaged with
most often is Pascal Convert (b. 1957). Among the publications are two
books and one text by Didi-­Huberman (1999b; 2013a: 9–30; 2019c), a
section of the Fédida volume (2005: 80–3) and a jointly produced livre
d’artiste (2017g; TBRB). Many of Convert’s exhibitions and ‘making-
­of’ films feature contributions from Didi-­Huberman; works by Convert
have been included in all of the exhibitions curated by Didi-­Huberman
from L’Empreinte (1997) to Soulèvements (2016–18); and Didi-­Huberman
is a regular guest lecturer at the Ecole supérieure d’art Pays Basque in
Biarritz, which Convert helped to found. I will focus on Convert’s projects
which lead Didi-­Huberman to discuss place, time, gestures of lamenta-
tion, memory and resistance.
Didi-­Huberman’s text from 1991–92, ‘La Demeure’ (1999b: 9–133),
focuses on two Convert projects, which overlap chronologically, about
 convert, pascal  51

memory and space: the first devoted to three abandoned early twentieth-­
century villas on the Basque coast and the second to The Artist’s
Apartment. Three Villas consists of large-­scale drawings and works in glass
and iron based on photographs taken by Convert at the Villas Belle-­Rose,
Itxasgoïsty (‘The house up there’) and Argenson before their destruction
in the 1980s. The huge, detailed and eerie drawings (5 metres square, wire
drawing, felt, with white or red gloss paint/enamel) pull the viewer inside
the extensive spaces of the villas, but they also salvage and reconstitute
them in the face of oblivion. Convert’s projects aim, as Didi-­Huberman
puts it, ‘not at a description of what is visible, but at a visual work, under-
taken by memory, recording a disappearance’ (1999b: 23; Convert, 2007:
1). The drawings privilege transparency, space and an intermittent state
between the plan and the aftermath of the destruction (Bann, 1997).
To make the trauma of conflict visible through different forms and
media, Convert uses tree stumps, wax low-­reliefs, platinum photographs
and vitrified books in other projects. Souches (1995–98) are sections of
tree trunks retrieved from the battlefields of Verdun and from Seju-­ji
Temple in Hiroshima, which are then covered in Indian ink in the first
case and from which a black lacquer cast is taken in the second. For Didi-­
Huberman, the form of the stump is the key to its singularity. The tree
stumps have been displaced and now tell a particular story or fable:

The process of extraction involves at least three different temporalities combin-

ing in the same object: the immemorial time of genealogies, growth rings and the
transmission of forms; the explosive time of burning and killing, of destruction
throughout history; and the anachronic and carefully crafted time of the trans-
formation into an image (moving the object, inking, lacquering, exhibition and
placement with other images. (1999b: 163–4)

The reference to catastrophic events is f­olded – ­but not ­diluted – ­into a

reflection on the different aspects of time that the works can engage with.
The tight structure of the tree stump unfolds dialectically before us: the
roots are also branches, the energy of the structures contrast with their
immobility and their organic function contrasts with their present stricken
state.
Didi-­Huberman’s Ninfa dolorosa (2019c, but begun before 2007) con-
nects his work on Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas with his interest in the wax
low-­reliefs, films and essays produced by Convert about recent conflicts
in the Balkans, Algeria and Gaza. The focus is Convert’s sculpture Piétà
de Kosovo (1999–2000), inspired by a photograph by Georges Mérillon,
Funeral Wake in Kosovo (1990). Both the photograph and the sculpture
retrieve commemorative energy from the moments of crisis and affect, but
52 critique 

Didi-­Huberman also argues that Convert’s work opens up the questions

of time, event, grief and memory implicit in the photograph. Convert’s
work is thus linked by Didi-­Huberman with a Warburgian reading of
the gestures of lamentation, but Didi-­Huberman also considers why this
matters for art today (2019c: 113). He shows how both Warburg and
Nicole Loraux have enabled him to continue his inquiry into the complex
time of the present’s visibility when ‘forms of the ghosts from inconsolable
mourning’ are before us (2019c: 100, citing Fédida, 2003–04: 196).
The cliffs of Bamiyan, where the Taliban blew up two giant sixth-­
century CE statues of the Buddha in 2001, have been at the heart of
Convert’s activity since 2016. The large-­scale photographic survey of
the cliffs carried out with the help of Iconem, a company that produces
3D archaeological surveys, is a witness to the erosion and destruction,
enhanced by an old photographic printing process, platinum palladium
(Cliffs of Bamiyan, 2017). In Didi-­Huberman’s view, set out in his hand-
written text for an artist’s book made with Convert, this process places the
images in relation to the many episodes in the history of the valley. The
4000 photographs date from 2016, their appearance dates from around
1870 and the cliffs traverse many centuries. Didi-­Huberman emphasises
dialogue, miscegenation and the passage of cultures in and through a valley
unbeholden to any empire (2017g: VIII). Despite succumbing to Taliban
doxa that would eliminate all art pre-­dating the life of Mohammed, the
imprint of destruction cannot be effaced (2017g: XIV). Hence Didi-­
Huberman calls the Bamiyan project one of resistance, malgré tout.

Works Cited
Bann, S. (1997). ‘Au travers des cloches’, in Pascal Convert, exhibition
catalogue, 9–15. Villa Arson.
Convert, P. (2007). 1. Villa Belle Rose, Biarritz. 2. Itxasgoïty, Biarritz. 3.
Villa Argenson, Biarritz, suivi de Œuvres. Généalogie des lieux. Préfaces
de G. Didi-­Huberman. Atlantica-­Séguier.
Fédida, P. (2003–04). ‘L’Ombre du reflet: l’émanation des ancêtres’, La
Part de l’œil, 19: 195–201.

CRITIQUE

Stijn De Cauwer
Critique is a term so commonly used in the history of philosophy,
from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to the critical theory developed by
 critique  53

the Frankfurt School, that its meaning can become obscured. When
Didi-­Huberman writes about the critical cinematography of Jean-Luc
Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini or Harun Farocki, when he writes about
the critique of the art historical tradition made by Aby Warburg, or when
he comments on the influence of the critical theory of Walter Benjamin
and Theodor Adorno on his work, what exactly is the aspect of critique
that they all have in common? When Didi-­Huberman received the Adorno
Prize in 2015 in Frankfurt, he took the occasion to clarify what critique
means for him in his acceptance lecture, published as ‘Critical Image/
Imaging Critique’ (CIIC).
The etymological origins of the word ‘critique’, as well as of the term
‘crisis’, can be found in the Greek verb krinein. This verb was first used
in an agricultural context, referring to the riddling of grain, using a sieve,
and, in a passage from Homer’s Iliad, to separating grain from husk.
Later, the verb was used in Plato’s Theaetetus in the sense of separating
truth from opinion. Didi-­Huberman emphasises that before critique was a
concept, it was first of all a practice with a long anthropological tradition.
Critique, the riddling of the grain with a sieve, is a gesture in which a
critical tool is used. Whether to riddle the grain with a sieve or to separate
theory from opinion, critique is learning to discern the world (CIIC,
253). Critique is a gesture in which one has to ‘separate, sort, choose and
decide’ (CIIC, 253). Even though the Greek word for a judge (kriter) is
also derived from this same linguistic root, critique does not have to be
a severe judgement; the interpreters of dreams (oneirokrites) were able to
play with nuance without judgement. Contrary to the recent advocates of
post-­critique, who argue that critique is only out to unmask its object of
study (Felski, 2015; Latour, 2004), krinein, Didi-­Huberman clarifies, also
means to evaluate and even to appreciate, ‘that is, to be sensitive to the
thousand and one nuances of the thing to be “criticised”’ (CIIC, 254).
Didi-­Huberman develops his exploration of critique with Adorno as an
example. Adorno’s critical tool, his sieve to discern the world, is dialec-
tics. In Mimima Moralia, Adorno writes: ‘It is the concern of dialectics to
cock a snook at the sound views held by later powers-­that-­be on the immu-
tability of the course of the world’ (2005: 72). In this sense, critique has
to shake up the world, like the farmers tossing the grain into the air with
their sieve, making the grain rise up, as can be seen in scenes from Vittoria
de Seta’s film The Lost World. Adorno famously argued that images, such
as those deployed by the culture industry, play a big role in presenting the
state of the world to us as immutable. It is the role of critique to shake this
immutability up and, crucially for Didi-­Huberman, we need images to do
so: ‘There can be no critical theory without a critique of images. But nor
is there any such theory without a c­ ritique – ­of discourse and ­image – b­ y
54 critique 

images themselves’ (CIIC, 260). Benjamin famously developed his theory of

the dialectical image, and Adorno wrote in ‘The Essay as Form’ that the
essay has no ‘overarching concept’ (Leitbild) but focuses on an image (Bild)
that causes ‘the totality to light up in a partial feature’ in an experimental
manner (1991: 16). Critique needs images, it needs to be given form, in
order to be truly critical and dialectical, though the use of images can
never be an exact science and always remains, so to speak, impure, just as
the riddling of the grain gives clouds of dust.
Throughout his oeuvre, Didi-­Huberman has always been greatly inter-
ested in the works of artists who formulate their critique of society, of the
ways in which images are used to govern and oppress people, by making a
montage of images, such as Jean-­Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Harun
Farocki, Bertolt Brecht and many others. In a cinematic essay such as
La Rabbia, Pasolini gives form to his critique of the state of affairs of his
time by adopting both the critical and poetic potentiality of montage
(Didi-­Huberman, 2013a: 45). Similarly, in his documentaries and video
installations, Farocki developed what Didi-­Huberman calls a ‘critical
montage’ of images: ‘a montage of thoughts elevated to the rhythm of
rage in order to be able to better, and calmly, attack the violence of the
world’ (2010b: 83, my translation). In The Eye of History: When Images
Take Positions, Didi-­Huberman evokes the discussion between Brecht
and Georg Lukács about realism. While Lukács denounced avant-­garde
experimentation such as the use of montage in literature as ‘formalism’,
Brecht argued that in order to develop a critical realism one must question
realism as such and be open to adopt new forms to express one’s critique
of society (EH, 99–103). Didi-­Huberman too, in his analysis in Images in
Spite of All of the Sonderkommando photographs taken in Auschwitz-­
Birkenau, pleads for the necessity of a visual critique of images of history
(ISA, 41). Developing such a visual critique requires not being too close,
or one risks losing oneself in the situation one wants to understand, and
not being too distant, which results in detached abstractions. As Benjamin
wrote: ‘Criticism is a matter of correct distancing’ (1979: 89).
Edward Said once remarked that critique runs the risk of becoming
cultural dogma, as happens often in academic institutional contexts (1984:
247). It is no coincidence that Didi-­Huberman is drawn to theorists who
are unclassifiable and considered to be iconoclasts, shaking up the conven-
tions of various disciplines: Benjamin, Warburg, Adorno, Bataille and
Goethe with his theory of morphology, all felt the necessity to shake
up the prevailing methodological dogmas and invent new critical tools to
understand the world, combining attention to detail with a poetic form.
 deleuze, gilles  55

Works Cited
Adorno, T. W. (1991). ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. S. W. Nicholsen, in
Notes on Literature Vol. I, 3–23. Columbia University Press.
Adorno, T. W. (2005). Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life,
trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. Verso.
Benjamin, W. (1979). One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans.
E. F. N. Jephcott and K. Shorter. NLB.
Felski, R. (2015). The Limits of Critique. University of Chicago Press.
Latour, B. (2004). ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matter of
Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30: 225–48.
Said, E. W. (1984). The World, The Text, and the Critic. Harvard
University Press.

D
DELEUZE, GILLES

Chari Larsson
In considering his long-­term project of critiquing orthodox formula-
tions of temporality and representation, Gilles Deleuze is one of
Didi-­Huberman’s most influential interlocutors. In Devant le temps,
Didi-­Huberman takes up the question of linear and chronological modes
of history, explicitly aligning himself with Deleuze. In the opening pages
he observes that the book is ‘a tribute paid to the Deleuzian time-­image’
(2000a: 25–6, n.31). Despite appearing ten years after Confronting Images
there is a certain synchronicity between the two texts. If the image can no
longer be imagined in mimetic terms, it becomes increasingly difficult to
sustain the temporal logic underpinning this history.
To explore this claim further, it is necessary to retrieve some of
Deleuze’s core arguments. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze
famously claimed that time is freed from its subordination to movement
in post-­war European cinema. Deleuze examined temporal structures that
do not necessarily conform to past–present–future configurations. The
linear narrative sustained by the movement-­image was gradually replaced
by the discontinuous temporality of the time-­image. For Deleuze, the
direct time-­image presented a plurality of possible durations as the ‘sheets
of past coexist in a non-­chronological order’ (1989: xii). Unimpeded from
56 deleuze, gilles 

its chronological dependency on movement, the time-­image is anachro-

nistic, discontinuous and a rupture in chronological time. In Devant le
temps, Didi-­Huberman returns to one of his favourite case studies, Fra
Angelico’s marmi finti, or the fictive marble panels located directly below
his Madonna delle Ombre (Madonna of the Shadows) (1450) in the corridor
of Florence’s San Marco convent. The gushes of paint act as an index or
trace of the event itself, leading Didi-­Huberman to draw a comparison with
Jackson Pollock’s twentieth-­century drip paintings. Here, he describes the
coexistence of heterogeneous and competing temporalities that the panels
present to the spectator: ‘The history of images is a history of objects that
are temporally impure, complex, overdetermined. It is therefore a history
of polychronistic, heterochronistic or anachronistic objects’ (2000a: 22).
For Didi-­Huberman, the panels are not simply a collision between the
contemporary and the past, but a montage of heterogeneous temporalities
and memories.
Deleuze’s treatment of difference and repetition signals another
important sphere of influence on Didi-­Huberman’s thinking and informs
his theorisation of Aby Warburg’s Nachleben and emotive formulas. In
his 1968 book Difference and Repetition, one of the core questions Deleuze
posed is what makes difference possible? How may difference be reim-
agined if it has traditionally been subordinated to identity, recognition
and analogy? How can difference be grasped as something other than
the subordination to the same? To answer this question, repetition is
crucial as he repositions the term against the traditional treatment of
sameness or equivalence. Repetition, for Deleuze, is best appreciated
in terms of the production of something new and is achieved through
difference. The conjunction of the two terms results in repetition being
freed from the strictures of imitation. Instead, it becomes productive and
generative.
Deleuze’s repositioning of difference and repetition comes to the fore in
The Surviving Image. Here, Didi-­Huberman draws Warburg’s enigmatic
concepts of Nachleben and Pathosformel (see pathos formula) specifically
in the direction of Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche and his discussion of the
eternal return (2006). For Didi-­Huberman, the resurgence or reappear-
ance of emotional gestures exceeds a direct appropriation or imitation.
According to Didi-­Huberman, in the return of ancient gestures something
new is created. He writes, ‘The return of the same is not the return to the
same, and still less a return to the identical. The “same” which returns in
the eternal return is not the identity of being, but only something similar’
(SI, 105).
A final significant idea that Didi-­Huberman extracts from Deleuze is the
‘image of thought’ that is discussed in the third chapter of Difference and
 deleuze, gilles  57

Repetition. Before we begin thinking, our thought is already organised by a

series of pre-­existing assumptions or postulates of what it means to think.
Deleuze’s point was that philosophy had never been entirely successful
in eliminating the conventions of what thought is. For Deleuze, it is an
image that lingers at the heart of representation’s residual subjectivity. To
overcome the image of thought, therefore, the image must be destroyed.
Didi-­Huberman detects a Deleuzian impulse in Warburg’s Mnemosyne
Atlas. He observes, ‘Warburg would not have displeased Gilles ­Deleuze
– ­it produces an “image of thought”’ (2002d: 20). It is possible to draw
a parallel with Didi-­Huberman’s long-­term commitment to displacing
pre-­existing ideas of what representation might be. In an interview with
Robert Maggiori (2000k), Didi-­Huberman declared:

Grosso modo, I am interested in the image in that it moves the foundations of rep-
resentation, that is to say our idea of ­representation [. . .] W
­ hat often fascinates me
is the way an image is capable of ­inventing [. . .] c­ onfigurations that, literally, defy
thought. This is why I have less an impression of projecting a ‘philosophical gaze’
onto images, than of handing myself over to the power that the image ­has – ­if it is
­strong – ­to upset, that is, to literally make thought itself start over, on all levels.

In Warburg’s experiments with montage, Didi-­Huberman identifies an

anti-­idealist sensibility that eschews recognition through imitation. By
mapping out pathos gestures in constellations of images, the Mnemosyne
project provided Warburg with the flexibility to pursue his ideas visually.
Didi-­Huberman emphasises the axiomatic openness of Warburg’s images,
and their ability to be constantly rearranged. He writes, ‘Well beyond any
process, montage is a procedure capable of putting into movement new
“thought spaces”’ (2011b: 281). The atlas remained resolutely unsynthe-
sised, unfinished and incomplete at the time of Warburg’s death in 1929.
It is through the juxtapositions and collisions of the montage process that
fresh lines of thought are generated by the images themselves. No longer
dependent on the illusionism of mimetic forms, Mnemosyne is a visual
form of knowledge. The atlas ‘thinks’, performing its own philosophical
and epistemological project, akin to Deleuze’s call to overcome the ‘image
of thought’.

Works Cited
Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and
R. Galeta. Continuum.
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton. Columbia
University Press.
58 d e s i r e

Deleuze, G. (2006). Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson.

Bloomsbury.

DESIRE

Chari Larsson
In Didi-­Huberman’s early work, the art historian’s desire for the art object
is punctuated by absence and loss. In Confronting Images, he observes that
the historian’s ‘desire will always be suspended between the tenacious
melancholy of the past as an object of loss and the fragile victory of the
past as an object of recovery’ (CI, 38). Later, Didi-­Huberman sidesteps
traditional formulations of desire measured in terms of absence and lack
as his proximity to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari comes to the fore.
As such, desire is positioned as productive and affirmative and is closely
associated with potentiality and Pathosformel (see pathos formula).
This corresponds with Deleuze and Guattari’s famous observation that
‘the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset: from the
very first step that the Platonic logic of desire forces us to take, making us
choose between production and acquisition’ (1977 [1972]: 25).
To formulate desire being rendered as a mode of production, Didi-­
Huberman retrieves an important case study by French psychoanalyst
Pierre Fédida that reveals a distinct attitude towards absence and loss. It
is crucial to recognise that Deleuze sat on the committee for Fédida’s doc-
torat d’État (state doctorate) (Deleuze, 2007 [2001]) and Fédida is a vital
link in retheorising desire as affirmative and generative. In his 1978 book
L’Absence Fédida described two young sisters whose mother had just died.
Fédida observed that the sisters played a game using a sheet imitating their
dead mother lying underneath a shroud:

A few days after her mother’s death, ­Laure – ­aged f­our – ­played at being dead.
With her sister, aged two years older, she argued over a bedsheet that she asked to
be covered with, while she explained the ritual that was to be scrupulously accom-
plished in order for her to disappear. The sister carried this out until the moment
when, seeing Laure no longer moving, she began to scream. Laure reappeared,
and, in order to calm her sister, now asked her to be dead: she demanded that the
sheet she had used to cover her remain still! She did not finish arranging it, for
her sister’s crying suddenly turned into laughter, rippling the sheet with joyful
jumps. And the sheet, which was a shroud, became a dress, a house, a flag hoisted
up a tree, before finally being ripped up in a mad dance, as an old velveteen rabbit
was put to death by Laure bursting its belly! (1978: 198)
 detail  59

Absence and mourning in Fédida’s hands become unstable and pro-

ductive. A shroud becomes a dress, house, or flag. Fédida goes on
to observe, ‘[d]ecidedly, mourning sets the world in motion’ (1978:
198). Underscoring the link between mourning and productivity, Didi-­
Huberman noted in relation to Fédida’s case study, ‘[f]rom the start,
mourning had to be conceived of together with play, that is to say, in its
paradoxical capacity to set in motion’ (2005c: 128).
Fédida’s case study of the two young sisters playing with a sheet forms
one of the theoretical cornerstones for the 2016 exhibition Soulèvements
held at the Jeu de Paume. In the exhibition, desire is configured as a
motor for change. Didi-­Huberman traces the iconography of the sisters’
sheet across diverse trans-­historical examples, from Sergei Eisenstein’s
film Battleship Potemkin (1925) to Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading
the People (1830) and Théodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa
(1818–19). Emphasising the connection between desire and production,
Didi-­Huberman writes, ‘[b]etween the shroud and the sheet, the sheet and
the flag, the flag and the tearing, it is as though the storm of the rebellions
found its clearest emblem in the rising up of all surfaces’ (U, 292). Desire
is understood as productive, the engine driving the potentiality of change.

Works Cited
Deleuze, G. (2007 [2001]). ‘The Complaint and the Body’, in Two Regimes
of Madness, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, 164–5. Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1977 [1972]). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane. Penguin.
Fédida, P. (1978). L’Absence. Gallimard.

DETAIL

Maud Hagelstein
As shown by its great ‘fortune’ in the interpretation of works, the detail
plays a ‘key’ role in the corpus of traditional iconography:

The ­detail – ­with its three operations: proximity, partition, ­addition – ­would be
the fragment as invested with an ideal of knowledge and of totality. This ideal of
knowledge is exhaustive description. Contrary to the fragment whose relationship
to the whole only puts it into question, posits is as an absence or enigma or lost
memory, the detail in this sense imposes the whole, its legitimate presence, its value
as response and point of reference, even as hegemony. (CI, 230)
60 detail 

In his works, Didi-­Huberman almost systematically discards the vocabu-

lary of the detail in favour of the vocabulary of the symptom – that
untreatable upon which we ­stumble – ­and of the ‘pan’ – that sovereign
accident of matter which catches our eyes and troubles representation
(the French word pan is used to denote a ‘patch’, ‘section’ or ‘fragment’
of fabric; a section, panel or part of a wall, a slab of masonry, or a patch
or slab of paint; see incarnation). While he undoes the cult of the detail
that seeks to resolve the whole, Didi-­Huberman gives a special place in his
text to singularities. The singular event in art history requires a mathesis
singularis (the theory of art is in his mind a ‘science of singularities’). Each
effective and intense encounter with a work of art calls for a careful adjust-
ment of already forged concepts, or even for a new theory, that is for the
invention of tailor-­made concepts:

Every parcel of the world merits its own book. As does every instant of every
parcel. There would have to be an infinite number of novels for that infinite
number of characters which are the most delicate things, the most short-­lived
moments or beings. I tend to look upon my work as that craft involving the impos-
sible tearing of every apparition from oblivion. (2018a: 15)

For Didi-­Huberman, the concept only has meaning if each image is rec-
ognised in its singularity. But the mathesis singularis with which he experi-
ments does not prevent him from tinkering, from one book to the next,
with the same c­ oncepts – e­ ven if their definitions always transform upon
contact with object­s – ­neither to reduce nor to raise the indetermination
of what is perceived but rather to complicate and to grasp, as closely as
possible, the behaviours of our power of imagination.
The conception of the detail adopted by Didi-­Huberman (symptom
rather than proof, acute anxiety rather than explanation) owes much
to art historian Aby Warburg, to whom people often attribute the
phrase: ‘God is in the detail’ (Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail). Warburg
gave extreme (and almost sick) attention to details – ‘details’ meaning
as much the singular elements that divide up at the heart of a work as,
more broadly, the so-­called ‘secondary’ aspects of culture. The reading of
images for Warburg was the object of a great meticulousness. Beginning
with his doctoral thesis in 1893, devoted to two major works by Botticelli
(The Birth of Venus and Primavera), Warburg showed an acute interest
in the representation of secondary elements (hair, draperies, etc.), which
had often been overlooked, as well as the movement that goes through
them. From this ‘local’ analysis of Botticelli’s work, he developed one of
the essential points of his vision of history and culture (in which forms
were understood through their relations to pathos) – with the detail
 dialectic  61

constituting an obligatory passage towards the elaboration of a general

theory while at the same time constantly threatening it. For Warburg
revealed in an exemplary way the fact that art is recalcitrant towards large
collections (grands ensembles). He sought to understand movements of
culture (the famous ‘migratory movements’) which he wished to grasp
and ­map – ­in order to reveal the logic with which Western artistic culture
developed. Didi-­Huberman sensed that secondary elements were only
secondary in appearance and that their status as apparent flaws was to
be taken seriously. For this reason, he presented Mnemosyne not as a
system of analogies, but as a system of divergences whose details (or
symptoms, fragments) are so many pitfalls that challenge thinking. For
the German Jewish art historian, the detail was not simply a matter of
‘meticulous awareness’, as it seems to have become later for the majority
of iconologists:

The detail is always understood by Warburg on the basis of its symptomatic

nature, which implies, at the least, four very precise points. First of all, the iden-
tification of the painted figures is not at all the goal of Warburgian interpretation
[. . .] Secondly, for Warburg the detail is always to be understood on the basis
of its intrusive effects or of the exception it represents; in short, as a historical
singularity [. . .] Thirdly, this singularity, this breach in the present, is understood
in turn, as the index of a structure of survival [. . .] Fourthly, this use of detail
assumes that the scholar, in understanding its function, is guided by the powers of
the unconscious. Just as in Freud’s work, the detail in Warburg’s work is revealed
in the ‘rejection of observation’: it is a detail produced by displacement, and not a
detail produced by enlargement. (SI, 322–3)
Translated by Shane Lillis

DIALECTIC

Patrick ffrench
Didi-­Huberman’s deployment of a dialectical method is persistent across
his oeuvre and is given a specific formulation; it involves the putting into
relation of ostensibly incommensurate registers, media, temporalities and
forms and an invariably provocative transgression of established bounda-
ries and categories. There is a dialectical impetus in Didi-­Huberman’s
work towards a form of relationality that is productive not in the sense
of synthesis or resolution, but of tension and collision. Didi-­Huberman’s
dialectic is thus richly heterodoxical and may be seen in continuity with
a broad tendency in post-­war French thought towards the contestation of
62 dialectic 

the legacy of both Hegelian philosophy and its albeit inverted form in the
standard version of Marx.
As with many other concepts and thematics in Didi-­Huberman’s work,
the influence of Walter Benjamin, ‘the least orthodox dialectician that
ever lived’ (IL, 21), is prominent; Benjamin’s subversive use of the term to
qualify the way the ‘dialectical image’ interrupts the present ‘in a moment
of danger’, in a ‘configuration pregnant with tensions’, informs Didi-­
Huberman’s approach to the temporal and historical complexities of images
and forms (Benjamin, 1973: 247, 254). In a similar vein, the ‘dialectic of
forms’ (IH, 35) with which Georges Bataille endeavoured to challenge
idealist aesthetics in his early work provides Didi-­Huberman with a pow-
erful conceptual tool to which, after his substantial attention to Bataille in
La Ressemblance informe (1995a), he constantly returns. The later parts of
this work propose a series of ‘alterations’ of the classically Hegelian notion
of the dialectic through attention to the material of the review Documents.
Bataille’s later, ‘shattering’ engagement with Hegel, and particularly with
the version of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind rendered by Alexandre
Kojève in his lectures of the early to mid-­1930s, is a less visible instance,
but is nevertheless formative, insofar as what emerges out of it is the anti-­
concept of ‘unemployable negativity’ that problematises the ‘work’ of the
dialectic as such. It is this ‘accursed share’ which Didi-­Huberman consist-
ently brings to bear upon the epistemologies and representational schemas
of cultural and art history (see Bataille, 1997: 296; 1991). A third essential
figure in the constellation conjured by Didi-­Huberman with regard to the
question of the dialectic is Sergei Eisenstein, whose ‘dialectical montage’
he discusses in relation to Bataille’s work in Documents, and to whom he
devotes significant attention in Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes, the sixth
volume of the Eye of History series (2016a). Eisenstein, he points out,
conceived of the result of dialectical montage of images as ecstatic (ex-stase
and not synthèse). The explosive, shock effect of dialectical configurations
theorised and practised by Eisenstein resonates significantly with the use
and the value Didi-­Huberman accords to the term and the method.
The dialectical has a heuristic value in Didi-­Huberman’s writing, in
which the effort to ‘dialecticise’ is a recurrent and omnipresent gesture,
whence the repeated refrain of Confronting Images, ‘to proceed dialecti-
cally’ (CI, 6, 7, 39, 40, 144, 184, 187), where the emphasis on the process
rather than the end result is paramount. This implies a dynamic of forces
whereby knowledge is fractured and confronted, as above, by its ‘accursed
share’ (2000a: 39), or by ‘non-­knowledge’ (CI, 7). This is to say that Didi-­
Huberman’s ‘omnidirectional’ dialectics is wielded against historically
positivist notions of progression or evolution (2002a: 102), and that it is
invariably expressed in a phraseology of violence, as collision, fulguration
 dialectic  63

(2002a: 115), rend (déchirure) or, less dramatically, as fold (pliure; 2002a:
113), among many other figures. Dialectics, for Didi-­Huberman, operates
not as a straightforward opposition, but as tension and interpenetration
of a ‘positive’ element and that which it represses or forecloses; thus the
dialectical relation between speech and silence, between the remainder
and the ‘flaw’ (ISA, 104), or the veil and its ‘tear’ (déchirure, ISA, 80–1)
(see rend). Dialectical relations, moreover, often involve a reversal of
agency, such as that between ‘grasping the image’ and ‘letting oneself be
grasped by it’ (CI, 16), encapsulated in the title of the early work ‘What we
see; what looks at us’ (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde, 1992b) and
deployed throughout that volume (see look). The extension of dialectics
to describe the relation between manifest and latent content (2005: 36),
from Freud’s account of the dream-­work, or between wakefulness and
dream-­sleep (see Freud, Sigmund; dreams), in Benjamin’s account
of the dialectical image (2000a: 113), suggests the extent to which Didi-­
Huberman wields this tool widely to qualify any relation of disruption and
tension between visual forms and the forces which underlie them.
Bodily performances, intersubjective relations and the plastic qualities
of specific forms are also dialectical. The performances of Charcot’s
hysterics, whose iconography is analysed in Invention of Hysteria, are
expressed as a series of d ­ ialectics – ­of gazes, of charm and seduction, of
mastery (IH, 167, 176, 233, 240; see hysteria); Giacometti’s Cube is
rendered as a dialectic of mass and void, for example (CF, 59). In the
more recent work Didi-­Huberman’s more politically oriented focus on
‘peoples’ and ‘a people’, including considerations of émotion-peuple and
of the motif of the ‘uprising’ (soulèvement), have required a renewed
attention to the political valencies of dialectics. The first volume of Ce qui
nous soulève, Désirer désobéir (2019a), puts Marx and Bakunin into dialogue
around the dialectics of class struggle and the realisation of the revolu-
tionary impetus in the State (Marx), versus the dialectics of the ‘revolt
and reflux’ of this impetus. Didi-­Huberman thus valorises a dialectics of
movement and rhythm, a dialectics of flux and of pulsation (2019a: 262).
The dialectical claim inherent to Didi-­Huberman’s work, that there
is a relational and critical force of expression in the dynamics of matter
and meaning, image and language, present and past, manifest and
latent, and even in the relation of images and forms to each other, has
occasioned significant critical debate. In their Formless: A User’s Guide
Rosalind Krauss and Yve-­Alain Bois take issue with Didi-­Huberman’s
dialectical rendering of the ‘thinking of the informe’, rejecting what they
call the latter’s ‘neat’ replacement of the third term of the Hegelian triad
with the symptom (Krauss and Bois, 1997: 69; see informe). Against this
they propose Bataille’s ‘dualist materialism’ and method of ‘asymmetrical
64 dissemblance 

division’ which, from their perspective, means that formless matter is not
absorbable into the image or in language, and remains as a material residue
(see materiality). This critique can serve to illuminate an essential aspect
of Didi-­Huberman’s dialectic: it affirms the possibility of a productive
collision between modes of expression, between image and form, for
example, or between language and image, while resisting the postulation
of synthesis or unity and maintaining the difference and violence of this
collision. Didi-­Huberman’s response to Krauss and Bois in the postface to
the re-­edition of La Ressemblance informe in 2019 proposes a useful rejoin-
der to this criticism, reiterating the claim inherent in the initial postulation
of the ‘dialectical image’ and underlining the mood of ‘perpetual anxiety’
which it induces.

Works Cited
Bataille, G. (1991). The Accursed Share, vol. 1. MIT Press.
Bataille, G. (1997). ‘Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel’, in The Bataille
Reader, ed. S. Wilson and F. Botting, 296–300. Blackwell.
Benjamin. W. (1973). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn,
ed. H. Arendt. Fontana.
Krauss, R., and Bois, Yve-­Alain (1997). Formless: A User’s Guide. Zone
Books.

DISSEMBLANCE

Maud Hagelstein
Didi-­Huberman’s epistemological work involves a critical and systematic
battle with the totem concepts of art history. Many of his texts offer a
determined deconstruction of the humanist concept of mimesis. For this
reason, the ­critique – ­sometimes ­fierce – ­is not only subversive, but also
proposes in a positive way new conceptual tools that are more suitable
for responding to observed artistic realities. While he places the seminal
notion of mimesis at a distance, Didi-­Huberman certainly does not shy
away from thinking about some forms of resemblance, especially in his
research on Christian iconology and his work on the heretical avant-­
garde of the journal Documents.
In his book Fra Angelico (1990b), published in a diptych in the same year
as Devant l’image (1990a; CI), Didi-­Huberman reinstated one aspect of the
mimetic ­process – ­already theorised by Aristotle, but subsequently forgot-
ten by V­ asari – w
­ hich the painter Fra Angelico had used. According to
 dissemblance  65

an alternative conception of the mimetic process, imitation is in the act of

creation rather than in the thing created. Or, to borrow Didi-­Huberman’s
frequently used expression: for Fra Angelico, it was a matter of ‘imitating
the process’ rather than of the ‘aspects’ or ‘appearances’ (cf. FAD, 96;
Didi-­Huberman, 1986b: 627). Thus, according to the theory of dissimilar
similitudes that arose from the negative theology of Pseudo-­Dionysius, a
splatter of paint blotches as shown in the Madonna of the Shadows places its
spectator more directly in the presence of God than, for example, the rep-
resentation of an old bearded man seated on a throne. For by splattering
his paint on the wall, following a technique frequently employed in the
Quattrocento, Fra Angelico reproduced the gesture of anointing. He imi-
tates the divine action. On the face of it, nothing resembles God less than
a spot of paint (Pseudo-­Dionysius used the image of a worm). If we must
speak here of a certain kind of resemblance, it nonetheless has nothing to
do with the resemblance of a copy to its model. In this case (God/a splat-
ter of paint blotches), the resemblance is cracked by dissemblance, yet
nourished by it, hence the paradoxical expression ‘dissimilar similitudes’.
Didi-­Huberman’s work on Georges Bataille and the avant-­garde
journal Documents represents, in his own words, another ‘particular
moment in a much broader study of the notion of resemblance’ (1995a:
6). The art journal Documents, abundantly illustrated, comprised fifteen
issues spread out over two years (1929/1930). Among the young surreal-
ist dissidents who wrote in it we find Carl Einstein, Michel Leiris and
Georges Bataille. The composition of this journal ­sought – ­by linking fine
arts with ­ethnography – ­a ‘certain art of rapprochements, of montages,
of friction, of attractions of images’ (1995a: 18); in other words, ‘an art of
resemblances’, bringing documents into contact with one another. But by
pushing resemblance to its limits, Bataille contributed to making a ‘work
of tearing’ and of making this notion ‘tear into us’ (1995a: 9). The artistic
and visual experiments of Documents worked initially from the idea of
‘contact’, violently breaking ‘the taboo of touch upon which the whole
Christian myth of resemblance indeed appeared to have been built’ (1995a:
29). This taboo relied on the idea that, in order for a copy to resemble the
model, they had to be distinct, and even hierarchically distinct. In the work
of Documents, the model and the copy touch one another, overturning
the very possibility of a hierarchical relation. Didi-­Huberman detected
a critique of humanism in the visual experiments by Bataille. Central for
the humanist conception of mimesis, the originality of the model is pushed
back by heuristic operations of levelling, by a ‘base materialism’ in which
images approach each other straightforwardly, a ‘materialism that touches
the lowest point’, where thought is brought down to the level of concrete
things (1995a: 240).
66 d i s t a n c e

This conceptualisation of the processes of resemblance favours ­contact

– ­or ­montage – ­between things over terms. But bringing documents
into contact with one another (whether photographic documents or not)
has no smoothing effect at all, and is haunted by dissemblance. The
images of Documents mix contact and conflict. While similar, they remain
heterogeneous. They resemble one a­ nother – ­they are, at the very least,
taken together: they a­ ssemble – ­but according to different orders. The
echoes between images bring the human face to face with the animal, the
object with the organ, the normal with the monstrous. Visual differences,
since they are in contact and since they touch, whether ‘assembled in a
montage’ or ‘stuck’ together, do not reduce each other to differences but
present themselves as dissemblances. Later, Didi-­Huberman proposes
that ‘only that which has firstly been separated, cut, can “stick” with
force’, and that, symmetrically, ‘only that which has firstly been in contact
can “cut” with intensity’ (1995a: 302). The shock of confrontations comes
from what the formless, the animal, the primitive, trash, the dead have
already made an integral part of the human figure. In this sense, dissem-
blance is d
­ evastating – a­ nd only an escape from the humanist model allows
the theory of art to perceive its effects.
Translated by Shane Lillis

DISTANCE

Busra Copuroglu
Didi-­Huberman’s conception of distance is one of his most intriguing,
complex and poetic ways of bridging relations between aesthetics, politics
and methods of seeing. He thinks of distance through the idea of contact
and draws from a constellation of writers, theories and concepts including
Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator (2009), Bertolt Brecht,
Walter Benjamin, hysteria, gaze, exile, photography, aura, atlas
and montage.
Rancière considers distance to be ‘the normal condition of any com-
munication’ (2009: 10). By questioning the position of the theatre specta-
tor since antiquity, Rancière removes the spectator from the position of
a passive agent and argues that viewing ‘is an action that transforms the
distribution of positions [where] the spectator observes, selects, compares,
interprets [and] links what she sees to a host of other things that she has
seen in other kinds of places’ (2009: 13). Rancière’s considerations of dis-
tance become one of the important reference points for Didi-­Huberman’s
conception of distance, as well as his insights derived from Brecht’s notion
 distance 67

of images that ‘take a position’, which Didi-­Huberman sees as a disorderly

montage created by the critical eye that comes to contact with history
through distance and forms an atlas of knowledge (EH). Thus, bridging
aesthetics and politics, the idea of distance informs Didi-­Huberman’s
project of ‘sketch[ing] a historical anthropology of the gaze and imagina-
tion [by examining] a certain variety and multiplicities of gazes’ (EH, xxv).
In Éparses (2020a), true to his imaginal thinking, Didi-­Huberman begins
his poetic reflection on distance with reference to contact and recounts a
memory of seeing his crying face in the mirror as he writes about the
moment of watching the gathering of tears in his eyes. In his reflection in
the mirror, he discovers a ‘new perception’, which illuminates his concep-
tion of distance: ‘this face I see in the mirror’, he says, is ‘impersonal and
interesting’ (2022: 9, 10). It is something new, born out of distance that
exteriorises (tears) emotions (interior) by modifying the surface of his
face, making it an ugly sight. Didi-­Huberman sees this as the moment that
distances him from himself, because the ugly face he sees does not feel
like his own any more. These tears situate the imaginal in proximity of
distance and contact, which ‘are implicated in each other’ (2022: 10–11).
Thus, the seemingly antithetical but interconnected processes of distance
and contact inform Didi-­Huberman’s perception of distance as a form
of contact that ‘immobilizes seeing and the object of seeing’ (EH, xvii).
After all, ‘contact’, Didi-­Huberman explains, is ‘the experience of moving
toward contact or the experience of distance’ (IH, 90).
As Didi-­Huberman considers distance in various shapes or forms,
Walter Benjamin’s definition of aura as ‘a strange weave of space and
time[,] the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how
close it may be’ (Benjamin, 2002: 105), becomes one of the recurring
motifs that inform Didi-­Huberman’s approach to distance and comple-
ments his approach to exile in The Eye of History series. In this series
Didi-­Huberman considers distance as ‘taking a position’, and argues that
by distancing one does not move away to ‘lose sight of things [. . .] [rather]
distancing means that we sharpen our gaze’ (EH, 56). As Sigrid Weigel
notes (2018 [2015]: 43), Didi-­Huberman’s writing here is informed by ‘a
gaze schooled in art and poetry’, whereby it ‘becomes fruitful to produce
the layered and condensed meanings, the configurations and conflicts
that revitalize the petrified images and set them in motion again’. Thus,
by bridging the aesthetic, political and ethical considerations, Didi-­
Huberman articulates position-­taking as a form of constructing knowl-
edge that creates an atlas of ‘new connections between orders of reality’
(EH, 58–60).
Furthermore, in Phasmes (1998a), Didi-­Huberman’s encounter with
phasmids during a visit to the Jardin des Plantes becomes an intriguing
68 d r e a m s

ground for him to reflect on the methods of seeing and distance: ‘Usually
when you’re told there is something to see and yet you can’t see anything,
you move in closer, imagining that what you have to spot is a missed detail
within your visual landscape’, he writes (1998a: 17, quoted in Alloa, 2018:
104). This means that ‘[t]o see phasmids appear, you need to do the very
opposite, softening your focus, taking a couple of steps back, yielding to
a floating visual’ (1998a: 17, quoted in Alloa, 2018: 104). Thus, from his
unconventional contact with the phasmid and tears, to the figure in exile
and aura, Didi-­Huberman, true to his poetic thinking that brings together
the least expected antithetical correlations, offers a series of reflections that
inform his own imagining of distance.

Works Cited
Alloa, E. (2018). ‘Phasmid Thinking. On Georges Didi-­ Huberman’s
Method’, trans. C. Woodall, Angelaki, 23(4): 103–12.
Benjamin, W. (2002). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological
Reproducibility: Second Version’, trans. E. Jephcott and H. Eiland, in
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. H. Eiland
and M. W. Jennings, 101–33. The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press.
Rancière, J. (2009). The Emancipated Spectator, trans. G. Elliott. Verso.
Weigel, S. (2018 [2015]), ‘The Readability of Images (and) of History:
Laudatio on the Occasion of the Awarding of the Adorno Prize (2015)
to Georges Didi-­Huberman’, trans. M. Rys and J. Vanvelk, Angelaki,
23(4): 42–6.

DREAMS

Magdalena Zolkos
Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams plays a key role in Didi-­Huberman’s
‘break [. . .] with conventional theories of representation’ in art history
(Larsson, 2020: 33). In particular, through a close reading of Freud’s
The Interpretation of Dreams, Didi-­Huberman elaborated the importance
of the psychoanalytic concepts of symptom and overdetermination for
the critical paradigm of visual analysis by emphasising the disidentifica-
tion of images and representations in dreams (CF, 139–228). As Didi-­
Huberman puts it, in writing the book on dreams, Freud ‘smash[ed] the
box of representation’ (CF, 144). Rather than harmoniously aligning, in
dreams signification and affect form complex dialectical constellations,
 dreams 69

bringing together elements that, at least from the perspective of the

rational mind, are incompatible and incongruous: ‘here expression and
there conflict, here congruence and there discordance’ (TRS, 70).
Freud famously insisted on the constitutive ‘negativity’ of dreams,
which meant that the truly radical aspect of his exposition was not the
latent or hidden meaning of dreams (as if dreams were a kind of ‘code’
for the subject to decipher), but the description of distortive mechanisms
(displacement and condensation), which showed the undoing or unravel-
ling of conscious thought in dreams (see e.g. Lipszyc, 2018). This oneiric
‘negativity’ imbricates with Didi-­Huberman’s philosophy of the visual,
being closely linked to the idea of imaginal rend. Just as the ‘navel’ punc-
tures dreams by bringing them into ‘contact with the unknown’ (Freud,
1953: 116, n.1), so do images ‘tear’ the sutures that hold together details
and fragments of an image. Dreams and images are disunified, heteroge-
neous and fragmentary ‘objects’ – Freud famously described dreams as
‘shreds and patches’, borrowing Heine’s poetic phrase (Freud, 1953: 489)
– which in turn suggests that any resemblance between these elements or
fragments is ‘unstable [and] phantasmatic’ (IH, 65), rather than intrinsic
to them.
This notion of dialectical movement between assembling and disassem-
bling fragments (in images and dreams) evokes the figure of a dehiscing
­wound – t­hey both instantiate a kind of failure of suturing, an echoing
of trauma and ‘the effect of the unconscious’ (CF, 30). Freud’s turn to
dreams from the ‘all too visible enigma’ of hysteria, Didi-­Huberman sug-
gests (CF, 144), did not simply pose a question of a different study ‘object’,
but created a demand for a different way of looking – one that situated the
gaze at the interstices of knowledge and non-­knowledge (non-savoir).
Furthermore, in his careful engagement with The Interpretation of
Dreams, Didi-­Huberman shows that Freud was intensely preoccupied
with the entanglement of language and visuality in dreams. In his analyses
of how repressed material became ‘transposed’ or ‘converted’ (umsetzen)
into an image (Freud, 1953: 280), Freud articulated a point that has been
a key insight of Didi-­Huberman’s project, that dreams and images are not
simply static entities (present or visible to the viewing subject), but that
they present themselves (actively and dynamically). Rather than ‘objects’ or
‘products’ of the unconscious, dreams are thus events of the unconscious
emerging or rising against the ‘surface’ that represses it. The appear-
ance of images is dynamic, sudden, plastic, intense, even overwhelming.
Thus, approaching The Interpretation of Dreams as a book ‘devoted to the
anadyomene movement of a plunge into the nether regions that produces
the surge of nocturnal images’, Didi-­Huberman not only captures a key
aspect of the Freudian dream-­work, but identifies a crucial dynamic in the
70 duende

­ sychoanalytic theory in general, namely that for Freud the unconscious

p
was an an event, or movement, or an act of rising, that always occurred
against something (the borders and obstacles set by defence mechanism,
which strive to render it invisible) (see anadyomene).
Finally, the correspondences between of Freud’s dream-­theory and
Didi-­Huberman’s images extend beyond their philosophical and phenom-
enological relations, and are also political, insofar as dreaming (for Freud)
and imagining (for Didi-­Huberman) are akin to acts of disclosure; of
‘unleashing and [. . .] reopening’ of foreclosed or disavowed possibilities
(U, 95). Crucial in this context is Didi-­Huberman’s emphasis on the claim
that Freud makes explicit in the closing of the book on dreams, and which
is its organising motif, namely that the desire (Wunsch) that instigates the
oneiric appearance is ‘indestructible’ (unzerstöbar). As such, for Didi-­
Huberman the power (or, rather, potency [puissance]) to imagine can never
be entirely eliminated, even in the most repressive historical moments.
Rather, it manifests against concerted efforts to obliterate and ‘disimagine’
as a ‘force of freedom’ (cf. ISA, 47).

Works Cited
Freud, S. (1953). The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. IV (1900), ed. J. Strachey, ix–627. Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-­analysis.
Larsson, C. (2020). Didi-Huberman and the Image. Manchester University
Press.
Lipszyc, A. (2018). Freud: Logika doświadczenia. Instytut Badań
Literackich PAN.

DUENDE

Paweł Mościcki
Didi-­Huberman’s use of the concept of duende should be seen in the
broader context of his interest in the culture of cante jondo and baile fla-
menco. It finds its expression in scattered articles and book fragments, and
will probably gain its full form in the book trilogy Chants profonds that has
been announced for years. The general framework of Didi-­Huberman’s
thinking about flamenco is an attempt to ‘deconstruct Orientalism’ (Didi-­
Huberman, 2021c: 5), of which the two patrons are Edward Said (on
Orientalism) and Georges Bataille. The latter is a kind of guide to the
 duende 71

world of Gypsy-­Andalusian culture in providing ‘a sovereign economy of

exchange that no longer depends on the cultural violence diagnosed by
the former’ (2021c: 5). Bataille’s experiences in Spain in the 1920s and
the writings he left on the subject (as well as those inspired by it) inflect
Didi-­Huberman’s rethinking of the heritage of flamenco (see Bataille,
1978a; 1978b).
The work of deconstructing the Orientalist view of Andalusia inherited
from the nineteenth century implies the need to ‘displace the usual model
of time’ (2021c: 5), in which it remains a picturesque, exotic fantasy of
an alien and backward culture. Meanwhile, the writings of Bataille and
later flamenco scholars and practitioners, such as Pedro G. Romero, show
that between modernity, personified by the European avant-­garde, and
the popular tradition of the Andalusian Gypsies, complex, dialectical
relations can take place. Thanks to the mutual displacements, Western
art was transformed, even taking elements from flamenco as models of
resistance against bourgeois culture, for example within bohemianism.
Flamenco art in turn has freed itself from its cultural confinement and
rediscovered its power of transformation and adaptation to the condi-
tions of modernity. As Didi-­Huberman shows, the deconstruction of
Orientalism turns into a search for a formula of autonomy with regard
to the opposition between the unification of global capitalism on the
one hand, and enclosed indigenous tradition on the other. Andalusian
culture appears in this reflection as a model of anachronism capable
of constantly transforming the existing heritage and resisting cultural
appropriation.
Key in this context is the category of duende, introduced into contem-
porary reflection on art by Federico García Lorca. Synonymous with
‘genius’, and connotative of the power that descends upon an artist in a
moment of inspiration, duende nevertheless shakes up classical Western
artistic categories. It is, above all, a ‘nomadic genius: the will-­o’-the-­wisp
of our thoughts on art’ (Didi-­Huberman, 2017b: 35; DD, 36). It is not a
static concept, it sets no foundation, and it cements no autochthony. It is
‘the essence of disquiet and strangeness’ (2017b: 35; DD, 36) that haunts
the flamenco singer or dancer as much as it haunts contemporary reflec-
tion on art. For Lorca, duende is limited neither by place nor time, which
is why, for Didi-­Huberman, it is a perfect example of the anachronism and
migration inherent in the culture of the Andalusian Gypsies. Filled with
duende, flamenco can become one of the contemporary ‘sound utopias’
­that – ­on a par with the experiments of Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono or
Helmut L ­ achenmann – i­s both ‘a form for resistance and for setting in
motion certain fundamental desires of a historical, ethical or political
order’ (2021c: 38).
72 duende

Duende is also an alternative model to classical aesthetics and classical

metaphysics, which are embodied, respectively, by the figures of the angel
and the muse discussed by Lorca. Unlike them, duende does not come
from outside; it corresponds neither to the ideal of aesthetic beauty nor to
the supreme power of God. It is the ‘genius of the poor’ (Didi-­Huberman,
2017b: 26; DD, 33) born of the experience of the body in pain, which seeks
a form of expression for itself. If they found anything, it is an ‘aesthetics
of intense form’ (2021c: 21), that is, an aesthetics that contains its own
rupture in confrontation with the power of the affect and is thus able to
blow up all top-­down aesthetic models and hierarchies. This is why the
experience of Andalusian culture was so important in Bataille’s work. As
Didi-­Huberman shows, duende is responsible for Bataille’s revolutionary
approach to art, his specific perspective that breaks with the tradition of
Western thought and questions the ‘art of stases’ in the name of the ‘art
of ecstasies’ that does not refer to any ideal and has only ‘erratic vital
upsurges’ at its disposal (2017g: 17–18; DD, 29).
As Bataille’s fascination with Goya’s paintings shows, Spanish culture
was for ­him – ­and is for Didi-­Huberman – ­an opening to the ‘art of the
impossible’ (Didi-­Huberman, 2021c: 21), that is, art whose inspiration is
not the closeness of the ideal or of divine power, but the inevitability and
intimacy of death. This art cannot ossify into monuments because it is
‘the art of the moment, whose monuments consist only of passing flashes,
sometimes of catastrophes’ (2021c: 22). Duende is recognised in a group
when a form of dancing or singing elicits an olé cry from the audience,
stating its presence. It is a popular art in which a marginal and nomadic
people celebrate their proximity to disaster and death.
As Lorca wrote, duende signifies ‘a radical change to all the old kinds of
form’ and ‘draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond
visible expression’. Working along these lines, Didi-­Huberman insists
that this claim means that ‘energy takes shape [prend forme]’ (2017b: 32;
DD, 35), but that, at the same time, it never closes it down, never fully
defines it, depositing in it the power of transformation and re-­emergence.
In this way, duende also embodies ‘this potency of interior uprising of
which an a­ rtist – o­ r any person guided by the desire to give shape to their
­freedom – ­might be capable’ (2017g: 37; DD, 36).

Works Cited
Bataille, G. (1978a). Story of the Eye, trans. J. Neugroeschel. Urizen
Books.
Bataille, G. (1978b). Blue of Noon, trans. H. Mathews. Jean-­Jacques
Pauvert.
 dynamogram  73

Lorca, F. G. (2007). Theory and Play of the Duende, trans. A. S. Kline.

https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Spanish/LorcaDuen​
de.php. Accessed 5 July 2021.

DYNAMOGRAM

Maud Hagelstein
In Le danseur des solitudes, Didi-­Huberman describes the rhythmic intel-
ligence with which dancer of the baile jondo Israel Galvan creates forms in
movement, or forms with movement, in an often very delicate mode, one
of virtuosic or dynamic immobility (2006a: 98). The quality of his ­gestures
– ­very much inspired by the world of ­bullfighting – ­is clearly artistic;
moreover, ‘to dance is not to bullfight’, as Didi-­Huberman says, rereading
Ortega y Gasset: ‘Where the dancer makes the beauty more visible than
the wound, the torero makes the wound more visible than the beauty. We
could assume that Israel Galvan seeks, in Arena, something equally distant
from both the wound and from beauty’ (2006a: 38). What is this plastic
language that produces figures that are so dense and always delicately,
tenuously balanced? The dancer invents gestures that seek to match the
intensity of the tragic desire that is expressed in the arena, gestures that
give form to the forces that life deploys when it comes into contact with
the possibility of death. It is at the same distance from the wound (pathos)
and from beauty (form). Dancing, then, resembles a Nietzschean struggle
that re-­enacts the tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian.
This model owes much to the views developed by Warburg, and to the
conceptual tools with which the art historian sought to comprehend how a
gestural language takes form.
‘Dynamogram’ is a concept borrowed from Warburg, and it plays a
unique role in the anthropological and aesthetic story of the emergence of
forms. What is it? A dynamogram measures muscular effort (movement)
and is defined literally as the sensitive trace (form) left by a movement
(force). Art is full, therefore, of these imprint-­forms that have recorded
forces graphically, and that have attempted to grasp or master them,
whether these forms are superlative, leaning towards excess, as are very
often the gestures linked to the expression of pathos, or whether they
are restrained as in Galvan’s works. In Didi-­Huberman’s reading, the
dynamogram is the ‘graph of the symptom-­image’: it is what draws, what
inscribes, and what gives form to the forces of life and to its contradic-
tory tensions (2002b: 169). One of the distinguishing features of antique
dynamograms is that they form at moments of great ‘energetic tension’
74 face 

– typically in situations of mourning, of desire, of delirium, of belief,

or of struggle. In them, life constantly beats and oscillates between two
strong poles, between excess and restraint, between maximum force and
introspection. Insofar as it is passed on (for the forms of art interchange,
copy each other, circulate), insofar as it crosses epochs and can therefore
disconnect from the precise historical ground on which it was formed,
the dynamogram is an operator for the phenomenon of survival: in other
words, it has the capacity to begin the future plastic and inventive revival
of the forms of the past.
Translated by Shane Lillis

F
FACE

Elena Vogman
The face appears as a crucial motif at many points throughout Didi-­
Huberman’s vast exploration of expression and pathos – first in the
representation of hysteria in Charcot’s photographic boards (IH), later
in the context of the German science of expression (Ausdruckskunde)
and Aby Warburg’s pathos formula (SI), and most recently in the
representation of peoples in the history of photography and film, with
a particular focus on film extras (les figurants) (PEPE, TRS). However, a
proper philosophical and conceptual elaboration of the ‘face’ (le visage) as
a paradigm takes place in Didi-­Huberman’s monograph on Giacometti’s
Cube sculpture (CF). The Cube serves here not merely as an object for
art historical investigation but as a unique instrument for the conceptual
articulation of the face: between the phenomenology of a surface (la
surface) or side (une face) of an object and an iconic vis-­à-vis, a visage and
its representation or portraiture.
In The Cube and the Face Didi-­Huberman discovers the Cube as a
many-­surfaced enigmatic object, a riddle having more sides than its
reception has noticed so far. He reveals the Cube’s overlooked u ­ nderside
– ­that is, its ­basis – ­as its thirteenth side, the one that stubbornly conceals
itself from view and seems to be buried in both the cube and its recep-
tion. Didi-­Huberman’s title, Le Cube et le visage, plays with the differ-
ence implied in the French notion of the ‘face’. While the French title
uses visage, which refers uniquely to the human face, the book’s ‘12+1’
 face  75

chapters go through the cube’s thirteen sides, one after the other, using
the French word face, which means surface, wall, side, front and aspect.
These two sides of the ‘face’ are unfolded in multiple variations and
conflicting facets in Giacometti’s sculpture. Neither a regular geometri-
cal cube, nor a doubled six-­sided cube, the Cube has 12+1 sides (faces).
Giacometti’s negation of the Cube as an abstract sculpture and a head thus
provides its reading at once as a head and not a head. If it is a head, it is
expected to show a face (visage). This is what happens when years later
Giacometti incised into one of the sculpture’s sides (faces) a visage, or
more precisely a kind of double portrait of his father and son. On another
side Giacometti placed his signature, and on a third a view or portrait
of the cube itself. All these manipulations of an abstract polyhedron
are concentrated in an almost one-­metre-­high object that is too small to
indicate a human counterpart, but large enough to stand as a massive,
many-­sided, many-­faced body-­object that in Giacometti’s words ‘has
volume’ (Lord, 1980: 9).
The play on face and visage is no mere pun; like the number of facets
that Didi-­Huberman follows up in his thirteen chapters – the last one has
the same title as the first – it originates in the Cube itself. Face derives from
the Latin facies, meaning, among other things, the exterior, look, shape,
figure, face, type, condition and configuration (see Olivetti Latin–English
Online Dictionary). This heterogeneous derivation points to the tension
on to which Didi-­Huberman shifts the reception of both the Cube and
Giacometti’s oeuvre by means of the sculpture as a figure of crisis.
In this sense the Cube has at least two faces. On the one hand, in the
(self-)portrait, it presents the signature of the artist, who seeks to create
an enigmatic and delicate monument to his loss (of his father, of meaning,
of the ability to love); on the other hand the face is also problematised as
an alteration: a simultaneously positioned, irregular structure of facets,
which the materiality of the sculpture opens up, dissects and perhaps even
explodes over the course of Didi-­Huberman’s study.
This is how, with Giacometti’s sculpture, Didi-­Huberman crystallises
the critical question addressed by the face as a paradigm of identification,
authorship and symbolic power (AI). Or he asks with Deleuze and Guattari
‘How do you dismantle the face?’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 186). In
a continuous rotation, the turning around of Giacometti’s sculpture, the
ascribed identity of the author becomes complex, an object of doubt. In
this way, the motif of the turn, which is inscribed into the face of the Cube
because of its genuine polarity, likewise anticipates Didi-­Huberman’s later
writings on the temporality of images, above all his study on Warburg
(SI). In the sense of the ‘iconology of the interval’ examined by Warburg,
this turn or twist can be discovered as a ‘place of thought’, as an interval
76 face 

that doesn’t simply bring about a transformation of the face but relocates
and intensifies it. This moving and twisting face has something unsettling
about it, as it simultaneously integrates two contradictory f­ eatures – b­ oth
(for example) the front and the profile. Oscillating between ‘mourning and
desire’, cavity and envelope, between the paradigm of proper name and
eerie revenant, it is primarily a ‘place to experience a threshold’ (CF, 31).
The face is pervaded by disquiet as if by a tic, a twitch, which Deleuze and
Guattari describe as an immanent conflict: ‘It is precisely the continually
refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign
organization of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down on
the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its
organization upon it’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 188). This shimmering
ambivalence can be read as the embodiment of the paradox that Didi-­
Huberman situates in the Cube between ‘a cavity that is too large and an
envelope that is too small’ (CF, 134).
This all-­embracing in-­between therefore takes the face close to that
desirable but ambivalent place described by Jorge Luis Borges in The
Aleph and quoted by Didi-­Huberman at decisive junctures:

I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and
in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own
bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret
and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has
looked upon. (AA, 60–1; see Borges, 1945)

In this vertiginous in-­between, the face is above all a critical locus that,
because of its polarities, would suggest the aleph less as a p ­ ossibility –
­that is, a place in which you could l­inger – a­ nd more as the place of sheer
impossibility. This figure of thought can be traced to Didi-­Huberman’s
exploration of an ‘atlas of the impossible’ (AA, 54). Yet this place is not
entered from a merely philosophical, fictional or theoretical direction,
but on the level of form: an aesthetic and genuinely anthropological level
where the face becomes the real result of a logic of neither–nor become the
‘crystal or the “synthesis” of a tearing’, which doesn’t resolve the conflicts
but crystallises them (CF, 154). To invoke Plato’s image, it belongs to a
certain extent to a ‘third kind of being’ (CF, 154).

Works Cited
Borges, J. L. (1945). The Aleph. http://www.phinnweb.org/links/litera​
ture/borges/aleph.html. Accessed 1 October 2021.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). ‘Year Zero: Faciality’, trans.
 farocki, harun 77

B. Massumi, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

167–91. University of Minnesota Press.
Lord, J. (1980). A Giacometti Portrait. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Olivetti Latin–English Online Dictionary. https://www.online-­latin-­dic​
tionary.com. Accessed 15 December 2021.

FAROCKI, HARUN

Maud Hagelstein
As the rebellious heir to critical iconology, so close to Aby Warburg yet
so harsh with regard to Erwin Panofsky, Didi-­Huberman returns to the
question of the legibility of images in the volumes of his series entitled
L’Œil de l’histoire (The Eye of History). A rereading of the fragments of
Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project allows him to dissociate himself from
the rigid arguments that surround the relations between the visible/the
legible in the perpetual debates regarding the ‘iconic turn’; and it allows
him to situate the investigation ‘beyond the endless nit-­picking over the
primacy of the legible over the visible or vice versa, in which historians
or i­conologists – e­ven ­structuralists – ­have too often become bogged
down, as well as all those who seek to establish an order of ontological
hierarchy between the “symbolic” and the “imaginary”’ (2010b: 15). To
avoid falling into these sterile debates, image theorists must endeavour to
construct new models of legibility. In 1990, in Devant l’image (Confronting
Images), while refusing to give texts a natural, absolute authority over
images, Didi-­Huberman had already begun to defend the idea that the
efficiency of images implied ‘transposed legibilities’ and ‘a work of opening
– and thus of breaking and entering, of symptom f­ ormation – ­effected in
the order of the legible, and beyond it’ (CI, 20). In his series of explicitly
political books L’Œil de l’histoire (2008b; 2010b; 2011b; 2012a; 2015b;
2016a; EH), Didi-­Huberman shows how those reopened and transposed
legibilities are vectors of critical perspectives: images whose historical leg-
ibility has been ‘affronted’ (poorly read images) can then be received anew
and can speak differently.
The works of filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944–2014) fit perfectly within
this experimental research into alternative ways of reading ­images – ­and
Didi-­Huberman pushes the problem to its greatest intensity. He begins
his work with an observation: images do not always speak in the moment
that they are captured. They can, however, find a new legibility later
on, once the ‘critical point’ or the ‘eddy in the stream of becoming’ (to
borrow an expression from Benjamin, 2019: 24), from which emerges the
78 f a r o c k i , h a r u n

possibility of a different gaze, has been found. This critical point must
be constructed. Didi-­Huberman calls this ‘the eye of history’, just as we
speak of the eye of a cyclone, that is, the point around which we can, at a
given moment, make everything else rotate. Even when images speak or,
through innovative audiovisual means, find the point from which they
address us, they do not speak to bring to a close:

By relentlessly attacking the violence of the world, the films of ­Farocki – ­in spite
of their fundamental tact, their somewhat Bressonian way of organizing dialogue
between images and of never letting go of their subject, just as Bresson held his
frames very ­tightly – ­confront a certain pretension on the part of any viewer who
expects to be given conclusions. This violence is merely the perseverance of a
thinking that has understood that an image never has the last word (no more than
does a word). (2010b: 93)

From Didi-­Huberman’s viewpoint, filmmaker Harun Farocki was among

the greatest contemporary performers of critical montage. He showed
this in exemplary fashion in his film Images of the World and the Inscription
of War (Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges, 1988), in which he ana-
lysed an aerial view of the Auschwitz death camp, a view taken unexpect-
edly by an American pilot on 4 April 1944, while he flew at an altitude of
7000 meters over the IG-­Farben factories:

The pictures taken in April 1944 in Silesia arrived for evaluation in Medenham,
England. The analysts discovered a power station, a carbide factory, a factory
under construction for Buna and another for petrol hydrogenation. They were
not under orders to look for the Auschwitz camp, and thus they did not find
it. (extract from the voice-­over from Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges,
H. Farocki, 1988, translated by Karen Margolis and Bert Papenfuss-­Gorek)

Yet the technical apparatus had indeed recorded and inscribed in these
aerial images the reality of the camp and clues to its organisation (selection
ramps, footsteps in the snow indicating the line of the new arrivals, gas
chambers, etc.). Everything was there except for the conditions that might
allow us to recognise in these images what w­ as – a­ lready – to be seen. And
these conditions of new legibility had to be constructed: ‘[f]or what is
recovered in the archive is always re-assembled into a montage by Farocki:
for it is his way to expose the lines of conflict rather than any assembled
groups [les ensembles], his way of dealing with the mass of archives in
order to construct a new legibility there’ (2010c: 109). By multiplying
the viewpoints, by bringing images (images that are initially mute) into
contact with other photographic documents produced from inside by the
 fédida, pierre 79

Nazi camp administrators, or produced clandestinely by a member of the

Sonderkommando (see photography; Sonderkommando photographs),
or with images from times that are closer to us, such as the photographs
of Algerian women unveiled taken by Marc Garanger in 1960, Farocki
helps to give a new thickness to the aerial views that he analyses. Using
innovative arrangements, he shows that the meaning of the images is not
definitively set and that exegesis must at all costs avoid freezing them. The
meaning of an image must, on the contrary, remain open; we can then
place it in a duration and maintain the possibility of a future reading.
Translated by Shane Lillis

Works Cited
Benjamin. W. (2019). Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. H. Eiland.
Harvard University Press.

FÉDIDA, PIERRE

Nigel Saint
The psychoanalyst and author Pierre Fédida (1934–2002) is an important
figure for Didi-­ Huberman both intellectually and personally. Fédida
taught and researched at the universities of Lyon, the Sorbonne and
Paris VII–Denis Diderot, establishing a new programme and laboratory
in ‘Fundamental Psychopathology’ and setting up the Centre d’études
du vivant (Stone-­Richards, 2003–04; Mijolla-­Mellor, 2002). Both men
contributed to each other’s seminars (CI, 9) and cite each other’s work
(Fédida, 1992: 142–3). Didi-­Huberman frequently draws on Fédida’s
work on dreams, absence, melancholy and the temporality of images,
and devoted a long essay to his friend after his death entitled Gestes d’air et
de pierre: corps, parole, souffle, image (2005a).
‘Psychoanalysis is not to be applied to art, instead it should allow itself
to become more complicated as a result of its readiness to engage with the
many questions asked of it by art’ (Didi-­Huberman, 2005a: 62). Fédida’s
questions for Didi-­Huberman begin with the former’s work on dream-­
images, where in a gloss on Freud’s discussion of perception and memory
in dreams, Fédida states that the dream-­image is initially both speechless
and sightless: ‘The image [. . .] does not reflect anything because it is the
screen-mirror of a vision that is unable to speak and therefore unable to
look. It’s as if the image becomes, for a moment, a face with unsighted
eyes’ (Fédida, 1995: 187). Fédida also considered what kind of sight might
80 f é d i d a , p i e r r e

still be accessed nevertheless: ‘The dream image is visual not because it

makes something visible but because it has seen something’ (Fédida, 1994:
51). To start with there is no ready account in words; the seer-­like dream-­
images are mute and a tussle begins in language between the forgotten and
the remembered. Gaps or obscurity in a dream account are nevertheless
still full of potential, since it is possible to investigate non-­verbal indistinct
expression such as a patient’s manner of breathing, which can indicate that
there is a dream-­image hovering in an intermediary state: ‘The breath of
the image is indistinct when it is held back during the struggle to insert
it into a narrative’ (Fédida, 1995: 220). Paradoxically, this opaqueness is
welcomed by Fédida since it frees the dream from trying to be a truthful
transcription; to be powerless and indistinct is welcomed. The analyst is
also avoiding taking control: ‘To appropriate the place of analysis in any
way is to make both the place and the session impossible. Metapsychological
writing is authorless since neither party has mastery over the language
used’ (Fédida, 1995: 285).
Having set the scene with these mini-­dramas unfolding in Fédida’s
dream laboratory, involving sightless visions, language, patient and
analyst, we will now sketch out three areas where Fédida’s work has had a
lasting influence on Didi-­Huberman. First, Fédida’s work on absence and
the imaginary offers Didi-­Huberman a way of positing a thinking, viewing
and feeling body on heightened alert in front of artworks (Fédida, 1978: 75;
Didi-­Huberman, 2005a: 20–9). Fédida argues that the analyst’s thinking
needs to reconsider its perspectives just as their language needs to reinvent
itself, if it can, in response to the violence in the patient’s discourse, akin
to Didi-­Huberman’s remark about casting off habitual ways of think-
ing when looking at artworks (Fédida, 1992: 124, 229; Didi-­Huberman,
2001a: 84–5). Secondly, Didi-­Huberman partly sources from Fédida a
way of reflecting on an alternative mode of transmission for images, forma-
tions and gestures, from past to present, through the figure of the mother.
Didi-­ Huberman is fascinated by a lineage that is non-­ imitative, not
representative, but rethought through the contact of birth and affection,
and mourning gestures: ‘The figure of the ancestor no longer represents
the absent (over-­represented) forefather, whether in their effigy or icon,
but is instead the image – indistinct breath, emanation – of absence itself’
(2005a: 78). Thirdly, Fédida also provided Didi-­Huberman with a living
context in which to examine thoughts about the difficulty we experience
in acknowledging, estimating and understanding the force of memory:
‘Our present [. . .] is obligated to, subject to, alienated from memory’
(CI, 85 and n.1, with the reference to Fédida, 1985). This sensibility and
anxiety about the past inflects Didi-­Huberman’s approach to questions of
trauma, Freud’s ‘delayed action’ (Nachträglichkeit) and historiography in
 figuration  81

the art historical work of his intellectual hero in the field, Aby Warburg
(SI, 214).
From a radical configuration of the making of a dream-­image in analysis
is developed an act of transmission in language, however indefinite or
incomplete. For Fédida, the individual instances of dream-­images can
cohere according to a temporality that saves us from excessive melan-
choly: ‘Perhaps mourning’s great enigma is the way over time the living
can dream about death while they sleep and thus be protected from the
violence that afflicts sufferers from melancholia’ (Fédida, 1978: 78). In
Didi-­Huberman’s case, working with a multitude of images carries the
possibility of revaluating the cultural dynamism of the present, of provid-
ing a critique of political structures and establishing an order to one’s
thoughts, pessimistic in the case of Walter Benjamin (SF, 61–70, 74).

Works Cited
Fédida, P. (1978). L’Absence. Gallimard.
Fédida, P. (1985). ‘Passé anachronique et présent réminiscent. Epos et
puissance mémoriale du langage’, L’Ecrit du temps, 10: 23–45.
Fédida, P. (1992). Crise et contre-transfert. Presses universitaires de France.
Fédida, P. (1994). ‘Compter les morts’, l’inactuel: psychanalyse, and
culture, 1: 49–59.
Fédida, P. (1995). Le Site de l’étranger: la situation psychanalytique. Presses
universitaires de France.
Mijolla-­Mellor, S. (2002). ‘Hommage à Pierre Fédida: Pierre Fédida à
l’université’, Carnet/Psy, 77. https://www.cairn.info/revue-­le-­carnet​
-­psy-­2002-­9-page-­37.htm. Accessed 20 January 2021.
Stone-­Richards, M. (2003–04). ‘Pierre Fédida, 1934–2002: A Mémoire’,
Journal of Visual Culture, 2(1): 69–72.

FIGURATION

Adina Balint
When the book Devant l’image (1990a; CI) was first published, it won
immediate critical acclaim because of its far-­reaching arguments about the
structure of images and Didi-­Huberman’s claim that visual representation
has an ‘underside’, in which intelligible forms defy rational understanding
and trigger creativity and imagination. This underside harbours images’
overdetermination and contradictions beyond the evident assumption that
visual representation is made up of legible signs and is subject to rational
82 figuration 

scholarly cognition. In Confronting Images too, Didi-­Huberman makes the

distinction between the ‘visible’ and the ‘visual’: the former refers to the
legibility of the image based on the knowledge of relevant conventions,
while the latter is present in the gaze and escapes the grasp of intelligence.
The philosopher warns against the superficiality of the visible, which veils
the visual, meaning that the viewer is therefore deprived of their own per-
sonal projection of the image. A way of seeing is to look beyond the visible
into the visual, a distinction that recalls the Augustinian immanence of
light where each section of space folds into a coruscation of virtual figures
(see Didi-­Huberman, 1998a: 121–36).
The sheer number of references and topics covered in Didi-­Huberman’s
books reveals a crucial feature of his writing style and approach, one which
has been called ‘figuration’. For him, there is a close link between the act of
seeing and recollection, encapsulated in figuration. Didi-­Huberman (like
Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin) argues for a particular position-
ing towards the past as something that will have been seen (cf. Lyotard,
2009: 203–5). When images are thought of ‘beyond the usual principle of
historicity’, they use this ‘art of memory necessary in all strong work to
transform the past into future’ (Didi-­Huberman, 1992b: 83, 101). This is a
‘figure of thought’ that appears in different forms in Didi-­Huberman’s art
history, as exemplified by the inherent surplus of sense that allows images
to emerge in new configurations in Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science (AA).
In middle English, the word figuracioun was borrowed either from the
Latin figūrātiōn- figūrātiō, namely the ‘process of forming, shape, repre-
sentation’ or from figūrāre, the verbal action of ‘to shape, make a likeness
of, represent’ (Merriam–Webster Dictionary). Didi-­Huberman’s ­work
– ­whether an individual book or his entire oeuvre taken ­together – ­forges
representations (‘figurations’) of montages he analyses (see AA), including
the set-­ups that bring together the Urformen of Karl Blossfeldt (1926–28)
and August Sander’s Gemeiner Wurmfarm (1930–50). He points out that
the sheer inexhaustibility and scope of a picture atlas such as Warburg’s
Mnemosyne Atlas breaks all frames (AA, 13). This is because, against
any epistemic purity, the atlas introduces the emotional dimension into
knowledge, diversity and the incomplete character of each image; against
aesthetic purity, it introduces the heterogeneity of the montage and of
the multiple. Even though an atlas is a critical and epistemological tool, a
cartography or a map, its aim is not to provide a form of complete knowl-
edge or to present a total picture. For Didi-­Huberman, the atlas configures
‘interstitial zones of exploration, heuristic intervals. For it has to do with
a theory of knowledge devoted to the risk of the sensible and an aesthetic
devoted to the risk of disparity’ (AA, 5). The emphasis on figurations and
fragments of images and texts refutes the pictorial totality and uniform-
 figuration  83

ity, and produces instead ‘transversal knowledge’ (AA, 13). In the atlas in
general or in the montage technique, ‘an empirical approach is combined
with an imaginative approach’ (De Cauwer and Smith, 2018: 4), while the
experience of seeing is doubled by the desire to search further, to forge
new figurations. For Didi-­Huberman, as for Warburg, pathos is a key
element in this project.
Fundamental to the discussion on the notion of figuration is Didi-­
Huberman’s book on Fra Angelico (1990b; FAD). Here he explores
the network of ideas evoked by the imagery, colours and compositions
of Fra Angelico, treating his paintings as virtual figurations of theologi-
cal speculations and vehicles of spiritual meditations. In order to explain
the means by which Fra Angelico portrayed spiritual truth rather than
physical veracity, Didi-­Huberman explores the theses of figuration and
dissemblance. These themes are derived from Pseudo-­Dionysius the
Areopagite’s theological concepts of dissimilitudo and figura, the first con-
noting the deceitfulness of earthly appearance, and the latter r­ eferring – i­ n
the Latin and medieval t­ raditions – ­to a thing other than what is seen with
the eye, the mystery of bodies beyond bodies or the supernatural in the
visible. Didi-­Huberman writes that ‘to figure did not mean to present the
story’s aspect, but rather to apprehend the mystery pictorially by practis-
ing the diffraction of meaning, its perpetual displacement’ (FAD, 122).
The fact that Didi-­Huberman explored Fra Angelico’s art as a blend of
scholastic exegesis and the figuration of a story by means of a pictorial
system is a testament to his ability to catch a glimpse of a gesture or idea,
and teach us the power of images (De Cauwer and Smith, 2018: 8).

Works Cited
De Cauwer, S., and Smith, L. K. (2018). ‘Critical Image Configurations:
The Work of Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Angelaki 23(4): 3–10.
Lyotard, J.-F. (2009). Karel Appel. A Gesture of Colour/Un geste de couleur,
trans. V. Ionescu and P. W. Milne. Leuven University Press.
Merriam–Webster Online Dictionary. https://www.merriam-­webster​
.com. Accessed 18 May 2021.
Warburg, A. (2020 [1925–29]). Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: The Original.
Hatje Cantz.
84 form 

FORM

Nigel Saint
Form, as Raymond Williams noted, has had a ‘complicated development’
as a word. It refers to both ‘a visible or outward shape’ and ‘an essential
shaping principle’ (Williams, 1988: 138). Didi-­Huberman’s interest in
the making and the phenomenon of art means that form has remained a
constant concern in his work. The term both classifies and eludes clas-
sification, involving the multiple functions of art and the creative life of
forms as they reinvent themselves. It has a complex and disruptive role in
Didi-­Huberman’s thinking, as if it threatens to coagulate if circumscribed.
It always incites and challenges, being the matrix and the crucible of the
work of art. Didi-­Huberman sets himself the task of observing the energy
of forms forming, becoming and altering, with all the disturbing aspects of
this process when a recognisable form morphs into its abject, chaotic and
alarming other. ‘The Nightmare of Forms (on formlessness and dialectics
again)’ is the title of a 2017 lecture and subsequent essay (2019d).
‘Venus has turned into a document’ was Valéry’s verdict on the stulti-
fying modern museumification of art (Valéry, 1960 [1923]: 1293, cited in
Didi-­Huberman, 2013i: 25). Ouvrir Vénus: nudité, rêve, cruauté was one
of Didi-­Huberman’s responses to this situation, investigating how the
visual forms associated with female beauty in the work of ­Botticelli – ­line,
colour, expression and accoutrements, all parts perfectly combined into
a ­whole – r­ isked anaesthetising the powerful forces of desire and decay
present in an image of beauty (1999a). Looking at deliberate disturbances
of a beautiful body’s forms, when the intestines are shown in a wax sculp-
ture (1999a: 106–14), or when a woman’s back is cut open in the painting
of a tale from the Decameron by Boccaccio (1999a: 64–85) – reminds us of
the hidden organs and punishments accorded to the desired body, despite
its canonical rendering as an ideal vision of beauty. Thus, rather than
finished artistic forms, as Didi-­Huberman notes in a discussion of Carl
Einstein, an alternative and symptomatic reading of artistic representa-
tion imagines ‘the discontents of form’ (2000a: 202–3). Forms are every-
where revealed to be in crisis, breaking down but also rendered for fresh
examination, as with Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs of flowers (2000a:
143–51), the contrasting poses of the hysteric (IH, 187–203), the inhuman
fate of the bodies in the Sonderkommando photographs (ISA), the
folding, withdrawal (repli) and unfolding of canvasses by Simon Hantaï
(1998b), and the screams from Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’s Gaze
(1995) included in the ‘New Ghost Stories’ exhibition (Paris, Palais de
Tokyo, 2014).
 form  85

The forms of visual experience are engaged in a process of emer-

gence, collapse and resurgence (Didi-­Huberman, 2019c: 207). In Didi-­
Huberman’s view, art involves both form and the formless, and for him
Georges Bataille’s achievement was to push the notion of the dialectical
image further than before, incorporating the anthropology of art and the
proliferation of images. Form is a process of damaging ‘altération’, from
the French verb meaning ‘to impair, to spoil, to mar’, as Eric Robertson
noted in his study of Arp (Robertson, 2006: 82). At the same time, and in
a way that has perplexed some American critics who consider the informe
to be irreducible to any dialectic and impossible to link to resemblance
(2019e: 422–80), Didi-­Huberman has adhered to the idea of a rend inher-
ent in resemblance and pursued an inquiry into the continuing destruction
and self-­renewal of forms: ‘it means advancing the subversive production
of forms by means of a regressive assault from formlessness’ (2000a: 203).
Images, in his view, function according to a double regime where paradoxi-
cally the symptomatic and the formless exist in co-­dependency with systems
and structures. Didi-­Huberman has summarised this visual regime as pairs
of opposites: ‘visible and visual, detail and “patch”, resemblance and dis-
semblance, anthropomorphism and abstraction, form and formlessness,
allure and cruelty’ (ISA, 79). Forms displace their antecedents, produce
new ways of experiencing and disturb habitual ways of thinking.
Didi-­Huberman uses the verb œuvrer (to craft, to sculpt, to work) to
emphasise the work of form: distance, time and value are variously said
to be worked into, and crafted by, a form, whether an object’s mass and
frontality or a drawing’s reinvention of space and depth. New modes of
critique are also developed: the use of a fable without a resolution in
essays on contemporary artists, the undercutting of erudition by nesci-
ence and the dislocation of subjecthood, the regular reworking of Walter
Benjamin and alignments of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas with
other thinkers’ projects, the experiments with alternative kinds of inquiry
and creation (exhibitions in many countries, photography, artists’ books,
flamenco guitar, teaching or lecturing in very different kinds of institu-
tion), the interest in philology and literature, and the release of the explo-
sive charge of a critical dictionary rubric, which included Bataille’s entry
‘Informe’, on to the modern era. Form will be conflicted and unruly, or it
will not exist.

Works Cited
Robertson, E. (2006). Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor. Yale University Press.
Valéry, P. (1960 [1923]). ‘Le Problème des musées’, in Œuvres II, ed.
J. Hytier, 1290–3. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
86 formless, the (l’informe)

Williams, R. (1988). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.

Fontana.

FORMLESS, THE (L’INFORME)

Hanna Doroszuk
The notion of the formless (informe) was widely elaborated by Didi-­
Huberman in La Ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges
Bataille (1995a), a publication dedicated to the dissident surrealist maga-
zine Documents: doctrines, archéologie, beaux-arts, ethnographie, published
in Paris between 1929 and 1931, and edited by Georges Bataille.
The book starts with an excerpt from Saint Augustine’s Confessions,
where, in the twelfth chapter, the reader finds the following definition
of formless: ‘I called formless not something that lacked form’, writes
Augustine, ‘but something that had form of such a kind that, were it to
become perceptible, my power of perception would turn away, as from
something unaccustomed and unsuitable, and my human frailty would
have been thrown into confusion’ (1966: 371). For Augustine, the formless
was something not deprived of form, but, rather, something impossible
to consider when compared to ‘more beautiful formed things’ (1966: 371).
He recognised the difficulties in the renunciation of form, while attempt-
ing to articulate what is ‘genuinely formless’ (1966: 371).
Augustine’s idea of formless provided undoubtedly the principal theo-
retical reference for the concept of informe elaborated by Didi-­Huberman in
La Ressemblance informe, alongside Bataille’s famous definition of informe,
found in ‘Critical Dictionary’ (in the seventh issue of the Documents
magazine; see Bataille et al., 1992). For Bataille (1929: 382, in Bataille
et al., 1992: 27), the notion of informe had the effect of ‘declassify[ing]’
(déclasser) the ‘require[ment] that each thing takes on a form’. Situated
against the philosophical and academic demand for a form, the notion of
informe, according to Bataille (1929: 382, in Bataille et al., 1992: 27), had
‘no claim in any sense, and [was] always trampled upon like a spider or an
earthworm’. He concluded that ‘to declare [. . .] that the universe is not
like anything, and is simply formless, is tantamount to saying [that] the
universe is something like a spider or spittle’ (Bataille, 1929: 382).
Didi-­ Huberman analyses Bataille’s notion of transgression and its
reference to the ‘transgression of form’ (1995a: 19). In this context, Didi-­
Huberman paraphrases Michel Foucault’s postulate made in Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice, ‘limit and transgression depend on each other
for whatever density of being they possess’ (1977: 34), as ‘form and
 formless, the (l’informe) 87

transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they

possess’ (1995a: 20). Didi-­Huberman argues that for Bataille transgres-
sion was not a simple refusal of form, but a possibility to broaden the limits
of form. Recalling the definition of informe in the ‘Critical Dictionary’,
Didi-­Huberman notes that informe was meant to ‘overturn’ (renverser)
the thesis that everything needs to have a form, as well as to ‘displace’
(deplacer), and ‘to bring things down’ (déclasser) (1995a: 20). He affirms
the dialectical (dialectique), rather than contradictory, nature of the rela-
tion between resemblance and dissemblance, which is part of Bataille’s
definition of informe. In this context, Didi-­Huberman introduces the
notion of ‘transgressive resemblance’ (ressemblances transgressives) to mark
its similarity to such forms as spiders (araignées) and spittle (crachat),
mentioned ‘Critical Dictionary’, but also to the forms of roots (racines),
decay (pourritures) or combustion waste (rebuts de combustion) (1995a:
21–2). These ‘transgressive resemblances’ also manifest in ‘miserable
forms’ (formes misérables), used instead of the simple negation of the form
(non-formes), and incorporated into Bataille’s methodology and preoc-
cupations in 1930s. Didi-­Huberman elaborates that the transgression of
forms requires ‘[committment] to the work of forms [travail des formes]’,
which is compared to childbirth and a­ gony – ­an opening (une ouverture), a
tear, or rend (déchirure), and putting to death (metter quelque chose à mort).
This approach leads to a new model of thinking about forms, where the
process (of acquiring, or taking, a form) exceeds the effect, where unstable
relations exceed fixed ones, and where unsubordinated materials are put
against the subordination of an idea. In addition to ‘transgressive forms’
(formes transgressives), Didi-­Huberman is speaking in this context about
‘tearing resemblances’ (ressemblances déchirantes) (1995a: 22–3).
Further, Didi-­ Huberman references Pierre Fédida’s contribution
to a La Part de l’Œil dossier on Bataille from 1994, ‘Le mouvement de
l’informe’, which sees in the Bataillean notion of the informe ‘an aspec-
tual term qualifying the movement’ of other contents (1995a: 134). This
process, defined as ‘putting forms into motion’ (mise en movement des
formes), is crucial for Didi-­Huberman’s thinking about ‘figurative mon-
tages’ (montages figuratifs) in Bataille’s work. The movement introduced
by the informe is, for Didi-­Huberman, the key ‘tool’ of ‘theoretical disas-
sembly’ (démontages théoriques), which illuminates the traditional notions
in Bataillean methodology: form, resemblance, anthropomorphism (1995a:
135). When it comes to visual representations of the informe, one of the
most distinctive images that Didi-­Huberman describes is a photo of the
Seine during the winter of 1870–71, when the river had frozen, forming a
‘magma of broken ice’ (1995a: 154). The photo was reproduced in ‘Critical
Dictionary’, and Michel Leiris referenced it in his entry on ‘debacle’ as a
88 foucault, michel 

figure of the decomposition of social relations: ‘[j]ust as in that winter of

1870–1871 [. . .] the solidified Seine braced its back, its spine of hardened
water, to the passing cars, pedestrians, and trucks, our rivers of feeling are
turning into arteries full of cold, coagulating blood, channels for sticky
animalcules’ (1929: 381–2, in Bataille et al., 1992: 26). The ‘image of the
dissimilar’ (l’image même du dissemblable), coinciding with the informe’s
transgression of forms, is significant with regard to Eli Lotar’s series Aux
Abattoirs de la Vilette, illustrating Batailles’s entry on ‘abattoir’ (1995a:
159–62). On one of the two photos reproduced on page 330 of Documents,
the formless shape left at the door was formed out of the animal remains,
creating a pile of rolled skin, with the forms almost impossible to recog-
nise, and giving a poignant visualisation of the informe (1929: 330).

Works Cited
Bataille, G. (1929). ‘Informe’, Documents, 7: 382.
Bataille, G., Leiris, M., Einstein, C., and Griaule, M. (1992). ‘Critical
Dictionary’, trans. D. Faccini, October, 60: 25–31.
Fédida, P. (1994). ‘Le mouvement de l’informe’, La Part de l’Œil, 10
(dossier: Bataille et les arts plastiques).
Foucault, M. (1977). ‘A Preface to Transgression’, in Language, Counter-
memory, Practice ed. D. Bouchard, 29–52. Cornell University Press.
Leiris, M. (1929). ‘Débâcle’, Documents, 7: 381–2.
Saint Augustine (1966). Confessions, trans. B. Vernon. The Fathers of the
Church, 21. Catholic University of America Press.

FOUCAULT, MICHEL

Chari Larsson
Didi-­Huberman’s investigation into the conditions of art history signals
an ongoing engagement with the work of Michel Foucault, and especially
with the Foucauldian notion of archeology that is hostile to the Hegelian-­
inspired, progressivist views of historical continuity (see Foucault, 1989a).
Foucault’s postulate that history needed to be rethought from the
perspective that privileges its disruption and disjointedness resonates
strongly with Didi-­Huberman’s anti-­Hegelianism and his commitment to
a non-­synthesised dialectics (see 2002c: 96–7). The impact of Foucault’s
emphasis on the necessity for discontinuous modes of knowledge is
perceptible, for instance, in Didi-­Huberman’s fascination with montage,
understood as a tool executing an epistemological ‘cut’ in that it recon-
 foucault, michel  89

figures and reassembles existing knowledge. In an interview discussing

Foucault’s ongoing influence, Didi-­Huberman acknowledged his debt to
Foucault’s essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ and his observation that
‘[k]nowledge is made for cutting’ (Foucault, 1977: 247). Didi-­Huberman
remarked that he ‘could work with that command (epistemic, but also
literary, ethical, and political) for years’ (KWC, 84). Of particular signifi-
cance for Didi-­Huberman has also been Foucault’s insistence on under-
standing the disciplinary configurations and formations of thought, which
Didi-­Huberman credits as one of the philosophical inspirations for his
study of Charcot’s photographic archives in Invention of Hysteria (KWC,
80–1). Emphasising the importance of the Foucauldian nexus of ‘practices
and discourses’, Didi-­Huberman says that he ‘just added another element’
to that matrix, namely images: ‘[s]ince the very beginning I wanted to
do with images what Foucault did so well with discourse’ by ‘analyzing
phenomena of emergence that have both long duration through time [and]
feature things that completely modify the current state of affairs and move
towards the future’ (KWC, 80).
Noting the ‘beauty of [Foucault’s] language’ in and beyond The
Archaeology of Knowledge, Didi-­ Huberman has not only stressed the
importance of ‘literary choices’ in philosophy, but has also opened up
the aesthetic and visual dimension of the clinic or the asylum (KWC,
82; IH). His inquiry into the conditions of the emergence of modern art
historiography as a scholarly d ­ iscipline – ­and of the discursive crystal-
lisation of its ­object – ­takes as its key reference Foucault’s archaeological
project by approaching the intersection between epistemology, power and
expertly gaze as ‘codes of knowledge’ and cultural conventions (Foucault,
1989b: 8). Reflecting on the role of paintings in Foucault’s writings, Didi-­
Huberman has argued that images have had a central place in the forma-
tion of the Foucauldian dialectic of ‘order and disorder’, understood as
an interplay between ‘[s]omething that builds up and something that dis-
turbs’, or as the ‘effects both of knowledge and of symptom in knowledge’
(KWC, 84). For Didi-­Huberman, Foucault’s engagement with pictorial
material, including the well-­known analysis of Diego Velázquez’s 1656
painting Las Meninas in the opening chapter of The Order of Things, was
underwritten by a different approach to visual culture than the dominant
tradition of iconology of Erwin Panofsky. Rather than an indexical
search for meaning, Foucault’s analysis emphasised the importance of
self-­reflexivity in any imaginal representation.
Furthermore, Didi-­Huberman’s attempt at disrupting the subject–
object binary in relation to images (which he endows with a capacity to
‘regard’ the subject and to ‘think’, cf. 1992b; ISA, 138) is best understood
in terms of Foucault’s philosophical reorientation from the subject to
90 fra angelico 

the object, and his the death-­of-­man thesis, as well as the crisis of the
‘modern episteme’ (Foucault, 1994). Foucault’s critique of the human-
ism and anthropocentrism of modern historiography echoes with Didi-­
Huberman’s claim that rational knowledge and the viewer’s control of the
image within the humanist tradition of art history are neither viable nor
desirable. Following Foucault, Didi-­Huberman has called into question
the epistemic act of placing human beings at the centre of the discourse,
and the authority assumed by the subject position of an expert. Instead,
at hand is a dissolution of the modern subject as a privileged locus of dis-
course and representation.

Works Cited
Foucault, M. (1977). ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, trans. D. Bouchard
and S. Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays
and Interviews, ed. D. Bouchard, 139–64. Cornell University Press.
Foucault, M. (1989a). The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith. Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1989b). The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith. Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1994). The Order of Things. Vintage.

FRA ANGELICO

Busra Copuroglu
Considered as a ‘sublime and exceptional talent’ by the Italian painter
Giorgio Vasari (1991: 175), the early Renaissance painter Fra Angelico
(c. 1387–1455) was celebrated for his ability to depict the ‘immortality
of the soul with the Incarnation doctrines of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the
Dominican doctor of the church’ (Spike, 1996: 11). Didi-­Huberman’s
interest in Fra Angelico’s paintings was spiked by his discovery of ‘two
or three disconcerting things’ in Fra Angelico’s mural paintings in the
convent of San Marco in Florence which, he claims, would not generally
correspond to ‘what an art historian’s eye can generally expect from a
work produced during [this period]’ (FAD, 2). In his book Fra Angelico:
Dissemblance and Figuration (1995), in his own complex language, Didi-­
Huberman examines Fra Angelico’s works that have been traditionally
categorised as works of ‘devotional practice and theological meditation’
(FAD, 3). Thus, aiming to ‘correct [the] usual categories of art history’
(FAD, 3) and attempting ‘to draw the gaze beyond the eye [and] the visible
 fra angelico  91

beyond itself’, he offers readings of ‘pictorial enigma’ (such as the blotches

of paint in the meadow in Noli me tangere) to study the element of mystery
in Fra Angelico’s painting (FAD, 4).
Fra Angelico provides the ground for Didi-­Huberman’s discussions
of the concepts of dissemblance and figuration and opens the way for
the repudiation of traditional understandings of Renaissance paintings
informed by the conventional readings of art history that record and
celebrate the visible as ‘the history of conquest of resemblances’ (FAD,
2; see Panofsky, Erwin). Thus, the paintings also offer an ideal ground
for Didi-­Huberman to showcase an analysis that actively employs the
gaze. Working from Freud’s view of painting in The Interpretation of
Dreams, where Freud considers paintings as lacking the capacity to express
and form logical relations (1953: 312–13), Didi-­Huberman characterises
paintings as disconcerting because of their overdetermination (FAD,
7; CI, 152–5). Focusing on works such as Noli me tangere (c. 1440–42),
Madonna of the Shadows (c. 1450), Annunciation (c. 1440–45), and distanc-
ing himself from ‘misleading [. . .] traditional categories’ of the humanist
art history, Didi-­Huberman traces the ‘exegetical tradition from late
antiquity to the quattrocento’ (Barryte, 1997: 1261). Against the traditional
scientific methods of art history, and in particular the legacy of Erwin
Panofsky, whose ‘perspectivist viewpoint of humanism’ (HE, xvii; see
Panofsky, 1991 [1927]) celebrated a ‘positivistic history of art and icono-
logical method of interpretation’ (Krasińska, 2018: 28), Didi-­Huberman’s
reading of Fra Angelico’s work follows a semiotic and psychoanalytic
approach. Through Fra Angelico’s paintings, Didi-­Huberman demon-
strates that ‘writing the history of a visual paradigm [is] writing the history
of a phenomenology of gazes and touches’ (CI, 30). For Didi-­Huberman,
the paintings also provide the ground for a methodological interrogation
of Vasari’s and Panofsky’s methods, whose insistence on the legibility of
visual representations and signs stands in contrast to the methods of Aby
Warburg, centred on the afterlife (Nachleben) of images.
Thus, Didi-­Huberman’s reading of the paintings emerges as a story
of the gaze that floats around the surface of the paintings. This mode of
looking at Fra Angelico’s paintings also serves as a point of reflection about
the embodiment of distancing (see distance): ‘even in front of the inno-
cent frescoes of Fra Angelico’, he writes, ‘it [is] necessary to take position,
and [. . .] to go back up, to go through, to revisit from top to bottom the
conventional hierarchies of high and low, of iconographies and of décor,
of resemblance and dissemblance’ (EH, xx). In Didi-­Huberman’s writing,
images ‘are allied with poetical language’ (Baert, 2018: 48), which in turn
challenges the traditional methods of art history and reaches beyond the
‘story [that] everyone knows’ and that, Didi-­Huberman mock-­laments,
92 freud, sigmund 

results in a ‘disappointment with what is legible’ and diminishes curiosity

(CI, 13).

Works Cited
Baert, B. (2018). ‘He or She who Glimpses, Desires, is Wounded’,
trans. E. Woodard, J. R. Solorzano, S. De Cauwer, and L. K. Smith,
Angelaki, 23(4): 47–79.
Barryte, B. (1997). ‘Review of G. Didi-­ Huberman, Fra Angelico
Dissemblance and Figuration’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50(4): 1261–2.
Freud, S. (1953). The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. IV (1900), ed. J. Strachey, ix–627. Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-­analysis.
Krasińska, M. (2018). ‘The Convergence of Phenomenology and Semiotics
in Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Aesthetics of the Symptom’, The Polish
Journal of Aesthetics, 49: 27–40.
Panofsky, E. (1991 [1927]). Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. C. S. Wood.
Zone Books.
Spike, J. T. (1996). Fra Angelico. Abbeville Press.
Vasari, Giorgio (1991). ‘Fra Angelico’, in The Lives of the Artists, trans.
J. Conaway Bondanella and P. Bondanella, 169–78. Oxford University
Press.

FREUD, SIGMUND

Maud Hagelstein
In the late 1970s, for his doctoral thesis on Charcot and the photographic
iconography of the Salpêtrière, which he then defended in 1981 at the
EHESS (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales) under the direction
of Louis Marin, Didi-­Huberman began to immerse himself in the thinking
of Sigmund Freud, and began to construct from his readings the project
of an ‘aesthetics of the symptom’ (see IH). A particular scene caught his
attention in Freud’s descriptions: that of a body during an attack of hys-
teria. The ­scene – ­witnessed by Freud, a ‘true feat of plasticity’ (IH, 162),
where the woman suffers while offering the spectacle of a paradox (she
embodies both the aggressor and the aggressed) – made it possible for the
first time to establish the hypothesis that the symptom of hysteria could be
the expression of a compromise between two fantasies, the one feminine
and the other masculine:
 freud, sigmund  93

In one case which I observed, for instance, the patient pressed her dress up against
her body with one hand (as the woman), while she tried to tear it off with the other
(as the man). This simultaneity of contradictory actions serves to a large extent to
obscure the situation, which is otherwise so plastically portrayed in the attack, and
it is thus well suited to conceal the unconscious phantasy that is at work. (Freud,
1959 [1924]: 166; see also Didi-­Huberman, 1995c: 200–1; 1995a, 361; IH, 163;
CI, 260)

As Didi-­Huberman is clearly sensitive to contrasting gestural formulae,

or ready to be seized by them, he was struck by this image, and recog-
nised Freud’s genius in having been able to give meaning to the apparent
incoherence of the hysterical crisis, whose attitudes had until then been
interpreted as illogical. What unsettled him then would never leave him:
Freud directed our gaze towards an alternative logic of the image, a para-
logic, allowing us to think that contradictory things can be simultaneous
and embodied in the same body. Captivated by this often neglected inau-
gural scene, he noted the violence of interpretation, which forces images
into the expected boxes. For the conflict observed by Freud on the body
of the hysterical patient, and the complexity of its painful choreographies,
had to a certain extent been ‘flattened out’ and unified by the photographic
practice of the Salpêtrière and its assigned stage directors. Obsessed by the
idea of masking the visual paradoxes that animated them, Dr ­Charcot – a­
skilled operator in the ‘twisting of meaning’ – wanted too much to make
these lost women resemble the model of the hysteric, according to an
idealist conception of resemblance, similar to that which Didi-­Huberman
would later refuse to grant to art historians (IH, 63).
The hysterical body described by Freud had enduringly challenged
knowledge. Upon discovering these images, the young art historian had
decided to face this challenge. The hysterics of the Salpêtrière hospital
visualised a lacuna, a fault in the reading, a blind spot in interpretation.
While the text is not explicitly devoted to the question of art, Didi-­
Huberman considers The Interpretation of Dreams – particularly the
chapter ‘The Dream-­Work’ – a necessary theoretical passage to study the
processes of image formation. Here, Freud defends the idea that a dream
never has a one-­sided meaning. Its manifest ­content – t­ he elements of the
dream to which we have direct access upon ­waking – i­ s overdetermined in
comparison to its latent ­content – ­the unconscious thoughts that give rise
to the dream. In other words, the elements of the dream are determined
several times by the thoughts of the dream. The possibility of an overde-
termination of images, opened up by Freud, allows us to understand how
contradictory elements react when brought into contact with one another,
the kind of contact that the psychoanalyst would call ‘contrasting associa-
94 freud, sigmund 

tions’ (where ‘condensation’ means that a thing is grouped together with

its contrary, though without any explanation as to why; Freud, 1953: 279–
80). A study of the rich logical relations that the dream has at its disposal
to show the latent content reveals that the expression of resemblance can
take unexpected forms (Freud, 1953: 284). ‘Resemblance’ is a sometimes
brutal or apparently incoherent operation that can take place between
elements with divergent meanings. Didi-­Huberman’s subsequent works
fall within this observation (CI, 145). For him, Freud’s thinking indicates
the crumbling of one patch or section (pan) of mimesis, in its humanist
acceptance, which mobilised art historians so strongly. For here, the act
of resembling exhibits a contact, a ‘collision’, an ‘infection’, rather than
a ‘formal and ideal unity of two objects’ (CI, 150). It is Freud therefore
who sets Didi-­Huberman on the way to a figurability capable of linking
resemblance (contact) with dissemblance (gap, contrast), and of accepting
that images can be overdetermined.
Didi-­Huberman has focused his gaze, since 1990, on the field of study
involving the interpretation of images, of which, for many reasons, he is
the direct heir: and that field is iconology. The year 1990 is an important
date, especially for the re-­ evaluation of this inheritance, since Didi-­
Huberman published two works that are like two separate focal points
regarding the same opposition to iconology: Devant l’image (translated
as Confronting Images) and Fra Angelico. These two works are formu-
lated around an event (which was presented many times in his works):
the encounter with a fresco by Fra Angelico, Madonna of the Shadows,
painted around 1440–50 for the San Marco convent in Florence. This
aesthetic ­event – t­ he discovery of something inconspicuous and unnoticed
yet striking: the four aniconic panels in the bottom ­half – w­ ould function
as a trigger, like a ‘symptom’ in the etymological sense, something we fall
upon, and that reaches us from its place of blindness. This fresco from the
Quattrocento then becomes the paradigmatic ­example – ­or more precisely
the ­symptom – f­or what iconology prevented us from seeing, since the
usual cognitive and evaluative arrangements always condition our percep-
tion of visual elements. The aesthetics of symptoms implemented from
this point by Didi-­Huberman intentionally focuses the gaze on objects
that have either been neglected by art and visual historians, or that subvert
the classic interpretative machine of art history (and very often these
objects are the same). He concentrated, therefore, on what causes us to
sway or to shake, what troubles the classic iconological reflexes, and which
for this reason calls for an alternative method of reading. For in order to
avoid getting bogged down in analyses that are merely reactive, we have to
see clearly the new evaluation that Didi-­Huberman proposes of this kind
of image, perfecting new descriptive and poetic means. Where art theory
 gaze  95

was insufficient for thinking about the overdetermination of the image,

and as Freud did in his own domain by forging specific tools (condensa-
tion, displacement, etc.), Didi-­Huberman concentrated on developing a
specific conceptual a­ rsenal – ­so specific indeed that it flirted with the idea
of a mathesis singularis – (re-)inventing concepts that matched the power
of his objects. We might think of the concepts of ‘pan’ (patch, section),
‘visual’, ‘dissemblance’, ‘symptom-­image’.
Translated by Shane Lillis

Works Cited
Freud, S. (1953). The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. IV (1900), ed. J. Strachey, ix–627. Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-­analysis.
Freud, S. (1959 [1924]). ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to
Bisexuality’, trans. D. Bryan, rev. J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IX, ed.
J. Strachey, 155–66. Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-­analysis.

G
GAZE

Busra Copuroglu
Didi-­Huberman’s concept of the gaze is one of the most fundamental
and complex terms he employs in the body of his work, and it becomes a
vehicle for the construction of an atlas of knowledge through montage.
For Didi-­Huberman, the movement and the stillness of the eye mobilises
images and becomes instrumental in creating meaning.
Didi-­Huberman considers the gaze not merely as the act of looking that
we take for granted in our relation to images, but as a regimen of seeing.
He conceptualises the gaze as it relates to art history (seeing and knowing
the image before our eyes), and the responsibility and the ethics of looking
at history (e.g., Sonderkommando photographs, Auschwitz-­Birkenau).
As Sigrid Weigel observes, Didi-­Huberman’s ‘works on and with images
are allied with poets and with poetical language’, and pervade his writing.
His work and thoughts on images, Weigel adds, are ‘the operations with
96 gaze 

which a gaze schooled in art and poetry becomes fruitful to produce the
layered and condensed meanings, the configurations and conflicts [. . .] set
them in motion again’ and so, we learn how to look (2018 [2015]: 43). ‘[I]t
is very difficult to write the history of gazes, because gazes are never simply
verified in archives or even lodged there’, Didi-­Huberman writes (FAD,
7). Nonetheless, one could argue that the depth, breadth and complexity
of his work appears as an attempt at writing the history of gazes. ‘We never
just look. We look with our groaning and our words’, he writes in Aperçues.
‘It is in writing that our gaze is released, how it unfolds, and makes sense
for us and becomes conceivable and readable to others’ (2018a: 257).
Didi-­Huberman’s use of the gaze perhaps becomes most instrumental
in his interventions in the scientific practices and writing of art history
(CI; FAD; see Fra Angelico). The gaze posed to an art image, Didi-­
Huberman says, paradoxically liberates and enslaves us by ‘the braid of
knowledge and non-­knowledge’ on the ‘surface of a picture or sculpture
where nothing has been hidden, where everything before us has been
simply presented’; and ‘posing one’s gaze to an art images’, he continues,
becomes a matter of knowing how to name everything that one sees (CI,
1–3), which means the specific knowledge of the art object ‘called the
history of art’.
Not limited to the realm of aesthetics, for Didi-­Huberman the gaze also
poses the question of the ethics of looking. Ludger Schwarte, reflecting on
the ethics of looking in Didi-­Huberman’s analysis of the Sonderkommando
photographs, notes that the gaze ‘consist[s] in the restitution of a Seeing-­
Power [Pouvoir/Voir] and thereby names the truth content of a sequence
of [the Sonderkommando] photographs’ (2018: 81). Another example of
how Didi-­Huberman employs the gaze as the ethics of looking, distanc-
ing and subjectivation can be found in his book Bark, where he brings
together his reflections on his visit to Auschwitz-­Birkenau, where his
grandparents died, in the photographs he has taken, and in the poetic
writings of fragmented memory (see bark). Didi-­Huberman’s words here
are marked by a gaze directed at the tensions between the visible and the
disappeared or effaced traces of the camp. These traces are recognisable in
the present museum, as well as in the natural environment proximate to
it (such as the birch trees and the meadow), whereby the gaze responds to
their ‘disjointed temporalities’ (B, 30; Weigel, 2018 [2015]: 44).
In addition to the movements of the eye, for Didi-­Huberman the
French word regarder (gaze) itself becomes a ground for further reflection.
Once broken down, what regarder captures and encapsulates is a nuanced
distinction between garder and re-garder that further complicates Didi-­
Huberman’s theorisation of the gaze, as regarder connotes the mutual
implication of the image and the looking subject: it is that which ‘within
 giacometti, alberto  97

the image concerns, or “looks at” us [nous regarde]’ (Schwarte, 2018:

81). Didi-­Huberman’s use of the gaze thus combines and connects the
processes of liberation, touch, distance and contact. In his philosophical
and poetic treatise on this particular regime of looking and seeing, Ce que
nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992a), Didi-­Huberman further reflects on
the dynamic of gaze and touch, drawing from Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s
reflection on the invisible and the visible, which refers to the tactility of the
verb touch and to the condition of being touched: ‘every experience of the
visible has always been given to me within the context of the movements of
the look [. . .] The visible spectacle belongs to the touch neither more nor
less than do the “tactile qualities”’ (Merleau-­Ponty, 1968: 134).
Most recently, in his talk in October 2020 at Machines à écrire at La
Maison Francaise of New York University, after years of commitment to
the capacities of the floating gaze, and almost thirty years after the pub-
lication of Ce que nous voyons, Didi-­Huberman ­reconsiders – ­or perhaps,
­replaces – g­ aze with attention, the most immediate correlation that one
does not notice because of its close proximity to gaze. Attention, he says,
floats, and floating attention, he adds, ‘allows one to see things [or] details
that the attention looking for the details would miss’.

Works Cited
Merleau-­Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis.
Northwestern University Press.
Schwarte, L. (2018). ‘The People Image: The Political Philosophy of
Georges Didi-­Huberman’, trans. C. Woodall, Angelaki, 23(4): 80–90.
Weigel, S. (2018 [2015]), ‘The Readability of Images (and) of History:
Laudatio on the Occasion of the Awarding of the Adorno Prize (2015)
to Georges Didi-­Huberman’, trans. M. Rys and J. Vanvelk, Angelaki,
23(4): 42–6.

GIACOMETTI, ALBERTO

Elena Vogman
The name of Alberto Giacometti appears in several of Didi-­Huberman’s
publications. However, the monograph on the Cube, Giacometti’s enig-
matic sculpture from 1934 (CF), seems to open up a series of themes
which Didi-­Huberman will deal with in the years to come: from the
critique of an author’s ‘personal mythology’ to the heterodox surrealism
around the journal Documents, from the anthropological processuality
98 giacometti, alberto 

of images to the visual dialectic of disintegration and montage. This

study of Giacometti’s Cube is above all an experimental and critical
exploration in which one work becomes the prism for Giacometti’s entire
oeuvre.
Giacometti’s Cube is an object ‘whose signification seems well-­buried
indeed’ (CF, 15): both enclosed within the form and exhibited by it. The
sculpture is an irregular polyhedron whose thirteenth side, on which its
volume rests, is ‘buried’ or ‘blind’ (CF, 15). The difficulty of determining
its stylistic tendency as a sculpture is underlined through a series of nega-
tions, since it is ‘neither sufficiently rigorous to be “constructivist”, nor
sufficiently analytical to be “cubist”, and is too geometrical to tell any story’
(CF, 13). While the art historical interpretations of Giacometti’s Cube
converge in their attempts to wrest its meaning once again from a­ bsence
– ­in the sublime, the biographical or the ­symbolic – D­ idi-­Huberman sees
in the state of being buried both a constitutive node in Giacometti’s entire
oeuvre and the essential conflict in this unique and fateful sculpture. Both
at once, for the Cube is equally the structural expression of Giacometti’s
tenacious artistic quest and the symptomatic result of a transformation
and distortion. In his methodical orientation towards the psychoanalysis
of Sigmund Freud – from The Interpretation of Dreams to the anthro-
pological writings such as Totem and Taboo – Didi-­Huberman takes the
buried side as a challenge to an archaeological interpretation. In the book’s
thirteen chapters this interpretation is pervaded by the consistent simul-
taneity of the various layers of Giacometti’s practice – to a certain extent
Cube’s thirteen sides.
At the same time, these manifold processes of multiplication and force-
ful disintegration appear as symptomatic gestures of a work whose fate
should not only be sought in a stylistic break or an artist’s biography but
also in the ‘insidious passions’ of man (CF, 73), and become the form that
the Cube attempts to invoke. This is how Didi-­Huberman traces a par-
ticular Janus-­headedness in Giacometti’s sculpture. This not only lies in
the conflict-­ridden meanings of the sculpture; it also (even) pervades the
aesthetic problem of Giacometti: the white of his plaster casts, the dark-
ness of his bronzes, the experiments with space and volume, with mate-
rial, with abstraction and figurativeness, the continuum between portrait
and the thinghood of sculpture. This aesthetic ambivalence returns in
Giacometti’s gesture when the artist incises on one of the sculpture’s sides
a face, the double portrait of his father and son. This manipulation makes
all sides of the Cube concentratedly opposed to each other, creating a face-
à-face that crystallises the question of the turn or détournement: between
mask and face in the face of figurative disintegration. The cube and the
face continually arise from the gulf of their conflict. The Cube gives this
 glimpses  99

conflict form, which oscillates between Giacometti’s portrait and mere

thinghood.
Such a figure of a heterodox ­dialectic – ­in opposition to transcending
presence or to Hegel’s logic of ­synthesis – ­was also articulated by Georges
Bataille, Michel Leiris and Carl Einstein as publishers and authors of
the journal Documents, which appeared in Paris between 1929 and 1931
and was eagerly read by Giacometti during those years. Didi-­Huberman’s
association of the Cube with the visual montage of Documents shows that
the monolith’s pervasive ‘geometry of cruelty’ (CF, 172) has nothing to
do with the formation of unity. Rather, the crystalline structure of the
Cube operates with optical multiplication and denuding cuts. In the same
moment it alters the human figure. In an extensive reading of Documents,
Didi-­Huberman indicates how in the journal, time is spatialised and
questioned through the juxtaposition of ethnological and historical mate-
rials with cubist and surrealist artworks. In Didi-­Huberman’s subsequent
book, La Ressemblance informe, ou Le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille
(1995a), this montaged heterogeneity turns into the central paradigm. The
aesthetic of alteration becomes the method that sets Bataille’s disquiet-
ing anthropology in motion against orthodox philosophical systems and
formal art historical hierarchies. The montage in Documents appears here
as a subversive equivalent to Sergei Eisenstein’s montage of attractions.

GLIMPSES

Busra Copuroglu
In Didi-­Huberman’s work, the glimpse emerges as a differentiated capa-
bility of seeing that catches the fleeting moments. For Didi-­Huberman,
‘appearance is disappearance’ linked to survival (survivance), which reso-
nates with his persistent engagement with the idea of the fragile endurance
of traces, a mode of seeing that informs his thinking. Didi-­Huberman’s
fascination with glimpses lies in the power of brevity and the mystery of
the passer-­by. His understanding of the glimpse is always in the plural
form and resists theorisation, which is both the charm and difficulty of
this concept. Glimpses emerge as reflections on moments, movements and
gestures; they are the ‘appearance of disappearance’, and reflection on the
survival of traces left behind.
Dedicated to the fragile endurance of traces, Didi-­Huberman’s book
on glimpses, Aperçues, organised around four chapters and comprised
of short fragmentary writings, is a massive project that gathers ‘evoca-
tive ­images – r­ecollections – which he had collected over the years;
100 glimpses 

i­ mpressions while walking in the streets, melancholic musings about love,

and thoughts gathered from literature en route’ (Baert, 2018: 47). For
a philosopher and art historian whose practice and mode of thinking is
marked by images, and whose books are always accompanied by images,
the book of glimpses is interestingly (or perhaps fittingly) without images.
These fragmentary writings and reflections are Didi-­Huberman’s own
collection of Denkbild, which, Gerhard Richter explains, ‘encodes a
poetic form of condensed epigrammic writing in textual snapshot’
(Richter, 2007: 2).
In his book, Didi-­Huberman differentiates between seeing, looking
and glimpsing: ‘Seeing means using our eyes to recognize something
real. Looking implies that our seeing is invested in the economy of desire.
Glimpsing means catching the real in the air, that which has encountered
our desire’ (2018a: 81). In glimpses, what the eye sees is not a fixed,
framed image, and, in glimpses, seeing begins with disappearance and
continues its life in the sketches of reflections as recordings of memory-­
traces on Freud’s mystic pad (see Freud, 1961 [1950]: 225–32). Most
importantly, glimpse is never singular and masculine (a distinction that
the original French captures and that the English translation sadly fails
to reflect). Didi-­Huberman vehemently refuses to employ the masculine
form aperçu because, for him, the masculine form evokes ‘something like
a table of contents, a resumé, a programme’, whereas the feminine form
suggests beauty and mystery. These are traces ‘of small but decisive
events’ and the glimpse (l’aperçue) he says, is his own small literary genre,
different forms of writings scattered around without a project (2018a:
17–19).
Images that inform Didi-­Huberman’s glimpses emerge in several of
his works, including Ninfa, that mysterious ‘draped beauty’ in a floating
white cloth, who ‘comes from an unknown place (2002a: 7; see nymph);
the figure of a butterfly (‘[s]uddenly something appears [. . .] a door opens,
and a butterfly, flapping its wings passes by’ (2013c: 9; see phasmids); the
passer-­by who suddenly appears and disappears in Baudelaire’s poem ‘Á
une Passante’ (2018a: 19); the mysterious eyes in Ernst Bloch’s Denkbild
‘Pippa Passes’ (see Bloch, 2006). Both Baudelaire and Bloch are particu-
larly important for Didi-­Huberman, as their writings exemplify how a
fleeting moment persists. The moment is fleeting because in glimpse
whatever is in front of our eyes disappears; persistent, because to glimpse
is to see the trace of that which has just disappeared. What persists is the
trace; it is the object of our contemplation, the fragile endurance of the
passer-­by that continues its life in memory traces (see memory).
On 20 March 2018, in an interview he gave to France Culture, ‘Je ne veux
pas que regarder possède’, Didi-­Huberman objected to the interviewer’s
 godard, jean-luc  101

use of the word ‘eternal’ to characterise his glimpses. He explained that

he does not like the word ‘eternal’ because things and people, sadly and
inevitably, die. Instead, he said, the word he prefers is ‘survival’ (surviv-
ance), which also, appropriately, connects the spirit of his project to Aby
Warburg’s concept of Nachleben (see afterlife).

Works Cited
Baert, B. (2018). ‘He or She who Glimpses, Desires, is Wounded’, trans.
E. Woodard, J. R. Solorzano, S. De Cauwer and L. K. Smith, Angelaki,
23(4): 47–79.
Bloch, E. (2006). Traces, trans. A. Nassar. Stanford University Press.
Freud, S. (1961 [1950]). ‘A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad’, trans.
J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX, ed. J. Strachey, 225–32. Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psycho-­analysis.
Richter, G. (2007). Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections
from Damaged Life. Stanford University Press.

GODARD, JEAN-LUC

Stijn De Cauwer
Before becoming the subject of an entire book in 2015, Jean-­Luc Godard’s
work, and especially Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988), was discussed in Didi-­
Huberman’s writing as an exemplary artistic reflection on the relation
between images and history. In Images in Spite of All, Didi-­Huberman
contrasts the approach of Godard in Histoire(s) du cinéma with that of
Claude Lanzmann in Shoah (1985; see ISA, 125–7). Lanzmann is scep-
tical of the possibility of images offering an adequate testimony of the
Holocaust, preferring verbal testimonies. Godard, however, makes an
elaborate montage of documentary images, words, citations and fictive
film footage. While Lanzmann refuses fictive cinema the capacity to be
able to offer a testimony of the Holocaust, Godard, conversely, looks
at cinema altogether in the light of the Holocaust. He contrasts, for
example, a still featuring Elizabeth Taylor from a A Place in the Sun (1951)
by George Stevens with stills from concentration camps, taken by the
same director earlier in his life during the liberation of the camps. Both
belong to the same history of war and cinema (ISA, 134–50).
Whereas Lanzmann’s montage is based on narrative, Godard’s use
of montage is based on the principle of the symptom, according
102 godard, jean-luc 

to Didi‑Huberman. Godard brings images together with other words

and images, whether from documentary sources or fictive, in order to
trace ­ connections between seemingly heterogeneous elements. While
Lanzmann believes that no image is adequate to show the Holocaust,
Godard famously wrote that ‘there is no just image, just images’ (ISA,
134). Didi-­Huberman points out that Godard is not seeking the one
adequate image, but that he regards images always in the plural: images
always have to be brought together with other images in a rhythmic
montage, a ‘centrifugal’ montage, to help us acquire a form of knowledge
that is never complete but always partial (ISA, 135, 125).
In the fifth instalment of the series L’Œil de l’histoire, an expression he
already used in Images in Spite of All, Didi-­Huberman devotes an entire
book to the relation between images and history in the work of Godard:
Passés cites par JLG (2015). He emphasises once again the role of ‘cita-
tion’ in Godard’s films as a way to re-­engage elements from the past in
the present and to reconnect them with our present desires (2015b: 11).
However, he gradually adopts a more critical tone throughout the book.
Didi-­Huberman notices a stark contrast between various approaches to
montage in Godard’s films. While he prefers the expansive montage of
images in Histoire(s) du cinéma, endlessly drawing connections between
images and other images, to acquire a more nuanced and complex under-
standing of what the images reveal, he rejects another tendency in the
work of Godard, namely to reduce a montage of images to offer a simplistic
political message. Two images are bluntly contrasted, such as images of
Hitler and the Holocaust and images of Golda Meir and the Palestinians in
Ici et allieurs (1976), or two images are shown followed by a third serving
as the solution or consequence. This is a way of closing the interpretation
of the images in favour of a specific message. In this type of montage, the
complexity and nuance of a historical situation is flattened, to be reduced
to a mere slogan, as opposed to the elaborate montage of Histoire(s) du
cinéma, in which montage serves as a tool to expand our knowledge of a
historical situation, including the context and various related topics. Didi-­
Huberman ends up reproaching Godard for the moments in his filmic
oeuvre and writings where he is overly propagandistic, thus foregoing
the subtlety of his montage work when looking at images to understand
history.
 hantaï, simon  103

H
HANTAÏ, SIMON

Nigel Saint
The artist Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) was born in Hungary, moved to
France in 1948, took part in Surrealist exhibitions and then developed
his own painting technique which involved the folding and unfolding
of canvases, in large and small scale, which were then sometimes cut up
and even buried in his garden. Didi-­Huberman saw him often from late
1996 to 1998, culminating in the book L’Étoilement: conversation avec
Hantaï (1998b). Hantaï was included in Didi-­Huberman’s exhibitions
L’Empreinte at the Centre Pompidou (1997f) and Fables du Lieu at Le
Fresnoy in 2001 (2001c). In 2008 Didi-­Huberman spoke at a commemora-
tive event at the Pompidou (2018a: 170–5) and in 2012 he wrote an essay
for the Pompidou Hantaï exhibition catalogue (2013i), in addition to being
interviewed for the ‘extras’ of the DVD of two documentaries by Jean-­
Michel Meurice (2013j).
In L’Étoilement, Hantaï is quoted abundantly, from letters, postcards
and notes sent to Didi-­Huberman, from comments in films or publica-
tions, and from remarks on what Didi-­Huberman has been writing and
saying. Hantaï likes a lapidary formulation, whether about ‘étoilement’
(‘You said “constellation”?’, Hantaï writes. ‘A knot that was invisible is
revealed’, 1998b: 87) or impurity (‘Impurity is the true condition’, 1998b:
105), which Didi-­Huberman works into his interpretations. Hantaï also
deploys a wide range of philosophical and literary references, drawn for
example from his reading of Bataille and Blanchot, or from his interest
in colours, materials and the natural world, even the vocabulary of animal
droppings, like laissée, left by a wild boar, which became the title of a series
of works (1998b: 105). Words are accumulated, compacted and unfolded,
just as Hantaï does in his work (Fleischer, 2011: 16). Didi-­Huberman
divides his text into a series of keywords and their definitions, anchoring
the conversation and his own reflections in the everyday objects linked to
Hantaï’s persona, practice or work (gag, net, apron, pocket, trellis, star,
mop). In the final section, the metaphors of burial and exhumation are
developed through the use of these and other key terms to explore the acts
of folding and unfolding: ‘Operations performed as if the work is both net
and mesh, apron front and back, pocket and shreds, trellis and u ­ ndulation’
104 hantaï, simon 

(1998b: 107). Finally, there are the gestures and actions of Hantaï: he is
initially very reticent, embodying the reclusive artist trope; soon he is
throwing his mother’s apron at Didi-­Huberman’s feet (1998b: 43); and
later he hurls piles of photos at him (1998b: 107). Didi-­Huberman aspired
to record Hantaï in thought and action, and in turn the artist saw the text
being produced as a vital account of his work (1998b: 23 n.22; Fourcade
et al., 2013: 303).
Didi-­Huberman analyses the situation of the canvases. The surface of
the canvas is like a trap which would trick the artist into producing pure
painterly creations, whereas for Hantaï the painting surface is more like
an archaeological dig, where space and time are folded into each other
(1998b: 58). This affects both the function of sight and the role of the
hand in the production of works (1998b: 93), since the focus shifts to the
unpredictable imprint variations introduced by the mechanical actions,
with reference to Duchamp, followed by the visible modulations of shapes
and colours upon unfolding, with reference to Cézanne (1998b: 79–80;
Larsson, 2020: 101). Then the discussion of Hantaï’s later practice of
cutting into his canvases reminds Didi-­Huberman of the artist’s lack of
fastidiousness about art. Impurity is adopted from Hantaï instead as a
watchword, which enables Didi-­Huberman to halt his text with the evoca-
tion of a series of buried canvases, recovered ten to fifteen years later, in
terms of their mass, decay, surfaces and colours, and of an early collage
based on a photograph of an Egyptian mummy (1998b: 108–10). Didi-­
Huberman’s talk in 2008 concentrated on the topic of repli (withdrawal/
refolding), as an intermediate state between folding and unfolding, an
invisible space within and suspension of activity that it was impossible to
exhibit (RFSH, 227–8).
Hantaï’s re-­emergence with exhibitions in 1998 was later addressed in
Didi-­Huberman’s essay for the Pompidou exhibition catalogue (2013i)
through a discussion of the sovereignty of the artist, referencing Bataille’s
1956 essay ‘L’Équivoque de la culture’ (as did the essay on Steve
McQueen [2013a: 31–85]). Sovereignty, for Bataille, is understood to be
power that is partly held in reserve and aware of its limitations, yet ready
to use its lack of real power to protest nevertheless. A sovereign artist is
wary of the consensual marketplace of culture: ‘Sovereignty means giving
without counting or calculating’ (Bataille, 1988: 440). Museums and gal-
leries were puzzled that Hantaï sometimes gave away his works, since
he considered art practice to be both inestimable and valueless, testing
the limits of cultural conventions and exposing art’s vulnerability. In the
catalogue text, Didi-­Huberman recalls Hantaï ‘brutalising’ his canvases
with his hands and feet (2013i: 221). The gift ethic and value dialectic
signal an outlook labelled as unrealistic by some critics and artists, as
 holocaust  105

Didi-­Huberman acknowledges, but which he nevertheless deems to be

potentially part of a broad reinterpretation of modernism, less focused on
markets and movements (1998b: 106).

Works Cited
Bataille, G. (1988). ‘L’Équivoque de la culture’, in Œuvres complètes, vol.
XII, ed. F. Marmande and S. Monod, 437–50. Gallimard.
Fleischer, A. (2011). Simon Hantaï: vers l’empreinte immaculée. Invenit
éditions, collection «Ekphrasis».
Fourcade, D., Monod-­Fontaine, I., and Pacquement, A. (2013). Simon
Hantaï. Éditions Centre Pompidou.
Larsson, C. (2020). Didi-Huberman and the Image. Manchester University
Press.

HOLOCAUST

Bruno Chaouat
What can the art historian do when confronted with the tragedy of the
century, the malheur du siècle (the disaster of the century) to use Alain
Besançon’s (1998) phrase? How should art history, and perhaps history
tout court, deal with the Holocaust? How can literature, film and painting
bear witness to a collective experience of dehumanisation and the loss of
the human face?
Philosophers and religious scholars have approached the Holocaust in
terms of the negative dialectic, the interruption of the Hegelian work of
negativity, or the eclipse of God (see, for example, Lyotard, 1986; Jonas,
1987). Some have argued that the only appropriate approach from an
aesthetic and ethical perspective is the sublime, understood as rejection
of figuration. They argued that narrative or figural representation was no
longer possible insofar as the Holocaust had destroyed a humanism rooted
in human likeness.
Didi-­Huberman is above all a dialectical thinker (see dialectic).
As such, he was never comfortable with either position regarding the
representation of the Holocaust. He rejects what he deems an absurd
alternative: either representation, or no representation at all; either
images, or no images. The zero-­sum game is alien to his thought. In 2001
he was criticised for an essay he wrote for the catalogue of an exhibition
of Auschwitz photographs taken clandestinely by the Polish resistance.
He published a long response to his opponents, who accused him of
106 holocaust 

t­ransgressing the taboo of representation of the Holocaust, rooting their

arguments in Claude Lanzmann’s rejection of archival footage.
Didi-­Huberman’s response took the form of a book: Images malgré
tout (2003a); ‘images in spite of all’.2 The title spells out his dialectical
approach: despite the impossibility of representation, images persist.
There are still (‘malgré tout’) images, in spite of the Nazi attempt at a total
erasure of traces, and despite the enormity of a crime that defies imagina-
tion (see in spite of all). For Didi-­Huberman, knowing is imagining,
which he understands as producing critical images. Aesthetics and ethics
are inseparable from epistemology. Hence the relevance of aesthetic phi-
losophy to the understanding of history. We are not talking Hollywood-­
type images, we are not talking kitsch ­representation – t­ he worst possible
genre, especially when it comes to historic witnessing. Kitsch representa-
tion assumes that images can represent without remainder. Instead, Didi-­
Huberman has in mind a type of image that embraces its fragmentary
character, its relic or vestigial quality. His images are ‘not-­all’ (pas-toutes)
(2003: 155). Against, then, any claim to totality, any pretence of represen-
tation without remainder, Didi-­Huberman reclaimed the possibility of
partial representation.
Previously, he had engaged with the representation of the Shoah in an
analysis of Claude Lanzmann’s masterpiece (see 1998c: 228–42). He had
already used the concessive ‘malgré tout’. His gloss on Lanzmann’s movie
was entitled ‘Le lieu malgré tout’. Filmed in the present and in colour,
Shoah showed the sites of the destruction of European Jewry, without
resorting to archival footage. The film is a monument in the sense of the
Latin monere, to indicate, to point to the past. Shoah is a nine-­hour index
that points to the European catastrophe. Didi-­Huberman’s commentary
on Lanzmann’s movie can be read as his aesthetic theory with regard to
the Shoah, and probably with regard to images in ­general – ­even images
in fiction.
Two major theoretical references for Didi-­Huberman are literary critic
Walter Benjamin and art historian Aby Warburg. In Images malgré

2 His essay in the catalogue forms the first section of the book Images malgré tout, pub-
lished two years after the exhibition. The second section of the book, entitled ‘Malgré
l’image toute’, is a long and scrupulous response to the accusations launched in Les
Temps modernes. Didi-­Huberman uses the polemical responses to the catalogue of
the exhibition Mémoires des camps to elaborate a sophisticated ontology of images that
builds upon twenty years of intense reflection on the visible. Although these accusa-
tions were formulated by Elisabeth Pagnoux (2001) and Gerard Wajcman (2001), it
is worth noting that the editor of Les Temps modernes, Claude Lanzmann, initiated
the polemic in an interview published in Le Monde at the time of the exhibition (see
Lanzmann, 2001).
 hysteria  107

tout, he uses Benjamin’s definition of the dialectical image as the collision

between the Then and the Now. A critical/dialectical image carries the
past in the present, that is, it will never represent the past, it will at best
present it as after-­image (survivance, or Nachleben, which is Warburg’s
concept; Didi-­Huberman, 2002b; see afterlife; survival). Where a ‘bad’
image is an image that claims to saturate vision, to make everything visible,
a ‘good’ image is one that embraces its ontological limitation, an image that
leaves a lot to be desired.
In Images malgré tout, Didi-­Huberman does not hesitate to turn to fic-
tional films, especially to one of the pillars of the nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc
Godard, in order to define an ethics of the critical and dialectical image.
His approach to the Holocaust thus rejects the dogmatic prohibition on
images. By turning to Godard, Didi-­Huberman finds a philosophy of
redemption of the real via images. To be sure, such redemption does
not have much in common with the grand narratives of Christianity or
Marxism. Images for Didi-­Huberman are meant, more humbly, to salvage
fragments of history.

Works Cited
Besançon, A. (1998). Le Malheur du siècle: sur le communisme, le nazisme et
l’unicité de la Shoah. Fayard.
Jonas, H. (1987). ‘The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice’,
The Journal of Religion 67(1): 1–13.
Lanzmann, C. (2001). ‘Entre mémoire et histoire des camps, le role de
la photographie, Claude Lanzmann, écrivain et cineaste’, Le Monde,
19 January.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1986). ‘Discussion or Phrasing “After Auschwitz”’, trans.
G. Van Den Abbeele, Working Paper of the Center for Twentieth Century
Studies, 2: 1–32.
Pagnoux, E. (2001). ‘Reporter photographe à Auschwitz’, Les Temps mod-
ernes, 56(613): 84–108.
Wajcman, G. (2001). ‘De la croyance photographique’, Les Temps mod-
ernes, 56(613): 47–83.

HYSTERIA

Tomasz Swoboda
‘The Greek hystérikē can be translated by “she who is always late, she
who is intermittent.” Yes, she who is intermittent is the hysteric, she is
108 hysteria 

the intermittent of her body’ (IH, 110). If the intermittence of the body
constitutes one of the axes of Didi-­Huberman’s reflection on hysteria,
it is unquestionably not limited to this dimension; far from it. Already
in the introduction to his first book, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and
the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, Didi-­Huberman openly
admits that what interests him is ‘an extraordinary complicity between
patients and doctors, a relationship of desires, gazes, and knowledge’
(IH, xi). Indeed, at the Salpêtrière, under the eye of Jean-Martin
Charcot, hysteria was invented – carefully crafted as medical discourse
and as ­image – a­ nd spectacularised. While attending to the inextricable
link between pain and the hysterical experience, Didi-­Huberman places at
the centre of his analysis the spectacularity of this pain and its meaning (he
writes: ‘what I want to speak of is the meaning of the extreme visibility of
this event of pain, the all too evident pain of hysteria’ (IH, 3)).
Didi-­Huberman thus seeks to explain why hysteria was, as he calls it,
‘la bête noire’ of physicians. Hysteria, as he points out, offers all kinds of
symptoms but ‘these symptoms issue from nothing (they have no organic
basis)’ (IH, 75). Highlighting the difference between the Charcotian and
Freudian approach to the symptom, Didi-­Huberman calls Charcot ‘the
great director of symptoms’ who, within the framework of the spectacle
of hysteria, transforms the symptom into a sign, ‘that is, the temporal
circumscription of the changeable, lacunal cryptography of the symptom’
(IH, 23). Focusing on the performative aspect of symptom formation, he
sees himself ‘nearly compelled to consider hysteria [. . .] as a chapter in
the history of art’ (IH, 4), and, accordingly, argues that hysteria be rec-
ognised and recorded as a collective work of art. This art would not have
existed without the invention and the specific use of photography. Indeed,
Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière constitutes a work of art in
its own right, including the components of ‘the aura, the clinical gaze
and pow­er relations (between the photographer/stage director and the
photographed), the mise-­en-­scène (staging, and posing), various aesthetic
layers of the process (the tableau, the nature morte, the picturesque and
its indexical value), and the museality’ (Pustan, 2017: 149). To illustrate
his point, Didi-­Huberman carefully examines the case study of Charcot’s
patient ‘Augustine’ (Louise Augustine Gleizes), the woman who, due to
her ‘ecstatic attacks’, became ‘an attested form, a classic or typical form of
hysteria’ (IH, 142). Observing Augustine’s play with the viewer’s d ­ esire –
­a play consisting in defying and at the same time consecrating the mastery
of the clinician’s ­gaze – D­ idi-­Huberman highlights the role of Charcot
who, as the argument goes, was able to invent the theatre of hysteria versus
the theatricality of hysteria itself ‘so as to denounce the latter as a simula-
tion, as the excess and sin of mimesis’ (IH, 244).
 hysteria  109

Taking into account gender relations as they played out in the

Salpêtrière, as well as (very rare) cases of masculine hysteria, Didi-­
Huberman goes further than the dominant cultural analyses of his con-
temporaries: he shows how ‘the hysteric, constrained to exist only as the
actress of her symptoms, simultaneously becomes ideal and martyr, which
is Baudelaire’s formula for the art of the actor, and for the genius himself’
(IH, 255). This binarity, simultaneously constructed and deconstructed,
leads to the conclusion that the invention of hysteria ‘went on exacer-
bating itself, in two senses: as infernal management, if I may say so, as
tyranny, bringing hysterical fantasies and hysterical bodies more strictly
to heel, and raising the stakes of retaliation. But also, and at the same time,
it was managing images with an eye to forms, that is, an aesthetic’ (IH,
279). Through this double entanglement of the bodily and the aesthetic,
hysteria has become a reference point in Didi-­Huberman’s work, to which
he has returned in his further thinking about the symptom, including his
studies on Georges Bataille and Aby Warburg (1995a; 2002b; SI).
Finally, as Gilman aptly concludes his review of Invention of Hysteria
(2004: 717), the book’s influence has extended beyond the framework of
Didi-­Huberman’s writing itself, and even that of the history of art and
history of ideas, as ‘it permeated studies of psychoanalysis and dance,
psychoanalysis and visual culture, psychoanalysis and feminism, as few
critical works have done’.

Works Cited
Gilman, S. L. (2004). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman, Invention of Hysteria:
Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière’ (Book
Review), Isis, 95(4): 716–17.
Pustan, E. (2017). ‘On the Artistic Propensity of Pathology: Georges
Didi-­Huberman and the Invention of Hysteria’, Caietele Echinox, 32:
147–56.
110 iconography 

I
ICONOGRAPHY

Nigel Saint
The critique of iconography proposed in Devant l’image (1990a) is part of
a complete reappraisal of the questions that we need to ask of images and
that images ask us. Reacting to the positive, though delayed, reception of
Panofsky in France, it questions the procession in his 1955 iconological
method from the recognition of objects or figures in a painting (the ‘pre-­
iconographical description’), through an explanation of their historical
or mythological significance and symbolic associations (the ‘iconographi-
cal analysis’) to an overall understanding of a painting’s subject and
its combined associations (the ‘iconological interpretation’) (Panofsky,
1993: 51–81). The two epigraphs to Devant l’image, from Panofsky’s
earlier essay ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’ (1920) and Bataille’s
L’Expérience intérieure (1943; CI, v), indicate that such an iconographical
model will be fully dismantled. Both passages involve a certain dialectical
tension, with Panofsky acknowledging that the difficulties in reconciling
the historical and ahistorical aspects of a work of art are considerable, since
a rigorous approach to art must both avoid a methodology based on over-­
simplistic general laws and at the same time reflect the value ascribed to art
(Panofsky, 1981 [1920]: 17–18). The exploratory tone in this 1920 essay
reminds us of the contrast widely made between Panofsky’s ‘German’
years and his later career in the USA, which, in Didi-­Huberman’s view,
involved the abandonment of Warburg’s pioneering work on the afterlives
of images in favour of a positivist outlook. In fact Panofsky already states
that it is going to be possible ‘to explain the sense of historical meaning as
an ideal unity’ (Panofsky, 1981 [1920]: 30). This underlying confidence is
radically undercut by the second prefatory quotation in Devant l’image,
from Bataille, since it suggests that advances in knowledge do not lead to
an ‘ideal unity’ but instead to further incompleteness:

Not-knowledge strips bare [le non-savoir dénude; ‘non-­knowledge lays bare’ in Leslie
Ann Boldt’s translation]. This proposition is the summit, but should be under-
stood as follows: it strips bare, hence I see what knowledge previously had hidden;
but if I see, I know. In effect, I know, but what I knew, not-­knowledge strips it
barer still. (Bataille, 1978 [1943]: 66; 1988: 52; CI, v)
 iconography  111

Just after Panofsky has indicated how it ought to be possible to hold firm
to the path of a methodologically sound method, Bataille suggests the
opposite. This opening quotation from Bataille is the prelude to numerous
mentions of ‘le non-­savoir’ and the Bataillean intertext (for example, the
additional allusions to ‘divisions intestines’ and ‘l’impensable’) is let loose
upon the discourse of art historical interpretation.
The method of interpretation being formulated in Devant l’image
pursues what may be called a negative iconography. Didi-­Huberman’s
account of the experience of looking at art, and indeed images in general,
no longer posits a harmonious synthesis between the mind and the world
seen by the eye:

If we want to open the ‘box of representation’, then we must make a double split:
split the simple notion of image, and split the simple notion of logic. For the two
constantly agree to give the history of art the specific self-­evidence of its simple
reason. To split the notion of the image would be [. . .] to return to a questioning
of the image that does not yet presuppose the ‘figured figure’ – by which I mean
the figure fixed as representational ­object – ­but only the figuring figure, namely the
process, the path, the question in action, made colours, made volume. (CI, 141)

Rather than a focus on the legible depicted figure, the visual phenomenon
being formed now occupies the spectator. There is no authority limiting
the action of the image, and the figure therefore resists any attempt on
the part of the interpreter to seize and circumscribe it in an humanist
iconographical manner. Furthermore, the idea of a figuring figure allows
the emerging figure to be dissimilar, which in the case of the system of
painting at work in Fra Angelico, for example, permits the image to refer
obscurely and negatively to the absent divinity (Didi-­Huberman, 1990b:
80).
In the new iconography propounded by Didi-­Huberman as a historian
of images, anthropologist of visual culture, philologist and exhibition
curator, the attention also shifts to different kinds of visual signs, such
as gestures, actions and movements. Didi-­Huberman’s regular recourses
to Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas project show how images may be con-
nected across cultures and periods, whether, for example, to highlight
the political potency of Steve McQueen’s postage stamp project, Queen
and Country (2003–10; Didi-­Huberman, 2013a: 31–85), or the emotional
force of the mourning tradition discernible in Pascal Convert’s Pietà de
Kosovo (1999–2000; Didi-­Huberman, 2019c). The broader project reads
between and across cultures and periods, joining up forms of memory
(Didi-­Huberman, 2002b). In place of discrete iconographic referents, the
dimensions of affect, gesture and time are examined under the umbrella
112 iconography 

of this updated, democratised iconology (Didi-­Huberman, 2019c: 114).

Through the montage of images it is possible to release the singular
power in these gestures of lamentation – ‘to sustain the weight of the time,
or of the times, that such a gesture brings into being’ (Didi-­Huberman,
2007c: 201) – and to amplify the political charge of both an artist’s works
and the resurgent images with which they coexist. The historian is looking
for the genealogy of influences, traumas and customs that consciously
or unconsciously results in a particular configuration of images (Didi-­
Huberman, 2019c: 106). As Didi-­Huberman has remarked, the erudite,
idealist and positivist focus on details and search for their ultimate source
gives way to an act of contemplation registering the rhythm of the event
and its visceral impact on the viewer (2019c: 119). This is an iconography
of time, gesture and affect.
Finally, alongside the open-­endedness of Didi-­Huberman’s inquir-
ies, the recognition of the negative dimension to the forming of figures
and the connections established between trans-­historical cultural activi-
ties, the alternative iconography reads for the gaps and returns in the
archive. This may be the result of the montage of images in the Atlas,
as mentioned above, or the creative search for lost or destroyed images
and objects. Didi-­Huberman’s thinking about the recovery of images is
developed in his work on contemporary visual artists, notably concerning
the monochrome, which offers a paradoxical terrain for the iconographer.
In works discussed by Didi-­Huberman, monochromes are deployed to do
justice to the situation of the historiographically overlooked, the socially
marginalised and the politically discarded. They suit a general social
attitude of indifference (Mathieu Pernot’s use of grey; Didi-­Huberman,
2014h), a combination of personal and political crisis (Convert’s white
or blanks; Didi-­ Huberman, 2013k) and a totalitarian death machine
(the black of László Nemes’s film Son of Saul (2015); Didi-­Huberman,
2015a). Being able to see through the monochrome of deathly indif-
ference enables us to see the beauty and energy in others and escape a
uniform, conformist understanding of the past, an oversimplified view of
memory and oppressive regimes. Traditional iconography can suffocate
the viewer, preventing them from seeing figures emerge from the past,
whether as extras given unexpected attention, participants in uprisings,
social pariahs, returning forms of affect upheld in rituals of mourning or
ethical gestures of resistance in spite of unbearable opposition. The new
iconography gestures towards a future iconology outside of the confines of
artistic representation and brought into the domains of cultural critique
and political reconfigurations.
 iconology  113

Works Cited
Bataille, G. (1978 [1943]). L’Expérience intérieure. Gallimard.
Bataille, G. (1988). Inner Experience, trans. L. A. Boldt. SUNY Press.
Panofsky, E. (1981 [1920]). ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, trans.
K. J. Northcott and J. Snyder, Critical Inquiry, 8(1): 17–33.
Panofsky, E. (1993). ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to
the Study of Renaissance Art’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts, 51–81.
Penguin.
Warburg, A. (2012). L’Atlas Mnemosyne. Warburg Institute and
l’Ecarquillé.

ICONOLOGY

Maud Hagelstein
From the 1990s onwards, visual theory reinvented itself by spreading out
into broader disciplinary territories and by developing a very original con-
ceptual arsenal. From the viewpoint of its philosophical grounding, image
theory has always had to take position in relation to critical i­conology – a­
field of interpretation of images launched in 1912 by art historian Aby
Warburg (1866–1929), enriched by the philosophy of symbolic forms of
Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), and systematised by Erwin Panofsky (1892–
1968) in his Studies in Iconology (1972 [1939]) in particular. Towards the
end of the 1980s, this theoretical heritage was challenged by researchers
seeking to distance themselves from it, or at least to give a more up-­to-­date
meaning to the concept of iconology.
Criticisms aimed generally by contemporary theorists at the icono-
logical m­ ethod – a­nd Didi-­Huberman can be linked with this critical
movement, even if he developed specificities of his own that are discussed
­below – ­are most often articulated around the problem of the language
paradigm. The question is whether it is possible to study the logic of the
visual (‘icono-­logy’) outside any reference to language and to its syntax.
And it is thought that the domination of the language paradigm for the
interpretation of images can be overturned, and that their supposed
docility can be undone in order to rediscover their potential. Rather than
concentrate solely on the study of the symbolic content, several theorists
seek to envisage what constitutes the intrinsic specificity of the image and
to show how its materiality directly affects the production of meaning (the
tools of phenomenology are very often employed in this way). Against the
excessive semiotisation of forms of visual expression, it was necessary, for
114 iconology 

these theorists, to confirm the intransitive function of images (images are

not only the service providers attached to the translation and the circula-
tion of words), that is, to give back to the image a thickness and even an
opacity of its own.
In many ways, Erwin Panofsky and his very efficient iconology served
both as a model and a foil in the debates concerning the change of para-
digm that would bring us back to the image. We can sense what would
be problematic in this method today: Panofsky is accused of mostly
dismissing material preoccupations from his analysis of pictorial works in
order to focus more intently (or even entirely) on the elements of content
(allegories, symbols) and to analyse at best the links between the work of
art and meanings or ideas. This critique is the foundation for the science of
the image today: it seems nonsensical now to study symbolic contents (the
what) without giving enough attention to the way in which these contents
are fastened to the sensible (the how). Didi-­Huberman has never hidden
his opposition to Panofsky’s classic iconology, while, at the same time,
being the main protagonist in the rediscovery of Warburg in the franco-
phone world. For Didi-­Huberman gives a political and an ethical turn to
his epistemological engagement: Warburg was a pioneer; Panofsky was to
be a ­founder – ­and this is not exactly the same vocation.
Confronting Images (Devant l’image, 1990a) is a decisive work, undoubt-
edly the most forceful and critical that Didi-­Huberman has ever written.
And in spite of surface appearances, it is undoubtedly the most political.
Here the epistemologist is not merely the one who observes the function-
ing of the sciences from on high (and from a distance); he also describes
relations of power and subservience, and describes the ­struggles – ­the turf
wars ­sometimes – t­ hat aim to impose interpretative models, with homog-
enising effects that diminish the heterogeneity of the situations analysed
(which are ideologising), with objects whose visibility is refused, etc.
If we examine the main critical axes of Confronting Images, we see
that Panofsky is challenged throughout, as much as Cassirer, who pro-
vided philosophical foundations to his work. Didi-­Huberman reproaches
Cassirer for reducing all acts of knowing observed in the field of culture
to scientific knowledge and to the knowing mind (where Didi-­Huberman
seeks, with Freud, whose thinking gave impetus to his early writings, to
comply with elements of non-knowledge in the image, with strangeness,
indetermination, the aniconic, etc.) (see knowledge). And he reproaches
Cassirer for bringing back ‘the multiplicity of mediations, methods and
objects of knowledge’ to the need for unity that scientific knowledge bears
within it, and finally with ­ending – ­by spreading the Kantian critique to
spheres that had hitherto been ­preserved – ­philosophical idealism (CI,
127) (see Kant, Immanuel). In the same vein, he reproaches Panofsky
 iconology  115

for applying to art a ‘transcendental-­scientific’ method based on concepts

that are not obtained by abstraction from artistic phenomena themselves
but that are ‘foundational’ concepts (that emerge from the fertile human-
ist soil) to which singularities would be required to conform. Didi-­
Huberman criticises the fact that Panofsky called for a doctrinal use of
Kantism which merely reinforced the order of the Same at the expense of
the difference and the heterogeneity that run through artistic productions;
that he adopted a Kantian tone in order to redirect ‘the totem-­notions of
the humanist history of art’, and preferred the denial of everything that
escapes the frame of representation, everything that is not identified as
a signifying symbol but that would belong to the order of the troubling
potential of the visual. When we take this as our starting point, it is not
easy to reconcile these different parties.
Beyond the critique, however, it is an entire method that seeks to rein-
vent itself. Where the defenders of the method instituted by art historian
Erwin Panofsky thought they could decode, translate and perhaps even
exhaust the meaning of a work of art, Didi-­Huberman recalls the particu-
lar rhythm that conditions our relations to images, playing dialectically
between proximity and distance, clarity and obscurity, knowledge and
non-­knowledge:

When we face images we face strange things that open and close alternatively
to our senses – whether we understand this word to mean a fact of sensation or a
fact of meaning, the result of a sensible act or that of an intelligible faculty. Here,
it was thought that it had to do with a familiar image, when in fact, suddenly, it
closes up in front of us and becomes the ultimate inaccessible. ­There – ­another
version of that same ­uncanny – ­we have experienced the image as an insurmount-
able obstacle, a bottomless opacity, when suddenly it opens in front of us and
gives us the impression that it is violently sucking us into its depths. (Didi-­
Huberman, 2007a: 25)

The image is conceived as an organism that opens and closes again (some-
times in a single movement) and whose meanings – rather than the single
­signification – ­are grasped with patience only: nothing says that the image
always speaks, and when it is not mute, nothing guarantees that it speaks
with a single voice. For Didi-­Huberman, it would appear that the critical
purpose of the constructed image is to shatter meaning, particularly when
it is ideological, to make it falter in order to make room for alternatives,
and to disassemble it to show what other possibilities it condemns, etc.
In his analyses, Didi-­Huberman has often given back to images the
meanings that had been denied them, but he also reopened images
whose interpretation was thought to be sealed or ­completed – t­he most
116 images 

s­ pectacular example being that of the frescoes by Fra Angelico. For many
years Didi-­Huberman has worked hard to return a new legibility to the ele-
ments in our visual culture (artistic elements in particular), despite firmly
established readings. The renewed ­iconology – ­whose possibility can be
seen to emerge in the epistemological debates initiated by him and o­ thers
– ­in reality surpasses the framework of art history alone. The dialogue
undertaken by the work of Farocki in Remontages du temps subi shows
the critical and political dimension in the problem of l­egibility – w ­ hich
constitutes a central and typical problem for iconological investigations:

Writing and montage make it possible [. . .] to offer images a legibility, which

implies a dual, dialectical approach (on condition that it is understood, with
Benjamin, that to dialectise is neither to synthesise, nor to resolve, nor to
‘regulate’): to never stop opening wide our childlike eyes in front of the image
(to accept the test, the non-­knowledge, the danger of the image, the deficiency of
language) and to never stop constructing, as adults, the ‘knowability’ of the image
(which implies knowledge, viewpoint, the act of writing, and ethical thinking).
To read is to link these two things – lesen, in German, means to read and to link,
to gather and to ­decipher – ­just as, in the lives of our faces, our eyes never stop
opening and closing. (Didi-­Huberman, 2010b: 65)
Translated by Shane Lillis

Works Cited
Panofsky, E. (1972 [1939]). Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the
Art of the Renaissance. Westview Press.

IMAGES

Nigel Saint
Plurality strikes the reader when encountering the images in the many
books of Didi-­Huberman. He himself encourages us to look at the images
first when opening any work of art history and always to consider an
image in relation to other images. His books range from the ancient to the
contemporary, with his selection of images from different media embrac-
ing not only the visual arts, but also conflicts and uprisings from the last
two centuries, the history of psychoanalysis, cinema, the natural sciences,
the history of medicine and the body, and philosophy. Throughout, the
guiding spirit is Warburg, to whose Mnemosyne Atlas Didi-­Huberman
has regularly paid homage in his work and in his exhibitions. A sample
 images  117

of images or ‘pans’ (see detail) discussed in his work might include the
following: the Farnese Atlas (2011b: 83–101), Fra Angelico’s frescoes at
the San Marco convent (1990a; 1990b), Enguerrand Quarton’s Coronation
of the Virgin (1998b), Niccolò dell’Arca’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ
(2002b: 176–9; 2007c: 238–9), the Susini and Zumbo sculptures in wax
(1999a: 106–18), the four Sonderkommando photographs (2003a) and
Turrell’s Blood Lust (2001a: 26–37).
In addition to the multiplicity of images, readers are struck by the
sustained attention that Didi-­Huberman pays to the making of them.
Craft, the choice of materials (his essay on ex-­votos includes objects in
metal, wood, marble, terracotta, stone and wax [2006b]), the experiments
with new forms and the potentialities of different media are all included
in his numerous studies. How a work is made and the skill demonstrated
therein are the first questions for artists, according to Henry Staten
(referring to Paul Valéry) in a discussion of aesthetics from Socrates to
Duchamp (Staten, 2011). Staten underlines how art is a knowledge-­based
activity that involves the making of a form (poem or sculpture) before
we come to the evaluation of how the work succeeds mimetically or in
terms of any higher cultural value. In the same way, Didi-­Huberman, in
Aristotelian and anti-­Platonist mode, argues for specificity and precision
when describing, situating and elaborating upon works of art in his analy-
ses. The transformative power of an artwork is far from being overlooked,
as may be seen in Didi-­Huberman’s interest in Rilke (2013c: 180–93) or
Blanchot (2013c: 249–79), but the effects are only possible because of the
manner in which the image has been made. Attention to production also
grounds the writing project in each of his studies: the relationship between
images and words remains open, alert, unending and noticeably uncertain.
Images in Didi-­Huberman’s work are regularly discussed collectively
in sets and groups, partly to escape an excessive fascination with the
whole or part of single images and also to avoid a dangerous focus on
the uniqueness of any particular image. In his view, images need to be
connected and compared, for our own sake and in order to register their
cultural significance. Nevertheless, as made objects and as the first sites
of our encounters with new forms of the imagination, images are also
singular and specific (Larsson, 2020: 48–68). The eyes of the beholders
are undoubtedly moving rapidly while looking, but they are also pausing
and contemplating, taking time with individual images. In fact, due to
this rapid movement and prolonged gaze, the viewing subject experi-
ences the loss of certainty and order that Didi-­Huberman equates with
Freud’s investigation into identity (1990a). In addition to an experience of
depleted self-­knowledge, the loss is felt like an absence (Didi-­Huberman,
2001a: 10–13), ‘nothing but the absence where every desire to see leads us’
118 images 

(2001a: 83–4). The loss experienced is like a mourning for the self and for
order, as if the image has sought its own collapse; the experience leaves us
‘before the image as before a gaping limit, a disintegrating place’, as Didi-­
Huberman writes with reference to Lacan (CI, 228). In the same text,
Didi-­Huberman finishes by noting that ‘the whole difficulty [consists] in
being afraid neither of knowing, nor of not-­knowing’ (CI, 228).
It is as sequences of singularities that the disarming force of images
is so striking across Didi-­Huberman’s work, notably in the case of the
Sonderkommando photographs (2003a) or the stills from Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin (2016a), as well as in his account of Pasolini’s La
Rabbia (2014a: 34–94) and indeed in his Atlas, Ghost Stories and Uprising
exhibitions. Didi-­Huberman took up Benjamin’s notion of the dialecti-
cal image, both reading it back to reach his own view of Baudelaire’s
interest in the present and reading it forward to his study of the questions
of legibility and visibility in visual images and history (2002a; 2010b:
11–67). The most productive images, in his view, present a dynamic and
dialectical relation between the past and the present. This approach to
time is built into what Didi-­Huberman calls a non-­trivial model; his gloss
on Benjamin’s dialectical image reinforces the latter’s attention to the
critical stance taken towards both the present and the past when he (Didi-­
Huberman) considers the potential for new artistic forms. If this happens,
the authentic modern artwork can overcome both the influence of the past
it has recognised and the present moment in which it participates (Didi-­
Huberman, 1992b: 125–52). In this way, images can move across cultures
(migrate), ask awkward questions about cultural tradition and demonstrate
an agency that underlines our lack of mastery over them. Returning to the
issue of knowledge production, the power of images to imagine, speak and
act enhances the link between our knowledge of the world and the media
we engage with in order to apprehend this insight.
Finally, in the present overview, the essay ‘Burning Image’ finds
Didi-­Huberman drawing together his ideas about the dialectic of the life
and death of images (2013c: 340–72). His work has shown that images
address both the mind and body of the spectator, at once our knowledge
and our senses. The reaction can be extreme, just as our ways of respond-
ing to an image can be too desultory or too appropriative (2003a: 45–56).
Conflagration is chosen as the paradoxical focus in ‘Burning Image’
because of Didi-­Huberman’s appreciation of the dangers facing images and
the dangers that they represent for their spectators. Images are fragile and
often marked by non-­knowledge, while also being the target of destructive
zealots or oppressive censors; and yet they postpone chaos and illuminate
the world more brightly while expiring. After patiently seeking a precise
series of questions to ask of images, so that their living contexts might be
 imagination  119

fully experienced, Didi-­Huberman’s analyses demonstrate that images are

still strange to us: they are too numerous to assemble and they exist as the
debris, remains and memories of the past (1992b: 130). They are ‘little or
nothing but life’, as Virginia Woolf said of the moth she observed (Woolf,
1966: 360). In ‘Burning Image’ they are aflame because of the force of the
real that they contain, because of their desire to speak, their ephemeral-
ity, their light, their arrested movement, their boldness, their pain and
their memory (Didi-­Huberman, 2013c: 370–1). Didi-­Huberman cites
Deleuze’s comment about the irreducibility of the temporality of images
to the present (2013c: 350), wherein lies their strength and their sovereign
status when treading the perilous line between spectacle and neglect
(2013c: 350; 2013a: 31–5).

Works Cited
Larsson, C. (2020). Didi-Huberman and the Image. Manchester University
Press.
Staten, H. (2011). ‘The Wrong Turn of Aesthetics’, in J. Elliott and
D. Attridge (eds), Theory after ‘Theory’, 223–36. Routledge.
Woolf, V. (1966). ‘The Death of the Moth’, in V. Woolf, Collected Essays,
vol. I, 359–61. Chatto and Windus.

IMAGINATION

Robert Harvey
Western philosophy has tended to relegate the imagination to a minor
position, to a rank far beneath the putatively peerless rigour of reason.
This situation, as Didi-­Huberman knows all too well, is little different
today than it was at the time of Plato: ‘We live in a time of the image in an
age of imagination torn’ (ISA, 181). Fear of imagination’s ‘oblique force’
is one reason for this: although ‘[d]rawing upon the force of imagination,
philosophy has also been obliged [. . .] to set imagination at a distance and
to provide itself with protection against the disruptiveness of [that] force’
(Sallis, 2000: 46). Altogether committed to that force, Didi-­Huberman
welcomes that disruptiveness. A breathless line from a spare short prose
piece by Samuel Beckett could serve as his guiding maxim: ‘No trace any-
where of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet,
yes, good, imagination dead imagine’ (Beckett 1995 [1965]: 182). More
than once does Didi-­Huberman appeal to this imperative proffered on the
verge of imagination’s disappearance.
120 imagination 

Didi-­Huberman thus champions the imagination. And that advocacy,

which began as early as Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, per-
vades his work. In the twenty-­first century, he has invariably tied the
exercise of the faculty of imagination to the potential for ethical behaviour
derived from the imagining capacity. What we see not only incongruously
looks back at us, what we see calls upon us to take a responsible position
and, if possible, and as a consequence, responsible action. What we see
concerns us. And this all happens through and thanks to our imagination.
Nowhere more intensively and emphatically does the ­imagination – a­ long
with its attendant and related ­functions – ­take centre stage than in Images
in Spite of All. Since reflection on the imagination is inseparable from
the complexity of the image, it is vital to observe that the i­mage – o­ r,
more precisely, the images – in question in Images in Spite of All are four
Sonderkommando photographs made by Auschwitz prisoners.
Over and against those for whom ‘the unimaginable of the Shoah means
to imagine nothing’ (ISA, 63), Didi-­Huberman observes and respects ‘how
often it is only possible for us to imagine’ (ISA, 64). To imagine is to apply
the understanding to an image p ­ erceived – ­whether event-­based or offered
by ­art – ­and translate it into an image not only ‘inscribed’ in the mind,
but one that catalyses moral responsibility. Between these two meanings
of ‘image’ – phenomenal and ­mental – t­here is an ‘infra-­thin threshold’
where much of Didi-­ Huberman’s oeuvre operates (ISA, 38). Seeing
something or anything does nothing for thought until it is looked at. The
look is the fundamental prerequisite to activating the critical faculties.
‘An image without imagination’, writes Didi-­Huberman, ‘is quite simply
an image that one didn’t spend the time to work on’ (ISA, 116). A pun in
the paratactic title of an earlier work conveys the argument neatly: putting
imagination’s force to work by looking occurs when what we see (ce que
nous voyons) concerns us (ce qui nous regarde) (1992b). Blending, as it does,
aesthetics and ethics, this economy of the image is what Didi-­Huberman
understands imagination to be.
Didi-­Huberman agrees with Kant’s elevation of the imagination to a
crucial role among the faculties. We recall that in the experience of the
sublime, as described in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, the imagi-
nation exceeds the understanding’s paralysis before a site of terror, allow-
ing the understanding to get a grip on itself, take itself in hand, as it were,
and proceed with reason reinforced. Such recovery of wits works just like
memory: ‘To remember’, Didi-­Huberman writes, ‘one must imagine’
(ISA, 30). Recalling the barely utterable words of the usually effusive Filip
Müller, ‘One never got used to that. It was impossible. Yes. One must
imagine’ (Shoah, quoted in ISA, 39). Though formed in completely dif-
ferent ways by the execution of the Endlösung (Final Solution), both Primo
 imagination  121

Levi and W. G. Sebald put imagination primarily to work in remembering

that ‘other scene’ that Levi called the ‘anus mundi, ultimate drainage site of
the German universe’ (1989: 65). In terms of the two German words for
experience, Levi’s work tended to derive primarily from an Erlebnis (lived
experience) that was nevertheless fragmented, whereas Sebald’s work had
to depend on a type of Erfahrung (know-­how).
Putting the imagination to work on an image connects the imagining
subject with the subject in the image. Walter Benjamin lamented the
atrophy of this know-­how. Didi-­Huberman has devoted his many books
to reviving it. The faculty of imagination opens the ­other – ­be he dead,
obliterated, smoke, ­oblivion – ­to my visitation, my care. Exercising the
imagination, one organises one’s mental transport into someone else’s
shoes. Under the heading of ‘the mathematically sublime’, Kant tells
us that, confronted with a space of inestimable magnitude, imagination
stands in for reason: ‘The measurement of a space (as an apprehension) is
at the same time the description of it, thus an objective movement in the
imagination and a progression’ (Kant, 2000: 142). By the same token, as
we cast our gaze, following Didi-­Huberman’s meditations in Remontages
du temps subi, upon scenes in Samuel Fuller’s film Falkenau, or Agustín
Centelles’s photographs in the Bram concentration camp, those places
then become spaces for us today in which our imagination intervenes to
convert reason tetanised by what we see to conscious care.
Pretending that inhumanity does not implicate the entirety of the
species (and for all time), we relegate them to a convenient over there,
rather than embracing them as ‘spaces otherwise’ here (cf. Foucault, 1986).
If conscience shuts them out, in other words, we deem them ‘unimagina-
ble’, as if our imagination weren’t capable of grasping them. Relegating
such spaces to the unimaginable, we reject or feign to ignore Beckett’s
vivifying imperative or Robert Antelme’s sarcasm: ‘Walking around
with unimaginable as your shield, the word of the void, your step stead-
ies, becomes resolute, your conscience pulls itself together’ (Antelme,
1992: 289–90). And so, with images before its attendant eye, the mind
rolls up its sleeves and gets down to work. The collisions, fusions, breaks
and transformations between images we look at act on ‘our own activities
of thinking and knowing. To know, one must imagine [s’imaginer]; the
speculative work bench is always there in tandem with the montage table of
the imagination’ (ISA, 119).
By dint of imagination’s power to exceed sense, what Kant called
Einbildungskraft, aesthetic experiences at the limit of the intellect become
building blocks for ethics. Marginal and tenuous ‘living’ spaces, faraway
favelas, even the camp, which Agamben has dubbed our nomos: all are
situated altogether elsewhere (Agamben, 1998: 166–80; Harvey, 2017: 175).
122 in spite of all (malgré tout)

Yet on condition that the work of the imagination be applied to them, the
filmic, photographic or painted i­mage – ­whether mediated by the screen,
the paper, or even the remanence of ­memory – ­become uncannily, uncom-
fortably, ethically here and now.

Works Cited
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
D. Heller-­Roazen. Stanford University Press.
Antelme, R. (1992). The Human Race, trans. J. Haight and A. Mahler.
Marlboro Press.
Beckett, S. (1995 [1965]). Imagination Dead Imagine, trans. S. Beckett, in
The Complete Short Prose: 1929–1989, 182–5. Grove Press.
Foucault, M. (1986). ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. J. Miskowiec, diacritics
16(1): 22–7.
Harvey, R. (2017). Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics.
Bloomsbury.
Kant, I. (2000). Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. P. Guyer and
E. Matthews. Cambridge University Press.
Lanzmann, C. (dir.) (1985). Shoah.
Levi, P. (1989). The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal. Vintage.
Sallis, J. (2000). Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. Indiana
University Press.

IN SPITE OF ALL (MALGRÉ TOUT)

Henrik Gustafsson
The locution malgré tout, ‘in spite of all’ or ‘despite everything’, is first
and foremost associated with the vexed debate stirred by the exhibition
Mémoire des camps, which was organised in Paris in 2001, and the violent
reactions provoked by Didi-­ Huberman’s catalogue essay, ‘L’Images
malgré tout’, subsequently expanded into the eponymously titled book
in response to the fierce criticisms. Didi-­Huberman’s conception of the
four photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando, the ‘special
units’ of Jewish prisoners whose task it was to dispose of the corpses at
Auschwitz-­Birkenau, as acts of resistance, as visual testimonies and as
‘survivors’ (ISA, 46), was first attacked by Claude Lanzmann, in an inter-
view in Le Monde (2001), and soon followed by Gérard Wajcman in Les
Temps modernes (2001; see also Pagnoux, 2001). In his article, Wajcman
accused Didi-­Huberman not only of corroborating the logic of Holocaust
 in spite of all (malgré tout) 123

deniers, who insist that the event is yet to be proved, but, primarily, of
Christianising the Shoah by means of images.
Didi-­Huberman’s conversation with Lanzmann goes further back,
though, beginning with a brief essay on Shoah titled ‘Le lieu malgré tout’,
the site in spite of all, written in 1995, which predates his book-­length
retort in L’Images malgré tout (Images in Spite of All), by almost a decade
(2003a; ISA). Ten years after the Mémoire des camps dispute, the site and
the image come together in Didi-­Huberman’s photo-­essay Bark, written
after a visit to the state museum at Auschwitz-­Birkenau in the summer of
2011 (2011a; B). In the birch forest surrounding the camp, he collected a
few pieces of bark that had curled off the trees and dropped to the ground.
While these flaky shards convey a loss of context and continuity, they
nonetheless maintain a relation to the living surroundings from which
they have been torn. It was precisely the edges of the cut, the aimless and
accidental framings, which Didi-­Huberman called attention to in his close
reading of the Sonderkommando photographs. In common with these
‘stolen shreds’ and ‘tiny extractions’ clandestinely ‘snatched from a vast
hell’ (ISA, 33, 38, 47), the frayed edges of the bark show the marks of
the tearing. Mute and unresponsive, the pieces of bark are, to borrow a
phrase from Marc Bloch, ‘witnesses in spite of themselves’ (1992 [1954]:
51). Hence, their survival, their potential to ‘start an afterlife which sus-
tains our memory’ (OCCE, 116), depends on the historical subject who is
willing to pay them attention. Malgré tout denotes here a latent possibility
that resides as much in the salvaged fragments as in the subject who is pre-
pared to engage with them. It is in their very inconspicuousness that they
implore us to get involved. Signifying at once dearth and defiance, the
preposition malgré – despite, albeit, n
­ otwithstanding – ­thus accords equal
emphasis to the modesty of these vestiges and to the acts of resistance or
revolt that they may induce.
While the word tout generally denotes an overwhelming and oppres-
sive adversary in Didi-­Huberman’s writings, such as amnesia, neglect,
ignorance or death, or the dire record of history as such, it attains a more
specific meaning in the aforementioned context. Lanzmann has described
Shoah as ‘an arid and pure film’, which ‘tells the truth’ and ‘teaches
everything’ (ISA, 127). Torn away from the proverbial ‘all’, the modest
tokens scrutinised by Didi-­Huberman point us in the opposite direction,
as when he refers to the pieces of bark as ‘the impurity that comes from
the things themselves’ (B, 118). Against the ‘all image’ (ISA, 59), which
claims to encompass the historical event in its entirety, granting complete
knowledge and total recall, he mounts a defence of the historically ‘useless
images’ (ISA, 47). Never ceasing to caution the reader that memory,
in whatever form, is always flawed and frayed, and that knowledge is
124 in spite of all (malgré tout)

a­ ttainable for us only in the meagre shreds of what remains to be sensed,

Didi-­Huberman responds by making his own photographic inventory of
the former campgrounds in Bark, including the lichen-­covered cement
floor of the demolished crematorium. Here, the ‘in spite of’ forms a
dialectical bond with its antonym, ‘because of’, whereby witnessing is
framed as a relation of resistance and opposition, rather than a relation
of consequence or as a corollary result. It is precisely because of its lack
of evidentiary value and its resistance to yielding information within the
curated discursive space of the open-­air museum that the cracked floor
deserves, and demands, our attention. Malgré tout thus implies an ethical
imperative to engage and respond, ‘and to become involved, in spite of all’
(AA, 118).
The genealogy of this signature phrase, however, antecedes Didi-­
Huberman’s engagement with the Holocaust and permeates his oeuvre
in its entirety. It has been key to his phenomenology of ‘minor’ images
and gestures, which, despite and because of their shortcomings, oblige
the viewer to continue to gaze, interact and imagine. Congruous with
his commentary on the pious artists of the early Renaissance, whose task
it was to summon God in spite of his silent withdrawal from the world,
in Fra Angelico and Confronting Images, the Bilderatlas created by Aby
Warburg demonstrates that the deities of pagan antiquity ‘survive in spite
of all’ (AA, 86), albeit disguised and displaced. While Didi-­Huberman
in The Surviving Image discusses Nachleben as a persistence of cultural
forms in spite of the passing and vanishment of their originary ‘stage’ (SI,
32), Survival of the Fireflies elaborates on this phenomenon in regard to
the intermittent yet indestructible glimmers of clandestine experiences,
marginalised communities and suppressed thoughts that continue to emit
a faint glow, and the ethical demand that these flickering lights exert upon
us to become sensitised to ‘that which has not completely disappeared and,
above all, that which appears in spite of all’ (SF, 32).
Encapsulating Didi-­Huberman’s lifelong interest in the involuntary or
accidental form, the idiom malgré tout was initially coined in the context of
his study of the revered and contested relics of the Veil of Veronica and the
Holy Shroud of Turin. Like the pieces of bark, ‘[w]hat strikes one imme-
diately is the triviality, the extreme humility, of the objects themselves,
which have nothing to show but the tatters of their material’ (CI, 188).
First featured in the 1984 essay ‘The Index of the Absent Wound’, malgré
tout is invoked in relation to the hermeneutic tradition of interpreting the
stains on the linen serge in Turin on which ‘almost nothing was visible’
(IA, 63). Didi-­Huberman explains that to the devout beholder it is the
very absence of figuration that verifies that ‘contact has taken place’ (IA,
67–8). Wajcman’s critique of Didi-­Huberman’s contribution to Mémoire
 incarnation  125

des camps is thus accurate when he proposes that the Holy Shroud is
the secret cipher for the art historian’s reading of the four photographs
from Auschwitz (2001: 83). Bruno Chaouat has similarly criticised Didi-­
Huberman for interpreting these photographs within the discourse of
the Christian art of the Italian Renaissance, based on the template of his
1990 study of Fra Angelico: ‘the art historian and the Christian artist
yearn for the image In Spite of Everything, be it for the invisible image
of God as arch-­Image or for Auschwitz as the limit of human imagina-
tion’ (2006: 93). Importantly, however, Didi-­Huberman does not posit
Auschwitz as a unique event that demarcates such a limit. Imagination
is always limited, or rather, it is the limit that any historical investigation
has to expand. Memory work therefore always means to work with the
liminal. Consequently, no sign, whether verbal or visual, can lay claim to
the purity and singularity that Lanzmann insists on, as each sign at once
illuminates and obscures that to which it refers. Didi-­Huberman urges his
readers that this is not an incentive to abandon signs, but to relentlessly
work on them, in spite of all.

Works Cited
Bloch, M. (1992 [1954]). The Historian’s Craft, trans. P. Putnam.
Manchester University Press.
Chaouat, B. (2006). ‘In the Image of Auschwitz’, diacritics, 36(1): 86–96.
Lanzmann, C. (2001). ‘Entre mémoire et histoire des camps, le role de
la photographie, Claude Lanzmann, écrivain et cineaste’, Le Monde,
19 January.
Pagnoux, E. (2001). ‘Reporter photographe à Auschwitz’, Les Temps mod-
ernes, 56(613): 84–108.
Wajcman, G. (2001). ‘De la croyance photographique’, Les Temps mod-
ernes, 56(613): 47–83.

INCARNATION

Ari Tanhuanpää
The problem of incarnation is a central theme in Didi-­ Huberman’s
La Peinture incarnée (1985a), Devant l’image (1990a; CI), Fra Angelico:
dissemblance et figuration (1990b; FAD) and L´Image ouverte: motifs de
l´incarnation dans les arts visuels (2007a). It should not be forgotten how
important the themes of the Annunciation and the Eucharist, discussed
in the fifth edition of the Logic of Port-Royal (Arnauld and Nicole, 1970
126 incarnation 

[1683]), were for Louis Marin, who supervised Didi-­Huberman’s doctoral

dissertation at the EHESS (see, e.g., Marin, 1989a: 3–25; 1989b).
Didi-­ Huberman calls the Annunciation the ‘very instant of the
Incarnation’ (FAD, 72). It is particularly relevant how he locates this
mystery in those areas of paintings that are, in Marin’s terms, ‘opaques’:
the ruptures (déchirures; see rend), interruptions and ­syncopes – ­the
terms that emphasise the ‘opening up of a gap, an interval [. . .] the diffé-
rance of delay or postponement’ (Marin, 2001: 373). Didi-­Huberman sees
the omnipresent red-­white columns depicted in the fourteenth–fifteenth-­
century Annunciation paintings in such terms, comparing them to the
‘the virginal placenta’ – a ‘membrane that was red on one side and white
on the other’ – which prefigures the Word to become flesh (FAD, 148–54).
The whites (as white as the unleavened bread of the Eucharist) and the
reds (as red as blood or the transubstantiated wine of the Eucharist)
incarnate the virtual (a ‘dissemblant similtude’) and the visual (visuel),
leading to the opening up of representation (FAD, 151; CI, 17-–24).
This opacified (i.e. incarnated) white has been a subject of Vinot’s (2009)
and Munk Rösing’s (2017) psychoanalytic readings. The latter sees it as
a metaphor for an analyst who acts as a projection canvas for the desires
and fantasies of their client. In the analytic session, the analyst focuses
a ‘free-­floating attention’ (Freud’s gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit) on
to the analysand (Vinot, 2009: 196; Munk Rösing, 2017: 43). In order
to be able to do so, Munk Rösing mentions that the analyst must empty
their mind of any preconceptions. She draws a comparison between a
psychoanalytic session and the art historian facing an artwork. She quotes
Didi-­Huberman, who writes that the image requires a kind of ‘learned
ignorance’, the suspension of any art historical knowledge they might have
had (CI, 143; Munk Rösing, 2017: 44). This act, in which the art historian
keeps their prior knowledge under the bar, is thus comparable to the tran-
scendental epoché in the Husserlian sense. Munk Rösing claims that the
white can manifest itself only as a result of this methodological suspension.
But would it be rather that, through this white, the Being itself performs
a kind of Deleuzian involuntary epoché into the art historian (cf. Bryant,
2008: 77)?
Didi-­Huberman argues, in stark resemblance to Louis Marin, that it is
‘urgent to think representation with its opacity, and imitation with what
is capable of ruining it’ (CI, 184). He sees the intense red blotches in Fra
Angelico’s fresco Noli me tangere (c. 1438–50, San Marco, Florence) as
openings or rends (déchirures) – symptom­s – ­in the tissue of representa-
tion (FAD, 19–22; CI, 144). Didi-­Huberman refers to them by the term
pan, taken from Marcel Proust’s idiom of ‘petit pan de mur jaune’ of Á la
recherche du temps perdu (1954: III, 187). Through these miraculous places
 incarnation  127

of incarnation, the visible is connected to the visual (visuel) (CI, 24, 187–8;
cf. Buatois, 2011). The function of pan is comparable to Jacques Lacan’s
‘button ties’ (points de capiton), through which the subject comes in contact
with the Real (Didi-­Huberman, 2007a: 35; CI, 187).
One of the first occurrences of pan in Didi-­Huberman’s oeuvre is his
reading of Honoré Balzac’s 1831 short story ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’
in La Peinture incarnée (1985a). In the story the beginner Nicolas Poussin
and the established painter François Porbus are trying to catch a glimpse
of a painting that no one has ever seen, done by the master painter
Frenhofer, which depicts a young woman named Catherine Lescault.
Didi-­Huberman describes the pan of Frenhofer’s masterpiece as the
‘announcement of a female body that does not manifest itself’. We are
dealing with a symptom: Catherine’s body is indicated, but not manifested
as such. ‘The effect of pan – what Lacan would have called “function of
painting” – would be [. . .] the symptom par excellence of the soma in the
pictorial sema’ (1985a: 61): a traumatic encounter with the Real (Recalcati,
2011: 52–62). Vinot associates the pan with transference: ‘[i]f the pan is
created by the artist in the painting, the analysand creates his or her pan in
transference’ (Vinot, 2009: 199). In Lacanian terms (1998 [1981]: 67–78),
the pan acts as the ‘vel of alienation’. Didi-­Huberman describes pan as the
‘imminence of the hallucinatory moment in painting’, which is, however,
only a ‘quasi-­hallucination’: what the pan accomplishes is only a quasi-­
metamorphosis; a painting remains as such, albeit ‘tense to the extreme’
(1985a: 59). Didi-­Huberman borrows Lacan’s diagram, which consists
of two overlapping circles representing the imaginary and the symbolic
spheres. The intersection of these circles is the Real, or the object-­cause
of desire; in Lacanian terms, the objet a (1998 [1981]: 77; Barcella, 2012:
38–40). Didi-­Huberman’s name for this object is le pan.
As Didi-­Huberman mentions in L’Image ouverte (2007a: 25): ‘[t]he
images open and close like our bodies looking at them’. The pan acts as the
operator of this opening and closing. It is the ‘split between the eye and
the gaze’ (Lacan, 1998 [1981]: 67–8), in which the perspective turns from
what we see (ce que nous voyons) to that object of desire (objet a), the gaze
of the Other that stares at us (ce qui nous regarde) (Didi-­Huberman, 1992b:
51–2). Our intentionality becomes inverted (cf. Hagelstein, 2006: 33–41).
An example of the effect of the pan is Didi-­Huberman’s description
of Johannes Vermeer’s Lacemaker (c. 1665, Louvre, Paris) (Vinot, 2009).
Didi-­Huberman first dealt with this subject in his 1983 essay ‘Le Sang de
la dentellière’ (1998a: 64–75), and he returned to it in Devant l’image (CI,
248–56). He tells us that at first glance the motif of the painting seems so
evident (cf. the Barthesian sens obvie, 1991 [1985]: 45–7), that it can be
easily identified. He points out, however, that there is something in it that
128 incarnation 

is not so perfectly c­ lear – i­t is something Roland Barthes called ‘obtuse’

(1991 [1985]: 47–59). It is a punctum that pricks; or, in Barthes’s words,
a ‘signifier without signifed; whence the difficulty of naming it’ (1991
[1985]: 54; cf. CI, 264–5). It is the ‘third meaning’, which we can locate
theoretically, but not describe. Barthes feels that ‘[i]t seems to open the
field of meaning totally’ (let us remember that Didi-­Huberman says that
Fra Angelico’s white ‘opens representation’, CI, 24). Barthes asks: ‘how
describe what represents nothing?’ (1991 [1985]: 44). In consequence, we
must resort to ‘art of not describing’, as Didi-­Huberman titled one of his
articles (AN).
Didi-­Huberman’s attention is drawn to the red thread between the
lacemaker’s fingers, a ‘burst of colour in the forefront of the work’. This is
the object of desire (objet a) whose éclat, brilliance, bedazzles (CI, 251–2).
It is what Lacan called (1991: 163–78) agalma – a ‘subject supposed to
know’ – whose function is embodied by the analyst during the treatment.
Didi-­Huberman writes that this element, ‘because it does not represent
anything, advances towards me, constrains me to its detail, looks at me’
(1985a: 47). This detail that becomes a stain (Lacan’s la tache) during the
transference is the paint becoming blood. It is the encounter of the Real
as trauma. In La Peinture incarnée the painter Frenhofer confronts the
Real, when he realises that what he fantasised to be Catherine Lescault’s
living skin is nothing but paint. It is the fall of the object of desire (chute
de agalma) and the realisation of the lack in the Other, the analyst.
Lacan refers to this with a lozenge (poinçon) that manifests itself in Didi-­
Huberman’s L’Image ouverte in the form of a s­ tigma – a­ n opening of the
flesh. Thus the object has a thematic link to the central lack of castration,
symbolised by the gaze as the objet a (Lacan 1998 [1981]: 77). It is note-
worthy that the drawing by Didi-­Huberman (CI, 254) based on the red
burst of paint in The Lacemaker again brings to mind a placenta, a figure
used by Lacan as a symbol for castration and the male subject’s lost object
of desire (Gersant, 2020).
In theological terms, the event of incarnation is the manifestation of
the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation; interpreted in an Aristotelian-­
Aquinasian mode, the accidents remain the ­same – ­the painting as a physi-
cal artefact does not transform to ­another – ­but its substance changes.
Here again Didi-­Huberman comes close to Louis Marin, for whom these
questions were pivotal. For both, incarnation is an essential part of any
encounter with an artwork. Didi-­Huberman has said that ‘[i]n each image
the incarnational question finds a provisional, fragile, lacunary, paradoxi-
cal, i.e., a problematic response, a knot of paradoxes in which the ques-
tions are not resolved but, rather, revive and proliferate’ (Davila, 2007:
62). Jean-­Luc Marion has even argued (2004: 27) that ‘[e]very painting
 incarnation  129

participates in a resurrection, every painting imitates Christ, by bringing

the unseen to light’.

Works Cited
Arnauld, A., and Nicole, P. (1970 [1683]). La Logique ou l’art de penser.
Flammarion.
Barcella, D. (2012). Sintomi, strappi, anacronismi. Il Potere delle immagini
secondo Georges Didi-Huberman. Et Al.
Barthes, R. (1991 [1985]). ‘The Third Meaning’, in The Responsibility of
Forms, trans. R. Howard, 41–62. University of California Press.
Bryant, L. R. (2008). Difference and Givenness. Deleuze’s Transcendental
Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. Northwestern University
Press.
Buatois, I. (2011). ‘La Figure comme moyen d’une approche critique
transdisciplinaire. Exemple de l’image ouverte de Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, Figures et discours critique. Figura, 27: 123–38.
Davila, T. (2007). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman: l’image ouverte’, Art Press,
334: 62–3.
Gersant, M. (2020). ‘Le Placenta: approche historique, anthropologique
et psychanalytique’, Érès, ‘Dialogue’, 2(228): 181–200.
Hagelstein, M. (2006). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman: vers une intentionnalité
inversée?’, La Part de l´Œil, 21–22: 33–41.
Lacan, J. (1991). Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre VIII. Le Transfert,
1960–61, ed. Jacques-­Alain Miller. Éditions du Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1998 [1981). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan.
W. W. Norton.
Marin, L. (1989a). Food for Thought, trans. M. Hjort. Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Marin, L. (1989b). Opacité de la peinture. Essais sur la représentation au
Quattrocento. Éditions de l´École des hautes études en sciences sociales.
Marin, L. (2001). On Representation, trans. C. Porter. Stanford University
Press.
Marion, J.-L. (2004). The Crossing of the Visible, trans. J. K. A. Smith.
Stanford University Press.
Munk Rösing, L. (2017). ‘I Kød og Blod: Om Signifiantens Materialitet
i Kunst og Psykoanalyse under Stadig Hensyntagen til Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, Lamella. Tidsskrift for Teoretisk Psykoanalyse, 2(2): 41–61.
Proust, M. (1954). À la recherche du temps perdu. Gallimard.
Recalcati, M. (2011). Il Miracolo della forma. Per un’estetica psicoanalitica.
Mondadori.
130 kant, immanuel 

Vinot, F. (2009). ‘Du pan du tableau au pan du transfert’, Érès. ‘Cliniques

méditerranéennes’, 2(80): 191–200.

K
KANT, IMMANUEL

Magdalena Krasińska
For Didi-­Huberman, the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant consti-
tutes an important historico-­philosophical reference in his critique of the
history of art and its methodologies (see art history). Drawing atten-
tion to the limited potential of Erwin Panofsky’s positivist history of
art and of the iconological method of interpretation (see iconography;
iconology), Didi-­Huberman proposes a kind of ‘regress’ back to Kant
and, in particular, to his Critique of the Power of Judgment (2000 [1790]).
According to Didi-­Huberman, the conclusions of that treatise on fine
arts and aesthetic experience (see aesthetics) were, for a time, neglected
by most influential art historians. That left room for the attempts at
‘scientification’ of their discipline, which derived inspiration from Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason (1998 [1781]) and the neo-­Kantian tradition
of Ernst Cassirer and his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1980 [1923]).
Developing this claim, Didi-­Huberman sketches out two pathways of the
‘development’ of the history of art as a science through its incorporation
of neo-­Kantian elements: the pathway of representation, or symbol (in
the spirit of Cassirer’s philosophy and the iconology of Panofsky) and
the pathway of the symptom (integrating the concept of the aesthetic
idea from the Critique of the Power of Judgment and Sigmund Freud’s
concept of the symptom).
These two paths of the (neo-)Kantian discourse on art branch out
in different directions. The former, taking as its guidepost conclusions
drawn from the Critique of Pure Reason and orienting itself to the cultural
sciences, maintains that a subject lives surrounded by symbolic forms
and that their access to ‘reality’ is always already mediated by categorial
symbol. The second type of neo-­Kantian discourse continues the train
of thought developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, including
the assertion that aesthetic experience is not reducible to knowledge and
concepts, because its nature is undefined. ‘The Kantism of pure reason’,
Didi-­Huberman writes, pushed art historians precisely in the direction of
 knowledge  131

knowledge, in that they made art the object of knowledge, thereby margin-
alising ‘the faculty of aesthetic taste’ (CI, 93).
In this way, at the opposite end from this scientific ‘tone of certainty’
(CI, 2–5), one finds something akin to an ‘economy of doubt’ (CI, 181):
an aspect of uncertainty that remains in close relation with the theory of
symptom, which it associates with excess (with ‘something more’ (CI,
155)). The two Kantian (or neo-­Kantian) ‘keys’ (CI, 5) thus turn out to be
two separate modes, one of which (i.e., the iconological) is characterised
by the desire for knowledge, and the other by non-­knowledge. The second
‘key’ grows out of the Critique of the Power of Judgment in that it absorbs
what Kant wrote about the aesthetic idea: that it is a ‘representation of
the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being
possible for any determinate thought, i.e., concept, to be adequate to it’
(2000 [1790]: 192). Neo-­Kantian iconology, according to Didi-­Huberman,
‘pretends to define the conditions of what will be thinkable in a work of
art’, while ‘the opening to the symptom gives us access to something like
an unthinkable that comes before our very eyes to traverse images’ (CI,
182). Nevertheless, Didi-­Huberman in no way invalidates the symbolic
manner of understanding an image; rather, he perceives the need to curb
excessive cognitive aspirations in positivist art history, and he indicates
the necessity of supplementing the iconological method with a description
of the work of the symptom.

Works Cited
Cassirer, E. (1980 [1923]). The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans.
R. Manheim. Yale University Press.
Kant, I. (1998 [1781]). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and
A. W. Wood. Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (2000 [1790]). Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer
and E. Matthews. Cambridge University Press.

KNOWLEDGE

Magdalena Krasińska
Didi-­Huberman uses the concept of ‘knowledge’ above all in reference to
the ways of practising the history of art that take as its goal the deciphering
of meaning, that is, obtaining a result in the form of a specific significa-
tion, as if the aesthetic experience had its foundation solely in structure,
and not also in the event (see aesthetics). In Invention of Hysteria
132 knowledge 

Didi‑Huberman identifies such a pursuit of knowledge with Jean-Martin

Charcot’s study of hysteria through interpretation and synthesis (1982;
IH). Didi-­Huberman formulates the charge that clinical (psychiatric)
science attempted to deduce meaning in photographs whose essential
paradoxicality eluded cognisance (IH, 59). A paradigmatic approach in art
historiography centred at the notion of knowledge was the neo-­Kantian
tradition of the philosophy of symbolic forms of Ernst Cassirer (see Kant,
Immanuel). The art historian Erwin Panofsky developed an iconologi-
cal discourse of knowledge (see iconology) into ‘the m ­ yth – a­ positivist
­myth – ­of the omni-­translatability of images’ (CI, 3). As Gottfried Boehm
writes, Panofsky’s approach ‘constitutes only a system of reference for the
contents of images and their identification’ (1978: 445).
Within the interpretative methodologies centred on the conception
of knowledge, symbolic form is regarded as integral, and as display-
ing a ‘formal integrity’, which implies ‘in the end, that it is an object of
reason, that it has all the characteristics of the Idea, and that it subjects
the world of individual phenomena to its transcendental law’ (CI, 169).
The integrity of the symbolic form that tends towards the subordination
of a multiplicity of forms to one single idea of reason is supposed to make
possible the expression of this function ‘in terms of knowledge’ (CI, 169).
This renders the method incomplete and even idealistic. This is also the
reason why Didi-­Huberman finds value not in the symbol’s unifying
function, which is at the centre of Cassirer’s and Panofsky’s conceptual
systems, but in Sigmund Freud’s meta-­psychology, where symptom is
closely related to what Didi-­Huberman calls ‘non-­knowledge’. It ‘breaks
up all discursive unity [. . .] intrudes upon and smashes the order of the
Idea, opens systems and imposes something unthinkable’ (CI, 169). It
should be noted, however, that Didi-­Huberman does not conceptualise
‘non-­knowledge’ in a privative or negative perspective, as if it were a kind
of error, Platonic illusion or something inferior to knowledge. Rather, as
he claims in ‘Glimpses. Between Appearance and Disappearance’, it is
a realm of wondering events or glimmers: ‘non-­knowledge is to knowl-
edge what the firefly is to the light’, and it is ‘something other than the
“nothing” of simple ignorance or obscurity’ (GAD, 112; see also Didi-­
Huberman, 2018a).
The symptom is not subordinate to logos and is clearly distinguished in
Didi-­Huberman’s work from indexical signs. Within the humanistic tra-
dition, the figure of the art historian is characterised by a desire for knowl-
edge. ‘[I]n the face of a more obscure and no less sovereign constraint to
not-knowledge’ (CI, 7), modern iconology has always eliminated what in an
image constitutes a trace, a remnant, a manifestation of forgetting. Thus
far, art historians have largely situated themselves within the neo-­Kantian
 light  133

approach in the centre of knowledge that they have created, looking

for signs and symbols in works of art. What they have not been paying
attention to are symptoms, because ‘[t]hat would have been to accept the
constraint of a not-­knowledge, and thus to dislodge themselves from a
central and advantageous position, the powerful position of the subject who
knows’ (CI, 161–2). The recognition that k­ nowledge – ­like the ­image – i­s
ruptured, internally incongruous and ‘rent’ (see rend) would lead to a loss
of the central, privileged position of art history as a humanistic discipline,
while at the same time allowing the neutralisation of its ‘methodological’
conceit and ‘clos[ed]’ character (CI, 8). In this respect, Aby Warburg
provides a model for Didi-­Huberman as an art historian who did not
confine himself to identifying in artwork that which is general, essential
and objective, but who focused his attention on that which is relational,
and on multiplication of ‘pertinent singularities’ (SI, 23).

Works Cited
Boehm, G. (1978). ‘Zu einer Hermeneutik des Bildes’, in G. Boehm and
H. G. Gadamer (eds), Seminar: Die Hermeneutik un die Wissenschaften,
444–71. Frankfurt am Main.

L
LIGHT

Tomasz Swoboda
Considerations about light feature in Didi-­ Huberman’s first book,
Invention of Hysteria, which include light as a crucial and formative aspect
in the process of photography itself, as well as ‘the intrinsic material of
the [hysterical] drama’, ‘a light full of hatred for the mystery of catalepsy’
(IH, 227–8; see hysteria). But it was in his subsequent work, Confronting
Images, that light as luminous revelation gained greater significance.
Opening with a vision of the fresco in Fra Angelico’s cell in Florence,
the study approaches the whiteness of the lime, invoking the dialectic of
light and of the obstacles placed in its path (see dialectics), which leads,
in this particular case, to a theological reference to the Word made flesh
in the form of a luminous intensity in the uterus Mariae (CI, 25). While
neither light nor the white belong to the order of the visible (and have been
134 light 

omitted in representational analyses of the fresco), they are visual: Didi-­

Huberman calls them the ‘almost-­nothing’ that nevertheless ‘touch[es],
concretely, upon the famous mystery of this fresco: the Annunciation
[. . .] imitating the process of announcement [. . .] but without describing
or representing’ (CI, 25).
Phasmes, the collection of essays bringing together texts written between
1985 and 1993, introduces Didi-­Huberman’s paradoxical method, which
makes it possible to demonstrate that ‘the dust shows us that there is light’
(1998a: 57), and which also anticipates the publication of his groundbreak-
ing 2010 book, Survivance des lucioles (published in English translation
as Survival of the Fireflies). ‘The glimmer’ of the tombs of Ravenna,
Didi-­Huberman writes in Phasmes, ‘is neither darkness nor light, but the
improbability of their meeting, of their threshold, the moment of their
joint reversion, the flash of their overthrow’ (1998a: 212). The distinc-
tion between light and glimmer forms the basis of Survivance des lucioles,
which Didi-­Huberman begins with the mention of Pier Paolo Pasolini
reading Dante for his lucciole (the ‘small lights’, or intermittent glowing
of the fireflies) and not for his luce (the great heavenly light). Transposing
the image of Dantesque Hell into the reality of the twentieth century,
Didi-­ Huberman observes that fascism has reversed the relationship
between luce and luciole: the propagandist spotlights and the powerful
spotlights of anti-­aircraft defences dominated the world while resistances
of all kinds transformed into fireflies (SF, 4). Accordingly, throughout the
book the fireflies are presented as the embodiment of ‘a passing, fragile
pulse of lightä (SF, 22), both concrete, material and metaphorical, or
even allegorical. This nuanced and multifaceted presentation allows Didi-­
Huberman to distinguish a great ‘light of truth’ from small ‘glimmers of
truth’, ‘inevitably provisional, empirical, intermittent, fragile, disparate,
passing, like fireflies’ (SF, 40). The glimmers are thus on the side of
the images – living, moving, ­changing – ­while the great and distant
light takes the side of the horizon, of a stable vision and of a one-­sided,
oriented belief. In this ‘glimmering’ context Didi-­Huberman returns to
his favourite authors – Benjamin, Warburg and Bataille – to discern
in their works the tension between luce and luciole. In particular, such
glimmers of thought allow him to see the transgressive power of Bataille’s
writing, of whom Didi-­Huberman writes that the ‘retreat into darkness’
afforded him the possibility of writing that is akin to nocturnal signalling,
‘like a firefly trying to escape the flame of spotlights, the better to emit
his flashes of thoughts, poetry, desires, ­stories – ­to transmit at any cost’
(SF, 75). As Didi-­Huberman points out, this tension is not limited to the
works of these three authors, but concerns us all: ‘We do not live in one
world but between two worlds, at least. The first is inundated with light,
 literature 135

the second crossed with flashes’ (SF, 83). We are thus a bit like the little
match girl from the famous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen that
Didi-­Huberman evokes in Aperçues: dreaming of the great joyful lights,
striking the very last of her matches, she dies of cold on the evening of
New Year’s Day (Didi-­Huberman, 2018a: 101).

LITERATURE

Busra Copuroglu
During a talk he gave in October 2020 at an event organised by La Maison
Française of New York University, Didi-­Huberman admitted that he
doesn’t start writing anything without first reading Charles Baudelaire,
who, more than a mere source of inspiration, informs and shapes his
relation to glimpses, a mode of seeing that captures the trace-survivance
of a moment or a figure that has just passed us by. The way in which
Didi-­Huberman engages with Baudelaire’s poetry is just one example
of his entanglement with literary texts. Though Didi-­Huberman thinks
with and through literature, he is not interested in offering a systematic
literary criticism. He thinks with and through literature, and his literary
reflections are grounded in authors such as Baudelaire, Bataille, Joyce,
Brecht, Borges, who sometimes inform, sometimes accompany his imagi-
nal thinking. The texts and writers he thinks with give shape to his key
concepts such as atlas, montage, gaze, glimpse and distance.
Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992b), Didi-­Huberman’s poetic
treatise on gaze, opens with a fragment from James Joyce’s Ulysses on the
‘ineluctable modality of the visible’, where Joyce talks about ‘[thinking]
through’ his eyes, and ‘shut[ting] [. . .] eyes’ in order to see, an important
foundation of his phenomenology of seeing. Another important name that
has shaped Didi-­Huberman’s philosophy of visuality is, as mentioned,
Charles Baudelaire, who he proclaims as the great master of glimpses.
Dedicated to a passer-­by woman, a ‘fugitive beauty’, Baudelaire’s poem
‘À Une Passante’ (1857) in particular has been key to the development
of the notion of glimpses (aperçues), which Didi-­Huberman also calls his
own ‘small intermittent literary genre’ (2018a: 18), a mode of writing
that becomes the premise of his book Aperçues (2018). Organised around
four big thematic chapters and written in the form of Denkbild (thought-­
images), in Aperçues Didi-­Huberman thus records the traces of passing
time, of moments, of his own scattered thoughts and desires.
On the other hand, on a more personal level, Didi-­Huberman has also
been fascinated by Baudelaire’s 1853 essay ‘The Philosophy of Toys’
136 l i t e r a t u r e

(‘Morale du joujou’). The essay depicts a child at play with a toy, which
they manipulate and seek to prise open only to discover that the toy’s
inside lacks a ­soul – ­a moment that, as Baudelaire puts it (2012: 20), ‘is
the beginning of stupor and melancholy’. Baudelaire’s figuration of a child
playing with a toy is a playful reflection of Didi-­Huberman’s own relation
to images: like the Baudelairean child, he ‘turns’ the images round and
round in his head, and classifies, annotates and frames them like a child
who is shaking his toy, trying to make something come out of it (2018a:
258).
Also important are Brecht’s Arbeitsjournal, which ‘confront [. . .] the
stories of a subject with the history of the world’ (EH, 12), and, which,
for Didi-­Huberman, are ‘minuscule stories’ (EH, 12). In particular,
Brecht inspires Didi-­Huberman’s conception of a montage, which is
key for constructing the atlas of political engagement and historical
knowledge in The Eye of History series. Working from Brecht’s exile jour-
nals, Didi‑Huberman builds his own library/atlas, and likens Brecht’s
Arbeitsjournal to Bataille’s Documents and Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas
(2018a: 116).
Didi-­Huberman’s entanglement with literature is also echoed in his
engagement with the atlas, an important form of knowledge grounded in
the processes of montage:

We use an atlas, [which is] made up of tables or of plates [and which] we consult
with a particular aim, or that we leaf through at ­leisure . . . i­ n a way that combines
. . . [these] two apparently dissimilar gestures: We open it, first, to look for precise
information. But once we find that information, we do not necessarily put the
atlas down; rather, we follow different pathways this way and that. (AA, 3)

To that end, Jorge Luis-­Borges aptly speaks to Didi-­Huberman’s lifelong

investment in the atlas and ‘Borgesian desire’ for libraries (De Cauwer
and Smith, 2018: 6). As well, Borges’ writings emerge as an important
consideration in Didi-­Huberman’s approach to the atlas. In the ‘atlas of
Borges’ he finds,

[The] enumeration of images or of ‘things seen’, [which] is not their summation,

their list or inventory, but rather the relations that they weave between them,
from the distance of the ‘teeming sea’ to the closeness of the body of a beloved
woman, from the impersonal ‘ring of baked mud in the sidewalk’ to the intimate
‘circulation of my own dark blood’. (AA, 61)

Thus, for Borges, Didi-­ Huberman contends, the process of writing

becomes a process of ‘forming the atlas or the defamiliarizing ­cartography
 materiality  137

of our incommensurable experiences’, which also echoes Didi-­Huberman’s

way of seeing and forming relations: the enumeration of ‘things seen’ not
to make an inventory but to weave relations through distance and close-
ness. (AA, 61).

Works Cited
Baudelaire, C. (2012). ‘The Philosophy of Toys’, in K. Gross (ed.), On
Dolls, 11–21 Notting Hill Editions.
De Cauwer, S., and Smith, L. K. (2018). ‘Critical Image Configurations:
The Work of Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Angelaki 23(4): 3–10.
Joyce, J. (2008 [1922]). Ulysses. Oxford University Press.

M
MATERIALITY

Ari Tanhuanpää
A particularly interesting aspect of Didi-­Huberman’s work is how he treats
an artwork’s materiality: it always falls within the limits of perceptibility
in one way or another; it is difficult to capture, simply because it is con-
tingent; and it is about latent virtualities and symptomatic intensities (see
symptom). Didi-­Huberman often focuses on abject matter (la matière
basse) in the Bataillean sense. Inspired by Julius von Schlosser’s History
of Portraiture in Wax (1911), Didi-­Huberman returns time and time again
to reflect on the uncanny plasticity of wax (1999l; 2000c; 2008a; EV; OM;
VS), which disrupts the temporal and stylistic categories of art history
(Larsson, 2020: 110). Other similar substances are, for example, dust, soot
and coal, which have been the materials used by Claudio Parmiggiani
and Giuseppe Penone (2001b; BS). Sometimes Didi-­Huberman lowers
his gaze to see the rags set on the streets of Paris to channel dirty water
into the sewer (2002a: 45–55) – the drapé of the Warburgian ninfa, whose
dance combines high and low (see nymph) – or a glove someone has
dropped and forgotten on the p ­ avement – i­t is still human (maintaining
the form of a hand and exuding the warmth of the living body), but already
becoming inhuman and formless. This is a process Georges Bataille
called informe (Didi-­ Huberman, 1995a; 2002a: 106; Barcella, 2012:
72–109; Bois and Krauss, 1997).
138 materiality 

Didi-­Huberman returns repeatably to occurrences whose phenomenal

being is highly problematic. His Survival of the Fireflies is based on the
figure of a flickering firefly, which emits its only barely perceptible light
in the night. The essay Le flux de toute chose (2004c), ‘the flux of every-
thing’, focuses on the movements of air currents and liquid fluids, which
Étienne-­Jules Marey was able to render visible in his chronographs. These
elements are then like, in the words of Michel Serres (1995: 40), ‘the
dancer’s body’, or ‘the Platonic chôra, the virgin wax on which one writes’.
Didi-­Huberman describes (2004c: 296) the movement of the draperies in
the dances of Loïe Fuller: ‘her body tends to ­disappear – ­to become fluid,
to evaporate, to rise like a smoke’. Didi-­Huberman imagines another flux
(2014a) that is formed in a mine shaft where the odorous methane gas
­floats – ­it is like a weak breeze or a breath, ‘almost nothing, but which
nonetheless’, as Didi-­Huberman points out (2005a: 76), ‘has the power to
change everything’.
Events that go entirely beyond phenomenality, logic and predictability
make up their own chapter in Didi-­Huberman’s work. One of them is
the paradox of incarnation (FAD; 1985a; 2007a). For Didi-­Huberman,
the physical matter of the artwork is not a medium of representation,
but a vehicle of incarnation. This concept of incarnation goes beyond
­understanding – ­that is precisely why it activates our power of imagina-
tion, which renders it sensible. According to Didi-­Huberman, we need
to penetrate the extremes of our imagination in order to imagine the
unimaginable. We have to look at the photographs secretly taken by the
Sonderkommando at the Auschwitz-­Birkenau extermination camp (ISA);
the only barely recognisable face of Christ miraculously formed on the
Shroud of Turin (IA); or the photographs taken of the hysterics in the
grip of their seizures at the psychiatric clinic of Jean-Martin Charcot’s
­Salpêtrière – ­performances that were not intended (by his patients) to be
seen (IH). Materiality in Didi-­Huberman’s oeuvre is in constant motion
and metamorphosis caused by the ‘imaginary breeze’ of the various
pathoses (IB) – this movement of the soul is the suffering of plasticity.
Catharine Malabou says that she shares with Didi-­Huberman the same
interest: ‘responding to a call for a strangely insistent motive, that of
plasticity’ (2005: 31). Didi-­Huberman claims that one has to get into the
matter: ‘[i]l faut entrer en matière’ (2002c: 94), in the manner of Gilbert
Simondon (2017: 248–9): to ‘enter the mold with the clay, to be both
mold and clay, to be both mold and clay at once, to live their common
operation’. Didi-­Huberman does just that when he reflects in his essay
‘L’Air et l’empreinte’ on the life casts made by Adolphe Victor Geoffrey-­
Dechaume at the Parisian Musée des Monuments français: the ‘moment
when ­nature – a­ young woman – shivers in her mold’, creating the goose-
 materiality  139

bumps effect, the effect which cannot be represented but which can only
be lived, suffered (2013c: 238–40).
Didi-­Huberman shares his interest in air with Luce Irigaray (1999), who
has considered air to be an element forgotten by philosophers. In his Gestes
d’air et de pierre (2005a: 60), ‘gestures of air and stone’, Didi-­Huberman
wonders whether breath (souffle) would be the matter of images. He
quotes Parmiggiani, according to whom the space surrounding a work
of art is its constituent physical part (2001b: 143). This is what Ludwig
Binswanger (1881–1966) – the Swiss psychoanalyst who treated Aby
Warburg at the Kreuzlingen sanatorium, and to whom Didi-­Huberman
extensively refers in The Surviving Image – called a gestimmter Raum, a
‘thymic space’ (1994 [1932]). Binswanger’s student Pierre Fédida, who
was close to Didi-­Huberman, used the idiom ‘le souffle indistinct de l’image’
(‘indistinct breath of the image’) (2009 [1995]: 187–220). This ‘invisible
animating principle’ is the breeze that raises the veil of a nereid sculpted
in marble, dancing in the ­wind – ­forming the improbable conjunction of
air and stone that Didi-­Huberman calls grisaille: a ‘matter agitated by the
wind of time’ (2005a: 59–60; 2013c: 283).

Works Cited
Barcella, D. (2012). Sintomi, strappi, anacronismi. Il Potere delle immagini
secondo Georges Didi-Huberman. Et Al.
Binswanger, L. (1994 [1932]). Das Raumproblem in der Psychopathologie.
Ausgewählte Werke, Band III. Asanger.
Bois, Y.-A., and Krauss, R. (1997). Formless: A User’s Guide. Zone Books.
Fédida, P. (2009 [1995]). ‘Le souffle indistinct de l’image’, in P. Fédida,
Le site de l´étranger. La situation psychoanalytique, 187–220. Presses
Universitaires de France.
Irigaray, L. (1999). The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans.
M. B. Mader. University of Texas Press.
Larsson, C. (2020). Didi-Huberman and the Image. Manchester University
Press.
Malabou, C. (2005). ‘La Plasticité en souffrance. Éditions de la Sorbonne’,
Sociétes, and Représentations, 20: 31–9.
Serres, M. (1995). Genesis, trans. G. James and J. Nielsen. University of
Michigan Press.
Simondon, G. (2017). On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans.
C. Malaspina and J. Rogove. Univocal.
140 mcqueen, steve 

MCQUEEN, STEVE

Chari Larsson
Didi-­Huberman’s essay on British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen
draws together many of the recurring themes in his work, including
anachronism and memory. Written as a catalogue essay to accompany
McQueen’s 2013 exhibition at Schaulager Basel, the text was published
by Minuit in Sur le fil (2013a: 31–85). Writing in an essayistic style,
Didi-­Huberman playfully juxtaposes his analysis of McQueen’s Queen
and Country (2003–10) with extracts drawn from Jean Genet’s essay ‘Le
funambule’ (‘The Tightrope Walker’) (1979 [1958]: 11–12). This in turn
creates a literary montage as fragments of text clash and rub against each
other. The technique also anticipates Didi-­Huberman’s turn to increas-
ingly experimental, fragmentary forms of writing in recent texts such as
Aperçues.
Didi-­Huberman commences with a contextual discussion of McQueen’s
Queen and Country. McQueen was selected as an official war artist by the
Imperial War Museum to document the war in Iraq. His task was to
travel to the war zone and produce a work of art about the British forces
in and around Basra. The situation, however, was extremely unstable and
dangerous, leaving McQueen unable to film and confined for the duration
of the six-­day trip (2013a: 40). The challenge facing McQueen was akin
to the moral and ethical question faced by all officially embedded war
artists: how to produce a work that is authentic and true to the experience
of war, without possessing the necessary physical freedom to create such
a work? If filming was out of the question, how best to represent the war?
Moreover, how to commemorate a highly contested war?
Returning home, McQueen began creating a new commemorative
project, Queen and Country, with the goal of giving representation to the
British men and women who had died serving in Iraq. McQueen’s solu-
tion was modest: to create a sheet of commemorative postal stamps for
each of the British servicemen and women who lost their lives. McQueen
wrote to 115 families, inviting their assistance. His request was simple: to
please provide him with an image of their son or daughter. Ninety-­eight
families responded positively, supporting the project. The images were
subsequently made into sheets of postage stamps, with each sheet contain-
ing 168 stamps. Each sheet was dedicated to an individual soldier, with
details of name, regiment, age and date of death printed in the margin.
Evoking Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Didi-­Huberman observes
that stamps are minor forms of images, especially when compared with
history painting, sculptured monuments, cinema, or even photography
 mcqueen, steve  141

(2013a: 42). In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari outline the
principal characteristics of a minor literature. Importantly, minor lit-
erature does not originate in a minority language. Instead, it is a minority
construct within a major language. Didi-­Huberman argues that stamps are
‘very powerful commemorative forms’ (2013a: 43).
To understand the stamps’ power, Didi-­Huberman pulls McQueen’s
project in the direction of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Stamps
possess a complex temporality. They are bearers of information or news
that is always belated and has happened after the fact. They are purchased,
however, with the future in mind. They will arrive at a destination at a
point in the future from a moment in the past. Never up to date, stamps are
intrinsically anachronistic. Both Benjamin and Warburg loved stamps
and were enthusiastic stamp collectors. Plate 77 of Warburg’s incomplete
Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29) famously included postage stamps. Warburg’s
interest in stamps focuses attention on an important concept in his body of
work: Nachleben (afterlife) or tracing the migration of images across ter-
ritories and time. Warburg would document the fluctuations in meaning
as images change according to cultural context. In one essay, Warburg
examined the visual motif of Neptune riding through the waves. This
ancient image was reclaimed by Charles II as an official seal and symbol of
British power. The motif made a colonial leap, crossing the Atlantic and
re-­emerging as a stamp from Barbados and showing the King of England
on his chariot. These chains of associations were formulated by Warburg
as Nachleben, or survivals, and evidence of the ‘continuing vitality of
pagan nature’ (Warburg, 1999 [1927]: 348).
For Didi-­Huberman, McQueen’s decision to utilise stamps to com-
memorate the dead soldiers reactivates the genre of state portraiture. This
is not a simple inversion or appropriation, by replacing the image of the
British monarch with images of soldiers. Instead, it may be understood as
a contemporary form of Nachleben, where images return, with a renewed
intensity after long periods of dormancy, and are invested with cultural
memory. Didi-­Huberman argues that Queen and Country is a disruption to
the sovereign representations of power traditionally embodied by stamps.
McQueen was not simply taking sides in the highly controversial com-
mitment of British forces to the war in Iraq. To take a position is more
than delivering an argument. By electing the humble postage stamp as his
preferred medium, he disturbed the normalised flow of carefully managed
information that neutralises the soldier’s individuality. In Brechtian
terms, we might say that McQueen’s gesture is the creation of knowl-
edge through making strange (Verfremdungseffekt) (see Brecht, Bertolt).
McQueen forced a disruption in the British Ministry of Defence’s careful
orchestration of images in the war on terror.
142 memory 

One of the reasons why Queen and Country is so curious, however,

is that it remains unrealised. The stamps were not intended to be mere
imitations, but were to be placed into circulation by the Royal Mail.
Ironically, the project was rejected by both the Ministry of Defence and
the Post Office, effectively neutralising McQueen’s gesture. In 2007 Queen
and Country was purchased by the Imperial War Museum, with financial
assistance from the Art Fund. Despite vigorous campaigning by the Art
Fund, and a petition with over 200,000 signatures declaring support for
the project, the work remains unfinished. The sheets were placed in a large
oak cabinet, reminiscent of ancient Greek and Roman sarcophagi that held
the remains of the dead. The stamps were never sent, and they remain in
the cabinet in the Imperial War Museum. As a part of the permanent col-
lection, the stakes are high: McQueen’s work has been effectively neutral-
ised by the State. Until the Royal Mail issues the stamps, and puts them
into circulation, the work is considered to be incomplete by McQueen.

Works Cited
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature,
trans. D. Polan. University of Minnesota Press.
Genet, J. (1979 [1958]). ‘Le funambule’, in J. Genet, Œuvres complètes,
vol. V, 11–12. Gallimard.
Warburg, A. (1999 [1927]). ‘Medicean Pageantry at the Valois Court in
the Flemish Tapestries of the Galleria degli Uffizi’, in K. W. Foster
(ed.), The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural
History of the European Renaissance, 343–8. Getty Research Institute.

MEMORY

Miguel Mesquita Duarte

The significance of memory in Didi-­Huberman’s writings stems from
his historical-­philosophical considerations on time and the correspond-
ing dialogue with authors such as Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg,
Sigmund Freud and Gilles Deleuze. It also relates to the centrality of
the atlas, described as a mnemotechnical apparatus that grasps the move-
ments of time (AH, 46, 165), and to his analysis of Holocaust representa-
tions in contemporary documentary film.
That which comes from the past is a set of scattered fragments, traces
or vestiges of a disappeared reality. It is up to the historian to imagine
what is created within the intervals of absence and presence, visibility and
 memory  143

invisibility, leading to a dialectical movement of actualisation that compli-

cates the assumption of the past as a fixed reality. ‘The history of images’,
Didi-­Huberman writes (BI, 42), ‘is a history of objects that are temporally
impure, complex, overdetermined. It is therefore a history of polychronis-
tic, heterochronistic, or anachronistic objects’ (see anachronism).
But what is the model of time capable of describing a past that isn’t fixed
in the past, constituting what Didi-­Huberman identified as a ‘more-­than-­
past’ (BI, 40)? What is the temporal structure that contests chronological
linearity by affirming the multiplicity of temporal moments as the inalien-
able condition of the historical act? For Didi-­Huberman, the only possible
answer is memory:

This time, which is not exactly the past, has a name: it is memory. She is the
one who decants the past from its accuracy. She is the one who humanizes and
configures time, interweaves its fibres, assumes its transmissions, devoting it to
an essential impurity. It is memory that the historian summons up and questions,
not exactly the past. [Ce temps qui n’est pas exactement le passé a un nom: c’est la
mémoire. C’est elle qui décante le passé de son exactitude. C’est elle qui humanise et
configure le temps, entrelace ses fibres, assume ses transmissions, le vouant à une essen-
tielle impureté. C’est la mémoire que l’historien convoque et interroge, non exactement
le passé.] (2000a: 37)

Familiar forms of historical representation, grounded on claims of evi-

dence and proof, are invaded by the irrational and the imaginal. This has
marked both Didi-­Huberman’s interest in the alternative historiographies
of Warburg, who defined himself as a psycho-­historian (Didi-­Huberman,
2002b: 285), and in Benjamin, for whom historical knowledge was bound
up with a theory of the unconscious (Didi-­Huberman, 2000a: 95–100).
Didi-­Huberman sheds light on a ‘psychohistory’ (KM, 16; 2002b: 278,
284, 314) that concerns memory as the opposing definition of the chrono-
logical order. In this sense, ‘memory becomes a symptom in the continu-
ity of events’ (KM, 16). It involves a ‘metapsychology of time’ (2000a: 112;
2002b: 316) that engenders history as a topological structure of survival,
repetition and difference.
The usual definition of memory as a stable collection of data is therefore
dismantled in favour of a paradoxical temporality that emphasises effects
of après-coup, ‘oblivion and returns from oblivion’ (KM, 16), and displace-
ments in time forcing ‘absolutely heterogeneous series to coincide’ (IH,
163). Examined from the perspective of an impure co-­presence of multiple
times and durations, memory problematises the horizontal nature of pro-
gressive history, replacing it with the vertical nature of a stratified time.
In his study on Warburg, Didi-­Huberman uses a geological metaphor
144 memory 

to compare the manifestation of memory to seismic waves registered by

the seismograph, envisaged, in the context of the philological tradition of
Bloch, Burkhardt, Nietzsche and Warburg, as a device for recording the
subterraneous fractures and discontinuities in history (2002b: 117–18; SI,
67–72).
By associating mnemonic construction with a temporal complexity that
is at once geological, archaeological and seismographic, Didi-­Huberman
articulates memory as a bearer of energetic and transformative forces
composing an unconscious of time. These forces, which refer to what
endures and survives throughout the intricacies of time, and therefore
what escapes the rationale of historical positivism, are also morphological,
since they are inscribed in the forms and gestures that animate the life
and the afterlife of images. The phenomenology of memory links to
the epistemology of history from the moment that the act of remembering
is described in terms of the survival and the spectrality of the image (see
phantom). This explains Didi-­Huberman’s interest in the migrations
and metamorphoses of images across the plates of Mnemosyne Atlas, with
particular emphasis on the nymph, whose emotive formulas of pathos
coincide with the staging of traumatic memories by the hysterical body
(2002b: 288–301; IH, 152–5, 160).
Images are put at the centre of historical examination because they carry
the marks of multiple times, necessarily including history of catastrophes
and destruction. Didi-­Huberman’s analysis of contemporary documentary
cinema related to political violence and the memory of the Holocaust
acquires a particular importance in this context. The films of such direc-
tors and artists as Jean-Luc Godard, Harun Farocki and Shalev-­Gerz
reactivate a psychic or mnemonic history by means of the montage of
multiple historical fragments, overlapping facts and fiction, testimonies
and self-­reflexivity. By counteracting the saturation of memory and its
mediatic ritualisation, these cinematic seismographies of history expose
the rhythms of a memory at work, a memory considered in its latencies,
interruptions, deferrals and flaws in communication (ISA, 156; BSO). As
inscriptions of memory, the images of the historical archive resist amnesia
and force humanity ‘to rub its eyes’ (TRS, 70) before the catastrophes that
must be rescued from oblivion (ISA, 178–9). For Didi-­Huberman, this
operation will only be effective insofar as memory is ‘de-­saturated’ and
treated as an intrinsically cognitive and imaginative process (2010b: 12;
ISA, 167) (see imagination).
 migration  145

MIGRATION

Maud Hagelstein
While both discrete and forceful, the Warburgian concept of migration
works from within Didi-­Huberman’s meditations on the ­image – ­probably
more and more over the last few years, or with a replayed dimension. His
interest in artistic or historical images of the nameless, the ‘extras’, the
‘people exposed’ to the shocks of modern democracies has led him to
observe the communities of those who rage to survive (see peoples). By
spending time on Warburgian themes, Didi-­Huberman became sensitive
to the effort and the tearing away from oneself involved in migration,
which is why he works, today, to look straight at the catastrophe of migra-
tion policies in Europe (2017a).
Without succumbing to the reductive facility of biographical explana-
tion, it is worth noting that art historian Aby Warburg himself suffered
the threatening reality of migratory displacements, not firsthand (even if
he was not unfamiliar with psychological wandering), but in his antici-
pated and visionary paranoid fantasies, and then ‘materially’ after his
own death, since his whole world of research, his tools, his library and
his archives, were all displaced to London in the early 1930s to be pre-
served from the Nazi regime. Echoing this posthumous migratory reality,
we could reread with Didi-­Huberman the essay by Adorno entitled
‘Bibliographical Musings’ in which Adorno shares a slightly anthropo-
morphised gaze on books damaged by travels in exile during the 1930s and
1940s, deported several times, finally devastated, mutilated, appearing as
the wounded survivors of a painful history (1992: 20–31). On this ground,
Didi-­Huberman has, throughout his work, put into narrative one of
Warburg’s key ideas: important things can become uprooted. In his article
from 1912 on the astrological frescoes of Ferrare, Warburg attempted to
elucidate the origins of enigmatic divine figures, of very particular ‘pagan
migrants’, whose beating Greek heart he thought he could detect under
the sevenfold coat that had gradually covered them during their peregri-
nations. He sought to track these motifs, these forms and these gestures
that inhabit Western art, to identify the migratory paths or the ‘pathways
of culture’ (Wanderstrassen) through which they circulate. In the impres-
sive work in 2002 devoted to the ideas of the art historian, The Surviving
Image, Didi-­Huberman measured the operative character of this concept
of migration.
Thus, the migrations of figures of art show that the time of the image is
impure, complex, and mixed (see temporality). Regarding the obstinate
circulations of certain motifs passing from earth to earth (passant de terre
146 montage 

en terre) (sometimes hostile), Warburg thought to create their precise

­cartography, noting the survivals, re-­establishing completely any links
that were otherwise unresponsive, showing the profound plasticity of
images. To do this, it was necessary to invent a knowledge that was in
movement itself, the knowledge of a tracker and of a cartographer (not
to mention a fortune teller), a knowledge ready to be reinvented through
contact with the power of difference or deviation of images. For the logical
effect of phenomena of migration (we might say of ‘displacement’, in the
Freudian sense) can be read in the overdetermination of images, in their
sense that is always too rich and in excess (that of a character who might
have the absurd idea of covering himself with seven coats):

First, we do not stand confronted with or before an image the way we do before a
thing whose exact boundaries we can trace. The ensemble of definite c­ oordinates
– ­author, date, technique, iconography, etc. – is obviously insufficient for that. An
image, every image, is the result of movements that are provisionally sedimented
or crystallized in it. These movements traverse it through and through, each
one having its own ­trajectory – ­historical, anthropological, and p ­ sychological –
­starting from a distance and continuing beyond it. They oblige us to think of
the image as an energy-­bearing or dynamic moment, even though it may have a
specific structure. (SI, 19)

For a person does not migrate as they might embark on any other journey;
migration is always costly. To circulate, the visual forms must be resilient;
they must also activate a resilient force of metamorphosis.
Translated by Shane Lillis

Works Cited
Adorno, T. W. (1992). ‘Bibliographical Musings’, trans. S. W. Nicholsen,
in T. W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 20–31. Columbia University
Press.

MONTAGE

Henrik Gustafsson
‘How can we see time?’ (EH, xv). This question is raised in the opening
sentence of Didi-­Huberman’s book-­length study of Bertolt Brecht’s
1955 photobook Kriegsfibel (War Primer in English translation, 2017),
which was pieced together with scissors and glue from press clippings
 montage  147

and self-­penned epigrams. Three years later, in the concluding sentence

of his second volume devoted to the unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas, created
by the cultural historian Aby Warburg in the late 1920s, Didi-­Huberman
declares that the tenacious construction of montage constitutes ‘the
­difficult – ­and ­dialectical – w
­ ork of anyone who attempts to see time’
(AA, 255).
Four interconnected theses informing Didi-­ Huberman’s poetics of
montage can be gleaned from these formulations. First, the montages
assembled by Brecht and Warburg constitute a belated response to the
devastation of industrialised warfare. The demand to make montages, to
break apart (dé-montage) and piece together (re-montage), is thus integral
to a modern experience of shock and chaos. Second is Didi-­Huberman’s
insistence on montage as dialectical work, or as ‘the art of making the
image dialectical’ (ISA, 138; see dialectic). However, contrary to the
Hegelian tradition, Didi-­Huberman understands dialectic antonymously
to synthesis and suture. Emphasising rather effacing gaps and tensions,
the juxtaposition of diverse imaginal elements accords equal significance
to the latent connection as to the disorienting rupture. Third, there is the
emphasis on the difficulty that the labour of montage entails, precisely due
to its resistance to closure, containment and completion. The intermina-
bility of the process is highlighted by Didi-­Huberman’s ubiquitous use
of the prefix re-: to make a montage is to ‘reedit’, to ‘reframe’, to ‘reread’,
to ‘rearrange’ and ‘to retie the memory threads’ (AA, 219). Fourth and
foremost, montage is conceived as the construction of a particular kind
of optics calibrated ‘to see time’. It enacts a form of visual ‘archaeology or
“cultural geology” that would aim to make the historical immanence of
images sensible’ (AA, 153).
The problem of ‘how to see time’ is also the eminently archaeological
question posed by Michel Foucault in his critique of historical herme-
neutics. In common with Foucault’s archaeologies of the human sciences
and the discursive production of knowledge, montage offers ‘a way of
visually unfolding the discontinuities of time’ (SI, 311). As such, it is prem-
ised on the notion that the contemporary is hidden from us, and that its
layers need to be unfolded in order to bring together what chronology
has separated. Here Didi-­Huberman takes his cue both from Warburg’s
cartographic model of a memory atlas and its concomitant terminology
of image migration (Bilderwanderung) and disciplinary border guards
(Grenzwächter), and from what Foucault referred to as his ‘spatial obses-
sions’ (1980 [1976]: 69), perambulating the boundaries of discursive for-
mations through the inquisitive lens of regional phenomena and territorial
struggles. Polemically positioned as a reaction against ‘the territorializa-
tion of the study of images’ (SI, 18), montage constitutes a form of spatial
148 montage 

intelligence that opens up new terrains of knowledge by transposing

temporal relations into spatial configurations. The archaeological method
that Didi-­Huberman inherits from Warburg and Foucault proffers an
alternative to the orthodox dramaturgy of history, plotted and propelled
by individual agents, elicited through lineages of influence and intention-
ality, and kept in check by what Foucault refers to as the ‘pre-­existing
forms of continuity’ that undergird the historian’s effort ‘to master time’
(1977 [1969]: 25, 22). These pre-­existing forms will shatter, however, if
attention is paid to the ‘dispersions themselves’ (Foucault, 1977 [1969]:
37). The formal principle that impels Warburg’s final project is succinctly
paraphrased by Foucault in his brief but influential proposal for a hetero-
topic approach to history, conceived as a shift from a linear succession
of causally driven events to a spatial collocation and confrontation ‘of
the near and far, of the side-­by-­side, of the dispersed’ (1986 [1967]: 22).
Apprehended as a spatial, or space-­enabling, enterprise, montage pro-
ceeds through ‘interstitial zones of exploration, heuristic intervals’ (AA, 5)
that ‘makes it possible to spatialize this “deterritorialization” of the objects
of knowledge’ (SI, 317).
The startling jump-­cuts across time and territory forged in Warburg’s
‘heterotopia of art history’ (AA, 55) demonstrate two key functions of
montage according to Didi-­Huberman: to map and to mine. The meta-
phor of mining is elucidated in a meditation on montage focalised through
the lens of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s compilation film The Anger (La Rabbia,
1963), where montage is understood as a method for rendering sensible
the invisible yet imminent threat of odourless and colourless mine gas
(2014a). The toxic and inflammable gases in the mine further invoke the
gas chamber, reminding the reader of Didi-­Huberman’s most fervent
defence of the montage form, launched in the polemical debate concern-
ing the four photographs taken by a member of the Sonderkommando
in Auschwitz (see in spite of all; Sonderkommando photographs).
Montage is not only an attempt to ‘see time’, then, but also to ‘see danger’.
Adhering to Walter Benjamin’s model of the dialectical image that
appears in a flash and ‘flits by’ never to be seen again (1968 [1940]: 255),
for Didi-­Huberman the goal is not to bridge the past and the present, but
to ignite their mutual tension that allows us to glimpse them together,
if only for a fleeting instant. It is not the past that flits by, but a sudden
actualisation or flash-­like cognition in the present. Echoing Foucault,
Didi-­Huberman argues that to make a montage ‘is, first of all, to dismantle
order, the spatial and temporal order of things’ (EH, 87). Facilitating an
encounter between the present and past, the near and the distant, the here
and the elsewhere, ‘it creates an entirely new epistemic configuration: a
knowledge obtained by means of montage’ (SI, 318).
 montage  149

But what kind of knowledge is obtainable by montage? This question

seems imperative in light of Didi-­Huberman’s sustained critique of the
erudite gaze of the art historian, biased towards a preconceived interpreta-
tion. ‘Knowledge through montage’ is a form of knowledge that ensues
from a critique of knowledge (ISA, 140). Or even, it is knowledge as a
form of non-knowledge, a perpetual deferral and ‘a prolonged suspension
of the moment of reaching conclusions’ (CI, 16), which purposefully dis-
rupts any predetermined path towards an expected meaning and unsettles
the position of the viewer as a subject of knowledge. Always a malleable
and provisional arrangement susceptible to revision, montage inaugurates
‘a new zone of knowledge’ that neither assumes ‘a definitive form’ nor
yields a totalising image or complete overview (AA, 3). In their place,
what montage has to offer are partial glimpses, which Benjamin described
as the sudden epiphanic flashes of legibility (Lesbarkeit) or visibility
(Sichtbarkeit) discharged at a precise moment of danger.
With Benjamin, Foucault and Warburg acting as his prime interlocu-
tors, Didi-­Huberman develops a general theory of montage that is poten-
tially reductive in relation to questions pertaining to medium-­specificity,
authorship and the integrity of resuscitated archival material. Subsumed
under the philosophical and aesthetic rubric of montage, Didi-­Huberman
considers a highly diverse set of practices that spans the dazzling con-
figurations of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), the
understated and open-­ended approach of Harun Farocki’s soft montage,
and the volatile clashes of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage of attractions,
Georges Bataille’s avant-­garde journal Documents, Benjamin’s Arcades
Project, and the epic theatre of Brecht. The merit of this vast scope of
engagement, however, is that it allows the reader to consider montage
beyond any particular art form, archive or author. By virtue of the
sheer multiplicity of viewpoints that it affords, montage is able to move
beyond the discursive constraints of art, origin and authorship. For Didi-­
Huberman, this anonymising and heuristic force is part and parcel of the
capacity of montage to make us ‘open our eyes’ (HT, 50) and ‘imagine for
ourselves’ (ISA, 3), if only for a brief moment.

Works Cited
Benjamin, W. (1968 [1940]). ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’,
trans. H. Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. H. Arendt,
253–64. Schocken Books.
Brecht, B. (2017). War Primer, trans. and ed. J. Willett. Verso.
Foucault, M. (1977 [1969]). The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans.
A. M. Sheridan Smith. Pantheon.
150 nymph 

Foucault, M. (1980 [1976]). ‘Questions on Geography’, in Power/

Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, trans.
and ed. C. Gordon, 63–77. Pantheon.
Foucault, M. (1986 [1967]). ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. J. Miskowiec, dia-
critics, 16(1): 22–7.

N
NYMPH

Johnnie Gratton
Aby Warburg’s research on the Italian Renaissance famously highlighted
the artistic reappearance of ancient gestures expressing intense emo-
tions. These he conceptualised through the coinage pathos formula
(Pathosformel), a kind of time capsule. Among such recognisable pathos-­
bearing figures, that of the nymph, or Ninfa, fascinated him most. While
writing The Surviving Image, Didi-­Huberman too fell under her spell and
soon developed ideas for a book of his own about her. The completed
work soon found a home for publication in Gallimard’s prestigious Art
et Artistes series, a collection printed on glossy paper, designed to accom-
modate a generous number of high-­quality illustrations. As of 2021,
Didi-­Huberman has published four ‘essays’ in that series (his term), all
featuring Ninfa in their titles. Sadly, apart from odd fragments, none
has been translated into English, leaving a rich vein of Didi-­Huberman’s
output inaccessible to much of his readership. Each essay has a title iden-
tifying a specific angle on the Ninfa figure. Do these angles materialise as
governing themes? Not necessarily. The essays speak to their titles, and
thus to the present topic, in varying degrees.
The first essay is titled Ninfa moderna: essai sur le drapé tombé (2002a),
‘an essay on fallen drapery’. Didi-­Huberman’s basic idea is to propose
‘another possible extension’ (2002a: 133) of Ninfa’s already versatile
afterlife. The essay works teleologically, if not chronologically. It builds
on Warburg’s realisation that, during the Renaissance, the nymph motif
underwent a process of ‘dissociation’ that transferred affect from the
figures themselves to their edges, their ‘moving accessories’, such as
windswept hair and billowing garments. But what of such ‘dissociation’
in the modern iconographic archive? Didi-­Huberman’s research yielded
an ingenious idea lying latent in his subtitle. The English ‘fallen drapery’,
 nymph  151

like the French drapé tombé, denotes the hang of worn drapery, but
visual modernity supplies material that can be imaginatively construed
as representing the nymph’s clothing once fallen from her body. ‘She’
has disappeared, leaving a mere remnant of her former glory. Thus, the
essay’s highpoint, delivered early, but clearly marking the journey’s end,
settles our gaze on two photo-­series of modern streetscapes (by Alain
Fleischer and Steve McQueen) featuring old cloth, bound or unbound,
placed in Parisian gutters to direct water gushing from the curb through
the spouts of the city’s nineteenth-­century street-­cleaning system. The
photos, and/or Didi-­Huberman’s lush ekphrases, confer ‘textural dignity’
and ‘rhythmic movement’ (2002a: 80, 100) on to these otherwise lowly
objects, guaranteeing that the absent nymph will nevertheless continue to
survive. All in all, a substantial, occasionally questionable, contribution to
the iconographic history of Ninfa (see Gratton, 2011).
Second essay: Ninfa fluida: essai sur le drapé-désir (2015c), ‘an essay
on the drapery of desire’, first written between 2002 and 2004. This
project views Ninfa through the prism of fluidity. It arose through Didi-­
Huberman’s rereading of Warburg’s 1893 thesis, centred on Botticelli’s
Primavera and The Birth of Venus. Emulating Ninfa moderna, he once
more selects the concept of ‘moving accessories’ to use as his launchpad.
Encouraged by Warburgian metaphorics, he adds further impetus to that
concept by attributing to it a power of ‘fluidification’ (2015c: 80, 214). In
this context, ‘fluidity’ denotes the power of form and figuration to visu-
alise flow, and to make the beholder feel flow as an intensifier of pathos.
He shows how fluidification enhances the commixture of motion and
emotion, and how it innervates images of dance, bodily grace, sensuality
and, above all, ‘the turbulences of desire’ (2015c: 81–123). There follows a
long ‘Post-­Scriptum’ whose main interest lies in Didi-­Huberman’s advo-
cacy and exemplification of the hypothesis that ‘images of fluidity [. . .] tell
us something very fundamental about the fluidity of images’ (2015c: 127;
emphasis in the original).
Third essay: Ninfa profunda: essai sur le drapé-tourmente (2017c), ‘an
essay on tormented drapery’, originally written between 2002 and 2004.
Despite the title, whether as nymph from the oceanic depths or as reclin-
ing nude, Ninfa appears only rarely in an otherwise impressive monograph
on Victor Hugo as poet, novelist and artist. The dialectic of simultaneous
physical turmoil and psychic torment dominates this plunge into the
natural world, accompanied by Didi-­Huberman’s plunge into Hugo’s
imaginary universe. Lack of critical distance leaves him open to challenge
on his evocations of Hugo’s voyeuristic sexualisation of the female body.
More positively, readers interested in the concept of immanence will be
well served.
152 nymph 

Fourth essay: Ninfa dolorosa: essai sur la mémoire d’un geste (2019c), ‘an
essay on the memory of a gesture’. Didi-­Huberman initially focuses on
Georges Mérillon’s famous 1990 photograph of several Kosovan women
mourning the death of a young man recently killed by Serbian guns.
Though taken for journalistic purposes, the photo stood out for its quite
unintended affinities with the Christian iconographic tradition of the Pietà,
based on representations of the Virgin grieving over of the dead Christ’s
body. This focus seems incompatible with the book’s title, given that the
photo’s central figure, the Mater dolorosa, cannot be confused with Ninfa
dolorosa, for, as Didi-­Huberman underlines, the latter is allied with Mary
Magdalene, a far more ambiguous character than the Virgin, given her
salacious past, as expressed figuratively in her overwrought performances
of mourning. Didi-­Huberman uses much of his book to undertake a wide-­
ranging, multidisciplinary investigation of ritual mourning conducted by
women across the complex cultural fabric of the Eastern Mediterranean.
To this end, he delves into specialist scholarly research, notably in the
fields of history and anthropology. Alongside, in more polemical vein, he
returns to his political theme of uprising, understood now, in relation to
collective mourning, as a dialectical process of transforming despondency
into ‘political uprising’ in the form of ‘women’s protest’ (2019c: 193–238).
This, in turn, proves part of a broader strategy whereby he is arguably
responding to certain virulent critiques of his Uprisings exhibition (Paris,
2016–17) by overtly espousing feminist perspectives and ­scholarship – ­a
rare move in his playbook.
The underlying aim of these explorations and exhortations is to allow
Didi-­Huberman to return to Mérillon’s photo sufficiently empowered to
submit his hypothesis that, among the image’s cast of mourners, a ‘suf-
fering nymph’ turned belligerent protester can indeed be identified in
the form of Aferdita, the deceased’s younger sister. Didi-­Huberman has
gathered the fruits of his research under three headings: iconographic,
genealogical, anthropological (2019c: 217–22). The transformation of
Aferdita into Ninfa starts immediately under the first heading with a
reference to Warburg’s Ninfa. Like her pre-­incarnation, Aferdita is said
to be young and graceful, but also an unsettling presence. The youngest
member of the group, the only mourner with head uncovered, she sits at
the far right, at the image’s edge, exactly where Ninfa Fiorentina appears
in Ghirlandaio’s Birth of John the Baptist (c. 1486–90), a fresco analysed by
both Warburg and Didi-­Huberman. Unlike that figure, however, Aferdita
is no fleet-­footed gatecrasher from another time and place, despite which
Didi-­Huberman sees her as ‘almost excluding herself from the com-
munity [. . .] subtly disturbing the normal regime’, manifesting a desire
sufficiently ‘other’ (dissensually enough) to associate her with the excesses
 object  153

of Mary Magdalene (2019c: 218). How judicious is this move (including

from a feminist standpoint)? How can one judge from the photo, even
with extraneous genealogical and anthropological evidence to support the
insurgent theme, that this teenage girl feels more apart from, than part of,
the mourning group? Is this a move endorsed by the political imagination
or a lapse into political fantasy?

Works Cited
Gratton, J. (2011). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Iconology of the Ninfa
Moderna: A Critique’, Irish Journal of French Studies, 11(1): 113–34.

O
OBJECT

Marie-Aude Baronian
Didi-­Huberman is a writer and thinker of objects. This is evidenced
by the fact that, as an art historian, he inevitably applies his arsenal of
analytical methods to a multitude of objects belonging to the field of art.
His oeuvre relies on discussing and dissecting an extraordinarily wide and
versatile range of objects, mixing media, time periods and traditions that
clearly recall two of his main inspirations: Walter Benjamin and Aby
Warburg (who both addressed objects that keep returning and speaking
to us). In particular, Warburg’s historical anthropology of imagination
has deeply inspired Didi-­Huberman to penetrate the micro-­histories of
a single artwork or a detail from which to draw a broader structural and
‘symptomatic’ lesson (see symptom).
Moreover, the work of Didi-­Huberman closely engages with material
and mundane objects (often unnoticed, overlooked or forgotten), showing
us that they deserve our attention, in spite of all. Such objects require
time and consideration, montage and contextualisation to unfold all
that we don’t know about them. This also explains why Didi-­Huberman
has often insisted on the importance of ‘displacing the gaze’ (déplacer le
regard), as if each object worthy of careful reflection and dedication opens
up various, often unforeseen, archaeological readings.
Yet there is more at stake when we think of the centrality of the object
in his work. This is in line with what Hubert Damish terms a ‘theoretical
154 object 

object’ as ‘an object that obliges one to do theory but also furnishes you
with the means of doing it’ (Blois et al., 1998: 8), or we could simply say
that thought draws from objects. As both an art historian and a philoso-
pher, Didi-­Huberman balances the place of the object, aiming to find an
equilibrium between the impulse of the detailed mimetic ‘things’ and that
of the abstraction of concepts. The prominence of objects in his writings
also justifies its interdisciplinary nature, navigating unreservedly but
tightly between philosophy, art history, aesthetics, history, anthropol-
ogy, cinema, literature and psychoanalysis.
If objects epitomise the foundation of Didi-­Huberman’s thinking and
are found everywhere in his oeuvre to be unravelled, scrutinised and
exposed, two texts, Phasmes (1998a) and Aperçues (2018a), are exemplary
in this regard. In Phasmes, Didi-­ Huberman offers a methodological
engagement with objects (things or images). In turn, Aperçues develops a
more meditative and tangible (even personal, self-­reflexive and affective)
handling of objects. In Phasmes, Didi-­Huberman writes about things
that appear and are profoundly disparate, thereby generating unexpected
narratives. The heteroclite range of ­objects – ­objects of daily life, dream
fragments, ink spots, pieces of wood, draperies, cinematic shots, canonical
texts and artworks, insects, archival photographs etc. – that engender such
‘narratives of apparition’ are indeed so disparate that they altogether tease
imagination and the interpretative trajectories of knowing. Analogous to
phasmid insects, Didi-­Huberman’s commitment to objects translates
the productive tension between what we see and what we don’t see, what
is formed and what is dis-­formed, or what could be situated ‘between the
crystallizing movement of the document (like a symptom of the object, born
from the real) and that of the disparate, more erratic and centrifugal (like
a symptom of the gaze, born from the imaginary)’ (1998a: 11). In other
words, objects are pivotal and formative if one wants to singularise the way
that Didi-­Huberman thinks through and manoeuvres concepts, which,
in turn, is constitutive of his ‘method’. The phasmids thus enable him to
decentre certain set assumptions in order to reinject not merely a different
look at the object but also a different understanding of it. The phasmids
infuse and suffuse creative readings of objects as a sort of a critical and
poetic epistemology that is at once free and focused. In Aperçues, the brief
section entitled ‘J’objecte’ refers precisely to what is constituted under our
gaze and what is placed in front of it, and what is exposed in front of us also
similarly means that we expose ourselves to it: ‘I object: I cast this before
our eyes’ (2018a: 36).
In sum, Didi-­Huberman is a thinker of objects because they constantly
regard us, implicate us and work upon us. The object is at once the origin
and the aim of developing a different anthropology that brings together
 pan 155

emotion and knowledge. Facing objects, to be confronted with them, is to

interrogate and challenge the way they speak to us and the way they shape
our imagination and our relation to the world. Between deep exegesis and
poetic interpretation, Didi-­Huberman remains close to the objects while
leaving them open and dynamic, intact yet distinctive.
Lastly, one must also mention that Didi-­Huberman’s peculiar interest
in objects is even more tangibly manifested in his curatorial practices.
There, his attachment and fascination for artistic and material objects
meets another aspect of the interpretative challenge: how to face them in
a museal, cultural and institutional space (2010d: 167). Didi-­Huberman’s
critical engagement with and towards objects testifies to a certain disa-
vowal of the necessity (and the myth) of a linear and all-­encompassing
knowledge of objects. As he has repeatedly put it, not-­knowing is a
productive force for understanding the object; the object is not a definite
and fossilised item that one can just box in. This is because every specific
­object – b­ e it noble or poor, grande figure or figurant – performs an ongoing
complexity that triggers documentation and imagination.

Works Cited
Blois, Y.-A., Hollier, D., Krauss, R., and Damisch, H. (1998). ‘A
Conversation with Hubert Damisch’, October, 85: 3–17.

P
PAN

Lilian Munk Rösing

‘Pan’ is Didi-­Huberman’s concept for the spot where or moment when
the materiality of the painting makes itself present in a way that draws
attention away from what the painting represents. In Confronting Images
he takes the word pan from Marcel Proust, from the passage in In Search
of Lost Time when the character Bergotte is standing in front of Vermeer’s
painting View from Delft (CI, 245–8). Bergotte is completely captivated by
a little patch (pan) of yellow that represents a piece of wall in Delft, but
just as much makes itself present as yellow paint on the cloth. To Bergotte,
who is a writer, this experience of pan is a kind of aesthetic shock experi-
ence; it literally kills him. ‘That’s how I ought to have written’, he says to
156 p a n

­ imself – a­ nd then he dies on the spot, on a circular sofa in the museum!

h
(CI, 246). The disturbing, ­shocking – ­in the scene from Proust even ­fatal
– ­character of the pan seems to be echoed in its very short, monosyllabic
name, almost an onomatopoeia miming the sound of an explosion or shot:
‘Pan!’
Pan is the moment when the brushstrokes on the cloth oscillate between
representation and materiality. It is the moment that tears the figure,
the moment that disturbs mimesis. Like Vermeer’s red hat (Girl with a
Red Hat, c. 1665, National Gallery of Art, Washington), the ‘pictorial
intensity’ of which disturbs its ‘mimetic coherence’; more than a hat,
it looks like ‘a lip’ or ‘a wing’, or simply ‘a colored flood’ (CI, 259). Or
like the red thread in another Vermeer, The Lacemaker (c. 1665, Louvre,
Paris), the red thread gushing forth from the cushion; rather than a thread
it is ‘a sovereign accident’, a ‘stain’, a ‘flow of red paint’, opposing its
‘material opacity’ to ‘all mimesis thinkable’ (CI, 252).
The pan is not the same as the ‘detail’, because the detail contributes
to the representation of the object, whereas the pan disturbs representa-
tion. It is more related to Lacan’s ‘stain’ as the moment when the picture
returns the viewer’s gaze and blurs the most clearly represented figures,
but whereas Lacan’s most famous example of the stain, the anamorphic
skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533, National Gallery, London;
Lacan, 1973 [1964]: 101), actually represents something (a skull) when
viewed from the ‘right’, oblique angle, the pan stays non-­figurative from
whatever angle it is seen.
Pan is one of Didi-­Huberman’s names for the tear in the painting’s
figural tissue; another name is exactly ‘tear’ (déchirure; see rend), and yet
another is ‘symptom’, which he transfers from the hysteric’s body (as
observed by Freud) to the painting’s cloth (see hysteria). In both cases
the symptom is a crisis, a violent visual event, and opposed to ‘the symbol’,
that is, to sense-­making (CI, 261).
In La Peinture incarnée Didi-­Huberman equates his concept of pan with
Lacan’s concept of ‘non-­sense’ (to be differentiated from ‘nonsense’). Just
as ‘non-­sense’ emerges when ‘sense’ and ‘being’ overlap (Lacan, 1973
[1964]: 236), so pan emerges when figurality and materiality overlap (Didi-­
Huberman, 1985a: 47). This means that pan is not pure materiality (yellow
paint) that does not represent anything (yellow wall), but emerges exactly
when there is a stride between representation and materiality; materiality
as some excess of, or other side to representation.
The concept of pan is elaborated in the last chapter (‘Appendix’) of
Confronting Images, but appears already in the first chapter, in Didi-­
Huberman’s analysis of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation fresco in San
Marco. Here his attention is drawn to the pan of white (CI, 17) which
 panofsky, erwin  157

occupies most of the painting, the space between Mary and the angel.
To an iconographic interpreter of the painting, there is simply nothing
between the simple, poorly painted figures, but to Didi-­Huberman, this
nothing, this lack of figurality, is indeed something, an excess of material-
ity: the overwhelming presence of the white pigment. The painting is not
as much about the figures representing the Annunciation as about the white
pigment incarnating what the Annunciation is all about: the announce-
ment that something is going to appear (see incarnation). The white
pigment incarnates this visual potentiality, it is the element of ‘the visual’,
which Didi-­Huberman differentiates from ‘the visible’ (the figure) and
‘the invisible’ (the white pigment seen as ‘nothing’) (CI, 17).
Thus, pan is a central concept in Didi-­Huberman’s pointing to ‘incar-
nation’ as an alternative (rooted in medieval, Christian painting) to the
ideal of ‘mimesis’ (rooted in antiquity and the Renaissance).

Works Cited
Lacan, J. (1973 [1964]). Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychana-
lyse, le séminaire XI, ed. J.-A. Miller. Seuil

PANOFSKY, ERWIN

Magdalena Krasińska
The German art historian and founder of the iconological method, Erwin
Panofsky (1892–1968) is for Didi-­Huberman the leading representative
of the positivist tradition of art scholarship. A student of Aby Warburg,
Panofsky was also under the strong influence of the neo-­Kantian school
of Ernst Cassirer (see Kant, Immanuel). Inspired by the philosophy
of symbolic forms, Panofsky wrote Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927),
Studies in Iconology (1939) and The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1943).
In these writings he developed the postulate that the history of art as
a humanistic discipline must take into account not only the problem of
artistic formation, but also the ideas that are expressed through plastic
form. Already in the work Hercules at the Crossroads (1930), Panofsky
wrote about imaging that confines itself to what he called the ‘first layer’
and about the art that belongs to the domain of the ‘second layer’, where
aesthetic experience was transformed into understanding. Later, in the
introduction to Studies in Iconology, Panofsky presented his well-­known
table (1972 [1939]: 14–15), in which he distinguished between three stages
of interpretation: the ‘pre-­iconographical description’, or ‘pseudo-­formal
158 panofsky, erwin 

analysis’, ‘iconographical analysis’ and ‘iconological interpretation’ (see

iconography; iconology). This last stage not only employs knowledge
of themes and concepts from art history, but also extends to the ‘intrinsic
meaning’, or ‘content’, of a work. This is what allows for symbolic decod-
ing understood as ‘cultural symptoms’.
Didi-­Huberman opposed this assumed equivalence between symp-
toms and symbols. In Panofsky’s thought, works of art are manifesta-
tions (‘symptoms’) of a more general history of a spiritual culture, and
the deeper sense of the works of art is to be found in symbolic forms.
According to Didi-­Huberman, the source of the problem created by these
methodologies of art history lay in the presumption that works of art
contain nothing but signification (content), as if the image were devoid of
its materiality. Iconology

delivered up all images to the tyranny of the concept, of definition, and, ulti-
mately, of the nameable and the legible: the legible understood as a synthetic,
iconological operation, whereby invisible ‘themes’, invisible ‘general and essential
tendencies of the human mind’ – invisible concepts or ­Ideas – ­are ‘translated’ into
the realm of the visible (the clear and distinct appearance of Panofsky’s ‘primary’
and ‘secondary’ meanings). (CI, 122)

In this context Panofsky’s division of the image into separate levels of

signification is a form of repudiation of the painted work’s autonomy and
its own separate ‘language’.
Didi-­Huberman has written about Panofsky’s neo-­Kantian influences
when discussing Kant’s iconological method:

Panofsky turned to Immanuel Kant because the author of the Critique of Pure
Reason had managed to open and reopen the question of knowledge [. . .] By
grasping the Kantian or neo-­Kantian ­key – ­via ­Cassirer – ­Panofsky opened new
doors for his discipline. But no sooner were these doors open than he seems to
have securely closed them again. (CI, 5)

According to Didi-­Huberman, the iconological method leads directly to

forgetting about the visual dimension of the image (see the visual), which
resists the image’s limited interpretation to the language of concepts.
Iconological interpretations are supposed to display a certain ‘totality’, a
holistic nature, without leaving space for ‘the rest’ (CI, 5).
For Didi-­Huberman these problems are apparent in Panofsky’s analysis
of three engravings by Albrecht Dürer. In The Life and Art of Albrecht
Dürer Panofsky interprets three masterpieces produced by the artist in the
span of two years: Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), St Jerome in His
 panofsky, erwin  159

Study (1514) and Melancholia I (1514). Although they did not constitute
a set, Panofsky assumed their unity of content, that is, as an expression in
symbolic form of three different paths through life that reflected the scho-
lastic classification of virtues as moral, theological and intellectual (1955
[1943]: 151). All three interpretations are quite substantive, and analyse
symbolically every (even the most minute) detail noticeable in the image.
The longest analysis is dedicated to Melancholia I: Panofsky interprets this
work as a representation of the destiny of the Renaissance artist, and, in
fact, as a symbolic self-­portrait of Dürer himself. Didi-­Huberman has sug-
gested that such deciphering of the ‘message’ of Melancholia I neglects its
religious aspect, which is that of a symptom. Noting a similarity between
the figure from Melancholia I and Dürer’s image of Christ, Man of Sorrows
from the frontispiece of the Small Passion (1511) – and referring to the
relationship between Melancholia I and St Jerome, which were finished in
the same year and share a particular mood, as well as many complementary
­oppositions – ­Didi-­Huberman proposes that in his third engraving, Dürer
‘also articulates a religious paradigm, the imitation-­of-­Christ paradigm,
in which melancholy found a field of application as paradoxical as it was
sovereign’ (CI, 173).
Didi-­Huberman also expresses his surprise that ­Panofsky – ­an accom-
plished expert on Renaissance ­art – d ­ id not consider the aforementioned
context. Didi-­Huberman finds an explanation in the neo-­Kantian pre-
sumptions of iconology, which aims at ‘a synthetic unity’. If Panofsky had
introduced into his interpretation of Melancholia I the motif of imitatio
Christi, it would have produced a symptomatic ‘overdetermination’, an
equivocation, or an antithetical sense within the analysis. The reference to
the theme of imitatio Christi would also introduce an anachronistic element
in the form of ‘a medieval symptom into one of the most emblematic works
of the entire Renaissance’ (CI, 171). For Didi-­Huberman, such inatten-
tion to traces and remnants equals a suppression of the symptom and a
‘tyranny of the system’, which subordinates it to the ‘will to synthesis’
(CI, 172). Panofsky’s approach does not permit itself to be subsumed
under the symbolic form but belongs to the type ‘I don’t want to know
anything about it’ (CI, 172). It thus becomes clear why Didi-­Huberman
writes about Panofsky’s introduction to his Studies in Iconology that it
‘unfolds a semiological fable in which we start out from a certainty’ (CI,
180). This ‘tone of certainty’ is indeed a specific ‘Kantian tone’ (CI, 5–6,
90–4, 106–15), which in Panofsky’s work overlapped with his adoption of
Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. Didi-­Huberman’s view is that in
consequence, Panofsky’s approach corresponds to the method of ‘unifica-
tion’, which is contrasted with the methods of ‘pathetic tensions’ proposed
by Aby Warburg (SI, 120; see pathos).
160 parmiggiani, claudio 

Works Cited
Panofsky, E. (1955 [1943]). The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. Princeton
University Press.
Panofsky, E. (1972 [1939]). Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the
Art of the Renaissance. Westview Press.
Panofsky, E. (1991 [1927]). Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. C. S. Wood.
Zone Books.
Panofsky, E. (1997 [1930]). Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike
Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst. Gebr. Mann Verlag.

PARMIGGIANI, CLAUDIO

Ari Tanhuanpää
Didi-­Huberman’s Génie du non-lieu (2001b) is dedicated to the work of
the Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani (b. 1943). The title of the artist’s
series Delocazioni (‘delocations’), which Parmiggiani began in 1970, is
the starting point for Didi-­Huberman’s examination. The artist made his
artworks, which could be called fire-imprints, by first placing objects of
his choice (boxes, various containers and bottles placed on a table, plates,
ladders and bookshelves, etc.) to lean against a wall. Next, by burning
car tyres, he generated black smoke which was directed towards the wall.
When the objects placed against the wall had been removed, a white area
in their shape was left on the wall, contrasted with the black soot. Didi-­
Huberman asks if the artist’s studio would already be conceivable as a
transition, delocazione, given that the studio, located in a red house on the
misty plateau of the river P­ o–w­ ith its air, its fog, its particular a­ tmosphere
– ­was destroyed in a fire. As such, the transformation of a surrounding
site would, thanks to the genius nonloci, the spirit of a non-­place, become a
landscape of the psyche, and be transformed into an imprint of intimacy.
It is a place of surviving time. The fire is far away, but the burning is still
very close. It is first expressed v­ isually – ­chromatically, a­ tmospherically –
­in the transformation of the same colour ratio: sections of red walls in the
greyness of the landscape, yellow and red flames devouring the intonaco
of the walls, grey and black ashes of the consumed house. The landscape
will have devoured in its greyness, the grisaille, the red house of child-
hood: all that remains is a deserted place, sand and mist. The red remains,
however; it is enough to imagine it moving, in a ceaseless delocazione.
Didi-­Huberman sees that ‘the fire remains lying, hidden, latent, surviving
in the ashes’. Because ‘the dust will survive us’ (2001b: 56).
 parmiggiani, claudio  161

Derrida argued (2005 [1986]: 43, 68] that the cinder or ash is almost
­ othing – ­is not being-­that-­remains, if one understands by that being-­
n
that-­subsists. It is a ‘figure of annihilation without remainder’. Cinder and
ash are not and have never been, but still, in accordance with the idiom Il
y a le cendre, ‘cinders, there are’, persistently. In Derridean terms, cinders
belong to the so-­called ‘undecidables’, which ‘break up not only the meta-
physics of presence, but as well the distinction between literal and figural
(or metaphorical) meanings’ (Salaün, 2006: 99). Pleshette DeArmitt adds
(2016: 103): ‘[w]hile remainders, by falling outside that which is proper,
appear to allow for secure demarcations between inside and outside,
proper and improper, pure and impure, they also destabilize the very same
borders they make possible’. Even if neither cinder nor ash as remainders
are not, they remain. This restance, ‘remaindering’, remains nonetheless
logically and ontologically associated with the verb ‘to be’ (Derrida, 2002).
However, its relation to being is paradoxical: it tends to slip between its
verbal form (‘to remain’) and the substantive form (‘remainder’). ‘Cinders
there are [il y a là cendre]’, as well, although the cinder (la cendre) is not
(Derrida, 1991: 31, 39). It does not ­exist – ­it insists malgré tout. It is irrel-
evant to this matter whether Parmiggiani’s burned red cottage by the river
Po had ever existed; rather, it stubbornly insists – as do the cinders of the
victims of the Holocaust in Auschwitz-­Birkenau, which Didi-­Huberman
recounts in his Bark (2011a; B). It is our responsibility to make them exist
(cf. Caputo, 2013).
Parmiggiani’s works also evoke in Didi-­Huberman an association of the
‘existence of the terrible in every particle of the air’ (2001b: 124; see Rilke,
2009 [1910]: 48). This remaindering as ‘ongoing incineration’ (Derrida,
1991: 37) takes place in the French word là, ‘there’ – a word homophoni-
cally indistinguishable from the feminine singular article la – which is
not a place. This word combines with another feminine figure of khōra
that Plato discussed in his Timaeus. Khōra as non-lieu disobeys the logic
of non-­contradiction (Derrida, 1995: 89). It is what Ludwig Binswanger
called (1994 [1932]) a ‘thymic’ space, which is neither sensible nor intel-
ligible. Khōra is an imprint bearer where nothing takes place but the place.
It ‘does not proceed from the natural or legitimate logos [. . .] It comes as
in a dream’ (Derrida, 1995: 89). In this state, we are ‘detached from the
objective world but also from ourselves’. We have entered the faculty of
aisthēsis, sensation (sentir), or, in Erwin Strausian terms, Empfindung (Didi-­
Huberman, 2001b: 146; Straus, 1956 [1935]: 195–279; cf. Maldiney, 1973:
175–200). Didi-­Huberman feels that it is the air, the breath (souffle), which
acts as a khôra in Parmiggiani´s works. The air is the medium of survivance.
Didi-­Huberman’s small artist monographs published in a series entitled
Fables de lieu (in addition to Génie du non-lieu dedicated to Parmiggiani,
162 pasolini, pier paolo 

there are others focused on Simon Hantaï [1998b], Pascal Convert

[1999b], Giuseppe Penone [2000b; BS] and James Turrell [2001a;
MWC]) follow this very same logic. It is the hybrid ‘neither–nor’ logic
of the essay as form, which, as Theodor Adorno put it (1984: 152),
‘[i]nstead of achieving something scientifically, or creating something
artistically [. . .] reflects a childlike freedom’.

Works Cited
Adorno, T. (1984). ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. B. Hullot-­Kentor and
F. Will, New German Critique, 32: 151–71.
Binswanger, L. (1994 [1932]). Das Raumproblem in der Psychopathologie.
Ausgewählte Werke, Band III. Asanger.
Caputo, J. D. (2013). The Insistence of God. A Theology of Perhaps. Indiana
University Press.
DeArmitt, P. (2016). ‘Cascade of Remainders’, Derrida Today, 9(2):
97–106.
Derrida, J. (1991). Cinders, trans. N. Lukacher. University of Nebraska
Press.
Derrida, J. (1995). ‘Khōra’, trans. I. McLeod, in On the Name, ed.
W. Hamacher and D. E. Wellbery, 87–127. Stanford University Press.
Derrida, J. (2002). ‘­Reste – ­Le maître, ou le supplément d’infini’, Le Seuil,
‘Le Genre Humain’, 1(37): 25–64.
Derrida, J. (2005 [1986]). ‘Shibboleth. For Paul Celan’, trans. J. Wilner
and T. Dutoit, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed.
O. Pasanen and T. Dutoit, 1–64. Fordham University Press.
Maldiney, H. (1973). Regard parole espace. Les Éditions du Cerf.
Rilke, R. M. (2009 [1910]). The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans.
M. Hulse. Penguin.
Salaün, F. (2006). ‘Survivance et devenirs: fragments sur la notion de
reste’, in S. Lafont (ed.), Le Reste, 145–54. Presses Universitaires de la
Méditerranée.
Straus, E. (1956 [1935]). Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung
der Psychologie. Springer.

PASOLINI, PIER PAOLO

Paweł Mościcki
Pasolini became a paradigmatic artist for Didi-­Huberman during the
work on his book cycle L’Œil de l’histoire (2008b; 2010b; 2011b; 2012a;
 pasolini, pier paolo  163

2015b; 2016a). Not only did Pasolini fit perfectly with the subject matter
that interested Didi-­Huberman, but he also embodied the specificity
of Didi-­Huberman’s approach to various issues. Pasolini was a prolific
writer, poet and filmmaker, but he was truly passionate about developing
his own theory of cinema and of dialectal poetry, and he spoke out in the
most important polemics of his time, often provoking them. This constant
circling between practice and theory, the concrete of experience and
the attempt to give it a conceptual shape, is one of the reasons for Didi-­
Huberman’s fascination with Pasolini.
Pasolini straddled more than one binary opposition. He was fully
absorbed in the formal concerns of art, and yet quite devoted to artistic
practice. His work shows that, as Didi-­Huberman writes of La Rabbia
(1962), ‘there are documentary films that are more poetic and political than
any attempt to reinvent the world from scratch’ (2014a: 94). With desper-
ate vitality, Pasolini participated in the present while remaining faithful
to the archaic forms of expression enshrined in culture. That is why he
spoke out against all forms of normalisation and modernity understood as
processes of extermination of popular cultures and social diversity. Didi-­
Huberman is certainly fascinated by Pasolini’s ability to combine political
passion with attentiveness to emotions, and a sense of universal matters
with love for the individuality and corporeality of all experience. For in
every ‘confronted people’ Pasolini always saw ‘confronted bodies’, and
vice versa (2012a: 182). The dialectical approach of Pasolini is also evident
in the fact that he was able to combine an uncompromising criticism
of modernity with an almost boundless tenderness towards its victims
(see dialectic). In so doing, he showed the authentic grace of an artist
that Didi-­Huberman himself increasingly seeks in modesty. In this way,
Pasolini has also been instrumental in developing a position of resistance
against the contemporary mythologisation of the artist and the grandiosity
of art institutions.
Pasolini is a paradigmatic artist for Didi-­Huberman not only because
of his complexity and the inherent dialecticality of his stance, but also
because of the system of references in which he appears. The originality of
Didi-­Huberman’s reading lies, among other things, in the fact that he sit-
uates Pasolini within a constellation of authors and perspectives that is at
first glance quite surprising, and yet perfectly plausible. Didi-­Huberman
himself has been developing his work in a similar constellation for years.
This includes, first, Walter Benjamin, with whom Pasolini is juxtaposed
in his search for the forms of expression of the oppressed. Didi-­Huberman
devoted extensive sections of his book on extras in cinema to analysing
the strategy of the cinematic close-­up as a form of bringing anonymous
actors of history (die Namenlosen) out of the shadows. He has also called
164 pasolini, pier paolo 

Pasolini’s film poetics of ‘figurative fulgurations’ a direct counterpart of

Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’ (2012a: 180).
The other major figure in this constellation is Aby Warburg, with
whom Pasolini shares an interest in the long duration of archaic gestures
and the cultural logic of the ‘survival’ of forms of expression. Tracing
the remnants of prehistory within the present is one of Pasolini’s most
important passions, and his theory of cinema can be straightforwardly
called a visual process of ‘sopravvivenza’ (2014a: 93). Pasolini may not
have read Warburg, but he was certainly influenced by authors close to
Warburg’s research, such as Roberto Longhi, Erich Auerbach and Ernesto
de Martino. The latter, a scholar of the migration of forms of lamenta-
tion from antiquity to contemporary popular practices in southern Italy, is
also important inspiration for Didi-­Huberman’s own research (see 2019c).
Another key insight emerging from Didi-­ Huberman’s writings on
Pasoloni is that he shows the fundamental influence of Pasolini on the
work of Giorgio Agamben, despite only sparse references to the former
in Agamben’s writings. However, the concept of a permanent state of
emergency, the new identity of the citizen as a homo sacer, or the theory
of modernity as the collapse of experience would have been impos-
sible without the unmasking of the fundamental anarchy of power and
the visions of anthropological catastrophe developed by Pasolini. Didi-­
Huberman also shows that Agamben’s indebtedness to Pasolini relates
closely to the inspirations of Warburg and Benjamin in his work. Thus the
constellation seems even tighter.
Pasolini is a paradigmatic figure for Didi-­Huberman for a third reason:
as the point of fundamental opening of the field of reflection. Didi-­
Huberman is not Pasolini’s uncritical admirer, and it is in polemics with
the theses of Pasolini’s article on the disappearance of the fireflies that one
of the most important books in his recent oeuvre, Survivance des lucioles,
emerges (2010a; SF). Characteristically, the opposition to Pasolini’s (and
consequently Agamben’s) apocalyptic tone underscores their inconsist-
ency with his own inherently dialectical thinking and his rejection of
capitulation in the face of despair. To the thesis of the extinction of the
­fireflies – ­tiny lights of hope opposed to the great searchlights of power
(see light) – Didi-­Huberman opposes the hypothesis of their survival, the
duration of the possibility of resistance malgré tout. It is in his nuanced and
not unsympathetic engagement with the despair of Pasolini’s late writings
that Didi-­Huberman defines his position, which a few years later would
result in the opening of a major new research field devoted to the images
and forms of revolt.
Finally, Pasolini has also enabled Didi-­Huberman to concretise his
­interest – ­aesthetic, political and t­ heoretical – ­in the cinema of poetry. This
 pathos  165

path, too, is still being developed, as demonstrated by Didi-­Huberman’s

recent essays on the films of Maria Kourkouta, Chris Marker and Mikhail
Kalatozov (2017a; 2019a: 11–15, 189–205).

PATHOS

Maud Hagelstein
In the autumn of 2016 Didi-­ Huberman presented his exhibition
Soulèvements (Uprisings) at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, which was shown
afterwards in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico and Montréal. What makes
us rise up? The exhibition was a five-­step response to this question, which
would form the chapters of a history of revolt told through a political
anthropology of images. Like Aby Warburg, who had in the late 1920s
created a gigantic atlas of images which brought together thousands of
‘formulae of pathos’, Didi-­Huberman created his own atlas (a collection
of images) for the figures of uprising. So how do we rise up? 1. With
(unchained) ­elements – ­2. With (intense) gestures – 3. With (exclaimed)
­words – ­4. With (blazing) c­ onflicts – ­5. With (indestructible) desires.
What link does Didi-­Huberman trace between the political value of
historical revolutionary facts, and the poetic charge of the phenomena
of uprising? In an interview for the journal Vacarme, in response to
the question (announced as ‘brutal’) about his ‘real relation’ to politics,
Didi-­Huberman said he felt incapable of having an authorised opinion on
political matters (WI). A certain reservation prevented him from speaking
publicly about all kinds of topical issues that we might have expected him
to speak about:

We only become engaged effectively in areas where we truly work, that is to say
where it is possible, through the work itself, to intervene effectively in a given
field. I feel quite ­unfit – a­ nd I am not trying to make excuses, but only recogniz-
ing my own ­limits – t­ o sign petitions on dossiers that I have only a second-­hand
knowledge about, or to engage in concrete and complex political questions. (WI)

In a radio interview on France Culture on 10 November 2016, Didi-­

Huberman showed, even more radically, his reluctance to enter into pre-
dictions, analyses, strategies and political solutions. He has no opinion on
the present ‘dark times’, or at least no opinion to give or to present publicly
(at the risk of imposing one) – because that is not his work, nor his exper-
tise. Yet his research on images has often led him into political terrain,
following in fact two central paths in Uprisings: the question of desire or
166 pathos 

of emotion, and the question of gestures. These paths are not self-­evident,
particularly the path of emotion. Numerous intellectuals have observed
that the present times are marked by lack and by anaesthesia: political
action, where it should be replenished, finds little hope, little energy, little
anger and little emotion.
Hence the importance of the problem of emotion, for which the heuris-
tic work of images can provide a new place, one that will allow us to ‘com-
pletely overturn our stereotypes concerning the “weakness” of affects (or
of passions) compared with the “strength” of facts (or of actions)’ (Didi-­
Huberman, 2012a: 21). Traditionally, in Western philosophy, pathos
has been thought of as ‘the impasse of the logos’, as a sort of illness of
reason (2012a: 26). In the ‘little conference’ entitled Quelle émotion! Quelle
émotion? (2013f), Didi-­Huberman starts from common sense to show the
extent to which emotionally stirred individuals (those who are crying or
shouting), exposed to others by their own nudity, in their own powerless-
ness or impotence, are often considered with disdain: such individuals are
called ‘pathetic’.
The very term ‘pathos’, in Aristotle’s categories of logic, flows directly
from what we refer to as the passive grammatical forms of the verb, and
it refers to the impossibility of acting or the ‘impasse of the act’. Yet can
we be sure that emotion is an impasse of the act? For Didi-­Huberman
– ­who is close to the positive revalorisation of pathos in Nietzsche and
later in ­Warburg – ­emotional individuals, by taking the risk of showing
their impotence and ‘losing face’, stand out also by an act of honesty and
bravery: such individuals refuse to lie, refuse to pretend, and thereby
resist a state of the world that is imposed upon them (2013f: 23). In other
words, this has to do with a first transformation of passivity, inherent in
the trial of emotion itself. Immediately, something resists.

The subject of emotion transforms therefore his or her initial ‘passivity’ – that
‘existential impasse’ linked to the fact that this subject ‘is unable to face’ a certain
order of the world that is imposed upon ­them – i­nto an insurrectional gesture
of his or her own body, an ‘activity’ that begins with the destruction, whether it
be psychological or visual destruction, of this objective world that must then be
‘shattered’. (2009a: 32)

The expression of pathos acts then like a resistance: a resistance that is

not (yet) organised and that seems to be passive (we suffer the world,
and the tears come), but which is at the same time ‘insurrectional’ since
it ­opposes – ­physically – a ‘certain order of the world’. Something of this
world is not accepted. When Didi-­Huberman states that this resistance ‘is
not organised’, he means that it is not collective. That will be the challenge
 pathos  167

of the second stage in coming out of passivity: how do we turn powerless-

ness into power? How do we ‘arm the eyes’? How do we convert tears into
weapons? How do we draw from tears new means for action?
Didi-­Huberman endeavours to show the social dimension of emotion.
Warburg, for his part, left this problem as a legacy, having articulated his
thinking on art around a reflection on the ‘formulae of pathos’. Warburg
showed that emotion is evidently incarnated in a subject, in a body, but that
it ‘overflows’ in order to open a larger dimension. It is detachment, tearing,
decentring in relation to the sensible and to the immediate given; and the
excess that characterises it is the condition of possibility of circulation and
the shareability of forms. Emotion is always articulated around overflow-
ing and effusion. It undermines the good management of our relation to
the world. From the opening of Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes, it is a
question of excess, of the pathos that resists the framework of representa-
tion, and of emotion as ‘movement outside of oneself’ or as ‘oblique revolt’
(Didi-­Huberman, 2012a: 33). To be outside of oneself, when gripped with
anger for example, means that the subject is overrun (overflowing), and the
question of the collective opens within this effusion. ‘Emotion does not say
I’, according to Gilles Deleuze in ‘La peinture enflame l’écriture’ (2003
[1981]: 172). While it does not say ‘I’, we can conceive a political approach
to it. Something strange, something foreign is deployed in emotion,
something too heavy for one person, and sometimes something like an
originary pain, one so intense that it is incomprehensible for an individual.
Something indeterminate in emotion links me with these depths (‘the other
of the inside’) and with other individuals (‘the other of the outside’).

On the one hand, we must note the ­universality – ­the geographic, temporal
­universality – ­and the community of emotions: all children have cried, all children
will cry [. . .] On the other hand, we must acknowledge the singularity of emotions:
all children cry, but each creates the ‘fundamental tonality’ of their affect through
the play, which is different every time, of innervations, motor discharge, singular
sensations and reminiscences linked to the moment, to movement, and to the
desiring constitution of the subject. This is how emotion, that movement outside
of oneself, appears as a movement outside of the self, outside of the ‘I’. (2012a: 46)

­ motions – l­ike beliefs or like the phenomena of ‘taste’ – are not those
E
little ‘personal’ things that an individual has to ‘possess’, to keep within
oneself: emotions are everyone’s business, they are the concern of all of us. It
is the aesthetic, ethical and even political extension of the idea according to
which emotions work on us like ‘movements outside of oneself’ or, even,
‘outside of the self’.
Translated by Shane Lillis
168 pathos formula (pathosformel)

Works Cited
Deleuze, G. (2003 [1981]). ‘La peinture enflame l’écriture’, in Deux
régimes de fous et autres textes (1975–1995), 167–72. Minuit.

PATHOS FORMULA (PATHOSFORMEL)

Johnnie Gratton
The work of Aby Warburg is widely referenced across Didi-­Huberman’s
oeuvre, but concentrated in two specific areas. The first comprises his
quartet of essays dedicated to the antique figure of Ninfa, herself the
ultimate embodiment of Warburg’s ‘pathos formula’ (see nymph). The
second consists of Didi-­ Huberman’s most sustained analysis of that
concept as found in his major work, The Surviving Image (2002b; SI).
Although wholly devoted to an in-­depth study of Warburg’s theory and
practice, the author’s aim is not to be even-­handed, but rather to explore
and further radicalise the conceptual innovations sparked by Warburg’s
intuition of the disruptive dynamics of anachronism. This theoretical
vista features two dominant conceptual landmarks, survival or after-
life (Nachleben) and pathos formula (Pathosformel), also translated as
‘emotive formula’. Nachleben is a neologism attributed to Anton Springer,
a nineteenth-­ century predecessor of Warburg, while Pathosformel is
Warburg’s own coinage. The former denotes an anomalous, historically
disorienting model of temporality whereby ancient hyper-­emotive figural
gestures and evoked movements survive into more recent pasts without
necessarily being revived by anyone. The latter might initially be thought
of as the survival kit that stores, protects and eventually delivers ancient
image patterns that have migrated across time and space.
The Pathosformel is a confusing, counter-­ normative, open-­ ended
­concept – ­hence the fact that neither Warburg, nor Didi-­Huberman, ever
graced it with a formal definition. Where Warburg said relatively little
about his neologism, Didi-­Huberman’s monograph uses it as an elastic
point of reference generating manifold observations that vary according to
context. Like many commentators on Warburg, however, he approvingly
quotes Giorgio Agamben’s succinct delineation of the elemental and
relational factors involved in the concept of pathos formula: ‘A concept
like the Pathosformel makes it impossible to separate form from content,
for it expresses the indissoluble intrication [read ‘entanglement’] of an
emotive charge and an iconographic formula’ (SI, 123). The identified
elements of ‘emotive charge’ and ‘iconographic formula’ have proven to
 pathos formula (pathosformel) 169

be reliable starting points for countless expansions undertaken ever since.

The pathetic element itself is highly charged from the very start.
Warburg regularly asserted that he had based his Pathosformel on the
Ancient Greek language of gestures specifically for its figural repertoire of
‘intensified physical or psy­chic expression’ (1999: 555). Affective intensity
is thus an indispensable ingredient of the overall concept of Pathosformel.
Didi-­Huberman enthusiastically endorses this understanding most explic-
itly when he revises Warburg’s pathos formulas to ‘Formulas of Intensity’
in the sub-­title of his book’s second chapter (SI, 67). He reiterates this
shift of emphasis later when ascribing to pathos formulas the ‘role of
intensifying the affect displayed in forms’ (SI, 154). Few have matched
Didi-­Huberman in the task of researching, conceptualising and further
developing the crucial Warburgian theme of intensity.
The formulaic element also derives from the ancient language of
expressive bodily gestures. Formulas were presumably unmarked or
indistinct forms before gaining entry into the language of gestures. To be
very schematic, Warburg’s ‘formulas’ are fixed forms. Taking certain of
his comments, we can intimate that gaining expressive force and formulaic
status involved the mutation of what looked like ‘spontaneous’ or ‘natural’
gestures into ‘typical’ or ‘universal’ attitudes (see Warburg, 1999: 193,
249). Didi-­Huberman’s reading of Warburg yields a Darwinian version of
this process, whereby unconscious memory can detach primitive expres-
sive movements from their ‘immediate necessity’. He concludes that,
‘in Warburg’s terms, it trans­forms them into formulas that may be put
to use in all the domains of culture’ (SI, 149), meaning in part that they
are ‘trans-­iconographic’ (SI, 165). Above all, the pathos formula remains
Warburg’s foremost conceptual device for explaining how certain, long-­
forgotten, ancient figural patterns came to haunt the cultural conscious-
ness of early European modernity. In this respect, the formulaic element
provides the stable, durable, repeatable and recognisable p ­ roperties – ­in a
sense, the ­hardware – ­of the Pathosformel.
Didi-­Huberman follows Agamben’s summary in highlighting the
complex relation between ‘pathos’ and ‘formula’. Indeed, he takes up
Agamben’s ‘entanglement’ (see above) as his starting point by describing
the two elements of the pathos formula as ‘polarities’ that can achieve
neither full synthesis nor complete separation. Why, then, the simpler fol-
low-­up image of ‘contrasting elements stuck together’? Didi-­Huberman
is probably alluding to the compound noun status of Pathosformel. The
German language is famous for the ease with which it can ‘stick together’
two, or often more, nouns into ‘closed’ compounds, where the correspond-
ing English might have a ‘hyphenated’ compound or, as with ‘pathos
formula’, an ‘open’ compound. In all such cases, the parts remain clearly
170 pathos formula (pathosformel)

identifiable: compounds lie in between fusion and separation. Going on

to offer sets of terms deemed synonyms or associates of the compounded
elements, Didi-­Huberman offers a more syntactical image of entangle-
ment: A ‘with’ B, or more specifically, a formula-­related term coupled
‘with’ an apparently incompatible pathos-­related term. Thus: ‘“formulas”
with passions, “engrams” with energies, impressions with movements’
(SI, 124). The list goes on, both in the immediate context and throughout
the book. Significantly, given Agamben’s denunciation of the conven-
tional form/content dichotomy, Didi-­Huberman had earlier proposed
a Warburg-­inspired coupling of force with form (SI, 121). As with the
rhetorical figure of oxymoron, the point is less to underline contradictions
than to appreciate the value of normally anomalous couplings, such that
a ‘deafening silence’ can be felt to perfectly express a pall of disapproval.
Oxymoron aims at a resolution of ­sorts – ­a logically incomplete but com-
pellingly motivated resolution. Thus, the oxymoronic coupling of ‘force’
with ‘form’ is resolved by Didi-­Huberman’s later assertion that ‘not only
is pathos not opposed to form; it engenders it’, furnishing form’s ‘moment
of effective action’ (SI, 130). Likewise, Warburg’s references to processes
such as ‘fixation’, ‘crystallization’, engrammatic ‘stamping’, or to late
nineteenth-­century recording technologies such as the seismograph, are
all acknowledged by Didi-­Huberman to mediate between the internally
pathetic and the externally formulaic. Finally, it is significant that his most
concise emblem of the Pathosformel should be the ‘living fossil’ (SI, 37,
217), itself a living oxymoron.
What substantively differentiates Didi-­Huberman’s analysis of the
Pathosformel from other approaches is his radical decision to interpret
that concept in terms of the Freudian symptom. This is formally
announced late in the book, although passing references to ‘symptoms’
abound from the outset. He firmly believes he has Warburg’s support for
his argument that the Pathosformel should be conceived, not semantically
or semiotically, but in terms of ‘psychological symptomatology’. Thus,
pathos formulas are henceforth to be considered as ‘the visible ­symptoms
– ­bodily, ges­tural, explicitly presented, fi
­ gured – ­of a psychological time
irreducible to the simple schema of rhetorical, sentimental, or individual
vicissitudes’ (SI, 180). His symptomatological turn clearly skews ‘pathos’
towards the pathological. It displaces ‘symbol’ and ‘archetype’, but gives
an extra Freudian thrust to numerous terms already active in the earlier
chapters: ‘polarity’, ‘oscillation’, ‘inversion’, ‘overdetermination’, ‘intru-
sion’, to name but a few. Didi-­Huberman enjoys going out on some-
thing of a limb and will not be too bothered by those who feel agnostic
over his choice of ‘symptom’ as a cardinal ‘interpretant’ of Warburg’s
­heritage.
 peoples  171

A concluding footnote. Around two decades after coining the neologism

Pathosformel, Warburg came up with a further neologism, deemed by
most commentators to be a sister term and by others to be a replacement:
German Dynamogramm, English dynamogram.

Works Cited
Warburg, A. (1999). The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to
the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. D. Britt. Getty
Research Institute.

PEOPLES

Magdalena Zolkos
Didi-­Huberman’s concept of the people is developed through analy-
ses of photographic and cinematic representations of marginalised and
oppressed groups, including works by Philippe Bazin, Wang Bing, Bertolt
Brecht, Harun Farocki, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergei Eisenstein and
Laura Waddington. Didi-­Huberman’s conceptualising of people rising
up against oppression and people ‘making-­appear’ history that has been
erased or ‘disimagined’ (ISA, 46–7) also marks a point of engagement
with political philosophers, including Hannah Arendt and Jacques
Rancière, by way of articulating the link between the political aesthetics
of representation, political subjectivity and the question of freedom (see
uprising). Finally, Didi-­Huberman’s notion of ‘people rising’ evidences
the importance of Walter Benjamin’s imaginal dialectic on his thought
in that appearance is closely linked to the act of making-­appear ‘other
images’ and ‘other montages’ (see Rancière, 2018).
Didi-­Huberman responds to two problems in the modern political
theory of ‘peoples’: 1) the projection on to heterogeneous peoples of a
unifying group identity and 2) the relation between specific actors and
historical roles (Bosteels, 2016: 14). Aligning closely the aesthetic and
political perspectives, he argues for the use of the plural form, ‘peoples’,
because, analogously to his notion of the irreducible plurality of images,
‘people’ always appear as a disunified multiplicity (TRS, 65; FH, 278).
This pluralising approach to the representation (and history) of marginal-
ised groups (Didi-­Huberman, 2012a: 40–55), including the working class
(PEPE; TB; U), concentration camp inmates (ISA; B), ghetto residents
(PP) and asylum seekers (SF, 84–7), opposes the presentation of vic-
timised groups as singular and unified in their plight and struggle. The
172 peoples 

appearance of peoples is inseparable from the event or movement of (up)

rising (see anadyomene); there are no people without uprisings. Finally,
the appearance of peoples not only actively opposes their attempted
erasure from history (or what Didi-­Huberman articulates as a problem of
historical ‘underexposure’), but also stands in contrast to hyper-­visibility,
‘overexposure’ or ‘archival fetish[isation]’ (BL, 62). Appearance is not
‘exhibition’ (FH, 271–2).
Didi-­Huberman’s notion of political peoples crystallises in his critique
of Giorgio Agamben’s borrowing of Carl Schmitt’s negative and unify-
ing conception of people (SF; see also TRS, 66–8; PNT, 192–210). In
Schmitt’s agonistic theory of the polis, people emerge through acts of
unanimous acclamation of power (2007 [1928]; 2001 [1933]). Agamben
borrows from this idea (2011) to outline ‘the sphere of glory’ – the sov-
ereign power of pre-­modern Herrschaft, which he argues was at work in
European twentieth-­century fascism and continues to operate in contem-
porary liberal democracies as the modern state demonstrates its power
through tactics of containment and subjugation of the people. Critical
of Agamben’s reduction of images to an element of the spectacularisa-
tion of social life, Didi-­Huberman repudiates the idea that subjugation
of people or destruction of experience can ever be final or complete
(the ‘apocalyptic way of “seeing the time”’) (SF, 39). Affirming images’
capacity for dialectic, multi-­temporal and anachronistic effects as ‘core’
of imaginal politics, Didi-­Huberman illuminates the conditions and pro-
cesses whereby peoples make ‘an appearance [and come] into visibility’
(Rancière, 2018: 12). This is akin to the survival of images of and by
subjects on the threshold of disappearance. Resistance against power and
violence thus has to do with dynamics and conditions that are, at least
partly, aesthetic.
Furthermore, the nexus of peoples and images develops against the
backdrop of Didi-­Huberman’s discussion of representation, where the
emphasis is placed on the dual purport of mandate and figuration. In a
polemical engagement with Pierre Rosanvallon (1998), Didi-­Huberman
articulates the imaginary dimension of people representation, which
pivots on the inquiry into the effects of ‘rendering-­sensible’ and ‘making-­
appear’ (see Rancière, 2018). Key aspects of such appearance are feelings,
affect and ­pathos – ­the ‘emotion-­people’ (un peuple-émotion) (TRS, 66–8).
Didi-­Huberman’s insistence that peoples’ subjugation by state power is
never total or without a remnant aligns closely with Michel Foucault’s
theory of power and counter-­power (see KWC). Foucault (1978: 95)
famously argued that ‘resistance is never in a position of exteriority in
relation to power’, which Didi-­Huberman has followed closely in his
study of ‘counter-­archives’. This includes photographs of social diso-
 peoples  173

bedience, resistance and popular protests, where people are never static
but always in movement, always ‘fleeing, hiding, burying evidence, going
elsewhere, finding a way out’ (SF, 82). Imaginal uprisings are not only
representations of deliberate acts of opposing or defying the state, but also
images of human precarity, because, as Rancière suggests (2018: 12), for
Didi-­Huberman, people appear ‘not so much the lifting of a prohibition of
visibility as instances on the verge of non-­being’.
Didi-­Huberman frequently uses the vernacular of ‘the oppressed’ and
‘the degraded’ (borrowed from Benjamin and Pasolini), for example,
in his analysis of film extras in early European cinema (PEPE, 16–22),
regarded as an undifferentiated mass of human bodies forming the
backdrop for cinematic plot and ‘proper’ actors. For Didi-­Huberman,
the appearance of extras poses an aesthetic and political challenge to the
key assumptions of the cinematic medium. He asks: ‘how should one
justly film those who have no name, those who [. . .] have no voice other
than their cry of suffering or revolt?’ (PEPE, 20). Battleship Potemkin is
a political film precisely insofar as Eisenstein gives ‘a place and a face’ to
those ‘who have no part in habitual social representation’ (PEPE, 22).
The act of ‘extras’ rising up as political people is also a key concern in
Didi-­Huberman’s writings on Laura Waddington’s film about undocu-
mented migrants in Sangatte (SF) and on Wang Bing’s Man With No
Name (2012a). For Didi-­Huberman, these films are not only representa-
tions of Europe’s cruel border policies, or of the human costs of economic
exclusion in modern China, but are also intimate portrayals of peoples’
capacity to resist and to appear.

Works Cited
Agamben, G. (2011). The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological
Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. L. Chiesa and
M. Mandarini. Stanford University Press.
Bosteels, B. (2016). ‘Introduction: This People which is not One’, trans.
J. Gladding, in What is a People?, 1–20. Columbia University Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction,
trans. R. Hurley. Allen Lane.
Rancière, J. (2018). ‘Images Re-­read. The Method of Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, trans. E. Woodard, J. R. Solorzano, S. De Cauwer,, and
L. K. Smith, Angelaki, 23(4): 11–18.
Rosanvallon, P. (1998). Le Peuple introuvable: histoire de la représentation
démocratique en France. Gallimard.
Schmitt, C. (2001 [1933]). State, Movement, People. The Triadic Structure
of Political Unity, trans. S. Draghici. Plutarch Press.
174 phantom 

Schmitt, C. (2007 [1928]). Constitutional Theory, trans. J. Seitzer. Duke

University Press.
Schwarte, L. (2018). ‘The People-­Image: The Political Philosophy of
Georges Didi-­Huberman’. trans. C. Woodall, Angelaki, 23(4): 80–90.

PHANTOM

Maud Hagelstein
In 1929 art historian Aby Warburg wrote, in the unpublished notes for his
Grundbegriffe, a phrase that described the project of his Mnemosyne Atlas,
which Didi-­Huberman cites on numerous occasions, that the history
of images is ‘ghost stories for grown-­ups’ (Gespenstergeschichte für ganz
Erwachsene) (quoted in SI, 50). This phrase, for Didi-­Huberman, eventu-
ally created an unwavering link between images and ghosts, a link that
photography had so often made possible for him to explore. Yet to speak
of images as ghostly realities or as ‘phantom-­like’ (SI, 50) is neither the
naïve illustration of a more complex reality, nor a language game, nor an
easy metaphor. Instead, it concerns the very nature of the image: several
definitions of the image exist, but the majority describe a certain ­relation –
­a new kind of relation on the ontological ­scene – ­of presence and absence.
The image escapes by staying there, and its absence (that part of the real
which withdraws into it) calls for reconstruction (we investigate what it
challenges us to grasp). Only phantoms can rival this type of existence.
Having studied phenomenology under Henri Maldiney (particularly
specialised in experiences of haunting related to art), and as a keen reader
of Merleau-­Ponty, Didi-­Huberman focused on giving back the complex
phenomenology of the image, or what he called the ‘double system’ of the
image, its dialectical system (1992b: 103). The image is not mere pres-
ence. In other words, it is not merely ‘the absolute denial of absence’, as
­some – ­those who believe only what they s­ ee – ­tend to think (1992b: 96).
However, nor is it ever absence alone, for it has its own consistency and
an insurmountable materiality. There is something within it that does
not pass, that resists metabolisation, and that insists. It is situated in the
interval between what is there and what disappears. Its auratic nature
makes it a fragile but obstinate ‘survivor’. To insist on its ghostly existence
is to claim that the image has an ‘essentially lacunary nature’, and is never
whole, and is never full (ISA, 59).
There is an elective link between (phantom-)images and death; they flirt
with death, and in this way, they put pressure on the living, like the empty
tombs in American minimalist sculpture analysed in Ce que nous voyons, ce
 phasmids  175

qui nous regarde (1992b). This link, this way of articulating ‘the question
of the matter of the image with that of the time of the dead’ (2005a: 66), is
one whose story Didi-­Huberman has told in almost all of his research,
from the final development of Confronting Images, which calls for ‘opening
itself (such is the risk) to the sombre insistence of an always-­returning
negativity’ and to ‘let death insist in the image’ (CI, 227), right up to his
very Warburgian focus on votive images: ‘their essential anthropomorphism
– which, as will by now be understood, has nothing to do with a more
or less “figurative” stylistic ­choice – ­makes these forms things that are
“everywhere escaping and everywhere similar to themselves,” types of
phantoms, in short’ (EV, 14).
Translated by Shane Lillis

PHASMIDS

Emmanuel Alloa
Belatedly, Didi-­ Huberman’s oeuvre is starting to be translated into
English and it comes as no surprise that his supposedly ‘main works’
have been published first, such as his readings of the iconography
of the Salpêtrière (IH) (see Charcot, Jean-Martin; hysteria), of
Fra Angelico (FAD), his groundbreaking readings of Warburg (SI)
or of the photographs of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando (ISA) (see
Sonderkommando photographs). As important as these works indis-
putably are, they might not necessarily offer the best entry points into
an often-­asked question: what does Georges Didi-­Huberman’s method
consist of? Arguably, the most concise answer might be found in the book
series Essais sur l’apparition, whose first volume came out in 1998, under
the title Phasmes (1998a), with the second in 2013, under the title Phalènes
(2013c). Rather than monographs, these are collections of short texts
about objects that, at face value, seem to be totally disconnected from
each other: an Etruscan ex-­voto, a Neapolitan nativity set, an inkblot on
a manuscript page by Victor Hugo, a drapery by Loïe Fuller, a diagram
by Beckett, an anatomical Florentine wax figure, a Jewish prayer shawl.
The only thing connecting this disparate series is that the author never
actively searches for them; he fortuitously encounters them in the course
of a bigger research project, aimed at producing some contribution to
knowledge. What is the status of these things that suddenly come in
the way, that appear out of the blue? What to do with these encounters
that never match with the long-­term goal, with that object of desire the
researcher was actively searching for?
176 phasmids 

Sometimes, as Didi-­Huberman states in the opening chapter of Phasmes,

the researcher is stopped dead in their tracks, as something else appears
before their eyes, a fortuitous, explosive or discreet thing, but anyway
unexpected. Although the researcher didn’t find what they were hoping
for, a finding it is, nonetheless. A finding that potentially changes how one
was orienting one’s own practice. Although it doesn’t offer an answer to
one’s quest, it has a fecundity of its own: it generates a gap or an opening, a
request within one’s own quest, a demand to make space for an alternative
understanding. As a heuristic opening, it indicates what it might mean to
carry out an investigation that takes the encounter seriously.
Didi-­Huberman’s short chapter ‘Apparaissant, disparate’ can be seen,
with some reason, as his Discours de la méthode, his reflection about (meta)
the way to go (hodos):

Such would be the double life of all research, its double pleasure or its double
task: not to lose the patience of the method, the long duration of the fixed idea,
the obstinacy of the predominant concerns, the rigour of the relevant things; not
to lose either the impatience or the impertinence of the fortuitous things, the brief
time of the discoveries, the unforeseen of the meetings, even accidents along the
way. A paradoxical task, difficult to hold on to its two contradictory ­ends – ­its two
temporalities. Time to explore the royal road, time to scrutinize the side roads.
The most intense times are probably those when the call of the side road makes us
change the royal road, or rather makes us discover it for what it was that we did
not yet understand. (1998a: 10)

The two volumes of these Essays on Appearance are a collection of these

strange encounters with mostly inanimate things, but occasionally also
living b­ eings – i­nsects for ­example – ­that have always been associated
with the mysteries of appearing. In the first volume, it’s the phasmid, this
strange animal that camouflages itself within its own milieu and adopts the
style of the surrounding foliage. The author recounts how, when strolling
through the Parisian Jardin des Plantes, amid the many cages with exotic
Lepidoptera that might be admired against a background of budding
flowers, one enclosure looks empty: that of the phasmids. Lacking any
obvious trace of animal life, the transparent box seems to await the immi-
nent arrival of some new tenant. But in fact, learning to see the phasmid
implies shifting the gaze and seeing the forest that surrounds it. The
vivarium’s little jungle is itself nothing other than the very animal one took
to be hiding within it.
Drawing on Roger Caillois’s famous essay ‘Mimicry and Legendary
Psychasthenia’ (1984), all the while taking his insights much further, Didi-­
Huberman insists on the epistemic function of the phasmid. Learning to
 phasmids  177

see the phasmid means thinking differently about appearances, and thus
adopting a different style of thinking. Rather than an adaequatio rei ad
intellectum, it is the intellect that adopts the forms of things, and moulds
itself into its own style of appearing (at this very point Didi-­Huberman
probably comes closest to Adorno’s idea of philosophy’s need to ‘snuggle
up to the object’ [Adorno, 1998: 134]). In looking at how Didi-­Huberman
approaches the disparateness of ­objects – ­each time ­differently – ­trying to
be faithful to their contours, what might be glimpsed is why his method
radically parts with traditional concepts of critique. In his peculiar
combination of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and history of science,
classical issues of judgement or of categorisation are superseded by the
patient work of collecting singular appearances and of mounting them into
an archive of intensities.
While some of these might be related to felicitous epiphanies, others are
definitely more ghostly. The second volume of the Essays on Appearance
has the phalènes as its emblematic figure, that is, moths or nightflies (2013c).
Here again, the phalène’s appearance is a challenge for what we thought we
knew: dazzling, as short sparks in the dark, they require what Nietzsche
called a ‘dancing spirit’ to follow their unpredictable movement. Between
appearance and disappearance, or, to use Lacanian vernacular, between
phanisis and aphanisis, all these appearances of a life in standstill call for a
gaze that is ready to be questioned by what it encounters (2013c: 11). Like
the phasmid, Didi-­Huberman’s writing immerses itself so profoundly into
the environment it studies that it draws the reader’s attention to all these
yet unseen aspects that surround an object (Alloa, 2018). One embarks
upon a dizzying reversal, whereby the background becomes the figure due
to its resemblance to the phasmid, which, in turn, appears simply by virtue
of its assimilation to its surrounding background. Hence the question: is it
the author who becomes imperceptible amid the ribbing of the microcosm
that the phasmid causes to appear, or is it this microcosm that can no
longer be distinguished from the author? Looking at Didi-­Huberman’s
oeuvre, we might speculate that his thinking, perhaps more than any
other, effaces itself amid the image-­worlds it creates, while also remaining
recognisable through its unmistakable phasmid inspiration.

Works Cited
Adorno, T. W. (1998). ‘Notes on Philosophical Thinking’, trans.
H. W. Pickford, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords,
127–34. Columbia University Press.
Alloa, E. (2018). ‘Phasmid Thinking: On Georges Didi-­ Huberman’s
Method’, trans. C. Woodall, Angelaki, 23(4): 103–12.
178 p h o t o g r a p h y

Caillois, R. (1984). ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, October 31:

17–32.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Jonathan W. Marshall
Didi-­Huberman’s doctoral thesis was published in 1982 as Invention of
Hysteria (IH; see also hysteria). It deals with the photographic archive
produced by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière
women’s hospital in Paris between 1875 and 1918. Although Didi-­
Huberman moved beyond early photography to topics such as the
photo-­realist paintings of Gerhard Richter (2014c; OP), serial portraits
by Philippe Bazin (2012a) and photographic installations by Alfredo Jaar
(EDI), his doctoral thesis introduced many themes that have recurred
throughout his oeuvre. These include concern for the dialectic and per-
formative character of photography as the modern indexical medium par
excellence.
Invention of Hysteria characterises photographic portraiture as a violent,
almost surgical imposition upon the subject, which severs a momentarily
elicited pose out of the phenomenal flow of experience (IH, 62; see also
peoples). In the words of the influential nineteenth-­century physiolo-
gist Claude Bernard, photography was seen as documenting observations
‘provoked’ by the clinician (Didi-­Huberman, 1984e: 8). Didi-­Huberman
argues that the uncertain status of the photograph as a transparent
depiction of that which was staged in front of it was recognised from the
beginning (PH, 71–5; 1987; 1984: 8). Didi-­Huberman cites the ‘spectral
theory’ of pioneering French photographer Nadar, who claimed that the
photographic plate was ‘made up of ghostly images superimposed in layers
to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films’ (quoted in IH, 89). He also
references work on X-­ray photography and Spiritualist research, both of
which quite literally strove to photograph what Walter Benjamin called
the ‘aura’ of the photographic subject (IH, 85–114; PH, 74–5).
Charcot’s photographs provide the first example of what Didi-­
Huberman calls the symptomatic image. This is an image that alludes to
something which has passed through the body or through another image,
but which may not be fully present and hence is only indirectly visible,
if at all (CI, 179; Marshall, 2020: 69–71). Hysterical seizures and altered
states resembling demonic possession, traumatic memories, as well as
chaotic symptoms of uncertain physical ­causality – ­all of these appear and
disappear across the pages of Bourneville’s and Regnard’s Iconographie
 photography 179

photographique de la Salpêtrière (1875–80), which featured Charcot’s

patients. Didi-­ Huberman characterises the hospital as a photomedial
‘image factory’, in which physician-­artists strove to track disease through
diverse representations (photographs, sketches from photographs, pho-
tographic captions, tabulated images, and equally indexical body casts)
in search of unambiguous signs of disease and its causes (IH, 10–30,
117–26; Marshall, 2020: 91–6). This pursuit was so relentless that some
patients even became ‘woman-­photographs [femme-cliché]’, seeing only in
black and white, their skin transformed into sensitive plates upon which
doctors drew experimental patterns (1984: 8–14; IH, 110). Far from being
medical curios, Didi-­Huberman portrays these relationships as paradig-
matic of photography as a whole. The presence of the subject having been
transposed to the technological medium, the photographic print becomes
a body in its own right (IA, 63–81). Scientific photography is therefore
immured in the same dialectics as sacred representations, such as the
photographs taken of the Shroud of Turin by Secondo Pia in 1898 (prints
that revealed otherwise obscure bloodstains left by the body of Christ). In
being transferred to the photographic plate, these secondary manifesta-
tions took on the status of relics (PH; 2008).
Didi-­Huberman expanded these concepts in his 1997 Pompidou exhibi-
tion L’Empreinte (Imprint). L’Empreinte linked photographic indexicality
to Didi-­Huberman’s concepts of the ‘transfer image’ (PH, 75) and ‘resem-
blance by contact’ (2008a: 58); a mode of production which photography
shares with bodily casts, death masks, anatomical models made from flesh
injected with wax, the Shroud of Turin, wax seals, fossils, archaeological
remains, as well as corporeal moulds, impressions and photograms made
by artists such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and others. Here, as with
the photograph, a now absent object is alluded to through a second visu-
ally similar materialisation produced via physical contact. Didi-­Huberman
argues that prints, photographs and casts generate a sense of presence even
as they occlude the original, producing a sense of absence. The ‘original’
is no longer fully present within the hollow imprint or photographic
negative, and hence the resultant representation is accompanied by the
possibility of ‘fiction, deception [. . .] [and] exchangeability’ (quoted in
Pelzer, 2018: 9). Through what André Gunthert (1997) characterises as
an ‘archaeology of photographic practice’, Didi-­Huberman constructs
photographic indexicality as that which precedes and exceeds the practice
of photography.
Didi-­Huberman sees the photograph as the paradigmatic form of the
modern atlas and the archive as a whole. The imprint (photographic or
otherwise) is first and foremost an imprint of memory. From Alphonse
Bertillon’s attempt to develop a complete identity kit from the criminals
180 p h o t o g r a p h y

he photographed, to Cesare Lombroso’s funereal prints of criminals’

skulls, photography has been deployed to retrospectively record and order
the world (IH, 35–58). It is significant that Aby Warburg’s art historical
iconography of suffering took the form of temporary arrangements of pho-
tographs and prints pinned to boards (thereby resisting the fixative, singu-
lar quality of the photographic still), which were in turn rephotographed
to produce a fractured, self-­divided document of elective affinities moving
across the panels (AA, 18–23, passim). As Didi-­Huberman observed in the
context of the photographic documentation of the Shoah, the insufficiency
of photographic representations of violence and suffering means that such
images ‘require [active] archaeological work. We must dig again in their
[. . .] past’ (as Warburg did) (ISA, 47; B, 66; see also Sonderkommando
photographs; bark). To ‘look’ at photographs from an ‘archaeological
point of view’ is, in Didi-­Huberman’s words, to ‘compare what we see’
in the moment of viewing with ‘what we know to have disappeared’ from
sight within the print which remains today (B, 66). These and other
considerations led Didi-­ Huberman to collaborate with photographer
Arno Gisinger to stage Mnemosyne 42, or New Ghost Stories (2012–14),
a dynamic, data-­projected version of Warburg’s famous arrangements,
­which – p ­ araphrasing ­Benjamin – ­constituted ‘an exhibition in the time of
its technical reproducibility’ (Didi-­Huberman, 2012b: 99).
Overall Didi-­Huberman’s mode of reading images derives in no small
measure from his early photographic analyses. His approach is to bring
out those shifting, unresolved tensions within the photograph or series of
prints, mobilising that which vacillates between presence and absence, the
visible and the occluded, truth and fabrication, appearance and essence,
semblance and substance, stillness and dynamism, individuality and gen-
erality, art and objectivity, and life and death.

Works Cited
Bourneville, D. M., and Regnard, P. (1875–80). Iconographie pho-
tographique de la Salpêtrière. Progrès médical, 3 vols.
Gunthert, A. (1997). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman, La ressemblance par
contact: Archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte’,
Études photographiques, 3: 1–2.
Marshall, J. W. (2016). Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-
Martin Charcot. Palgrave.
Marshall, J. W. (2020). ‘Traumatic Dances of the “Non-­Self”: Bodily
Incoherence and the Hysterical Archive’, in J. Braun (ed.), Performing
Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, 61–83.
Leuven University Press.
 potentiality  181

Pelzer, R. (2018). ‘Deceleration Through the Imprint: Photo/graphic

Interactions in Contemporary Art’, Photographies, 11(1): 3–30.

POTENTIALITY

Chari Larsson
What is potentiality for Didi-­Huberman? The term was given its most
explicit treatment in the 2016 exhibition Soulèvements (Uprisings), curated
by Didi-­Huberman for the Jeu de Paume in Paris (2016b; U). In the
exhibition, Didi-­Huberman charted a trans-­historical and transnational
iconography of gestures rising up against oppression. The exhibition was
an intensification of Aby Warburg’s concept of Pathosformel (pathos
formulas; see pathos formula) analysed in L’Image survivante (2002b;
SI). For Warburg, a typology of emotional gestures survived from antiq-
uity through history. Didi-­Huberman writes, ‘gestures are transmitted,
surviving in spite of us and in spite of everything. They are our own
living fossils’ (U, 302). To rise up is a potentiality and occurs just prior to
carrying out an action, or the particular moment when desire is actualised.
Before the actualisation of the actual event, the potentiality surges forth
in the form of a gesture of protest. In this way, the notion of potentiality
is closely interconnected to Didi-­Huberman’s formulation of desire as a
productive motor for change.
The opening montage sequence of Chris Marker’s film Le fond de l’air
est rouge (1977) is a particularly helpful entry point to Didi-­Huberman’s
theorisation of potentiality, as the film was featured in the exhibition and
discussed in the catalogue. Marker creates juxtapositions between scenes
drawn from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin and contempo-
rary news footage of demonstrations drawn from the 1960s and 1970s.
Marker draws a strong visual parallel between mourners of the 1962
Charonne metro station massacre and the lamentation sequence com-
memorating Vakulinchuk’s death in Potemkin. Marker’s notes, quoted by
Didi-­Huberman, substantiate Didi-­Huberman’s thesis that gestures are
forms of potentialities: ‘Burial of the dead of Charonne [. . .] A woman
wipes her eyes. Potemkin: close-­up of a woman wiping her eyes, finishing
the gesture of the woman of Charonne’ (U, 290). In line with Warburg’s
theorisation of Pathosformel, the gesture is indestructible, as it re-­emerges
across temporalities and nationalities.
Didi-­Huberman makes a careful distinction between potentiality (puis-
sance) and power (pouvoir). For instance, the French Revolution is
understood in terms of pouvoir, where a monarchic power is replaced by a
182 psychoanalysis 

republican power (U, 311). Working against this, the desire to rise up in
protest is considered by Didi-­Huberman as a form of potentiality (puis-
sance). He writes:

When a people rises up (or even, in order for a people to rise up), the people
must always start from a situation of ‘unpower’. To rise up would then be the
gesture through which the subjects of unpower would give rise, in themselves, to
something like a fundamental potency (puissance) that would erupt or re-­emerge.
(U, 311)

It is important to recognise that Didi-­Huberman is explicitly positioning

his theorisation of the gesture against Giorgio Agamben’s influential
account of potentiality. In Désirer désobéir, Didi-­Huberman argues that
Agamben turns ‘good wine into vinegar’ (2019a: 142) by neutralising
the people’s potentiality to rise up against oppression. Working against
Agamben, Didi-­Huberman delineates an intellectual lineage that reaches
from Deleuze, Nietzsche and Spinoza to Aristotle’s distinction between
potentiality and actuality in Metaphysics. Didi-­Huberman observes that
for Aristotle, potentiality is the principle of process and change and
‘[e]verything moves, everything changes, and the intrinsic motor must be
called dynamis, potency or potentiality (puissance)’ (U, 313).

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Kathia Hanza
Psychoanalytic theory has been a key influence on Didi-­Huberman’s phi-
losophy of image and visuality. As he argues, ‘[i]t is with the dream and the
symptom that Freud smashed the box of representation. And with them
that he opened, which is to say rent and liberated, the notion of image’
(CI, 144) (see dream; image; representation; symptom). Sigmund
Freud shows that in dreams and symptoms the categorial apparatus is
incoherent and ­dislocated – ­their ‘logic’, if there is any, is shown not to be
ruled by judgement (as articulated in the Kantian tradition). This rupture
coincides with a negative theory of subjectivity: the subject is no longer
the sole legislator of their judgements. As such, dreams and symptoms
radically challenge the notion of a subject as a holder and possessor of con-
scious knowledge. Rather, through his espousal of the psychoanalytic epis-
temic model, Didi-­Huberman repudiates the Kantian conception of ‘the
object of knowledge as a simple image of the discourse that pronounces it
and judges it’ (CI, 139; emphasis in the original) (see knowledge; object).
 psychoanalysis  183

Thanks to Freud, images cannot be taken as simple objects of discourse.

There are three issues discussed by Freud concerning the psychic life
that have been particularly generative for addressing the peculiar logic of
images. The first is ‘dream-­work’ (Traumarbeit). In the sixth chapter of
The Interpretation of Dreams (1953), Freud explores the processes through
which the unconscious unfolds in images. Freud’s reflection on ‘figur-
ability’ (see figuration), or ‘considerations of representability’ (Rücksicht
auf Darstellbarkeit), as the oneiric conversion of dream-­thoughts into
‘pictorial and concrete’ items (1953: 339), is a necessary theoretical pas-
sageway to Didi-­Huberman’s understanding of the paradoxical logic of
images (Hagelstein, 2005: 85). Images, like Freudian dreams, appear to
the subject as fragmented, as shreds put together, and as rend (CI, 146).
Didi-­Huberman picks up on Freud’s remark about ‘omission’ (Auslassung)
being one of the identifying markers of dream-­work, in particular with
regard to the mechanism of condensation, insofar as a dream is not a
‘point-­for-­point projection’ of the unconscious wish, but its deficient,
‘fragmentary and incomplete’ rendition (1953: 281). For Didi-­Huberman,
this omission is a kind of remnant or a ‘vestige’: the sole survival, simulta-
neously a sovereign remainder and the trace of an erasure; a visual agent of
disappearance. Which makes it possible for Freud to conclude in turn that
a dream is no more a translation aiming at ‘legibility’ than it is a figurative
drawing aiming at ‘visibility’ (CI, 146–7) (see survival).
The second issue is Freud’s concept of the symptom and symptom-­
formation (Symptombildung), which helps disentangle images from the
enunciative, representative or mimetic paradigm. Regarding images as
well as symptoms, one ought to ask how to address the singular, which
is ‘borne [. . .] by a symbolic structure, but always interrupting or dis-
placing its regularity’ (CI, 30). Such an inflection in regularity ‘requires
the juncture between two seemingly foreign points of view, the point of
view of the structure and the point of view of the e­ vent – i­n other words
the opening made in the structure’ (CI, 30). This opening implies for
Didi-­Huberman acceptance of difference in its magnitude, as well as
developing the conceptual tools necessary to handle its concrete, sin-
gular manifestations. The ‘overdetermination’ (Überdeterminierung) of
the symptom, that is, the fact that it is an effect of plural and conflicting
determinations (Freud, 1953: 306–7), becomes a productive heuristic tool
in imaginal analysis.
The ‘overdetermination’ of images is manifest and present from the
start in many works by Didi-­Huberman (cf. IH). Paraphrasing James
Joyce, Didi-­Huberman postulates that overdetermination is built into the
‘ineluctable rift of seeing’ (1992b: 9). In Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous
regarde (1992b), he analyses it in relation to the works of Tony Smith and
184 psychoanalysis 

Robert Morris. Across a range of other texts (DM, AA, SI), he draws
on the category of the symptom to analyse the work of Aby Warburg.
Elsewhere, he also approaches visual overdetermination through an
analysis of what he calls ‘an aporia of detail’ in Johannes Vermeer’s paint-
ing The Lacemaker (AN, 159). Pointing to a red colour stain, a ‘pan’ or a
‘patch’, Didi-­Huberman describes it as an ‘[intrusive] pictorial moment’,
which acquires the philosophical status of a sovereign accident (a ‘sovereign
product of chance’) (AN, 154; emphases in the original). Like a Freudian
symptom, it does not carry referential meaning, but nevertheless bears and
exerts a force.
The third aspect of psychoanalytic theory that has influenced Didi-­
Huberman’s work is Freud’s concept of desire. Bound to the notions of
dream-­work and symptom-­formation, in the work of Didi-­Huberman
desire underlies the postulate of radical openness to works of art (2018a:
97). The concept of desire is of key importance in Invention of Hysteria
since it sheds light on the condition of excessive and uncontrollable
emotionality, which was at the origins of psychoanalysis. Jean-Martin
Charcot isolated hysteria as a gnoseological object, and, working across
iconographic, clinical and epistemological discourses, ‘invented’ hysteria
by situating it at the interstices of the regime of neuropsychiatric observa-
tion and photographic forms of medical documentation. Didi-­Huberman
argues that ‘[a] reciprocity of charm was instituted between physicians,
with their insatiable desire for images of Hysteria, and hysterics, who
willingly participated and actually raised the stakes through their increas-
ingly theatricalized bodies. In this way, hysteria in the clinic became the
spectacle, the invention of hysteria’ (IH, xi).
Importantly, Didi-­Huberman’s approach is not a ‘psychoanalytic inter-
pretation’ of latent or manifest contents of images (Décarie, 2015). Rather,
he makes critical use of the epistemological and heuristic model of psycho-
analysis, which is partly why he also takes interest in the work of Jacques
Lacan and Pierre Fédida. Didi-­Huberman (2005a; CI, 157–8) shares
with Fédida the view that the importance of the dream paradigm is not the
recovery of the hidden content or object of the dream, but, rather, that it
rests in the interpretative procedure, or what Fédida calls the ‘solicitation
to interpret’ (1983: 6) and requires attention to the workings of the distor-
tive mechanisms. In turn, Lacan has been important to Didi-­Huberman
because of his notion of the ‘elision of the gaze’ and ‘alienation’ (Lacan,
1998; Didi-­Huberman, 1985a) (see gaze). The elision of the gaze is a way
of dialectising gaze (see dialectic), by way of sustaining its oppositions
and contradictions. When Didi-­Huberman asserts the incongruity of
‘seeing an image’ and ‘conscious knowing’ (CI, 140), he also suggests that
the choice between these two positions would be akin to an ‘alienation’
 rancière, jacques 185

and that ‘the desire [. . .] to look’ means to ‘lose the unity of an enclosed
world [and] to find himself in the uncomfortable opening of a universe
henceforth suspended’.

Works Cited
Décarie, I. (2015). ‘“Images pour que notre main s’émeuve”. Regard,
écriture et survivance chez Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Études françaises,
51(2): 101–18.
Fédida, P. (1983). ‘La sollicitation à interpréter’, L’Écrit du temps, 4: 4–19.
Freud, S. (1953). The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. IV (1900), ed. J. Strachey, ix–627. Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-­analysis.
Hagelstein, M. (2005). ‘Georges Didi-­ Huberman: une esthétique du
symptôme’, Daímon. Revista de filosofía, 34: 81–96.
Lacan, J. (1998). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans.
A. Sheridan. W. W. Norton.

R
RANCIÈRE, JACQUES

Stijn De Cauwer
As two of the most prominent and prolific theorists of images, often
writing on similar topics, Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-­Huberman
have repeatedly referred to each other’s works and entered into dialogue
with other, both in writing and during conferences. During these dia-
logues they have respectfully formulated their diverging opinions. Didi-­
Huberman briefly takes Rancière’s theories into account in Images in Spite
of All, where he comments on Rancière’s writings on the role of history in
the cinematic work of Jean-Luc Godard and his criticisms of the alleged
unrepresentability of certain topics in the arts (ISA, 147–9, 156–7).
Rancière dismisses the claims made by Claude Lanzmann and others
that the Holocaust cannot be represented by means of images, writing:
‘There is no unrepresentable as a property of the event. There are only
choices’ (2009: 129). Didi-­Huberman finds himself in agreement with this
view, claiming that we have an obligation to look at the Sonderkommando
186 r a n c i è r e , j a c q u e s

photographs taken in Auschwitz-­Birkenau and use our imagination to

try to understand (ISA, 3).
In recent years, Rancière and Didi-­Huberman have commented on
each other’s theories in greater detail, most extensively in Rancière’s text
‘Images Re-­Read: The Method of Georges Didi-­Huberman’ (2018) and
Didi-­Huberman’s reply to this text in the form of a letter, titled ‘Image,
Language, The Other Dialectic’ (IL). Rancière’s critical analysis focuses
on Didi-­Huberman’s reading of Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer in The Eye
of History: When Images Take Position (2017). Brecht’s War Primer con-
sists of photographs from the Second World War to which Brecht added a
stanza in order to help us to ‘read’ the images. Rancière’s critique centres
on the specific potentialities that Didi-­Huberman attributes to images,
namely that they are active, display traces of various anachronistic and
dialectical temporalities and that they transmit pathos, which can incite
the desire in the viewer to take action. In the view of Rancière, the dia-
lectics that Didi-­Huberman sees at work in War Primer is not the same
as Brecht’s more Marxist dialectic. According to Rancière, Brecht’s verses
do all the explaining, while the photograph is simply there. Ultimately,
the photograph is passive, while all the activity is in the words. When
Didi-­Huberman sees a different dialectic at work in War Primer, namely
a montage of images that ‘take position’, revealing dialectically traces of
various temporalities, a time of oppression as well as a time of resistance
and uprising, he is attempting, in the view of Rancière, to credit a more
active role to images than Brecht did. However, Didi-­Huberman needs
all the words of his poetic writing style to evoke this activity. Rancière
concludes that Didi-­Huberman’s books are about the montage of others,
in which he needs all the power of his words to evoke the activity that he
credits to images (2018: 17).
In a contribution to the catalogue of the Uprisings exhibition, titled ‘One
Uprising Can Hide Another’, Rancière makes a similar critique of the
division between activity and passivity when it comes to images. He argues
that some words, such as ‘uprising’, ‘seem to already have accomplished
what they refer to’, though he finds the transition from the pathos that
surrounds certain words to action that some take for granted questionable
(2016: 62). Even Eisenstein, who Didi-­Huberman prominently refers to,
knew this, which is exemplified by the anecdote that during the premiere
of Battleship Potemkin, he wanted to have an actual ship tear open and
burst out of the screen. Rancière concludes that on the screen ‘there are
only images. And images do not rise up’ (2016: 68).
In ‘Image, Language, The Other Dialectic’, Didi-­Huberman responds
to these criticisms by questioning the stark division that Rancière
makes between passive images and active words. He responds that his
 rancière, jacques 187

dialectical approach takes into consideration ‘the visual consistency of

the image beyond its strictly representative function’ and ‘the imagina-
tive power of language beyond its strictly argumentative function’ (IL,
19). Rancière reduces Brecht’s War Primer to a simple juxtaposition of
images and words, but Didi-­Huberman argues that Brecht’s work brings
multiple images and words into play, which opens up a multitude of
associations. Furthermore, Didi-­Huberman clarifies that he does not
think that pathos or emotions are literally in the images, but pathos, emo-
tions and desires are entangled with images, and it is this entanglement,
or ‘implexity’ as he also calls it, as such that he aims to study (IL, 22).
This approach is influenced by the work of Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, a
thinker who Rancière has never shown an interest in, who wrote: ‘Every
analysis that disentangles renders unintelligible’ (Merleau-­Ponty, 1968:
268).
Didi-­Huberman ends his reply by challenging Rancière to clarify what
precisely he means with the phrase that is central to his work: the distribu-
tion of the sensible. In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière defines this as
‘the system of self-­evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously
discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations
that define the respective parts and positions within it’ (2004: 12). There
is a division in what is considered to be common in society and who can
partake in it, a division that can be challenged. For Rancière, ‘Politics
revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who
has the ability to see and the talent to speak’ (2004: 13). Didi-­Huberman
acknowledges that the aspect of ‘distribution’ (partage) is indeed present
in Rancière’s work, both in the sense of sharing (such as in his theories
about democracy) and in the sense of dividing (for example, in his writ-
ings on disagreement or dissensus). In Proletarian Nights (2012), Rancière
analysed the diversity of aesthetic activities of workers in the nineteenth
century, challenging the prevailing reductive representations of workers.
However, Didi-­Huberman questions what Rancière, who is always cau-
tious about overly poetic and lyrical claims about images, understands
by the ‘sensible’. In Didi-­Huberman’s view, ‘the sensible presupposes
the body, the body shakes with gestures, the gestures channel emotions,
emotions do not occur without the unconscious, and the unconscious
itself implies a node of psychological temporalities’ (IL, 22). He concludes
that to understand the multiple entanglements dialectically at work in a
montage of images, in which critique is combined with a poetic form, we
need to use our imagination.
188 r e n d ( d é c h i r u r e )

Works Cited
Brecht, B. (2017). War Primer, trans. S. S. Brecht. Verso.
Merleau-­Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis.
Northwestern University Press.
Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the
Sensible, trans. G. Rockhill. Continuum.
Rancière, J. (2009). The Future of the Image, trans. G. Elliott. Verso.
Rancière, J. (2012). Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-
Century France, trans. J. Drury. Verso.
Rancière, J. (2016). ‘One Uprising Can Hide Another’, trans. S. B. Lillis,
in Uprisings, exhibition catalogue, 62–70. Gallimard/Jeu de Paume.
Rancière, J. (2018). ‘Images Re-­read. The Method of Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, trans. E. Woodard, J. R. Solorzano, S. De Cauwer and
L. K. Smith, Angelaki, 23(4): 11–18.

REND (DÉCHIRURE)

Patrick ffrench
In his response to the criticisms of his writing on the ‘four pieces of film
snatched from hell’ that makes up the first part of Images in Spite of All,
Didi-­Huberman writes that in contrast to those who hold to the ‘mimetic
illusion’, his own work has ‘from the beginning [. . .] taken the opposite
direction, that of the tear-image [image-déchirure]’ (ISA, 79). He goes on
to qualify this direction as a ‘dialectical stirring together of the veil with its
rip’ (ISA, 80). The motif of the tear, rip or rend, the activity of rending
(déchirure, déchirement, déchirer), of the ‘tearing experience’ (expérience-
déchirante; ISA, 81) or of ‘torn consciousness’ (conscience déchirée; 1985:
128–9) are thus foregrounded in Didi-­Huberman’s work as spatial and
material figurations of the mode of addressing the image that he advocates.
It is not only therefore a question of pointing to and witnessing the crisis
of representation, the rent image as such, but also its rending effect and
affect (2019e: 434). The rend thus extends beyond the object to the modus
operandi of Didi-­Huberman’s writing.
Drawing explicit impetus from the work and thought of Georges
Bataille (see Didi-­Huberman, 2019e), the motif is particularly salient in
the earlier work; the fourth part of Confronting Images, ‘Image as Rend’,
exhorts its readers to ‘think the fabric of representation with its rend’
(CI, 144) and ‘to think the rend as part of the fabric’ (CI, 8), a figural
rendering of the more abstract proposition to ‘think the thesis with its
 representation  189

antithesis’ or to open a space for the negative, ‘that includes the power of
the negative within it’ (CI, 146). To rend is thus an act through which to
open up the Kantian schema of representation (figured as a box of mirrors
and as a magic circle; CI, 139; see Kant, Immanuel), and to fracture
its speculative self-­sufficiency. The rend operates between knowing and
seeing, opening knowledge to what there is to see but also to a ‘dark’ effi-
cacy on ‘this side’ of the image, the process of its making and becoming
visible (CI, 142–3). This is to think Kant with Freud; alongside Bataille,
Didi-­Huberman credits Freud as the most significant thinker of the image
as rend, highlighting the latter’s conception of the dream-­image as a
non-­graphic distortion (Entstellung) and its status as ‘work’, thus as trans-
formative process (CI, 144; see Freud, Sigmund). Freud’s dream-­work
also informs Didi-­Huberman’s proposition of a notion of resemblance dif-
ferent from that proposed by classical mimesis, one that eschews unity and
instead privileges a ‘work of figuration envisaged with its rend – its rend at
work’ (CI, 153). The rending of resemblance and mimetic self-­sufficiency
also informs the violence of Didi-­Huberman’s approach to the motif of
incarnation in the early work La Peinture incarnée (1985). The rend thus
operates persistently throughout Didi-­Huberman’s writing and thought
and stands out as an emblem of the conceptual and material shifts he seeks
to make in the discourse of the theory and history of art.

REPRESENTATION

Chari Larsson
One of the ongoing preoccupations that have underwritten Didi-­
Huberman’s project is a concern with representation. In Confronting
Images he writes, ‘we are frequently tempted (and more than ever since
Vasari) to fold all resemblance into the model of the mimetic drawing
of the Renaissance’ (CI, 150). Representation, mimesis and imitation
are frequently used interchangeably, and one of Didi-­Huberman’s most
important achievements is to criticise mimesis as art history’s default
mode for understanding representation. He reminds us that the complex-
ity of the term is continuously at risk of being flattened or homogenised.
Didi-­Huberman’s critique is part of a broader conversation and must
be understood as a shared commitment to rethinking mimesis by the
Strasbourg circle of scholars including Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe, Jean-­
Luc Nancy and Mikkel Borch-­Jacobsen. If we were to reach back further,
it is this critique that loosely connects the philosophical projects of
Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In this context,
190 representation 

Didi‑Huberman’s research is committed to advancing the previous gen-

eration’s commitment to overcoming Platonism. For Didi-­Huberman,
this is the latent idealism bequeathed to art’s history. This line of thought
descends from Plato, who criticised images as secondary and derivative, as
opposed to higher Forms.
Didi-­Huberman has taken up the question of representation in various
ways over the decades. An early example is his 1984 essay ‘L’Indice de la
plaie absente: monographie d’une tache’ (1984b: 151–63; IA), where he
discusses Secondo Pia’s 1894 photograph of the holy shroud of Turin that
revealed Christ’s face. The photograph functioned as evidential proof of
being in direct contact with the body of Christ. Didi-­Huberman, however,
does not offer a straightforward reading of the index as formulated in
Peircean terms. Instead, he works to decouple the index’s relationship
from its origin and presence. Didi-­Huberman works in an explicitly
deconstructivist register, evoking the Derridean trace to complicate an
indexical reading of Pia’s photograph and its physical link back to Christ’s
body. This puts pressure on an entire line of thought that has laid claim
to the index’s authority and its privileged relationship to the referent, and
that includes writers as diverse as André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Rosalind
Krauss and Susan Sontag. With echoes of Nancy’s deconstruction of
Christianity, the index is instead formulated by Didi-­Huberman as a form
of withdrawal and loss.
Another early anti-­idealist strategy deployed by Didi-­Huberman was
to recover matter from its subservience to form. In his discussion of Jan
Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (c. 1665), Didi-­Huberman identifies a zone of
red paint in the foreground that places a mimetic reading of the painting’s
representational system into crisis. In the painting, a young woman sits in
a room quietly absorbed in her work. To the left of the woman’s hands lies
a bundle of threads that have escaped the confines of their wooden box and
spill out against a mass of blue fabric in ‘a sudden burst of colour’ (AN, 147).
The vermilion thread swells forward to meet the spectator’s gaze, aggres-
sively asserting itself against the receding blue. Didi-­Huberman argues
that the paint betrays its representational task, affirming the signifier’s
materiality against the immateriality of the signified. He argues that while
Vermeer ‘may not push visual recognition and the attribution of meaning
in general into aporia, he leaves it in a critical state at the very least’ (AN,
154–5).
In the early 2000s, Didi-­Huberman’s project made a distinctive turn, as
his gaze shifted from issues pertaining to imitation and mimesis to episte-
mology under the broad rubric that constitutes representation. His com-
mitment to an anti-­idealism helps us understand why Aby Warburg’s
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Mnemosyne Atlas) has occupied such a central
 richter, gerhard  191

position in his research. Drawing from a diverse range of sources includ-

ing his photo library, contemporary press images, maps and even postage
stamps, Warburg assembled and reassembled collections of images. For
Didi-­Huberman, the Atlas’s radicality lies in its ability to disrupt an entire
aesthetic and epistemological tradition originating with Plato. He writes
that ‘[t]he great Platonic tradition promised an epistemic model founded
on the preeminence of the Idea: True knowledge supposes, in this context,
that an intelligible sphere was extracted beforehand f­rom – o­ r purified
­of – t­he sensible space, of images therefore, where phenomena appear
to us’ (AA, 4). In line with Didi-­Huberman’s commitment to rethinking
the possibilities of what representation can be, the Atlas is an epistemo-
logical form of montage and has the capacity to reconfigure thought and
knowledge. Working against illustrating a higher ‘truth’, the possible
combinations of images are theoretically inexhaustible and unpredictable.
At odds with the Platonic tradition that prioritised the purity of the idea,
the Atlas is considered instead to be an impure form of knowledge. An
atlas of images does not merely illustrate a pre-­existing idea but is active
in its construction.

RICHTER, GERHARD

Miguel Mesquita Duarte

Panels 807 and 808 of Gerhard Richter’s Atlas display the four
Sonderkommando photographs thoroughly examined by Didi-­
Huberman in Images in Spite of All. Making use of reproductions directly
taken from Didi-­Huberman’s book and experimenting with crops and the
rotation of the photographs, Richter gave these panels from 2013 the title
Birkenau Studies. They were at the basis of Birkenau, a series of four large-­
scale abstract paintings produced in 2014, constituting the only series
of paintings directly related to Holocaust imagery to be concluded and
publicly exhibited by Richter. The documentation of the work’s progress
demonstrates that Richter started by projecting and copying the photo-
graphs on to canvases, and that the subsequent application of multiple
layers of paint, blends and scratches gave the final pictures an entropic and
stratified appearance, characterised by striations of grey interspersed with
progressions of reds and greens (OP, 253–5).
For Richter, ‘painting is to create an analogy for the imperceptible and
the unintelligible which thereby take form and become accessible’ (OP,
248). According to Didi-­Huberman, Richter’s Birkenau paintings appear
as a sort of elegiac overlay of a material substratum, or hypokeimenon
192 richter, gerhard 

(the ‘underlying thing’), symbolised by the Sonderkommando photos as

the underlying and unstable subject of the paintings. In their precarious
condition, the photographs are only approachable through perpetual
dislocations between subject and form, truth and concealment, inclusion
and exclusion, giving painting the meaning of a medium to explore what is
inaccessible to direct apprehension (OP, 250, 248). If Richter understood
these photographs as ‘the incriminating evidence of the Nazi extermina-
tion system’ (MAM, 44), that is not equal to saying that the paintings
reproduce the prisoners’ unique testimony. They propose, instead, a new
form of visual and mnemonic presentation that eschews both the reduc-
tion of the photographs to icons of horror and their sublimation to art.
Consequently, Richter’s engagement with the photographs is ‘the
exact opposite of trying to appropriate them and dissolving them into art’
(MAM, 49). To move from photography to painting is not simply to move
from one medium to another, says Didi-­Huberman, but to engage with
the aporetic condition of the photographs, exploring what is lacunar and
unresolvable in them (MAM, 37).
Didi-­Huberman links Richter’s Vermalung (the process of pictorial
destruction and disfiguration) to deferred action and the play of ‘laten-
cies and emergencies’ that characterise psychic memory (OP, 252) (see
Freud, Sigmund). Borrowing the notion of ‘anasemia’ from Nicolas
Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s transphenomenology and their metaphori-
cal treatment of the ‘dual unity’ of the shell and the kernel (cf. Abraham
and Torok, 1994 [1987]), Didi-­Huberman extends it into the dialectics
between visible surfaces (paradigmatically symbolised by the bark (écorce)
of the birch trees of Birkenwald), and the indecipherable condition of what
is placed ­underneath – ­that is, of what is subjected to a movement of (re-)
transcription conveying the scraps and blows of historical anamnesis (OP,
257–8, 252; cf. Derrida, 1986; Abraham and Torok, 1986 [1976]).
Thus, in Richter’s practice, to ‘get out of the plan’ is to get ‘out of the
outline through the underneath’ (OP, 253). It involves the pictorial act of
‘stripping’ (écorcement) the ‘skin-­picture’ (OP, 259) in order to reveal its
(in)visibilities and traumatic thresholds, perceived by Didi-­Huberman
as the phenomenological and ethical equivalents to the hesitations and
silences of oral witnessing (ISA, 36; BSO).

Works Cited
Abraham, N., and Torok, M. (1986 [1976]). The Wolf Man’s Magic Word.
A Cryptonymy, trans. N. Rand. University of Minnesota Press.
Abraham, N., and Torok, M. (1994 [1987]). The Shell and the Kernel:
Renewals of Psychoanalysis, trans. N. Rand. University of Chicago Press.
 screen  193

Derrida, J. (1986). ‘Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas

Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. B. Johnson, in N. Abraham and
M. Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word. A Cryptonymy, xi–xxxviii.
University of Minnesota Press.

S
SCREEN

Belén Cerezo
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, shadows are cast on the cave’s wall which
acts as a screen. Hence, the notion of the screen occupies an important
place in philosophical thinking. Still, the word ‘screen’ encompasses
various definitions and understandings that have changed, from its origin
as an object of protection in the sixteenth century to later usages related to
separating, filtering, concealing or protecting, and to the association of the
screen with ‘a surface supporting a changing representation’ (Buckley et
al., 2019: 8, 9). This understanding was a result of the arrival of spectacles
such as the phantasmagoria and later cinema, so that by the 1910s the
term screen was a metonym for the motion-­picture medium or industry
(Huhtamo, 2006: 39).
For many years now Didi-­Huberman’s writings have provided tools
for reflecting on cinema and interrogating its philosophical and political
implications (Smith, 2021: 1). Didi-­Huberman has discussed in depth
the work of several filmmakers including Harun Farocki, Pier Paolo
Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergei Eisenstein and Robert Bresson.
Farocki’s use of the split-­screen and his installations composed of two
or more screens is one the specific ways through which Didi-­Huberman
has paid attention to the understanding of screens as displays of visual
representation. Didi-­Huberman connects these installations with the
procedure of montage which is crucial in his thinking, and he affirms
that they ‘allow a very effective and healthy spatial deployment of the
processes of montage that the mono films reveal only in their tempo-
ral succession’ (RI, 85). Farocki has coined the term ‘soft montage’ to
refer to this type of montage (Farocki and Silverman, 1998: 142), of
which Jean-­Luc Godard would be the pioneer, and which he explicitly
deploys in his film Numéro Deux (1975) (Didi-­Huberman, 2010b: 153–4).
Further, soft montage could be described as an atlas-­in-­movement that,
194 s k u l l

in Didi-­Huberman’s words, ‘never hastens to conclude or to come to a

halt’ (ISA, 121).
The screen as a surface for displaying is a critical element in Aby
Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, a work that Didi-­Huberman has examined
thoroughly in The Surviving Image and Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science.
The Mnemosyne Atlas is an ever-­changing ‘photographic apparatus’ (SI,
296) that Warburg used in his lectures to unfold his arguments. The latest
form of this display was formed by wooden frames covered with black
cloth; this black cloth, this surface, was essential for provisionally affixing
black and white photographic reproductions of works of art and other
visual materials. For Didi-­Huberman, ‘the blackness of the screens, in
many cases, is an indicator of empty spaces, of missing links, of memory
gaps’ (SI, 296); it created an interval, a space-­in-­between that ‘is essen-
tial for understanding everything that the Mnemosyne Atlas invents and
employs in its manipulation of images and in the knowledge it yields’
(SI, 327).

Works Cited
Buckley, C., Campe, R., and Casetti, F. (eds) (2019). Screen Genealogies.
From Optical Device to Environmental Medium. Amsterdam University
Press.
Farocki, H., and Silverman, K. (1998). Speaking About Godard. New York
University Press.
Huhtamo, E. (2006). ‘Elements of Screenology: Towards an
Archaeology of the Screen’, Navigationen – Zeitschrift für Medien- und
Kulturwissenschaften, 6(2): 31–64.
Smith, A. (2021). Georges Didi-Huberman and Film: The Politics of the
Image. Bloomsbury.

SKULL

Ari Tanhuanpää
Didi-­Huberman’s reflections on the skull as a philosophical and artistic
object can be found in his 2000 book Être Crâne, published in English
translation in 2016 as Being a Skull: Contact, Thought, Sculpture. In this
essay, inspired by the artworks of the contemporary Italian artist Giuseppe
Penone, Didi-­Huberman delves into the depths of the union between the
soul and the body that René Descartes made the subject of his Meditations
(1641).
 skull 195

Paul Richer, Jean-Martin Charcot’s collaborator at the Salpêtrière

hospital, described the cranium as a ‘bony box’ (1971: 21). According to
Didi-­Huberman, he forgot that every magic box poses both the question
of the interior and the question of folds. Didi-­Huberman suggests that
when Leonardo da Vinci compared the skull to an onion in his drawing of
the cerebral ventricles, he understood the matter better than Richer. Da
Vinci recognised namely that ‘with the onion, the outer skin is the core’,
and that there is no hierarchy between the centre and the periphery, but
a ‘troubling solidarity, based on contact’. This opens a dialectic relation
between pia mater (the innermost membrane enveloping the brain) and
dura mater (the skull) (BS, 17–21).
In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel reflected on the relation of the
Spirit’s being-for-itself and existence, making his famous speculative
proposition that ‘[t]he being of Spirit is a bone’ (1977 [1807]:§343, 208).
In this infinite judgement the subject and the predicate are radically
incompatible. Slavoj Žižek, who reads Hegel through a Lacanian prism,
has interpreted the sentence to mean that the inert skull bone ‘by means
of its presence, fills out the void’, and is the ‘[t]hing that occupies the place
where the signifier is lacking’ (1999 [1989]: 208). For Didi-­Huberman,
the skull is a Pandora’s box inhabited by its ‘beautiful evils’. If we open it,
we expose ourselves to the danger of losing our heads and being devoured
(BS, 12). What is most intimate for the subject is also what is most foreign
to them: the Other in us (cf. Lacan, 1992 [1959–60]: 71).
Paradoxically, the skull is the ‘immediate presence of the Spirit’ (Žižek,
1999 [1989]: 208). According to Jacques Lacan, during the mirror stage of
our infancy, we become fundamentally split and alienated (1973: 185–95).
Lacan’s symbol for alienation is the vel (‘or’), which in Didi-­Huberman’s
work manifests as le pan (2008b [1985]: 47–52). Between the brain and the
skull, there is also a sort of vel. When the mind ‘encounters’ the skull, it
faces what Catherine Malabou calls a ‘counter-­thrust’ (2009 [1996]: 178);
it ‘compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it
in some other way’ (Hegel, 1977 [1807]: 39). Didi-­Huberman’s repetitive
format in the titles of the book chapters (‘Being a Box’, ‘Being an Onion’,
‘Being a Snail’, ‘Être Aître’, ‘Being a River’, ‘Being a Dig’, ‘Being a Fossil’,
‘Being a Leaf’ and ‘Being a Site’) does just that. Being is shared between
bodies, which in Penone’s artwork is stressed by his use of verbal forms
for the installations’ titles (BS, 46). We can imagine the interrelatedness
of our brain and skull as well on the basis of what Edmund Husserl called
a ‘double sensation’, Doppelempfindung (1989 [1952]: 152–4), from which
Merleau-­Ponty began to reflect on the reversibility between the touch-
ing organ and the touched object, which are not congruent, but between
which a divergence (écart) opens up (1968 [1964]: 272). This gap is part of
196 s k u l l

all contacts, including the one between the skull and the ­brain – ­as Didi-­
Huberman argues, ‘[w]hen we touch something with our hand, the exact
place where contact is made becomes invisible to us (we have to remove
our hand in order to see what we are touching). Such is the paradox spe-
cific to image-contacts, which produce their visuality itself within the event
of a blind take [prise aveugle]’ (BS, 75).
Didi-­Huberman elaborates the brain’s relation to the skull as a kind of
‘tactile blindness’ by referencing Sigmund Freud’s posthumous note
‘[t]he psyche is extended; it knows nothing of it’ (Psyche ist ausgedehnt;
weiss nichts davon) (1964 [1938]: 300). While this note has been subject
to prior philosophical reflections by Jean-­ Luc Nancy (2008 [1992]),
who sees it as a statement on the psyche’s relation to the body, Didi-­
Huberman’s intervention is due to the recognition of a tactile aspect of
the verb ausdehnen: ‘[t]he psyche is in contact, and does not know it’,
he writes (BS, 34). One could compare this strange topography to the
contact between a mould and clay and the process of ‘taking form’ (Didi-­
Huberman, 2008a: 34–5; cf. Simondon, 2017 [1958]). This is captured in
Didi-­Huberman’s analysis of Penone’s 1981 artwork Essere fiume, which
explores the ‘Being of a river’; the material ontogenesis of its form, and
the blind contacts where rocks and water currents touch each other (BS,
38, 46–7). Essere fiume brings together two temporalities of geological
plasticity and artistic sculpting. Didi-­Huberman reflects in this context
on the difficulty of recognising one’s own cranium as a sculpted object;
a ‘mold [. . .] of the mother’s genital strait’ and ‘an imprint hardened by
our own years’ (BS, 54). This requires a perspective akin to ‘turning the
glove inside out’, as Merleau-­Ponty (1968 [1964]: 263) and Lacan (2016
[1975–76]) suggested. It is as if Didi-­Huberman were trying to show that
there is a sort of reversibility between the skullbone and the spirit. He
adopts here an almost Irigarayan tone, suggesting that at hand is an act of
looking at the body from within, seeing it within the mother´s womb, and
seeing ourselves as our own m ­ atrix – ­in the ‘nascent state’ (BS, 54). Didi-­
Huberman suggests that in order to understand Penone’s sculptures, one
should imagine a skull-­site, an ‘aître’ (BS, 38, cf. Maldiney, 1975: VII–
IX) where incongruent or ‘disparate’ elements rub against each other, as
in a double sensation.

Works Cited
Freud, S. (1964 [1938]). ‘Findings, Ideas, Problems’, trans. J. Strachey,
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Vol. XXIII, ed. J. Strachey. Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-­analysis.
 sonderkommando photographs 197

Hegel. G. W. F. (1977 [1807]). Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller.

Oxford University Press.
Husserl, E. (1989 [1952]). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to
a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. T. Rojcewicz and
A. Schuwer. Kluwer.
Lacan, J. (1973). Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Le
séminaire XI. Seuil.
Lacan, J. (1992 [1959–60]). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of
Jacques Lacan, trans. D. Porter. Routledge.
Lacan, J. (2016 [1975–76]). The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book XXIII, trans. A. R. Prise. Polity.
Malabou, C. (2009 [1996]). The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality
and Dialectic, trans. L. During. Routledge.
Maldiney, H. (1975). Âitres de la langue et demeures de la pensée. L’Age de
l’Homme.
Merleau-­Ponty, M. (1968 [1964]). The Visible and the Invisible, Followed
by Working Notes, trans. A. Lingis. Northwestern University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2008 [1992]). Corpus, trans. R. A. Rand. Fordham University
Press.
Richer, P. (1971). Artistic Anatomy, trans. R. B. Hale. Watson-­Guptill.
Simondon, G. (2017 [1958]). On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,
trans. C. Malaspina and J. Rogove. Univocal.
Žižek, S. (1999 [1989]). The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso.

SONDERKOMMANDO PHOTOGRAPHS

Robert Harvey
A set of four photographs are the only ones known to have been taken
by victims of the Nazi extermination while it was in process and to have
survived obliteration. The film was exposed in August 1944 and smuggled
out of Auschwitz in a toothpaste tube. From what they show as a group
and in their original framing, the viewer can see what it is impossible to see:
the gas chambers in operation and glimpses of the immediate environs of
this industry. Bridging the infra-­thin divide between an ‘impossible’ image
that the imagination might construct from tangible images is the focus
of Didi-­Huberman’s powerful Images in Spite of All.
Images in Spite of All expands on the catalogue essay Didi-­Huberman
wrote for Mémoire des camps, an exhibition in 2001 of concentration
camp photographs at the Hôtel de Sully. This set off a polemic insti-
gated by writers at Les Temps modernes whose editor-­in-­chief was Claude
198 sonderkommando photographs

Lanzmann. Lanzmann’s epic film, Shoah (1985), had made a point of

using no archival material. For Didi-­Huberman, the Sonderkommando
photographs, when the critical work of imagination is brought to bear on
them, refute claims pertaining to the unimaginable.
It is known that the four photographs in question were snapped at
Birkenau’s Crematorium V: two from within a gas chamber (ISA, 12–13),
two outside (ISA, 13–14). If the first two images, from a position of only
partial potential visibility, were captured in haste, the second two must
have been made on the run: ‘image[s] on the gallop’, as Didi-­Huberman
calls them in Aperçues (2018: 20–1). The fourth in the series (ISA, 14)
captures only the black silhouettes of a few trees. Together, they suggest
to the mind a moving picture of those few moments of resistance against
Goebbels’ prohibition of any evidence of their atrocities.
On display at the Auschwitz-­Birkenau State Museum in Oświecim,
Poland, these images are credited to an anonymous photographer. From
survivor testimony, Didi-­Huberman conveys what we know about this
Greek prisoner known as ‘Alex’ and the circumstances under which he
made and managed to get the photos out of the extermination camp (ISA,
9–17). If ‘Alex’ was in the gas chamber during those moments, it was
because he was a member of the Sonderkommando. Two of the tasks to
which this ‘special unit’ was assigned were pulling gassed bodies out of
the death chamber and incinerating them. Two of the photographs bear
witness simultaneously to both tasks: the views are trained on bodies that
we can see being hauled and dropped by other Sonderkommando labourers
into a fiery pit, and the oblique opening of the gas chamber thickly frames
this hellish vision, suggesting where those people being burned had just
been gassed moments before.
In the analysis Didi-­Huberman meticulously offers in Images in Spite of
All, the Sonderkommando images are inextricable from a matrix of issues
hovering around witnessing. ‘Witness to all the last moments’ (ISA, 4),
members of the ‘special unit’ were the most potent and irrefutable wit-
nesses to the atrocity. Knowing this perfectly well and bent, as they were,
on making the Endlösung an event without witness, the Nazis took care
to regularly eliminate the Jews who made up the Sonderkommando. Were
none to have survived (in fact, about twenty did), the four photographic
documents would become silent, ‘inanimate’ witnesses in their p ­ lace –
­rich in testimony for those who would read them, eloquent for those who
would listen to them.
The subterfuge carried out by ‘Alex’ and his accomplices and the
survival of the four photographs converge at the nexus of witnessing and
the preservation of eyewitness testimony when no witnesses are meant
to survive. Or, as Didi-­Huberman puts it, ‘in the fold between [. . .] two
 survival  199

complementary constraints: the ineluctable obliteration of the witness

himself and the fear that the testimony itself too would be obliterated’
(ISA, 6). Before the four furtively snapped shots, Didi-­Huberman puts
his skills of observation to work, entering as far as any witness of today can
into what David Rousset named ‘the concentrationary universe’ (1982).
A cursory glance at a few titles reveals how Didi-­Huberman’s work with
the four Sonderkommando photos resonates in his considerable oeuvre.
Already in 2002, in studying Aby Warburg, he was referring to the
survival of images (SI). Lending the title ‘Eye of History’ to a series of
six monographs to date pays tribute to the brave Sonderkommando. Just as
‘Alex’ exposed himself (PEPE) to immediate death by positioning himself
(EH) and his camera as best he could in order to take a risky position vis-­
à-vis the Nazi prohibition of all images of the Shoah, Didi-­Huberman,
in turn, and on the basis of these four photographs, took position with
respect to Claude Lanzmann’s cultish foreclosure of presentability.
To the extent that this set of photographs provides guideposts for a
narrative, they tend to allow a convergence between film and photogra-
phy. The suture holding moving images together and articulating them
is montage. As powerfully as the survivors’ words bearing testimony
in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, under Didi-­Huberman’s critical eye the
Sonderkommando photographs constitute a ‘cited past’ (cf. 2015b) that
lives on in the witnesses we should be today.

Works Cited
Lanzmann, C. (dir.) (1985). Shoah.
Rousset, D. (1982). The Other Kingdom, trans. R. Guthrie. Howard Fertig.

SURVIVAL

Maud Hagelstein
The concept of ‘survival’ runs through Didi-­Huberman’s entire theoreti-
cal work, from epistemological considerations to the more political devel-
opments of his theory of the image (see images). However, the survivals
that he finds in the history of images are not identical repetitions, nor are
they archetypes, and it would be a serious error of analysis of his work (and
that of historian Aby Warburg from whom he borrowed the concept) to
believe this. Survivals are not manifestations of a maintenance or a stabil-
ity of meaning. It is not the order of the Same that is expressed in them;
it is not a reassuring permanence, but rather a symptom of ‘temporal
200 survival 

disorientation’. In The Surviving Image, Didi-­Huberman reminds us that

survival (Nachleben) is first of all a concept of Anglo-­Saxon anthropology,
borrowed from British ethnologist Edward B. Tylor:

The ‘permanence of culture’ is not expressed as an essence, a global characteristic,

or an archetype, but, on the contrary, as a symptom, an exceptional characteristic,
something displaced. The tenacity of the survivals, their very ‘power’, as Tylor
says, comes to light in the tenuousness of minuscule, superfluous, derisory, or
abnormal things. It is in the recurrent symptom, in games, in the pathology of
language, and in the unconsciousness of forms that survival as such is to be found.
(SI, 30)

By focusing on the behaviours of forms, Warburg strategically shifted the

focus on to the problem of their plasticity, underlining the echoes and
resonances on the one hand, but identifying a whole system of differences
and variations on the other. The concept of survival allows us to think
about continuity and fractures at the same time. The survival of a form,
and especially the survival of an antique form in the Renaissance, refers to
its critical recovery by an artist who stumbles upon it as on a root sticking
out of the ground, and inevitably transforms it: survival does not define
a model, or a motif borrowed from ancient art which might be replicated
identically, according to the standard schema of mimesis (imitation). This
concept seeks to think, on the contrary, about the extreme or ‘radical’
plasticity of forms of art, in the sense of the powerful metaphor used
by Didi-­Huberman in Aperçues: ‘we do not go “to the root” because the
root does not exist: there are only roots, a necessarily indefinite, pullulat-
ing and incalculable, vivid and sometimes monstrous quantity of roots’
(2018a: 177). Art is indeed woven with borrowings from distant eras
(underground eras), but it is also punctuated by deviations. To study art
history as a movement, as a trajectory, to show how art developed along
the lines of an infinite number of migrations, means, from the perspective
of Warburg and followed by Didi-­Huberman, to draw, to map out a whole
system of gaps and twists, a somewhat mad ‘tree of derivation’, to borrow
an expression from Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge.
The Mnemosyne Atlas has this function. It allowed Warburg to draw
anew the ‘radical’ vitality of artistic forms, their perseverance, their vital-
ity, the way in which they refuse (themselves) and adapt at the same time.
This history is, of course, a history of phantoms, of beings on the crest
that separates existence and absence, since the surviving form survives
above all its own death (SI, 37).
What ‘survives’? That which is strongest and best adapted? Not neces-
sarily. Sometimes things survive which might easily have succumbed,
 survival  201

from not being captured by the gaze. Not only did Warburg not discount
­contradictions – t­ he moments in which, for example, a secularised culture
reconnects with pagan ­beliefs – ­but he enjoyed looking for the flaws,
the exceptions, the moments when the dominant explanatory system is
shown to be defective. Culture is always already complicated by all kinds
of exteriorities, by the unknown that insists from far away. Culture does
not resist its inevitable contamination, the times and the influences that
it crosses, and from these incessant crossings there emerge ‘enigmatic
organisms’. The images studied by Warburg can rarely be assigned and
assimilated to a precise (social and historical) identity culture, for which
they would be the authorised representatives. Transformation alone is
permanent. Didi-­Huberman is the heir to this idea, and the knowledge
concerning the image that he has built over these forty years seeks to be
on the same level.
Survival in Didi-­Huberman’s work has gained a critical and political
aspect of its own. This is seen in the title of a work that not only solicits
this difficult concept, but defends the idea of a space of resistance specific
to art and popular culture – Survival of the Fireflies. Didi-­Huberman
knows that political reason is made up of images, in the same way that the
‘imagination is political’, in other words that ‘in our way of imagining lies
a fundamental condition of our way of doing politics’ (SF, 30).
With an unfailing attentiveness, close to that of Walter Benjamin or
Hannah Arendt, Didi-­Huberman distanced the concept of survival from
a messianism that would have been inconsistent. Even if it survives in
dark times, survival does not indicate a salvation with which we could be
content, or that might recreate a light without shade on forgotten cultural
motifs.

Only religious tradition promises a salvation beyond all apocalypse and beyond all
destruction of human things. Survivals, though, concern only the immanence of
historical time: they have no redemptive value. And as to their revelatory value,
it is always spotty, in flickers: symptomatic, to be honest. Survivals promise no
resurrection (what meaning could one expect from raising a ghost?) They are
nothing but glimmers, flashes, passing in the shadows, never the advent of a great
‘light of lights’. Because they teach us that d
­ estruction – e­ ven ongoing d
­ estruction
– ­is never absolute, survivals spare us from believing that a ‘last’ revelation or a
‘final’ salvation is necessary for our freedom. (SF, 42)

Works of art are full of survivals, that is to say they are full of desire, of
the desire to live. They are perforated with elements that insist, that stand
their ground, that leave traces (we find the layers and the passage of migra-
tions). With regard to Ninfa (see nymph), the young servant carrying a
202 symptom 

basket of fruit on her head in the fresco by Domenico Ghirlandaio at Santa

Maria Novella, Warburg wondered where he had already seen it, and
wondered about its ‘anamnestic content’:

This very young woman occurred in the image unexpectedly, breaking with her
strangeness the economy of representation which surrounded ­her – ­the Christian
imagery of the birth of Saint John the B
­ aptist – a­ nd this from something like a
very early Antiquity, as though the two temporalities of suddenly and since a very
long time were superimposed in the same event or figurative symptom. (2018a:
160)

Survival is defined as an overwhelming phenomenon which renders dis-

traught and tormented. Didi-­Huberman, both seduced and shaken by the
‘dangerous fluidity’ of the figure of Ninfa, has sought to put himself to the
test of these torments (see 2002a; 2015c; 2017c; 2019c). If survivals must
be excavated as such, looked at head on, it is above all because in art, as
elsewhere, there is always something left over, ‘so we should be wary of
grand discourses that begin by declaring the disappearance of all kinds of
things’ (2018a: 176).
Translated by Shane Lillis

SYMPTOM

Magdalena Krasińska
The symptom is a very important concept in Didi-­Huberman’s critical
reflection on the perception of art. It appears in numerous works, from
Invention of Hysteria to Confronting Images to The Surviving Image. The
essay ‘Of Images and Ills’ recapitulates the implementation of the concept
of the symptom in Didi-­Huberman’s critical method of art history
and imaginal analysis (it was written as a postface to the 2012 edition of
Invention de l’hystérie). In the essay Didi-­Huberman reminisces that his
research interests developed in the direction of the painful experience of
an image (see pathos), by which he means a disturbed experience that
cannot be reduced to a result, a synthesis, an incontestable interpretation
or the recognition of a specific symbol within the work (II, 440–1).
In Didi-­Huberman’s approach, the notion of the symptom is situated
as a counterpart to symbolic function and constitutes a crucial component
of his critical study of the history of art as knowledge (see art criti-
cism; art history).Adapted from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis,
the notion of the symptom in Didi-­Huberman’s writings in not used in
 symptom  203

a clinical sense, but, rather, it is a category that belongs to the critique of

knowledge insofar as it signifies ‘the unpredictable and immediate passage
of a body into the aberrant, critical state’ (CI, 260). Importantly, contrary
to the category of signs, with symptoms, gestures lose their clear repre-
sentational function. In Freudian thought, symptom includes the work of
a hidden structure; it is antithetical, but not devoid of sense. As a semio-
logical entity, the symptom is therefore located between an event and a
structure; its meaning is not stable, but, at most, a puzzle or a pointer.
That which the symptom expresses does not allow any sort of transcrip-
tion, because the symptom is a rupture: it ‘speaks to us of the insistence
and return of the singular in the regular [. . .] of the rupture of equilibrium
and of a new equilibrium, an unprecedented equilibrium that soon will
break itself again’ (CI, 162). For this reason, the symptom as a hermeneu-
tic category requires a continuing renewal of interpretation. Confronted
with the symptom, the theory of art faces a different task, which is not
distinguishing the symptom from the symbol, but capturing the moment
‘in which knowledge of the symbol is traumatized and interrupts itself in
the face of the not-­knowledge of the symptom’ (CI, 180). This ‘opens and
propels’ the rich symbolicity of visual contents ‘into an exponential spurt
of all the conditions of meaning operative in an image’ (CI, 180).
Dynamic in nature, the symptom is not reducible to knowledge; it cor-
responds to the psychoanalytic notion of work, which eventually is also
expressed ‘in the crude and material terms of the signifier’ (CI, 177–8).
At the same time, however, one is dealing here with a dispersion of asso-
ciations of sense and visualisation of ‘equivocal knots and the conjugation
of symbolic treasure with markers of not-­meaning’ (CI, 177–8). The
symptom reveals the paradoxicality and ambiguity of a painted work, in
which both the relation of negation and the relation of identity are impos-
sible to sustain: ‘the image effectively knows how to represent both the
thing and its contrary; it is impervious to contradiction and must always
come back to this’ (CI, 262). This can be followed in Didi-­Huberman’s
analysis of the details of Renaissance paintings, including Johannes
Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (c. 1665) and Girl with a Red Hat (c. 1665–67),
which are capable of ‘binding together as they do, p ­ aradoxically – b­ ut
­closely – ­the work of mimesis and that of not-­mimesis’ (CI, 262).
The ‘aesthetic of the symptom’ (CI, 264), for which Didi-­Huberman
formulates general guidelines, is supposed to give an answer to the
problem of what, in the work of art, is signifying and what is unthinkable.
As such, symptom aesthetics presumes a convergence of semiotics and
phenomenology. He writes that ‘[t]he concept of symptom is two-­faced,
being situated precisely on the boundary between two theoretical fields: a
phenomenological field and a semiological field. The whole problem of a
204 symptom 

theory of art lies in the articulation of these two fields’ (CI, 263). Siding
with only one of these ­approaches – ­one that looks only at the structure
and the system of meaning, and the other that sees in an image first and
foremost an event and an impenetrable ­matter – ­is a choice that leads to
an impoverished understanding of the image and to a diminished aesthetic
experience. As Didi-­Huberman writes, ‘it is more simply to strive to take
the measure of a work of figurability’, while recognising that ‘the relation
between the figure and its own “figuration” is never simple: this relation,
this work, is but a skein of paradoxes’ (CI, 262). Although the open and
torn (see rend) structure of the symptom lends to the image a specific
‘power of the negative’ (CI, 142), this negativity is reducible neither to a
simple privation nor to some kind of ineffability. Rather than inciting an
irrational poetics, silent contemplation or a nihilistic attitude, the symptom
sustains a boundary, paradoxical or dialectic status of experience itself,
‘between knowing and seeing’: ‘In no case is it a matter of replacing the
tyranny of a thesis with that of its antithesis. It’s a matter only of proceed-
ing dialectically: of thinking the thesis with its antithesis. . .’ (CI, 143–4).
Because of that, an imaginal analysis that limits itself to phenomenology
risks ‘a definitive self-­silencing, through effusiveness before that which is
beautiful [. . .] losing oneself in i­mmanence – i­n an empathic s­ ingularity
– ­of becoming inspired and mute, or indeed stupid’. At the same time,
an analysis limited to the semiological order risks ‘talking too much, and
silencing everything not strictly within its purview’ (CI, 263). For that
reason Didi-­Huberman proposes a crossing of those fields:

[s]o it is necessary to propose a phenomenology, not only of the relation to the

visible world as empathic milieu, but of the relation to meaning as structure and
specific work (which presupposes a semiology). And thus be able to propose a
semiology, not only of symbolic configurations, but also of events, or accidents,
or singularities of the pictorial image (which presupposes a phenomenology). (CI,
263–4)

The two Kantian keys mentioned by Didi-­Huberman – t­ hat is, two modes
of description of the image (and hence also of the visual experience) – are
the semiological key (via Critique of Pure Reason) and the phenomeno-
logical key (via Critique of the Power of Judgment) (see Kant, Immanuel).
Observing that the former is closer to naming (conforming to the principle
of certainty) and the latter is linked to silence (conforming to the economy
of doubt), Didi-­Huberman insists on combining both of them within the
philosophical rubric of the aesthetics of the symptom.
In The Surviving Image, the concept of the symptom is embedded in a
model of knowledge emerging from Aby Warburg’s writings. According
 taking position (prendre position) 205

to Didi-­Huberman, the montage and relational nature of the Mnemosyne

Atlas provides an alternative model for constructing a knowledge about art.
Within its framework, history (as in Walter Benjamin’s philosophy) does
not have a linear course, but is full of decompositions, ruptures, discon-
tinuities and recurrences of the unconscious. Therefore, Didi-­Huberman
distinguishes the categories of phantom, pathos (or Pathosformel) and
symptom as concepts closely related to the figure of survival (Nachleben),
questioning the positivistic and naïve methodology of historical discourse.
In the model of history proposed by Warburg ‘temporal periods are no
longer fashioned according to the academic transmission of knowledge,
but are expressed, rather, by hauntings, “survivals”, residues, and the
persistent return of ­forms – ­that is to say, by notions that do not constitute
knowledge, that are unthought, and by unconscious aspects of time’ (SI,
12). Because of this, in the context of Nachleben the image-­as-­symptom
turns out to have a specific temporal (see temporality) and phantom-­
like dimension: pictorial forms appear and disappear, are unexpected,
elude interpretation and historical periodisations. The form ‘survives, as
symptom and as phantom, its own death. Having disappeared at a certain
point in history, it reappears much later, at a moment when, perhaps, it is
not expected; it has survived, therefore, in the still poorly defined limbo
of a “collective memory”’ (SI, 36–7). This complex, layered and sympto-
matic nature of time incites an understanding images as glimpses, dynamic
events on the border of memory and non-­knowledge, rather than as closed
and stable symbolic forms.

T
TAKING POSITION (PRENDRE POSITION)

Andrzej Leśniak
The concept of ‘taking position’ addresses the question of the political
engagement of intellectuals and the efficacy of images as political actors.
It was introduced by Didi-­Huberman in Quand les images prennent posi-
tion (2009) in the context of the effects of montage, and the study of
Bertolt Brecht’s war photobook Kriegsfibel, though its earlier traces and
inspirations can be found in Didi-­Huberman’s analyses of the gestures
and poses struck by hysterical women in Salpêtriere photographs (IH; see
Charcot, Jean-Martin). Didi-­Huberman argues that ‘[m]ontage makes
206 taking position (prendre position)

any authority of message or program equivocal, improbable, and even

impossible. This is because, within a montage of this kind, the e­ lements –
­images and texts – take position instead of becoming discourse and taking
sides’ (EH, 118; see also IL). The difference between taking position and
taking sides, or taking a stand, concerns the critical character of the former
(see critique); taking position always implies undermining the unequivo-
cal character of political declarations in favour of destabilising power
relations. Meanwhile, taking a stand equals submission to an already
established political line of thought (cf. Larsson, 2015).
Taking position refers both to the work of visuality and to subjective
agency. Images take position in the sense that they enable us to respond
(both rationally and emotionally) to historical events and to political
configurations of the contemporary world in a non-­dogmatic manner.
Similarly, taking position means for the subject to question social injus-
tices, to try to understand them and to respond to them. In a comment on
Harun Farocki’s films, Didi-­Huberman underlines the complexity of
subjective image experience and its presumed political potential: ‘[l]ifting
one’s thought to the level of anger, lifting one’s anger to the level of
work. Weaving this work that consists of questioning technology, history,
and the law. To enable us to open our eyes to the violence of the world
inscribed in the image’ (HT, 50).
Didi-­Huberman’s distantiation from making an unequivocal
political stance leads to a formulation of an alternative vision of intellectual
political engagement. He seeks to overcome the pitfalls and limitations of
short-­term political action by taking seriously into account the possibilities
of agency nested within intellectual practices. He argues: ‘[b]ut in order
to describe, one must first know how to write, that is, to take a p ­ osition
– ­literary, aesthetic, e­ thical – ­in the language, that vast field of conflicts
where the most reductive and most open usages are encountered, the
worst slogans and the best questionings’ (TRS, 81). Following the thought
of Theodor Adorno, he insists on the necessity of taking into account the
contradictions governing the field of culture, as well as the formal, and
even aesthetic, character of critical gestures (see Leśniak, 2017; WI). As
such, taking position becomes a way of reconsidering political agency
proper to images and to the intellectual enterprise.
Didi-­Huberman’s stance on the agency of images has been criticised
by Jacques Rancière (2018). In Rancière’s view, the political subversion
attributed to images is only made possible thanks to the text that accom-
panies the visual. Rancière claims that in the case of Didi-­Huberman’s
essays it is the poetic quality of the commentary that breaks the passivity
of the image.
 temporality  207

Works Cited
Larsson, C. (2015). ‘When Images Take a Position: Didi-­Huberman’s
Brechtian Intervention / Quand les images prennent position:
l’intervention brechtienne de Didi-­Huberman’, Esse arts + opinions, 85:
36–43.
Larsson, C. (2020). Didi-Huberman and the Image. Manchester University
Press.
Leśniak, A. (2017). ‘Images Thinking the Political: On the Recent Works
of Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Oxford Art Journal, 40(2): 305–18.
Rancière, J. (2018). ‘Images Re-­read. The Method of Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, trans. E. Woodard, J. R. Solorzano, S. De Cauwer and
L. K. Smith, Angelaki, 23(4): 11–18.

TEMPORALITY

Patrick ffrench
‘Whenever we are before the image, we are before time’ (BI, 31; Didi-­
Huberman, 2000a: 9). The opening sentence of Didi-­Huberman’s book
Devant le temps emphasises a consistent attention in his work to the
multiple temporalities of the image, which encompass both the ‘time’ of
the image itself, the historical and trans-­historical dynamics it puts into
play, and the time of our engagement with it. Confronted by an image,
Didi-­Huberman asserts, our present is continually reshaped, but so also
is the past; the image has a duration and a futurity, moreover, which has
the potential to endure and outlast us (BI, 33). The temporalities of the
image thus exceed the temporal categories through which we structure
our experience as subjects, and those which history and art history have
deployed to make sense and knowledge of the image. The challenge to the
epistemological and phenomenological categories through which we make
sense of time, implicit in this excess and this confrontation (in the strong
sense of the word), is what drives Didi-­Huberman’s sustained attention to
the temporality of the image. His work is determined by a continuous and
varied effort to ‘be equal to’ this challenge, to make and remake a history
of art capable of comprehending this excessive hetero-­chronology (BI, 33;
2000a: 10; SI, 32–8).
Across all of his work, but especially since Devant le temps, Didi-­
Huberman has thus maintained a sustained engagement with a conception
of the temporality of the image as impure, departing from orthodox art
historical approaches, particularly those determined by the i­conological
208 temporality 

methods of Erwin Panofsky (see iconography), and affirming the epis-

temological and methodological value of anachronism. The image, far
from a fixed point in time or history, is conceived as an ‘eddy’ or ‘whirl-
pool’ in time (Didi-­Huberman, 2000a: 82), that is, as dynamic and het-
erochronic, and with its own plasticity (BI, 31, 38). Notions of origin and
source are put under erasure. In tension with teleological, evolutionary or
linear approaches to temporality, Didi-­Huberman’s time is characterised
by instances of repetition, survival (survivance), untimeliness, haunting
and rupture, and these support the broad references across his work to
Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. The former’s emphasis on
untimeliness and on the eternal return, and the latter’s exploration of the
compulsion to repeat and the archaeology of the psyche (see psychoa-
nalysis), determine a sustained attention across Didi-­Huberman’s oeuvre
to post-­Nietzschean and post-­Freudian thinkers (see Fédida, Pierre)
who have worked with and extended this concern with the irruption of the
past into the present and problematised the compartmentalised temporali-
ties of history and art history. Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg are
omnipresent interlocutors; the former’s attention to the anachronistic het-
erogeneity of history and the historical practice of montage, and the lat-
ter’s focus on the dynamic survival (survivance) of the past in the present,
alongside the sustained attention to psychoanalytically informed accounts
of experience and memory, provide Didi-­Huberman with a series of key
words which his work has not ceased to interrogate: symptom, survival,
montage. Other terms can no doubt be a­ dded – t­he temporality of Didi-­
Huberman’s work itself has a mobility and a plasticity such that it is not
fixed or fixated but in constant modulation as new objects, new images,
new bodies of writing come into view.
Marcel Proust and Georges Bataille are less prominent but neverthe-
less consistent points of reference; the former’s excavation of the dynamics
of involuntary memory and the intermittences of time, as interpreted by
Benjamin, and Bataille’s fascination with the irruptive force of the archaic
past within the forms of the present, add to the battery of instances of
temporal disruption with which Didi-­Huberman’s work is punctuated. In
a more contemporary frame Didi-­Huberman’s work can be seen to work
within the transformations wrought on the epistemological and histori-
cal certainty of the present by poststructuralist thought in the 1960s and
after, while insisting on the limitations of structuralist and semiological
synchrony. References to Michel Foucault’s archaeology (see BI, 33;
Didi-­Huberman, 2000a: 27) and to Jacques Rancière’s explorations of
the methodological uses of anachronism in history and politics (Didi-­
Huberman, 2000a: 33) suggest the ways in which Didi-­ Huberman’s
writing moves in the wake of the deconstruction, broadly speaking, of the
 temporality  209

phenomenological and historical present which has characterised French

thought since the 1960s.
‘Images also suffer from reminiscences’ (SI, 202); this expression
is emblematic of Didi-­Huberman’s approach to the anxious temporal
independence of the image. The image has a temporality which is not
ours, an insight implicit in the expression ‘the unconscious of time’ with
which Didi-­Huberman qualifies the transformative contribution of Aby
Warburg to art history (SI, 65). In a broad sense, then, the temporality
with which Didi-­Huberman engages is not that ‘of the subject’, not one
that pertains to the phenomenological experience of the subject. The
writing that endeavours to bear witness to the temporalities of the image
is nevertheless obliged to use the vocabulary of the subject’s experi-
ence of temporal and psychic disruption, in other words the vocabulary
proposed by Freud’s attention to the symptom and the strange tempo-
rality of the dream: latency, crisis, repression, après-coup, phantom,
haunting, return (revenance). Without becoming fixed, these instances
crystallise around the theme of survival, which overflows the association
with Warburg to colour Didi-­Huberman’s work as a whole, surfacing
thematically in Survival of the Fireflies, for example (see 2010a; SF). The
motif of survival is also very much present behind the major shift of focus
around Images in Spite of All (2003a; ISA); the phraseology of this title
suggests the new concern on Didi-­Huberman’s part with the persistence
of images despite the industry of a destruction without remainder which
was put into effect with the Holocaust (see in spite of all). In the latter
volume and in Remontages du temps subi (2010b), Didi-­Huberman’s work
negotiates with the disruptions of temporality wrought by the event of
the Shoah, on the one hand, and the opening of the camps, on the other.
The capacity to image and to imagine (see imagination) in the face of
the unimaginable, which Didi-­Huberman affirms, stems in part from
the instantaneous yet enduring temporality of the photographic and
cinematographic image which, although a persistent concern, is accentu-
ated in the later work and particularly in the Eye of History series (see
cinema; photography). Roland Barthes’ proposition, in Camera Lucida,
that the invention of photography divides human history to a before and
after of this ‘anthropologically new object’ (1981: 88) illuminates Didi-­
Huberman’s concern with this medium, even though one can say that the
aberration that the photographic image introduces into phenomenological
time, time as it is lived, is always extended, in Didi-­Huberman’s work, to
the confrontation with the image as such.
Before the image, then, and confronted by the event of its appearance,
a demand is imposed on us to negotiate with a time which is impure;
beyond any specific work or influence, Didi-­Huberman has experimented
210 textile (drapé)

throughout his oeuvre with methodologies equal to this demand. This

experimental endeavour informs the bifurcations, latencies and differen-
tial repetitions of his writing, and the practice of temporal montage and
archaeological layering that are its salient features.

Works Cited
Barthes, R. (1981 [1980]). Camera Lucida. Vintage.

TEXTILE (DRAPÉ)

Marie-Aude Baronian
Textile is not a typical notion nor an evident focal point in the work of
Didi-­Huberman. Yet it does crystallise (explicitly or implicitly) several
of his ongoing interests and concerns. In his writings, Didi-­Huberman
dissects a plethora of artistic and cultural objects wherein textile elements
are de facto mentioned or conceptually described. Be it Loïe Fuller’s
famous white shirt-­dress, the textile materials that constitute the work
of Sarkis, the folds (étoilement) in the paintings of Simon Hantaï, the
thread in Vermeer’s The Lacemaker, Baudelaire’s thoughts involving the
sartorial, or Lautréamont’s sewing m ­ achine – t­ he list could go on. While
these might at first seem anecdotal or accidental, they are ultimately no
coincidence.
It is through his marked interest in the motif of le drapé – initially
explored by art historian Aby Warburg – that Didi-­Huberman unpacks
the notion of textile. In Ninfa moderna: essai sur le drape-tombé (2002a),
Ninfa fluida: essai sur le drapé-désir (2015c), and Ninfa profunda: essai sur le
drapé-tourmente (2017c), Didi-­Huberman zooms in on drapery as a leading
motif for reading the multifaceted, nomadic and reappearing figure of the
nymph as it keeps returning in various art movements and expressions
through different epochs. While Ninfa moderna and Ninfa fluida refer
explicitly to Aby Warburg, Ninfa profunda embarks on a reading of Victor
Hugo, presenting him as a ‘peintre-poète’ who manipulates matter and
textures to express questions of torment and turbulence (the books do not
follow each other as much as indicate a certain reapparition, not unlike a
symptom; cf. 2015c: 58).
In Ninfa fluida, for instance, Didi-­ Huberman pursues Warburg’s
original project in the iconographic (see iconography), poetic, anthro-
pological and psychic analysis of the nymph (Ninfa), while suggesting
a certain material anchoring. In following the detailed contemplation of
 textile (drapé) 211

what Warburg terms ‘accessories in movement’, Didi-­Huberman shows how

the dresses, the hair and other sartorial or airy elements (as, for example,
in Botticelli’s paintings) open up a different perspective on the images,
one that acknowledges the various fluxes, metamorphoses and choreo-
graphic configurations at stake in the images as well as the mutations and
pleas of a more spiritual matter. In other words, the accessory is no longer
secondary or accessorial (accessoire). Ninfa is, in fact, much more than an
iconographic formula in art as it also condenses the moving (in the two
senses of the word) quality of life itself. Thus, in addressing the figure of
Ninfa through a large spectrum of aesthetic forms and momentums, Didi-­
Huberman finds in drapery, as one of the most extensive and versatile
clothing styles and techniques, the modi of fluidity, vitality, lightness,
movement and transformation. The fluidity of the draperies recalls the
fluidity of images themselves and of the forms and surfaces in art history.
It is as though draperies embody or perform the animation of the image
itself. In other words, drapery is a vector and a producer of affect and (e)
motion.
As a symptom, dense and rich in contrasts, that keeps reappearing in
a wide and heterogeneous range of representations and media objects
(juxtaposing sculptures, films, photographs and poetry, or involving
Quattrocento canonical paintings with contemporary abandoned dirty
fabrics), Ninfa retains a certain archetypal yet mobile, spectral and surviv-
ing structure (see survival). As Didi-­Huberman puts it: Ninfa is ‘always
elusive, yet always there. Visiting and revisiting. Surviving’ (2015c: 146).
Surely, from Antiquity through the Renaissance up to today, Ninfa’s
ageless symptomatic presence persists: ‘[t]he images flow and ebb: they live
in the movement of the surf [ressac], which makes them at once so close
(caressing, intimate) and so far (enigmatic, withdrawn)’ (2015c: 143) And
as he summarises it:

[t]he figure of Ninfa imposes itself as a crucial motif that enables the question to
be ­problematized – ­the question that I’d approached in the early 80s about the
relationship between the image and desire, the image and psychic time in general
[. . .] It’s thus a fully fledged theoretical character, carrying, as it were, a profound
lesson in method. (2015c: 126)

It is indeed Ninfa itself that holds the possibility of ongoing rereading, as

a moving and enduring thread of interpretation. In exploring the motif of
drapery through a broad and anachronistic array of artistic objects, Didi-­
Huberman invites us to ‘displace the gaze’ (déplacer le regard) (2015c: 94)
consistently in his work. Eventually, drapery disturbs and decompartmen-
talises the movements of looking.
212 t u r r e l l , j a m e s

Furthermore, it is quite significant that when Didi-­Huberman reflects

on his own thinking and writing practice, signs of the sartorial and textile
are often evoked. One could actually consider his handling of objects
and concepts in textile terms: Didi-­Huberman embroiders, stitches and
weaves together a plural constellation of ideas, questions and objects that
altogether offer a rich and dense tapestry (or an atlas in Aby Warburg’s
sense) that invites us to unfold (déplier) the multiple phenomena and issues
that are seen and addressed. One can therefore find in the motif of textile
exactly what lies at the heart of Didi-­Huberman’s own thinking, analysis
and method. This is precisely what is happening in the gesture of déplier,
when one handles, manipulates and thinks with objects: examining inside-­
out, revealing the various pleats of his ­objects – ­close to them and yet
leaving them the space and the time they need to come to life, to confront
us. Comparable to the Deleuzian pli (see Deleuze, Gilles), there is the
infinite force emanating from an image or an object to appear and reap-
pear, to hide and seek, to disclose its smallest parts in the grandest eye-­
illuminating ways, in boundless and even unexpected fashions. Moreover,
there is the interpretative mode of tearing fabrics, matter and texts apart
that Didi-­Huberman practises in exploring his objects. One can also find
in the closing page of Aperçues (2018a: 332) the significant reference to
caressing – as a tactile and material ­gesture – ­that defines his method of
approaching the questions and the objects that touch him ­and – ­delicately
but ­fiercely – ­push him to read, write and interpret.
It is as though textile enables us to catch the very ephemerality of what
has caught our eye in the original and furtive moment of looking. After all,
Didi-­Huberman invites us to touch (or to be touched by) the tiniest fibre
or thread of a piece of fabric as if it composes and encompasses an entire
‘wardrobe’ made of unconscious yet unforgettable memories. Therefore
one will not be surprised, as Didi-­Huberman has confessed about his own
way of working with images (2010d), that he tends to gather and assemble
the archival and visual materials he works with and reflects upon on a large
table that used to be a dressmaker’s table which, once again, illustrates and
materialises the affinity between textile-­oriented material objects and the
thinking and interpreting of (artistic and cultural) objects.

TURRELL, JAMES

Nigel Saint
The work of the American light artist James Turrell (b. 1943) features
in museums and art centres around the world, often in the form of per-
 turrell, james 213

manent installations and ‘skyspaces’. Turrell stages encounters between

visitors and artificial or natural light, space and time, even though there
is no image or object to look at (LACMA, 2013). Two installations were
included in the exhibition Les Fables du lieu curated by Didi-­Huberman
at Le Fresnoy (2001c). In Didi-­Huberman’s view, the artist’s precisely
constructed light installations and viewing chambers transform a space
(espace) into a place (lieu). In L’Homme qui marchait dans la couleur (2001a),
Didi-­Huberman gives a framework to the experience of a Turrell work by
positing a man walking in diverse locations, natural and man-­made, across
time. His walker accompanies Moses in the desert, visits Graeco-­Roman
temples, advances in the light of stained glass windows in York Minster,
approaches the pala d’oro altarpiece in St Mark’s, Venice, and looks up at
the sky in Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.
At last he enters Turrell’s interior spaces and skyspaces, arriving at
the Hopi-­connected Roden Crater (still unfinished today, the project was
nevertheless already well-­advanced by the time Didi-­Huberman wrote
about it in 1990 [2001a: 87]). Didi-­Huberman underlines how Turrell’s
understanding of the Hopi traditions, extremely precise adjustments to
the crater and detailed preparation of the viewing chambers all enable visi-
tors to look at light and the sky in harmony with astronomical time (2001a:
76–82). While the reader may recall Aby Warburg’s encounter with the
Hopi snake ritual on his visit to Arizona (Warburg, 1938–39), the link is
here subsumed within the broader geological and mythical concerns of
Hopi memory, just as the account of the ritual nearly thirty years after the
event fitted into Warburg’s own studies of the planets, history and images
(Didi-­Huberman, 2002b: 354–62).
The experience of light and space in Turrell’s installations (or lieux)
is analysed in relation to the foreground and interior in the illuminated
spaces, the remembering and forgetting of a place, the spectator’s lack
of control and the sense of absence. The disarming effect of Turrell’s
skyspaces is especially felt in the impossibility of a detached, objective
interpretation. Among the many sources drawn upon to find the discourse
most suited to these works, Plato’s enigmatic term for a particular kind of
space, ‘chora’, resurfaces. In the Timaeus it is associated with a space like
a ‘receptacle (or nurse, if you like) of all creation’, ‘altogether character-
less’, and with an ‘almost incomprehensible’ way of thinking (Plato, 2008:
40, 43). In Didi-­Huberman’s reading, chora is the nursemaid to all the
discourses that may be found for Turrell’s works. Jacques Derrida noted
how the stories, stages and processes of the Timaeus are interdependent:
‘Each narrative ­content – ­fabulous, fictive, legendary, or myth [. . .] is thus
the receptacle of another’ (Derrida, 1995: 117). Didi-­Huberman’s ‘fable’
devoted to Turrell’s constructed spaces avoids any kind of technological,
214 u p r i s i n g

psychological or religious conclusion in order to explore these strange

‘nameless, symbol-­free, anti-­
hierarchical and sovereign’ places (Didi-­
Huberman, 2001a: 83).

Works Cited
Derrida, J. (1995). ‘Khōra’, trans. I. McLeod, in On the Name, ed.
T. Dutoit, 89–127. Stanford University Press.
Plato (2008). Timaeus and Critias, trans. R. Waterfield, ed. A. Gregory.
Oxford University Press.
LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) (2013). James Turrell’s
Roden Crater. Dir. P. Vogt.
Warburg, A. (1938–39). ‘A Lecture on Serpent Ritual’, Journal of the
Warburg Institute, 2: 277–92.

U
UPRISING

Stijn De Cauwer
In 2016 Didi-­Huberman curated the exhibition Soulèvements (Uprisings)
for the Jeu de Paume in Paris, marking the beginning of a research interest
in the visual forms of uprisings in his work (2016b; U). In this exhibition,
which was later displayed in slightly modified forms in Buenos Aires, Saõ
Paulo, Montreal, Mexico City and Barcelona, Didi-­Huberman aimed to
explore the various visual forms of the desire to rise up against oppres-
sion, from photographs of Black Panther activists raising their fists and
teenagers in Northern Ireland throwing stones to written pamphlets and
visual artworks such as the ciné-tracts made during the protests in Paris in
1968. What interests Didi-­Huberman are the gestural manifestations of
rising up against oppression, for example the famous shots of an elderly
woman in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin mourning the murdered sailor,
whose dejected hand gradually clenches into a raised fist, ready to rise up
against the oppressors.
Didi-­Huberman’s exploration of the visual forms of uprisings was
elaborated theoretically in the catalogue of the exhibition and the
essays included in Désirer désobeir. Didi-­Huberman regards this project
as an extension of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (2016a: 302–7).
 uprising 215

While Warburg famously studied the transmission of pathos formu-

las throughout various time periods, Didi-­Huberman argues that he
nonetheless omitted images of uprisings from his atlas because, follow-
ing his psychiatric treatment, political turbulence was too upsetting for
him (2016a: 304). Taking Warburg’s approach to the topic of uprisings,
Didi-­Huberman aimed to establish a visual anthropology of the gestures
indicating the human desire to rise up against oppression. As he explains
in the catalogue, seeing these images can help to flare up and give form
to our desire to rise up in the present. This is what Chris Marker did in
the opening sequence of Le fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat,
1977), combining gestures from Battleship Potemkin with documentary
footage of protests and their suppression, in which similar gestures can
be seen.
With this exhibition, Didi-­Huberman wanted to explore the indestruct-
ible desire (as one section of the exhibition was called) described by Freud
and that Herbert Marcuse called ‘political Eros’ (Marcuse, 1955: 336–44).
Just as Freud pointed out the capacity of the ‘reversal into the opposite’
of symptoms and dream content (1953), the images in the exhibition
showed the gestures of dejected people being transformed into the desire
to rise up against their situation. The gestures give a visual form to our
‘life in motion’, as Warburg called it (2020: 20). They transmit the pathos
of people in the past while connecting with the desires of viewers in the
present. In some of the essays in Désirer désobeir, Didi-­Huberman engages
more explicitly with various political theorists. He makes a distinction
between political thinkers such as Lenin, who were of the opinion that
spontaneous uprisings had to be taken up into a more organised revolu-
tionary programme in order to be successful, and other thinkers, from
Mikhail Bakunin to Peter Kropotkin, who believed that such a programme
could be stifling and that the desire to revolt will always take on new forms
(2019a: 249–62).
Though the exhibition made his interest in uprisings more explicit,
visual traces of the desire to resist or overcome hardships have always been
an important topic in Didi-­Huberman’s oeuvre. The four photographs
taken in Auschwitz, discussed in Images in Spite of All (see photography;
Sonderkommando photographs), attest to the desire of the prisoners to
resist their situation, however difficult this might be, and to document the
horrors they saw. The notion of duende and the canto jondo of Andalucía
similarly indicate, in Didi-­Huberman’s view, the process of giving a
musical and gestural form to the transformation of the feeling of mourning
into the desire to overcome this state (2000a: 315–18; 2019a: 104–5). In the
catalogue of Soulèvements, Didi-­Huberman describes the psychoanalytic
theories of Pierre Fédida about turning mourning into play (2016b:
216 visual, the (visuel)

289–90). Mourning can shake up our world, but we can also set m ­ ourning
in motion, making it ‘rise up’ by funnelling it into certain activities or
gestures. In Pour commencer encore, Didi-­Huberman recounts a moving
personal story about turning mourning into play. After his mother had
died, the young Didi-­Huberman was walking in the hospital corridor and,
being a fan of John Coltrane, Coltrane’s tune Olé was stuck in his head.
Olé is based on an Andalusian melody, and the affirmative tone of the title
indicated two things to him: it affirmed that the pain was there, but it also
affirmed that, in spite of all, his life would go on, gradually transforming
his mourning into the interests he would pursue in the remainder of his
life (2019a: 62).

Works Cited
Freud, S. (1953). The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. IV (1900), ed. J. Strachey, ix–627. Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-­analysis.
Marcuse, H. (1955). Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud. Beacon Press.
Warburg, A. (2020). Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, The Original, ed. Haus der
Kulturen der Welt and the Warburg Institute, R. Ohrt, A. Heil. Hatje
Cantz.

V
VISUAL, THE (VISUEL)

Ari Tanhuanpää
Didi-­Huberman makes an important distinction between the ‘visible’
and what he calls the ‘visual’ (visuel): ‘[w]ith the visible, we are [. . .] in
the realm of what manifests itself. The visual [visuel], by contrast, would
designate that irregular net of event-­symptoms that reaches the visible
as so many gleams and radiances’ (CI, 31; 1990a: 41). He delves into this
dimension in his essay Dans la lueur du seuil, ‘in the glow of the threshold’
(1998a: 204–16), which is inspired by Yves Bonnefoy’s (1923–2016) essay
‘Les Tombeaux de Ravenne’, published in L´Improbable (1959: 13–30).
The starting point of Didi-­Huberman’s essay is the alabaster windows
 visual, the (visuel) 217

of the Byzantine mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, which in

Didi-­ Huberman’s experience manifest what he calls a ‘glow’ (lueur),
which he describes as the ‘event of truth that arises on the threshold of
“darkness” and “clarity”’ (1998a: 212). The word lueur is phonetically
close to another French word, leurre, and therefore the word pairing of
lueur–leurre contains the dual meaning of the Platonic phainestai, which
refers both to ‘glow’ and to ‘lure’ or ‘deception’. Didi-­Huberman argues
that a ‘glow’ (lueur) is ‘neither darkness nor light, but their “improbable”
[in the Derridean sense, ‘undecidable’] encounter’ (1998a: 212). This
is the improbable truth of unconcealment as alētheia – Didi-­Huberman
specifies that the ‘improbable’ is where ‘any codification maddens, even
discreetly’ (1998a: 209). These four alabaster windows render sensible
‘spatial and luminous paradoxes’; they are ‘opaque like the marble of the
tombs’, while, at the same time, being ‘translucent like amber or like a
precious stone’ (1998a: 212–13).
This glow or splendour (éclat or Glanz), which imbricates with the
visual (visuel), ‘depends on the spectator’s gait and his encounter with a
(always unexpected and wondrous) luminous orientation. The object is
over there, surely, but the radiant brilliance [éclat] encounters me, it is an
event by way of my gaze and my body [. . .] of my movements’ (MWC,
19; 2001a: 17; cf. CI, 30). In spatial terms, the visuel brings itself to be
thought of in what Heidegger called Ent-fernung (2008 [1962]: 138–45). It
is ‘de-­severance’, which Heidegger regarded as the fundamental aspiration
of ‘Being-­in-­the-­world’ or Dasein: to bring close the beings encountered
in the world, which, even when brought near, still maintain their distance.
The experience of the visuel is combined with the experience of aura, in
Walter Benjamin’s words (1968: 222), the ‘unique apparition of a dis-
tance how near it may be’.
Didi-­Huberman feels that he comes across a somewhat similar phe-
nomenon with Georges de la Tour’s painting Education of the Virgin (c.
1640, Frick collection, New York), in which his attention is drawn to the
hand, which is represented in front of the flame: it is simultaneously black
(‘half in penumbra’) and red (‘through the blood which shows through
the flame’), but also white (‘by default in some way, as one should see it
if it were frontally lit by the flame’). The hand is ‘incandescent surface
(like a blade on a blacksmith’s anvil) and volume of delicate flesh: opaque
body (like marble) and organ made translucent (like alabaster) [. . .] All
that which contradicts itself in words or in logic.’ Just as with alabaster
windows, here too there is an event in which ‘everything becomes for-
midably dialectical and suspended from never being either this, or that, or
thesis, or antithesis, but something absolutely new which is not a logical
synthesis’ (2018a: 277–8).
218 visual, the (visuel)

This instantiation of the visual, or visuel, has a deep resonance with

Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s description of a pool in southern France:

When through the water’s thickness I see the tiled bottom of the pool, I do not
see it despite the water and the reflections; I see it through them and because of
them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without this
flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and
where it ­is – ­which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place. (Merleau-­Ponty,
1964: 182)

One could compare these distortions with the Vitruvian motif of orna-
mental mouldings (strigilis or stria) on ancient Roman sarcophagi, which
create a threshold in motion and hold the viewer suspended between lure
(leurre) and glow (lueur). This imposes on the viewer the power of orna-
ment as a visual ontology of the threshold (1998a: 215–16). It must be
emphasised how central the figure of the threshold is to Didi-­Huberman
(see, for example, 2019b: 59–60; 1992b: 183–200; cf. Nancy, 1993).
Our skin is naturally a threshold closest to us (Dagognet, 1998 [1993]).
Jean-­Luc Nancy refers to the connection between the words carnation (a
‘local color’ but also a ‘skin color’) and incarnation. Nancy characterises
carnation as ‘vibration’ and ‘unique intensity’, it is something chang-
ing, ‘mobile’ and ‘multiple’, it is not a two-­dimensional surface, but an
ontological ‘skin-­event’ (2008: 15). Didi-­Huberman postulates that the
‘concept of skin never stops oscillating between the integument (that
which covers) and the dermis (that which discovers)’ (1985a: 32). In this
context Didi-­Huberman (1985a: 27) refers to Hegel, for whom

the most difficult thing in the matter of colour, the ideal or, as it were [das Ideale
gleichsam], the summit [der Gipfel] of colouring, is ‘carnation’, the colour tone of
human flesh which unites all other colours marvellously in itself without giving
independent emphasis to either one or another. The youthful and healthy red of
the cheeks is pure carmine without any dash of blue, violet, or yellow; but this red
is itself only a gloss, or rather a shimmer, which seems to press outwards from
within and then shades off unnoticeably into the rest of the flesh-­colour, although
this latter is an ideal inter-­association of all the fundamental colours. (Hegel,
1975: 846; 1838: 71)

What draws Didi-­Huberman’s attention in this description is the ‘trans-

parent yellow’, a diaphanous element through or across which (à-travers)
there appears the ‘red of the arteries’ and the ‘blue of the veins’ (1985a:
27). This pale yellow is the ‘in-­between’, the entre (Alloa, 2008: 109; 2017:
68), which incarnates the oscillation of epiphasis and aphanisis (Didi-­
 visual, the (visuel) 219

Huberman, 1985a: 37) – the appearance and d ­ isappearance – ­between the

surface and the depth.
In this context, Didi-­Huberman (1985a: 60–1) reminds the reader of
how Martin Heidegger (2008 [1962]: 52) used the idiom of the symptoms
of a disease to elucidate the conceptual difference between phenom-
ena which show themselves, and semblance, which only ‘indicates’ or
‘announces’ ‘something which does not show itself’ (in this case a disease).
Didi-­Huberman explains the idea of ‘indication’: ‘when a curtain [. . .]
touches what it hides, then it indicates it’ (1985a: 94). In both cases,
something announces itself ‘through something which does show itself’
(1985a: 52). According to Heidegger, this is semblance as ‘not-showing-
itself’ (2008 [1962]: 52). He underlines that the ‘not’ is not a privative
modification of a phenomenon. It is what Aristotle called ‘diaphanous’:
the element through which the invisible depth (or a symptom) manifests
itself on the visible surface (or consciousness): neither visible nor invis-
ible, neither unconscious nor conscious, but an event of entre that occurs
between them.
To detect such entre, the subject must employ a certain intuitive vision,
which Henri Bergson metaphorised as a ‘lamp almost extinguished, which
only glimmers now and then’ (1964: 282). This is a vision that ‘sees the
invisible in the visible’ – a ‘transcendent’ seeing, in the Rimbaudian sense,
voyance (Carbone, 2016: 34–7). A seer (voyant) is capable of seeing beyond
the visible the essences in the form of sensible ideas. These are essences
that remain the same for themselves only under the veil (Benjamin, 1996:
351; cf. Merleau-­Ponty, 1968: 149–50). The truth is in the s­emblance
– ­which is the ‘necessary veiling of things for us’ (Benjamin, 1996: 351) –
not behind it. Didi-­Huberman deploys these figures of veils or thresholds
of alabaster windows and the skin to illustrate this idea, through which the
visuel manifests itself. That is what Merleau-­Ponty called (1968: 131, n.)
‘visibility’ (visibilité), the ‘flesh as Sichtigkeit’, which, in Didi-­Huberman’s
words (1992b: 156), sublates the ‘false opposition of the visible and the
invisible’.

Works Cited
Alloa, E. (2008). La Résistance du sensible. Merleau-Ponty. Critique de la
transparence. Éditions Kimé.
Alloa, E. (2017). Resistance of the Sensible World. An Introduction to
Merleau-Ponty, trans. J. M. Todd. Fordham University Press.
Benjamin, W. (1968). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’, trans. H. Zohn, in Illuminations. Essays and Reflections,
ed. H. Arendt, 217–51. Schocken Books.
220 warburg, aby 

Benjamin, W. (1996). ‘Goethe´s Elective Affinities’, trans. S. Corngold,

in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed.
M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings, 297–360. The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Bergson, H. (1964). Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell. Macmillan.
Bonnefoy, Y. (1959). L’Improbable. Mercure de France.
Carbone, M. (2016). The Flesh of Images. SUNY Press.
Dagognet, F. (1998 [1993]). La Peau découverte. Les Empécheurs de
Penser en Rond.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1838). Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Dritter Band.
Dunder und Humboldt.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1975). Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox.
Volume II. Oxford University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2008 [1962]). Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and
E. Robinson. Harper and Row.
Merleau-­Ponty, M. (1964). ‘Eye and Mind’, trans. C. Dallery, in The
Primacy of Perception. And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology,
the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. J. M. Edie, 159–92.
Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-­Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by
Working Notes, trans. A. Lingis. Northwestern University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (1993). ‘On the Threshold. For Marie-­Eve Druette’, trans.
P. Kamuf, Paragraph, 16(2): 111–21.
Nancy, J.-L. (2008). Corpus, trans. R. A. Rand. Fordham University
Press.

W
WARBURG, ABY

Maud Hagelstein
In the wake of the epistemological revolution that he launched with
his very first theoretical works (in Confronting Images especially), Didi-­
Huberman has adopted a more overtly political gaze regarding images
(or rather, a more visibly political gaze). In this process, the theory of
culture defended by German Jewish historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929)
has certainly played an indispensable role, and for this reason constitutes
a key passage in Didi-­Huberman’s work, creating a link between the first
 warburg, aby  221

historiographic or epistemo-critical considerations, the implementation of a

heuristics of visual documents (revealed in the exhibition projects, among
others) and the political approach to images developed in the series enti-
tled L’Œil de l’histoire (2009–16) or Ce qui nous soulève (2019–21). Didi-­
Huberman has contributed with great commitment to the rediscovery of
Aby Warburg, with The Surviving Image being certainly, in the French-­
speaking world, the most stimulating introduction to Warburg’s work.
The conceptual apparatus refined by Warburg at the beginning of the
twentieth century elucidates the complexity of the investigation of images,
as Didi-­Huberman has chosen, in turn, to implement it. By developing,
following Warburg, a very elaborate ethos of observation and of frequenta-
tion of images, Didi-­Huberman allows us to keep in mind the idea that
the image does not exactly behave as an entity that bears information and
offers useful service to the diffusion of meaning. Facing images, the spec-
tator is not specifically invited to ‘recognise’; the relation to visual works
is not only a matter of recognition, which would involve referring them
to the real from which they emerge or of which they are a projection. Of
course, recognition, attribution, deciphering, identification are all parts of
the iconological inquiry (see iconology). However, the play of recogni-
tion is interesting only insofar as it comes up against obstacles, mixes with
moments of non-­recognition, and this is why ­Warburg – ­the first to use
the term ‘iconology’ in a modern ­sense – s­ poke of ‘enigmatic organisms’
with regard to artworks. Yet, while he sometimes restored, in their most
minute details, the symbolic values and ideological context of the works
analysed, Warburg did not seek to give any definitive signification to the
works. Rather than limiting iconology to the sole identification of figures,
he explicitly took on the task of recreating paths of transformation to show
the great plasticity of the motifs of art.
In many ways Didi-­Huberman has (re-)opened the contemporary field
of the theory of the image to all the concerns that stirred the mind of
Warburg. As he bathed in the world of ­images – ­as an investigator, as a his-
torian, as a lover ­even – ­what did Warburg do? What did he look for? He
sought to make the plasticity of the visual appear. Not to exhibit the estab-
lished meanings attached to images and to the visual formulae from which
they are created, but to render visible the modifications that they ­know
– ­each time they are taken up and reworked by an artist in the practice of
a style. Warburg built his propositions for art history starting from the
concept of Pathosformel, ‘pathos formula’. These formulae that haunt
Renaissance painting were, for Warburg, intensified gestural (overplayed)
formulae bearing a great emotional charge: an arm raised to the sky,
knees bent (in deference, devotion or warlike aggression), mouths open,
expressions of desire, cries, moans, gestures of lamentation, e­ nthusiasm,
222 warburg, aby 

or pain. Warburg notes that these formulae are omnipresent, and that
most of them are borrowed from antiquity, from the Greek sarcophagi
for example. They are formulae that move (in every sense). For once they
have been taken up again in the paintings of the Renaissance, they find
another grounding, an alternative actualisation, and their meaning can
even be inversed (Warburg spoke of ‘energetic inversion’); in other words
they are ambivalent plastic formulae which are charged according to the
contexts in which they are reinvested.
Hoping to show these displacements, these circulations (to indicate
how images are charged), Warburg invented an atlas, an apparatus that
marked all theoreticians of the image who came after it, and beyond them
the artists, the avant-­gardists, the historians; an atlas that is presented as a
gigantic visual juxtaposition of motifs of art history. With the Mnemosyne
Atlas, the art historian sought to capture the infinite variation of motifs
and deviations – ‘disfigurations’ – engaged in this phenomenon called the
‘survival’ (Nachleben) of forms. Through his use of documents, Warburg
restored the ‘life’ of images to a certain extent by activating their latent
effects. With regard to Warburg’s propositions, the interpretation (the
work of inquiry) basically seems to have no end, nor to have any final goal
other than to describe a movement.
Didi-­Huberman brought his predecessor’s project to maximum inten-
sity. We might begin by understanding that the ‘legibility’ of works
remained the objective for Warburg. But by rethinking the strictly inter-
pretative function of the relation to works, by challenging the complicity
of the art historian with the order of reason, Didi-­Huberman shed light
on the truly avant-­garde character of Warburg’s project, insisting on the
implementation of a singular heuristics. Images are not to be read in the
sense of a reasoned deciphering, but are to be read alternatively, through
an alternative practice of manipulation of documents: images are to be
grasped, to be arranged, integrated into new, opening, poetic (in the
etymological sense) montages. During the First World War, deeply
affected by the horror in which he saw Europe foundering, Warburg
had seemingly ‘abandoned’ his research in art history in order to devote
himself to the study of conflicts. Haunted by the rise of devastating forces,
he reacted by compiling a mass of iconographic documents related to the
war (maps, newspaper cuttings, etc.). He explored in his own way a more
practical and urgent relation with images, struggling to understand their
logic and their effects. If Didi-­Huberman teaches us to reread Warburg’s
propositions, if he follows his impulsions (even as an exhibition curator),
it is certainly with the idea of starting to build a new epistemological
framework, one in which montage would become both a concrete appa-
ratus for understanding the potential of images and a new interpretative
 witnessing  223

tool. If iconology had a different life after this, it is because it involved

empirical work with images, even for the historian or the theoretician:
this involves handling them, cutting, arranging, changing frames, moving,
etc. The essence of the critical operation of montage consists in preventing
the impression of too much legibility. The work of montage allows us to
separate things that are taken for granted, or to introduce mistrust, and
to cast doubt on appearances. The possibility of thinking, rethinking and
giving legibility to historical documents must constantly be maintained;
the possibility of rearranging them into a new order, of introducing them
into complex m ­ ontages – s­ o as not to abandon reason to those who make a
totalitarian use of it.
Translated by Shane Lillis

WITNESSING

Robert Harvey
Didi-­Huberman is altogether straightforward about how the conjunction
of images mobilises the imagination: ‘montage creates a third image
out of the assemblage of two’ (ISA, 138). Coming as she does between a
victim and a perpetrator, the third party that a witness is does exactly the
same thing: she bears testimony regarding a crime. This special position
and this special function meet in the Latin pun concerning witnessing: the
testis is a terstis. Like the work of the imagination, the work of witnessing
has the power to raise to 3 the sum of 1 + 1.
Witnessing is thus conceptually more complex than the single term
would seem to indicate. An event occurs in front of someone who sees
(hears, smells, etc.) what occurs in such a way that it makes an impression
on that person’s mind. This individual thereby becomes a witness. At
some later moment, this individual may be called upon to relay what she
saw (heard, smelled, etc.) in some context such as a court of law or a docu-
mentary film. This we call bearing witness. (Primo Levi and others have
noted that a sense of the burden of such transmission is the guilt felt by the
witness-­bearing witness that she survived the event relatively unscathed.)
Not only are witnessing and bearing witness the two discrete yet inter-
related operations just outlined, occurring in two discrete yet interrelated
temporalities, the agents of these acts that witnesses are may be animate
or inanimate: a piece of evidence, an ‘exhibit’, that is, in a criminal trial
may be as eloquent as a speaking witness. The event is actualised when
(and if) the witness reproduces what she saw for the interpretative ear or
eye of the recipient of the testimony (the court, the spectator, the reader,
224 witnessing 

etc.). Finally, and most importantly for Didi-­Huberman, the baton of

­witnessing – ­if we may call it ­that – ­has the potential to be passed on to
an infinite number of third parties by virtue of some record, some trace left
by the original witness. The function uniting these categories is always,
inexorably, the imagination.
Through the four Sonderkommando photographs, anyone at any time
after the fact can bear witness to parcels of the crime named the Shoah
of which those photographs are the authentic recording. Re-­establishing
their original out-­of-­kilter framing and untouched blur, which Didi-­
Huberman painstakingly executes and explains in Images in Spite of All, is
fundamental to allowing these photographs to fully bear witness to what
their maker saw, including the conditions under which he saw it. These
conditions include the precise position he must have been in when he
witnessed events at first hand. Indeed, the whole point of the argument in
Images in Spite of All is that anyone seeing these photographs today must
take up this legacy of witnessing. Or, as Marcel Duchamp put it: ‘It’s the
viewers who make paintings. The public paints them 300 years after their
official author’ (1957: 143).
Were the indictment launched by the ideological guardians of Claude
Lanzmann’s Shoah against Didi-­Huberman for having ‘nullified thought’
in presenting the Sonderkommando photographs as catalysts for witnessing
to be in any way cogent, then even witnesses as infinitely close to the event
as Filip Müller would also be guilty of delivering deficient ­testimony –
­testimony with no particular ethical sway over any who receive it. Bearing
witness, which Didi-­Huberman contends even such photographs can do,
would in all cases be misleading, vain, mere fantasy. Bequeathing ethical
value to new witnesses who read words and images would be an empty
gesture.
On the contrary, the very sense of witnessing is that it can and must
be passed on, inherited. Preserving this promise requires that Didi-­
Huberman approach difficult questions: What if all those who recount
near-­death experiences were to have died? What if all that was left were
their memoirs, their testimonials, their r­ emnants – i­ncluding crude pho-
tographs? What kind of witnesses might readers of witnessing become
through their reading? What value is there in witnessing by proxy? Do
we ethically legitimate such a position? How could an ‘I’ (survivor) ever
become a witness at all if that ‘I’ was only ‘there’ ‘then’ by the proxy of a
text or an image?
‘An image without imagination is quite simply an image that one didn’t
spend the time to work on. For imagination is work’ (ISA, 116). Taking
inspiration from Godard’s life devoted to showing us that anything but
subtractive ‘editing’ is incremental and that montage alone can show a
 witnessing  225

feeling, Didi-­Huberman argues that witnesswork is a homologous proce-

dure: witnessing is the noblest task to which work with the imagination
can set itself. ‘To know, one must imagine [s’imaginer]; the speculative
work bench is always there in tandem with the montage table of the imagi-
nation’ (ISA, 119). With anything less than exercising the skill to go where
the experience of the other once brought her, the filmmaker can achieve
no montage. And without that mad courage, there is no ‘humanity’ in
the being we claim we are. It is thus that the seemingly endless moral
controversy over experience by proxy and the possibility of preserving the
integrity of the other is laid to rest.

Works Cited
Duchamp, M. (1957). ‘Marcel Duchamp, vite’, interviewed by J. Schuster,
Le Surréalisme, même, 2: 143–5.
Harvey, R. (2010). Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of
Responsibility. Continuum.
Levi, P. (1989). The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal. Vintage.
 L i st of W orks b y G e orge s D i di - ­H ub e r man

PRIOR TO 1982

1977a. ‘Éléments de biographie’, in J.-C. Lambert (ed.), Krasno ou le

matérialisme magique, 50–61. Wurtz.
1977b. ‘Au lieu de ­Baal – ­Croisements’, in Baal, 35–52. Théâtre national
de Strasbourg.
1978a. ‘Exordre’, Théâtre/Public, 20 (March): 39–40.
1978b. ‘L’Action restreinte (paradoxe de ventriloque)’, Théatre/public,
25 (December): 24–9.
1978c. ‘L’Icône, le corps, le sacrilege’, Études psychothérapiques, 32(3):
197–201.
1978d. Le Belvédère: théorie du soupçon, sa surface. Théâtre national de
Chaillot.
1980a. ‘Digressions sur la scène un (théatre et crime)’, Alternatives théa-
trales, 4: 80–7.
1980b. ‘Aux Entournures’, Théatre/public, 32 (March): 52–9.
1980c. ‘D’une histoire éperdue de Dibouk’, EtcEtc, 3: 8–9.

1982

1982a. Invention de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’iconographie photographique de

la Salpêtrière. Macula.
1982b. ‘À l’iris’, Land, 4: 26–30.
1982c. ‘Invention de l’hystérie’, L’Ane, 5: 37.
1982d. ‘La Patiente mise en scène, ou le spectacle de l’hystérie’, Revue, 1:
25–35.
1982e. ‘La Mère amérique’, Revue, 1: 78–89.
1982f. ‘Le Haut-­le-­corps hystérique’, Spirales, 15: 37.
1982g. ‘Replis et sidérations de l’architecture’, in D. Arasse (ed.),
Symboles de la Renaissance, II, 131–47. Presses de l’École Normale
Supérieure.
228 ­ u b e r m a n
list of works by georges didi-h

1983

1983a. Mémorandum de la peste: le fléau d’imaginer. Christian Bourgois.

1983b. ‘Le sang de la dentellière’, Comédie française, 123.
1983c. ‘L’Optogramme (l’arrêt sur la dernière image)’, Revue belge du
cinéma, 4: 29–34.
1983d. ‘Fragments de dramaturgie’, in J. Audureau, Félicité, 173–215.
Éditions de la Comédie-­Française.

1984

1984a. ‘Une notion du “corps-­cliché” au XIXe siècle’, Parachute, 35

(June/August): 8–14.
1984b. ‘L’indice de la plaie absente, monographie d’une tache’, Traverses,
30–31 (March): 151–63.
1984c. ‘Eloge du diaphane’, Artistes, 24 (December): 106–11.
1984d. ‘La Férocité mimétique’, Traverses, 32 (August): 30–9.
1984e. ‘Charcot, l’histoire et l’art: imitation de la croix et démon
de l’imitation. Postface’, in J.-M. Charcot and P.Richter, Les
Démoniaques dans l’art, suivi de La Foi qui guérit, 125–88.
Macula.
1984f. ‘L’Incarnation figurale de la sentence: note sur la peau
autographique’, Scalène, 2: 143–69.

1985

1985a. La Peinture incarnée suivi de Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu par Honoré

de Balzac. Minuit.
1985b. ‘Un sang d’images’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 32 (December):
123–53.
1985c. ‘Les Apories du corps manifeste’, Entrevues, 12: 13–30.
1985d. ‘Esthétique et expérimentation chez Charcot’, in Doctrines, sci-
ences ou pratiques sociales?, 121–38. Presses universitaires de
Nancy.

1986

1986a. ‘L’image scientifique et pseudo-­scientifique’, in J. Lemagny and

A. Rouillé (eds), Histoire de la photographie, 71–5. Bordas.
 ­ uberman
list of works by georges didi-h 229

1986b. ‘La Couleur d’écume ou le paradoxe d’Apelle’, Critique, 469–70

(June–July): 606–29.
1986c. ‘La Dissemblance des figures selon Fra Angelico’, Mélanges
de l’école française de Rome, Moyen-Age-temps modernes, 98(2):
709–802.
1986d. ‘Une Ravissante Blancheur’, CNAC Magazine, 34: 26–7.
1986e. ‘Une ravissante blancheur’, in Un siècle de recherches freudiennes en
France 1885–1886: 22 et 23 février 1986, Centre Georges Pompidou,
71–83. Eres.
1986f. ‘L’Art de ne pas décrire: une aporie du détail chez Vermeer’, La
Part de l’oeil, 2: 102–19.
1986g. ‘Les Paradoxes de l’œil vorace’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 33
(May): 316–21.

1987

1987a. ‘Superstition’, Antigone: revue littéraire de photographie, 8: 22–52.

1987b. ‘Les Portes du diable’, Pandora’s Box, 4: 6–7.
1987c. ‘La Couleur de chair ou le paradoxe de Tertullien’, Nouvelle revue
de psychanalyse, 35 (May): 9–49.
1987d. ‘La Parabole des trois regards’, in Le Regard du dormeur, exhibi-
tion catalogue, 13–18. Musée d’art contemporain.

1988

1988a. ‘Le Paradoxe de l’être à voir (fragment)’, L’Ecrit du temps, 17:

79–91.
1988b. ‘L’Hymen et la couleur: figures médiévales de la vierge’, La Part
de l’oeil, 4: 6–21.

1989

1989a. ‘Le Parcours clos du danseur de corde ou l’histoire de l’art

dans les limites de sa simple raison’, Les Cahiers du MNAM, 30
(winter).
1989b. ‘L’Image ouverte’, Armodée: idées, images, signes, 1: 37–55.
1989c. ‘Deux versions d’une légende’, Pleine Marge, 9: 67.
1989d. ‘Le Paradoxe du phasme’, Antigone: revue littéraire de photogra-
phie, 13: 30–6.
230 ­ u b e r m a n
list of works by georges didi-h

1989e. ‘Art et théologie’, in Encyclopædia Universalis-Corpus, 65–73.

Encyclopædia Universalis.
1989f. ‘Angelico (Fra)’, in Encyclopædia Universalis-Corpus, 92–6.
Encyclopædia Universalis.
1989g. ‘Notes sur l’hystérie’, in Annette Message: comédie-tragédie, 1971–
1989, exhibition catalogue, 79–82. Musée de la ville.

1990

1990a. Devant l’image. Questions posées aux fins d’une histoire de l’art.
Minuit.
1990b. Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et figuration. Flammarion.
1990c. ‘L’incarnation figurale de la sentence: note sur la peau
autographique’, Bulletin de psychologie, 43(395): 359–67.
1990d. ‘Eloge du diaphane’, Sfr, Du point de vue de l’œuvre d’art, 1
(October): 12–25.
1990e. ‘L’Histoire de l’art face au symptôme. Interview with J. Criqui’,
artpress, 149 (July–August): 52–5.
1990f. ‘Celui qui inventa le verbe “photographier”’, Antigone: revue lit-
téraire de photographie, 14: 23–32.
1990g. ‘Le Disegno de Vasari, ou le bloc-­notes magique de l’histoire de
l’art’, La Part de l’œil, 6: 30–51.
1990h. ‘Le Visage entre les draps’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 41
(May): 21–54
1990i. ‘Un rêve: le verbe voit’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 41 (May):
305–7.
1990j. ‘L’Art des rapprochements. Interview with H. Debailleux’,
Libération, 5 (May): 36–7.
1990k. ‘L’Homme qui marchait dans la couleur’, Artstudio, 16 (spring):
6–17 (with Y. Klein).
1990l. ‘Ressemblant et dissemblable: l’image, le vestige, le portrait’,
in Annuaire de l’EHESS, comptes rendus des cours et conférences,
1988–1989, 387–8. EHESS.
1990m. ‘Puissances de la figure: exégèse et visualité dans l’art chrétien’,
in Encyclopædia Universalis-Symposium, 596–609. Encyclopædia
Universalis.
1990k. ‘Le lieu virtuel: l’annonciation au delà de son espace’, in
D. Arasse, M. Brock and G. Didi-­Huberman (eds), Symboles
de la Renaissance, III, 65–93. Presses de l’École Normale
Supérieure.
1990l. ‘Régions de dissemblance’, in Régions de dissemblance: Musée
 ­ uberman
list of works by georges didi-h 231

départemental de Rochechouart, 5 avril–10 juin 1990, exhibition

catalogue, 11–75. Musée départemental.

1991

1991a ‘Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde’, Les Cahiers du MNAM,
37 (autumn): 32–59.
1991b. ‘La Plus Simple Image’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, 44
(autumn): 75–100.
1991c. ‘Le Visage et la terre’, Artstudio, 21 (Summer): 6–21.
1991d. ‘Devant l’image: entretien’, Lieux extrêmes, 2: 37–41.
1991e. ‘L’Observation de Célina (1876–1880): esthétique et expérimen-
tation chez Charcot’, Revue internationale de psychopathologie, 4:
267–80.
1991f. ‘Disparates sur la voracité’, Poandsie, 58: 765–79.
1991g. ‘Question posée aux fins de l’histoire de l’art’, in D. Payot (ed.),
Mort de Dieu, fin de l’art, 215–43. Le Cerf.
1991h. ‘L’image ouverte, le sacrifice et l’incorporation (problèmes
d’anthropologie du visuel)’, in Annuaire de l’EHESS, comptes
rendus des cours et conférences, 1989–1990, 498–9. EHESS.
1991i. ‘Sur les treize faces du cube’, in Alberto Giacometti: sculptures,
­peintures, dessins, exhibition catalogue, 43–6. Musée d’art moderne
de la ville.

1992

1992a. À visage découvert. Flammarion.

1992b. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde. Minuit.
1992c. Le Cube et le visage: autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti.
Macula.
1992d. ‘La Solitude partenaire’, Théatre de la Bastille-Revue, 13: 45–6.
1992e. ‘Une Masse aveugle qui nous regarde’, Voir: périodique du Centre
de recherche sur les aspects culturels de la vision, 4: 17–23.
1992f. ‘“Forme” avec “présence”’, Théatre/public, 104 (March): 18–23.
1992g. ‘Pascal Convert’, Galeries Magazine, 47 (FebruarynMarch): 70–1.
1992h. ‘Indices, détails et symptômes visuels’, in Annuaire de l’EHESS,
comptes rendus des cours et conférences, 1990–1991, 402–3. EHESS.
1992i. ‘La Demeure (apparentement de l’artiste)’, in Pascal Convert:
œuvres de 1986 à 1992, exhibition catalogue, 13–47. capcMusée
d’art contemporain.
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1993

1993a. ‘La Leçon d’anachronie, suivi de deux textes de C. Eistein:

Georges Braque; la fabrication des fictions’, Artpress, 185
(November): 23–7.
1993b. ‘Regard historique, regard intempestif. Interview with S. Germer
and F. Perrin’, Blocnotes, 3 (summer): 30–5.
1993c. ‘Le Tremblement des évidences’, L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui,
286 (April): 74–7.
1993d. ‘D’un ressentiment en mal d’esthétique’, Les Cahiers du MNAM,
43 (spring): 102–18.
1993e. ‘L’imitation comme mythe de la renaissance’, in T. W. Gaehtgens
(ed.), Künstlerischer Austausch = Artistic Exchange. Akten des
XXVIII: Internationalen Kongress für Kunstgeschichte, Berlin
15–20 Juli 1992, 493–502. Berlin Akademie Verlag.
1993f. ‘Le visage et le lieu ou la question du portrait’, in Annuaire de
l’EHESS, comptes rendus des cours et des conférences, 1991–1992,
464–6. EHESS.
1993g. ‘L’autre miroir: autoportrait et mélancolie christique selon
Albrecht Dürer’, in A. Gentili, P. Morel and C. Cieri Via (eds), Il
ritratto e la memoria: materiali 2, 207–40. Bulzoni.
1993h. ‘Marin, Louis’, in Encyclopædia Universalis – Universalia 1993,
561–2. Encyclopædia Universalis.

1994

1994a. ‘L’empreinte du ciel’, in Les caprices de la foudre précédé de

l’empreinte du ciel. Antigone.
1994b. Saint Georges et le dragon: versions d’une légende. Adam Biro. (with
R. Garbetta and M. Morgaine).
1994c. ‘Pensée par image, pensée dialectique, pensée altérante: l’enfance
de l’art selon Georges Bataille’, Les Cahiers du MNAM, 50
(winter): 5–29.
1994d. ‘Le Travail d’inachever ou d’anthropomorphisme déchiré selon
Georges Bataille’, Nouvelle revue de psychologie, 50 (autumn):
237–61.
1994e. ‘Bataille avec Eisenstein: forme, matière, montage’, Cinémathèque:
revue semestrielle d’esthétique et d’histoire du cinéma, 6: 15–38.
1994f. ‘D’un ressentiment en mal d’esthétique’, in F. Bonnefoy
(ed.), L’art contemporain en question, 65–88. Éditions du Jeu de
Paume.
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1994g. ‘De l’art d’être un bon “soldat du Christ”’, L’Inactuel: psychana-

lyse et culture, 1 (spring): 60–70.
1994h. ‘Une Page de larmes, un miroir de tourments’, Nouvelle revue de
psychanalyse, 49 (spring): 238–40.
1994i. ‘Don de la page, don du visage’, Poandsie, 67 (March): 95–105.
1994j. ‘D’un ressentiment en mal d’esthétique’, in B. Françoise (ed.),
L’Art contemporain en question, 65–88. Éditions du Jeu de Paume.
1994k. ‘Le Verbe voit’, in M. Gribinski (ed.), Analyse ordinaire, analyse
extraordinaire, 94–8. Gallimard.
1994l. ‘Paradoxes de l’œil vorace’, in M. Gribinski (ed.), Analyse ordi-
naire, analyse extraordinaire, 106–14. Gallimard.
1994m. ‘Le don du visage ou les ritualités du portrait’, in Annuaire de
l’EHESS, comptes rendus des cours et conférences, 1992–1993,
495–6. EHESS.
1994n. ‘Feux d’images: un malaise dans la représentation du XIVème
siècle’, in La peinture à Florence et à Sienne après la peste noire,
les arts, la religion, la société au milieu du XIVème siècle, ix–il.
Hazan.

1995

1995a. La Ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges

Bataille. Macula.
1995b. ‘Le Lieu malgré tout’, Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire, 46 (April/
June): 36–44. Reprinted in 1998a: 228–42.
1995c. ‘Dialogue sur le symptôme’, L’inactuel, 5: 200–1 (with P. Lacoste).
1995d. ‘Figée à son insu dans un moule magique . . .: anachronisme du
moulage, histoire de la sculpture, archéologie de la modernité’,
Les Cahiers du MNAM, 54 (winter): 80–113.
1995e. ‘L’Armoire à mémoire’, FMR, 11(54): 107–26.
1995f. ‘Comment déchire-­t-on la ressemblance?’, in Bataille après tout,
colloque d’Orléans, 1993, 101–23. Belin.
1995g. ‘La ressemblance ouverte’, in Annuaire de l’EHESS, comptes
rendus des cours et conférences, 1993–1994, 497–9. EHESS.

1996

1996a. ‘Tableau = coupure: expérience visuelle, forme et symptôme

selon Carl Einstein’, Les Cahiers MNAM, 58 (winter): 4–27.
1996b. ‘L’Image-­matrice: généalogie et vérité de la ressemblance selon
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Pline l’Ancien, hisoire naturelle, XXXV, 1–7’, L’Inactuel, 6

(autumn): 109–25.
1996c. ‘Pour une anthropologie des singularités formelle: remarque sur
l’invention warburgienne’, Genèse, sciences sociales et histoire, 4:
145–63.
1996d. ‘L’Image-­matière: poussière, ordure, saleté, sculpture au XVIe
siècle’, L’Inactuel, 5 (spring): 63–81.
1996e. Imaginum ­pictura . . . i­ n totum exoleuit, début de l’histoire de l’art
et fin de l’époque de l’image’, Critique, 586 (March): 138–50.
1996f. ‘Imitation, représentation, fonction: remarques sur un mythe
épistémologique’, in L’image, fonctions et usages des images dans
l’occident médiéval, colloque d’Erice, 1992, 59–86. Le Léopard
d’Or.
1996g. ‘Don de la page, don du visage’, in J.-M. Maulpoix (ed.), Poétique
du texte offert, 57–75. ENS.
1996h. ‘La Ressemblance ouverte (suite)’, in Annuaire de l’EHESS,
comptes rendus des cours et conférences, 1994–1995, 617–19. EHESS.

1997

1997a. ‘La Solitude partenaire’, Cinergon, ouvroir cinéma et image, 3: 5–9.

1997b. ‘Dans les plis de l’ouvert’, Contretemps, 2–3: 238–49.
1997c. ‘Question de temps’, Le Journal des arts, 36 (April): 6.
1997d. ‘Ressemblance’, Delta: revue internationale pour la poésie expéri-
mentale, 6 (February): 38–45.
1997e. ‘“Superstition”, “Le paradoxe du phasme”’, in N. Gingras (ed.),
The Tenuous Image = De la minceur de l’image, 29–33. Dazibao.
1997f. L’Empreinte, exhibition catalogue. Éditions Centre Pompidou.
1997g. ‘Être crâne: lieu, contact, pensée, sculpture’, in Giuseppe Penone,
exhibition catalogue, 187–210. Musée d’art contemporain/
Hopefulmonster.

1998

1998a. Phasmes: essais sur l’apparition. Minuit.

1998b. L’Étoilement. Conversation avec Hantaï. Minuit.
1998c. ‘Image, organe, temps: approche de l’ex-­voto’, Le Fait de l’analyse,
5 (September): 245–60.
1998d. ‘Supposition de l’aura: du maintenant, de l’autrefois et de la
modernité’, Les Cahiers du MNAM, 64 (summer): 95–115.
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1998e. ‘Viscosité et survivances: l’histoire de l’art à l’épreuve du maté-

riau’, Critique, 54(611): 138–62.
1998f. ‘Fable du lieu’, Pages Paysages, 7: 10–25.
1998g. ‘L’Historien d’art et ses fantômes: note sur J.J. Winckelmann’,
L’Inactuel, 1: 75–88.
1998h. ‘L’Anachronisme fabrique l’histoire: sur l’inactualité de Karl
Einstein’, Études germaniques, 53(1): 29–54.
1998i. ‘La ressemblance par contact (suite)’, in Annuaire de l’EHESS,
comptes rendus des cours et conférences, 1996–1997, 547–9.
EHESS.
1998j. ‘Morceaux de cire’, in Définitions de la culture visuelle, III: art
et philosophie, colloque de Montréal, 16–18 octobre 1997, 53–65.
Musée d’art contemporain.
1998k. ‘Art et théologie’, in Dictionnaire de la théologie chrétienne, 85–97.
Encyclopædia U ­ niversalis – ­Albin Michel.
1998l. ‘Angelico, Guido di Piero, dit “Fra” (1400 env.–1455)’, in
Dictionnaire de la Renaissance, 34–42. Encyclopædia ­Universalis –
­Albin Michel.
1998m. ‘Marin, Louis (1931–1992)’, in Dictionnaire des philosophes, 999–
1000. Encyclopædia ­Universalis – ­Albin Michel.
1998n. ‘Anthropologie du visuel: la ressemblance par contact’, in Annuaire
de l’EHESS, comptes rendus des cours et conférences, 1996–1997,
547–9. EHESS.
1998o. ‘Savoir-­ mouvement (L’Homme qui parlait aux papillons)’,
preface in P.-A. Michaud, Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement,
7–20. Macula.
1998p. ‘Face, proche, lointain: l’empreinte du visage et le lieu pour appa-
raître’, in H. L. Kessler and G. Wolf (eds), The Holy Face and the
Paradox of Représentation, 95–108. Nuova Alfa Editoriale.
1998q. ‘Ouvrir une image’, in F. Dastur (ed.), Phénoménologie et esthé-
tique, 169–91. Encre marine.
1998r. ‘La Dialectique du visuel ou le jeu de l’évidement’, in 2nd
International Art Meeting, Katowice, exhibition catalogue, 96–124.
Galeria Sztuki Wspolczesnej.
1998s. ‘Dans la lumière du seuil’, in Yves Bonnefoy, exhibition catalogue,
89–98. Le Temps qu’il fait.

1999

1999a. Ouvrir Vénus: nudité, rêve, cruauté. L’image ouvrante, 1. Gallimard.

1999b. La Demeure, la souche: Apparentements de l’Artiste. Minuit.
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1999c. ‘Dialogue sur l’inestimable’, Artpress, 248 (July/August): 43–7

(with P. Convert).
1999d. ‘L’Image survivante: Aby Warburg et l’anthropologie tylorienne’,
L’Inactuel, 3 (autumn): 39–59.
1999e. ‘Contact-­image’, Tympanum, 3.
1999f. ‘Notre Dibbouk: Aby Warburg dans l’autre temps de l’histoire’,
La Part de l’oeil, 15–16: 219–36.
1999g. ‘Sismographies du temps: Warburg, Burckhardt, Nietzsche’, Les
Cahiers du MNAM, 68 (summer): 5–20.
1999h. ‘L’Être qui papillone’, Cinémathèque, 15 (spring): 7–14.
1999i. ‘L’inquiétante matière du ressemblant’, in Annuaire de l’EHESS,
comptes rendus des cours et conférences, 1997–1998, 575–7. EHESS.
1999j. ‘La déchirure constitutive de l’image artistique’, in L. Lavaud
(ed.), L’image, 186–92. Flammarion.
1999k. ‘Histoire de l’art, histoire de fantômes: renaissance et survivance,
de Burckhardt à Warburg’, in V. Mauron and C. de Ribaupierre
(eds), Le Corps évanoui, les images subites, 60–71. Musée de
l’Elysée/Hazan.
1999l. ‘Chairs de cire: cercle vicieux’, in M. von Düring and M. Poggesi
(eds), Encyclopædia Anatomica – A complete Collection of Anatomical
Waxes, 64–99. Taschen.
1999m. ‘Pour une anthropologie des singularités formelles: remarque
sur l’invention warburgienne’, in Rhetorik der Leidenschaft:
zur Bildsprache des Kunst im Abenland, Meisterwerke aus der
Graphischen Sammlung Albertina and aus der Porträtsammlung des
Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, 237–45. National Museum of
Western Art.

2000

2000a. Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Minuit.

2000b. Être crâne. Lieu, contact, pensée, sculpture. Minuit.
2000c. ‘La matière inquiète (Plasticité, viscosité, étrangeté)’, Lignes, 1(1):
206–23.
2000d. ‘L’Aiguille et le papillon, ou le dispositif du silence perçant’,
L’Inactuel, 5 (autumn): 201–14.
2000e. ‘L’Histoire de l’art est une discipline anachronique’, Le Genre
humain, 35: 291–301.
2000f. ‘L’Histoire de l’art à rebrousse-­poil: temps de l’image et travail au
sein des choses selon Walter Benjamin’, Les Cahiers du MNAM,
72: 92–117.
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2000g. ‘Connaissance par le kaléidoscope: morale du joujou et dialectique

de l’image selon Walter Benjamin’, Études photographiques, 7
(May): 4–27.
2000h. ‘Saint Georges et le dragon’, in Saint Georges et le dragon: de la
légende au mythe, 19–32. La Lettre volée.
2000i. ‘Plasticité du devenir et fracture dans l’histoire: Warburg avec
Nietzsche’, in C. Malabou (ed.)., Plasticité, 58–69. Leo Scheer.
2000j. ‘Devant le temps: histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images’,
in Annuaire de l’EHESS, comptes rendus des cours et conférences,
1998–1999, 595–7. EHESS.
2000k. ‘Des gammes anachroniques. Interview by R. Maggiori’,
Liberation, 23 November.
2000l. ‘L’Image survient: l’histoire se démonte, le temps se remonte’,
in Le Temps, vite, exhibition catalogue, 10–11. Éditions Centre
Pompidou.
2000m. ‘Sismographie du temps: Warburg, Burckhardt, Nietzsche’, in
3rd Internetional Art Meeting, Katowice, exhibition catalogue,
118–43. Galeria Sztuki Wspolczesnej.

2001

2001a. L’Homme qui Marchait dans la Couleur. Minuit.

2001b. Génie du non-lieu. Air, poussière, empreinte, hantise. Minuit.
2001c. ‘Fables du lieu’, in Fables du lieu: Pascal Convert, Simon Hantaï,
Claudio Parmiggiani, Giuseppe Penone, James Turrell, exhibition
catalogue, 11–16. Studio national des arts contemporains.
2001d. ‘Devant le pan: devant le temps. Souveraineté de l’anachronisme’,
in J. Neefs (ed.), Le temps des œuvres: mémoire et préfiguration,
87–100. Presses universitaires de Vincennes.
2001e. ‘Nachleben, ou l’inconscient du temps: les images aussi souffrent
de reminiscences’, L’Animal: littératures, arts et philosophie, 10:
40–8.
2001f. ‘La Tragédie de la culture: Warburg avec Nietzsche’, Visio, 5(4):
9–19.
2001g. ‘La Femme clichée: dermographisme et stigmatisation expéri-
mentale au XIXème siècle’, L’Herne, 75: 167–76.
2001h. ‘Montage des ruines. Interview with G. Astic and C. Tarting’,
Simulacres, 5: 8–17.
2001i. ‘Sous le regard des eaux’, Lieu-dit, 14: 5–13.
2001j. ‘Aby Warburg et l’archive des intensités’, Études photographiques,
10: 144–63.
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2001k. ‘L’Oeuvre-­fable. Interview with Ch. Palmiéri’, Etc Montréal, 53

(March–May): 24–9.
2001l. ‘Le Philosophe de la maison hantée: entretien avec Nicolas
Demorand’, Beaux-Arts Magazine, 202 (March): 42–5.
2001m. ‘Les Oeuvres d’art sont comme des noeuds du temps. Interview
with S. Gignoux’, La Croix, 15 (February).
2001n. ‘Devant le temps: histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images
(suite)’, in Annuaire de l’EHESS, comptes rendus des cours et confé-
rences, 1999–2000, 623–6. EHESS.
2001o. ‘Fables du lieu. Interview with C. Loire’, DDO, 43: 7–9.
2001p. ‘Images malgré tout’, in Mémoire des camps: photographies des
camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis (1933–1999), exhi-
bition catalogue, 219–41. Marval.

2002

2002a. Ninfa Moderna. Essai sur le drapé tombé. Gallimard.

2002b. L’Image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby
Warburg. Minuit.
2002c. ‘Image, matière: immanence. Interview with F.Noudelmann’,
Rue Descartes, 4(38): 86–99.
2002d. ‘Aby Warburg, l’histoire de l’art à l’âge des fantômes. Interview
with É.During’, Artpress, 277: 18–24.
2002e. ‘La Draperie des trottoirs’, in Herzog and De Meuron: his-
toire naturelle, exhibition catalogue, 277–87. Centre canadien
d’architecture.

2003

2003a. Images malgré tout. Minuit.

2003b. ‘L’Immanence figurale: hypocondrie et morphologie selon Victor
Hugo’, Les Cahiers du MNAM, 85 (autumn): 90–120.
2003c. ‘Saint Georges et le dragon’, in Saint Georges et le dragon: de la
légende au mythe, 19–32. La Lettre Volée.
2003d. ‘L’Être qui papillonne’, in Alain Fleischer: la vitesse d’évasion,
exhibition catalogue, 23–9. Éditions Centre Pompidou.
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2004

2004a. ‘La danse de toute chose’, in G. Didi-­Huberman and L. Mannoni

(eds), Mouvements de l’air: Etienne-Jules Marey, photographe des
fluides, 173–343. Gallimard.
2004b. ‘L´image est le mouvant. Intermédialités/Intermediality, 3, 11–30.
2004c. ‘Le flux de toute chose’, in G. Didi-­Huberman and L. Mannoni
(eds), Mouvements de l´air. Étienne-Jules Marey, photographe des
fluides, 249–343. Gallimard.
2004d. ‘Images malgré tout, entretien avec Georges Didi-­Huberman.
Interview with M. Ravache’, L’Œil, 560 (July): 18–19.
2004e. ‘Azur et cendre’, in Ouvrir Couvrir, 41–81. Verdier.
2004f. ‘Une notion du “corps-­cliché” au XIXe siècle’, in Ch. Pontbriand
(ed.), Parachute: essais choisis 1975–1984, vol. 1, 207–31. La Lettre
Volée.

2005

2005a. Gestes d’air et de pierre. Corps, parole, souffle, image. Minuit.

2005b. ‘L’Espace danse: étoile de mer Explosante-­fixe’, Les Cahiers du
MNAM, 94 (winter): 36–51.
2005c. ‘Air et pierre’, Recherches en psychanalyse 1(3): 127–30.

2006

2006a. Le Danseur des solitudes. Minuit.

2006b. Ex-voto. Image, organe, temps. Bayard.
2006c. ‘Ouvrir les camps, fermer les yeux’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences
sociales, 5(61): 1011–49.
2006d. ‘Israel Galvan, “El disloque”: la solitude du danseur profond’,
Artpress, 319 (January): 50–4.
2006e. ‘L’image brûle’, in L. Zimmermann (ed.), Penser par les images:
autour des travaux de Georges Didi-Huberman, 11–52. Cécile
Defaut.

2007

2007a. L’image ouverte: motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels.

Gallimard.
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2007b. ‘L’Emotion ne dit pas “je”. Dix fragments sur la liberté esthé-
tique’, in N. Schweizer and L. Bovier (eds), Alfredo Jaar: la
politique des images, exhibition catalogue, 57–69. JRP Ringier.
2007c. ‘Esquisse d’atlas’, in Pascal Convert: lamento [1998–2005], exhi-
bition catalogue, 199–261. Musée d’Art moderne Grand-­Duc
Jean.
2007d. ‘Construire la durée’, in Pascal Convert: lamento [1998–2005],
exhibition catalogue, 25–51. Musée d’Art moderne Grand-­Duc
Jean.
2007e. ‘Bertolt Brecht ABC de la guerre, 1955’, Artpress 2(5): 14–
19.
2007f. ‘Dessin, désir, métamorphose (esquissés sur les ailes d’un papil-
lon)’, in Le Plaisir au dessin: carte blanche à Jean-Luc Nancy,
exhibition catalogue, 214–26. Hazan.
2007g. ‘Das Archiv brennt’, trans. Emmanuel Alloa, in G. Didi-­
Huberman and K. Ebling, Das Archiv brennt, 7–32. Kadmos.
2007h. ‘Le Lait de la mort’, in Sarkis: ‘au commencement, le toucher’,
exhibition catalogue, 99–120. Frac Alsace/Archibooks.

2008

2008a. La Ressemblance par contact: archéologie, anachronisme et modernité

de ­l’empreinte. Minuit.
2008b. L’Œil de l’histoire – Tome 1: Quand les images prennent position.
Minuit.
2008c. ‘Simon Hantaï 1922–2008’, Artpress, 351 (December): 28.
2008d. ‘Image, événement, durée’, Images Re-vues, hors série 1. https://​
journals.openedition.org/imagesrevues/787. Accessed 12 April
2022.
2008e. ‘Geste, fêlure, terre’, in B. Formis (ed.), Gestes à l’œuvre, 17–35.
De l’incidence.
2008f. ‘Mortal cadencia ou la gravité dansée’, in Pilar Albarracin: mortal
cadencia, exhibition catalogue, 29–37. Fage/La Maison rouge.

2009

2009a. ‘Peuples exposés, peuples figurants’, De(s)générations, 9

(September): 7–17.
2009b. ‘Pasolini ou la recherche des peuples perdus’, Les Cahiers du
MNAM, 108 (summer): 86–115.
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2009c. ‘La Terre se meurt sous les pas du danseur’, La Part de l’oeil, 24:
125–41.
2009d. ‘Gestes survivants, corps politiques’, Centquatrevue, 1 (May):
11–14.
2009e. ‘Image, événement, durée’, in D. Donadieu-­ Rigaut (ed.),
Traditions et temporalités des images, 237–48. Éditions de l’École
des hautes études en sciences sociales.
2009f. ‘L’Envisagement du monde’, in Philippe Bazin: la radicalisation
du monde, exhibition catalogue, 254–71. L’Atelier d’édition.

2010

2010a. Survivance des lucioles. Minuit.

2010b. L’Œil de l’histoire – Tome 2: Remontages du temps subi. Minuit.
2010c. ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman, atlas: comment remonter le monde.
Interview with C. Millet’, Artpress, 373 (December): 48–55.
2010d. ‘Harun Farocki ou la dialectique des Lumières’, Les Cahiers du
MNAM, 112–13 (summer–autumn): 160–81.
2010e. ‘Introduction’, Images Re-vues, hors série 2 (January). https://​
journals.openedition.org/imagesrevues/276. Accessed 12 April
2022.
2010f. ‘L’Ivresse des formes et l’illumination profane’, Images Re-vues,
hors série 2 (January). https://journals.openedition.org/images​
revues/291. Accessed 12 April 2022.
2010g. ‘Grand joujou mortel (fragments) = Big Mortal Toy (Fragments)’,
Artpress, 363: 23–36.
2010h. ‘Remonter, refendre, restituer’, in J.-P. Criqui (ed.), L’image-
document, entre réalité et fiction, 68–91. Le Bal/Images en
manœuvres.
2010i. ‘Rendre une image’, in E. Alloa (ed.). Penser l’image, 267–92. Les
presses du réel.
2010j. ‘Des Oeuvres sans queue ni chef’, in Chefs-d’oeuvre?, exhibition
catalogue, 21–4. Éditions Centre Pompidou.

2011

2011a. Écorces. Minuit.

2011b. L’Œil de l’histoire – Tome 3: Atlas ou le gai savoir inquiet. Minuit.
2011c. ‘Eloge de la table, ou la scène hétérotopique’, Pavillon, 3 (June):
58–72.
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2011d. ‘Petites boîtes de lecture, pour voir’, in T. Davila and P. Sauvanet

(eds), Devant les images. Penser l’art et l’histoire avec Georges Didi-
Huberman, 41–68. Les presses du réel.

2012

2012a. L’Œil de l’histoire – Tome 4: Peuples exposés, peuples figurants.

Minuit.
2012b. ‘Mnemosyne 42’, Manifesta Journal, 16: 99–103.
2012c. ‘Le Bref été de la dépense: Carl Einstein, Georges Bataille et
l’économie-­Picasso’, Les Cahiers du MNAM, 120 (summer):
12–43.
2012d. Les grands entretiens d’artpress. Georges Didi-Huberman. Interviews.
IMEC. Art Press.
2012e. ‘Blancs soucis de notre histoire’, in Esther Shalev-Gerz, exhibition
catalogue, 63–8. JRP/Ringier.

2013

2013a. Sur le fil. Minuit.

2013b. Blanc Soucis. Minuit.
2013c. Phalènes. Essais sur l’apparition, 2. Minuit.
2013d. ‘Rendre sensible’, in Qu’est-ce qu’un peuple?, 77–114. La fabrique.
2013e. L’album de l’art à l’époque du musée imaginaire. Hazan and Louvre.
2013f. Quelle émotion! Quelle émotion? Bayard.
2013g. ‘Film, essai, poème: La Rabbia de Pier Paolo Pasolini’, Les Cahiers
du MNAM, 124 (summer): 18–35.
2013h. ‘Hépatique empathie: l’affinité des incommensurables selon Aby
Warburg’, in A. Gefen and B. Vouilloux (eds), Empathie et esthé-
tique, 371–89). Hermann.
2013i. ‘Bouquet de fleurs bleues et de fleurs du mal’, in Simon Hantaï,
exhibition catalogue, 216–25, sous la direction de D. Fourcade,
I. Monod-­Fontaine, A. Pacquement. Éditions Centre Pompidou.
2013j. ‘L’inestimable. Entretien avec Georges Didi-­ Huberman’, in
Simon Hantaï: Deux Films de Jean-Michel Meurice. P.O.M.
Films/INA/Centre Pompidou.
2013k. ‘Sortir du blanc: Lettre à Pascal Convert. 30 octobre 2013’, paper
delivered at 14th Ritournelles Festival, Bordeaux.
2013l. ‘Penser penché’, in Vues d’en haut, exhibition catalogue, 196–207.
Éditions Centre Pompidou.
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2014

2014a. Sentir le grisou. Minuit.

2014b. Essayer voir. Minuit.
2014c. ‘Sortir du plan’, in Gerhard Richter: Pictures/Series, exhibition
catalogue, 54–173. Fondation Beyeler/Hatje Cantz.
2014d. ‘Le Monde soulevé’, Artpress2, 33 (May–July): 78–83.
2014e. ‘Une exposition à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique’,
Palais, 19: 188–96.
2014f. ‘L’art remonte l’histoire (À propos du Musée imaginaire)’, in
A. Beyer, A. Mengoni and A. von Schöning (eds), Interpositions.
Montage d’images et production de sens, 89–110. Éditions de la
Maison des sciences de l’homme.
2014g. ‘Lumière contre lumière’, in La Disparition des lucioles: collection
Lambert en Avignon, prison Sainte-Anne, exhibition catalogue,
31–45. Actes Sud.
2014h. ‘Sortir du gris’, in Mathieu Pernot: La Traversée, 5–31. Jeu de
Paume/Le Point du Jour.

2015

2015a. Sortir du noir. Minuit.

2015b. L’Œil de l’histoire – Tome 5: Passés cités par JLG. Minuit.
2015c. Ninfa fluida: Essai sur le drapé-désir. Gallimard.
2015d. L’histoire de l’art depuis Walter Benjamin. Mimésis (with G. Careri).
2015e. ‘Fête profonde et pseudo-­fête: La Comtesse aux pieds nus et
la question de la souveraineté’, Les Cahiers du MNAM, 133
(autumn): 4–23.
2015f. ‘Jean-­Luc Godard ou l’histoire contrariée’, in J.-P. Greff (ed.),
Jeux sérieux: cinéma et art contemporains transforment l’essai,
229–56. Mamco.

2016

2016a. L’Œil de l’histoire – Tome 6: Peuples en larmes, peuples en armes.

Minuit.
2016b. Soulèvements. Gallimard/Jeu de Paume.
2016c. Hubert Damisch, l’art au travail. Mimésis (with G. Careri).
2016d. ‘Sortir du plan. Deux lettres à Gerhard Richter’, Les Cahiers du
MNAM, 135 (spring): 74–105.
244 ­ u b e r m a n
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2016e. ‘Sortir du plan 2. L’écorcement: 3e et 4e lettres à Gerhard

Richter’, Les Cahiers du MNAM, 137 (autumn): 17–59.
2016f. ‘Soulèvements. Interview with E. Hatt’, Artpress, 438 (November):
8–11.
2016g. ‘Préface’, in R. Cuir (ed.), Renaissance de l’anatomie, 11–24.
Hermann.

2017

2017a. Passer, quoi qu’il en coûte. Minuit.

2017b. ‘La Dama duende. [Préface]’, in Georges Bataille, Courts écrits sur
l’art, 7–42. Lignes.
2017c. Ninfa profunda: essai sur le drapé-tourmente. Gallimard.
2017d. ‘Quatre bouts de pellicule arrachés à l’enfer’, in V. Lavoie (ed.),
La preuve par l’image, 207–18. Presses de l’Université du Québec.
2017e. ‘Image-­fait ou image-­fétiche’, in V. Lavoie (ed.), La preuve par
l’image, 219–58. Presses de l’Université du Québec.
2017f. ‘Lire, encore et toujours, ce qui n’a jamais été écrit’, in E. Alloa
(ed.), Penser l’image III. Comment lire les images?, 369–92. Les
presses du réel.
2017g. ‘Antres-­Temps: Ritournelle de Bâmiyân’, in P. Convert and
G. Didi-­Huberman, Antres-Temps (Ritournelle de Bâmiyân).
Artist’s Book.

2018

2018a. Aperçues. Minuit.

2018b. ‘Multitudes, essaims, communautés’, Esse, 92 (winter): 60–7.
2018c. ‘Hauteurs de vue’, Esprit, 446 (July–August): 65–78.

2019

2019a. Désirer désobéir. Ce qui nous soulève, 1. Minuit.

2019b. Pour commencer encore. Dialogue avec Philippe Roux. Argol.
2019c. Ninfa dolorosa. Essai sur la mémoire d’un geste. Gallimard.
2019d. ‘Le cauchemar des formes (retour sur l’informe et la dialectique)’,
Le Genre humain, 60: 199–209. Special issue, Le Rêve des formes:
arts, sciences and Cie, ed. A. Fleischer and A. Prochiantz.
2019e. ‘L’inhérence, l’œil et les voies du couteau. Retour sur l’informe et
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list of works by georges didi-h 245

la dialectique’, postface to the reissue of 1995a, La Ressemblance

informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille, 422–80). 3rd
edition. Macula.
2019f. ‘Nouvelles histoires de fantômes, 2012–2014’, in J. M. Dallet and
B. Gervail (eds), Architecture de mémoire, 84–109). Les presses du
réel/ArTeC (with A. Gisinger).
2019g. ‘Aperçues d’accrochage’, in L. Déry (ed.), Le Soulèvement infini,
exhibition catalogue, 14–52. Galerie de l’UQAM.
2019h. ‘Soulèvements’, in L. Déry (ed.), Le Soulèvement infini, exhibition
catalogue, 54–5. Galerie de l’UQAM.
2019i. ‘Racine ou tourbillon? A la recherche du “grand temps”’, in
L. Déry (ed.), Le Soulèvement infini, exhibition catalogue, 194–
207. Galerie de l’UQAM.

2020

2020a. Éparses. Voyage dans les papiers du ghetto de Varsovie. Minuit.

2020b. ‘Faire danser la pensée’, Perspective, 2: 10–16.

2021

2021a. Imaginer recommencer. Ce qui nous soulève, 2. Minuit.

2021b. ‘La Verticale des émotions’, Critique, 10(893): 845–63.
2021c. ‘Idas y vueltas ou la politique du vagabondage’, Cahiers du Musée
national d’art moderne, 154 (autumn): 3–49.
 List of Sc h ol a rl y Pu b l i c a ti on s o n Ge o r g e s Di di -­
H u b e rm a n i n Eng l i s h

Alloa, E. (2018). ‘Phasmid Thinking. On Georges Didi-­ Huberman’s

Method’, trans. C. Woodall, Angelaki 23(4): 103–12.
Armstrong, P., and Lisbon, L. (2015). ‘Conversations with Hantaï:
Didi-­Huberman, Damisch, Rouan, Nancy’, Journal of Contemporary
Painting, 1(2): 201–49.
Baert, B. (2017). ‘Stains. T
­ race – ­Cloth – Symptom’, Textile: Cloth and
Culture, 15(3): 270–91.
Baert, B. (2018). ‘He or She who Glimpses, Desires, is Wounded. A
Dialogue in the Interspace (Zwischenraum) between Any Warburg and
Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Angelaki, 23(4): 47–79.
Chirolla, G., and Mejía Mosquera, J. F. (2017). ‘Deleuze and Didi-­
Huberman on Art History’, in S. van Tuinen and S. Zepke (eds), Art
History after Deleuze and Guattari, 91–104. Leuven University Press.
De Cauwer, S. (2018). ‘Searching for Fireflies: Pathos and Imagination
in the Theories of Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Angelaki, 23(4): 133–
49.
De Cauwer, S. (2021). ‘Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Georges Didi-­
Huberman: The Persistence of Lost Worlds’, Journal of Aesthetics, and
Culture, 13(1): 1–13.
De Cauwer, S. (2021). ‘Potentiality and Uprisings: Georges Didi-­
Huberman in Dialogue with Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri’,
Italian Studies, 76(2): 186–99.
De Cauwer, S., and Smith, L. K. (2018). ‘Critical Image Configurations:
The Work of Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Angelaki 23(4): 3–10.
De Cauwer, S., and Smith, L. K. (eds) (2018). ‘Critical Image
Configurations: The Work of Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Angelaki 23(4),
special issue. Republished as S. De Cauwer and L. K. Smith (eds),
Critical Image Configurations: The Work of Georges Didi-Huberman.
Routledge, 2019.
Doroszuk, H. (2018). ‘Disappearing Objects in Georges Didi-­Huberman’s
Curatorial Practices’, Studia de Arte et Educatione, 13: 56–65.
Duarte, M. M. (2017). ‘Reading Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Devant Le
Temps: History, Memory and Montage’, Studies in Visual Art and
Communication 4(1). http://journalonarts.org/wp-­content/uploads​
/2017/08/SVACij_Vol4_No1-­2017-­Miguel-­Mesquita-­Duarte_Rea​d
ing-­Georges-­Didi-­Hubermans.pdf. Accessed 12 April 2022.
 list of scholarly publications 247

ffrench, P. (1999). The Cut: Reading Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil.

Oxford University Press.
ffrench, P. (2006). ‘Pathology of the Photogram’, Film-Philosophy 10(2):
23–30.
ffrench, P. (2020). ‘Suppressed Emotion: Georges Didi-­ Huberman’,
in P. ffrench, Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics,
144–51. Bloomsbury.
Fowler, C. (2018). ‘Slow Looking: Confronting Moving Images with
Georges Didi-­Huberman’, in M. Beugnet, A. Cameron and A. Fetveit
(eds), Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty,
241–54. Edinburgh University Press.
Gratton, J. (2012). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Iconology of the Ninfa
Moderna: A Critique’, Irish Journal of French Studies, 11: 113–34.
Gustafsson, H. (2019). Crime Scenery in Postwar Film and Photography.
Palgrave Macmillan.
Hanza, K. (2014). ‘Images and Symptoms: Georges Didi-­Huberman’s
Studies on Art’, Journal of British Society for Phenomenology, 45(1):
38–48.
Harvey, R. (2017). Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics.
Bloomsbury.
Harvey, R. (2018). ‘Eyes Wide Open. What the Eye of History Compels
Us to Do’, Angelaki 23(4): 91–102.
Ionescu, V. (2017). ‘On Moths and Butterflies, or How to Orient Oneself
through Images. Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Art Criticism in Context’,
Journal of Art Historiography, 16 (June). https://arthistoriography.files​
.wordpress.com/2017/05/ionescu.pdf. Accessed 12 April 2022.
Larsson, C. (2011). ‘Suspicious Images: Iconophobia and Ethical Gaze’,
M/C Journal 15(1). https://journal.media-­culture.org.au/index.php​
/mcjournal/article/view/393. Accessed 12 April 2022.
Larsson, C. (2015). ‘And the Word Becomes Flesh. Georges Didi-­
Huberman’s Symptom in the Image’, Electronic Melbourne Art Journal,
3. http://index-­journal.org/media/pages/emaj/issue-­8/and-­the-­wo​
rd-­becomes-­flesh-­by-­chari-­larsson/446c4759dc-­1589785132/larsson​
-­and-­the-­word-­becomes-­flesh.pdf. Accessed 12 April 2022.
Larsson, C. (2016). ‘Thinking Things: Images of Thought and
Thoughtful Images’, Transformations 27. http://www.transformations
journal.org​/wp-­content/uploads/2016/12/Larsson_Transformations
27.pdf. Accessed 23 March 2022.
Larsson, C. (2016). ‘Making Monsters in Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul’,
Senses of Cinema, 81. https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2016/feature​
-­articles/son-­of-­saul/. Accessed 12 April 2022.
Larsson, C. (2020). ‘Didi-­ Huberman and Art History’s Amicable
248 l i s t o f s c h o l a r l y p u b l i c a t i o n s

Incursions’, Journal of Art Historiography, 22. https://research-­repos​

itory.griffith.edu.au/handle/10072/394977. Accessed 23 March 2022.
Larsson, C. (2020). Didi-Huberman and the Image. Manchester University
Press.
Larsson, C. (2022). ‘Scandal in the Museum: A Symptomatic Response’,
Psychoanalysis, Culture, & Society. Forthcoming.
Leśniak, A. (2013). ‘The Problem of Formal Analysis of the Representations
of the Holocaust. Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Images in Spite of All and
Harun Farocki’s Respite’, Teksty Drugie, 2: 182–202.
Leśniak, A. (2017). ‘Images Thinking the Political: On the Recent Works
of Georges Didi-­Huberman’, Oxford Art Journal, 40(2): 305–18.
Leśniak, A. (2021). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman’, in K. Purgar (ed.), The
Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies, 951–64. Palgrave Macmillan.
Longford, S. (2020). ‘Putting Gestures to Work: Georges Didi-­Huberman,
Uprisings’, Kronos, 46(1). http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=​
sci_arttext&pid=S0259-­01902020000100014. Accessed 12 April 2022.
Marshall, J. W. (2008). ‘Pathos, Pathology, and the Still-­Mobile Image:
A Warburgian Reading of Held by Garry Stewart and Lois Greenfield’,
About Performance, 8: 180–206.
Marshall, J. W. (2017). ‘A Dramaturgy of Montage and Dislocation,
Brecht, Warburg, Didi-­ Huberman and the Pathosformel’, in
E. O’Toole, A. Pelegrí Kristić and S. Young (eds), Ethical Exchanges in
Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy, 187–209. Rodopi.
Marshall, J. W. (2020). ‘Traumatic Dances of the “Non-­Self”: Bodily
Incoherence and the Hysterical Archive’, in J. Braun (ed.), Performing
Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, 61–83.
Leuven University Press.
Marshall, J. W. (2021). ‘Hysterical Aesthetics in Contemporary
Performance: Theatre, Dance, Voice’, in J. Braun (ed.). Hysterical
Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt, 271–95. Palgrave Macmillan.
Oberprantacher, A. (2020). ‘The Shimmering Phenomenon of
Clandestinity: Political Phenomenology Beside Appearing and
Vanishing’, in T. Bedorf and S. Herrmann (eds), Political Phenomenology.
Experience, Ontology, Episteme, 98–118. Routledge.
Rancière, J. (2018). ‘Images Re-­read. The Method of Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, trans. E. Woodard, J. R. Solorzano, S. De Cauwer and
L. K. Smith, Angelaki, 23(4): 11–18.
Rose, S.-E. (2008). ‘Auschwitz as Hermeneutic Rupture, Differend, and
Image malgré tout: Jameson, Lyotard, Didi-­Huberman’, in D. Bathrick,
B. Prager and M. D. Richardson (eds), Visualizing the Holocaust:
Documents, Aesthetics, Memory, 114–37. Camden House.
Saint, N. (2004). ‘Didi-­ Huberman, Georges’, in C. J. Murray
 list of scholarly publications 249

(ed.), Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought, 173–6. Taylor and

Francis.
Saint, N. (2013). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman: Images, Critique and Time’,
in N. Saint and A. Stafford (eds), Modern French Visual Theory. A
Critical Reader, 219–38. Manchester University Press.
Saint, N. (2015/2017). ‘Georges Didi-­Huberman: From non-­savoir to the
Atlas’, Images, Imagini, Images, 5: 39–62.
Saint, N. (2017). ‘Figure and Agency in the Work of Georges Didi-­
Huberman’, in L. Marin and A. Diaconu (eds), Usages de la figure,
régimes de figuration, 97–108. Editura universitatii din bucuresti.
Saint, N. (2022). ‘Dream Images, Psychoanalysis and Atrocity: Pierre
Fédida and Georges Didi-­Huberman’, in E.-R. Baker and D. Otosoka
(eds), Dreams and Atrocity: The Oneiric in Representations of Trauma,
39–62. Manchester University Press.
Schwarte, L. (2018). ‘The People-­Image: The Political Philosophy of
Georges Didi-­Huberman’, trans. C. Woodall, Angelaki, 23(4): 80–90.
Smith, A. (2015). ‘Searching for Fireflies. Georges Didi-­ Huberman
and the Re-­Assessment of Pasolini’s Legacy’, Lo Sguardo: Rivista di
Filosofia, 19(3): 215–34.
Smith, A. (2020). Georges Didi-Huberman and Film. The Politics of the
Image. Bloomsbury.
Smith, L. K. (2018). ‘Re-­Imagining the “Loss of Place”. Georges Didi-­
Huberman and the Aura after Benjamin’, Angelaki, 23(4): 113–32.
Rösing, L. M. (2020). ‘Color between Materiality and Signification’, in
H. J. Bjerre, B. B. Hansen, K. Hyldgaard, J. Rosendal and L. M. Rösing
(eds), Analyzing the Cultural Unconscious: Science of the Signifier,
215–24. Bloomsbury.
Vogman, E., and Fliescher, M. (2015). ‘In the Face of the Unface’,
in G. Didi-­Huberman, The Cube and the Face. Around a Sculpture
by Alberto Giacometti, ed. M. Fliescher and E. Vogman, 225–46.
Diaphanes.
Weigel, S. (2018 [2015]). ‘The Readability of Images (and) of History:
Laudatio on the Occasion of the Awarding of the Adorno Prize (2015)
to Georges Didi-­Huberman’, trans. M. Rys and J. Vanvelk, Angelaki,
23(4): 42–6.
Zolkos, M. (2021). ‘Skulls, Tree Bark, Fossils: Memory and Materiality
in Georges Didi-­Huberman’s Transvaluation of Surface’, Qui Parle,
30(2): 249–91.
Zolkos, M. (2022). ‘The Nocturnal Order of Visuality, or Anadyomene
in the Ghetto: Images, Dreams, and Uprisings in the Work of Georges
Didi-­Huberman’, Journal of Continental Philosophy. Forthcoming.
 N ote s on C on tri but o r s

Emmanuel Alloa, Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art,

Department of Philosophy, University of Freiburg.

Kathia Hanza Bacigalupo, Professor of Philosophy, Department of

Philosophy, Pontifical Catholic University of Peru.

Adina Balint, Associate Professor of French Studies, Department of

Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Winnipeg.

Marie-Aude Baronian, Associate Professor in Film and Visual Culture,

University of Amsterdam.

Michaela Bstieler, doctoral candidate, Department of Philosophy,

University of Innsbruck.

Belén Cerezo, artist-­

researcher, Associate Lecturer in Photography,
Nottingham Trent University.

Bruno Chaouat, Professor of French and Jewish Studies, College of

Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota.

Busra Copuroglu, doctoral candidate, Department of Comparative

Literature, Western University.

Stijn De Cauwer, postdoctoral researcher, Literary Theory and Cultural

Studies, University of Leuven.

Hanna Doroszuk, doctoral candidate, Institute for Art History,

University of Warsaw, and Curator at the National Museum of Warsaw.

Miguel Mesquita Duarte, the Institute of Art History, Universidade

NOVA de Lisboa (IHA/FCSH/NOVA)/­LabCom – ­Communication,
and Arts, Universidade da Beira Interior.

Patrick ffrench, Professor of French, King’s College London.

 notes on contributors 251

Johnnie Gratton, Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin/

Trinity College Dublin.

Henrik Gustafsson, Professor of Media and Documentation Science,

Department of Language and Culture, The Arctic University of
Norway.

Maud Hagelstein, Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of

Liège.

Robert Harvey, Distinguished Professor, Department of Philosophy,

Stony Brook University.

Vlad Ionescu, Associate Professor in Art Theory, Faculty of Architecture

and Art, University of Hasselt.

Chari Larsson, Senior Lecturer, Queensland Collage of Art, Griffith

University.

Andrzej Leśniak, Associate Professor, Institute of Literary Research of

the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Jonathan W. Marshall, Senior Lecturer, West Australian Academy of

Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University.

Paweł Mościcki, Adjunct Professor, Institute of Literary Research of the

Polish Academy of Sciences.

Andreas Oberprantacher, Associate Professor, Department of

Philosophy, University of Innsbruck.

Lilian Munk Rösing, Associate Professor, Department of Arts and

Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University.

Michiel Rys, postdoctoral researcher, University of Leuven.

Nigel Saint, Lecturer in French Studies, School of Languages, Cultures

and Societies, University of Leeds.

Alison Smith, Lecturer, Department of Languages, Cultures and Film,

University of Liverpool.
252 n o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s

Tomasz Swoboda, Associate Professor, Faculty of Languages,

University of Gdansk.

Ari Tanhuanpää, independent art historian (PhD), and Senior

Conservator, Finnish National Gallery.

Elena Vogman, Freigeist-­Fellow of Volkswagen Foundation, Bauhaus-­

University Weimar.

Magdalena Zolkos, Associate Professor, Department of Social Sciences

and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, and Humboldt Research Fellow,
Goethe University Frankfurt.