Georges Didi-Huberman Research Articles

The afterlife of uprisings in the work of Georges Didi-Huberman and João Moreira Salles’ No Intenso Agora.

ABSTRACT In the exhibition Soulèvements, curated by Georges Didi-Huberman, various manifestations of gestures indicating the desire to rise up were displayed. This exhibition triggered the criticism of decontextualising images. In a written exchange with Enzo Traverso, Didi-Huberman clarified his approach as an anthropology of bodily gestures attesting to the overlooked role of desire in uprisings. This focus, however, requires downplaying the historical and political context of the material shown, which creates a tension underlying the Soulèvements exhibition. Similarly, in Désirer désobeir, Didi-Huberman makes a distinction between ‘revolt’, as the manifestation of the desire to rise up, and ‘revolution’, as a more organised project which stifles the desire to revolt. In a second part of the article, the film No Intenso Agora (2017) by João Moreira Salles is presented as an alternative approach to the ‘afterlife’ of images of uprisings. Salles manages to derive from the footage he explores rich insights into the specific dynamics of the protests of 1968. Furthermore, in contrast with Didi-Huberman, Salles explores the problems with focusing on gestures and iconic images, as well as the blinding effects of intense emotions such as joy.

Visceral Economies, Queer Dialectics: Eisenstein Meets Bataille

Abstract Mapping the encounters between Sergei Eisenstein and Georges Bataille in Paris in 1930, this essay reveals a new dimension of their respective approaches to materialism and the body, as explored, for instance, through a shared cannibalistic and visceral model of mimesis, one that operates below the visual or phenomenological qualities previously addressed by the discourse on the formless carried out by Georges Didi-Huberman, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Annette Michelson, among others. The present text argues for the existence of something it calls a visceral economy, pointing to a specific administration and distribution of affect as an aesthetic resource. It is precisely in granting the autonomous organological reactions of attraction and repulsion a function as collective operators of materialism that Bataille and Eisenstein would each formulate and experiment with elements of this visceral economy. While both authors considered sexuality to be a critical force of materialism, Bataille ultimately presumed an essentialized and binary understanding of gender difference that provided the ground for fantasies of excess and transgression. Against this heteronormative tendency, Eisenstein's research into the forces of materialism embraced a queer dialectics, or “bisexuality,” not as an opposition of genders but as a term for a gender-undifferentiated condition.

Dark tourism goes underground: ghostly materialities of Japanese occupation in Datong, China

In north China, memorial museums are often associated with the suffering of victims of the Japanese occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945). The Datong Coal Mine Massacre Site Memorial Hall affords visitors opportunity to bear witness to atrocities at the hands of the occupiers. At the 10,000 men pit (wanrenkeng), where over 60,000 miners perished, visitors gaze at the corpses of dead miners in two deep pits, at harrowing photographs of excavated remains and at unnamed spirit tablets in the memorial hall and on the hillside above. The research brings together the spectrality of absent presence with the Chinese tradition of hungry ghosts as social actors. Referencing the newly available North China Railway Archive of photographs taken by the Japanese of everyday life on the Datong coalfields, read through a lens inspired by Georges Didi-Huberman, we aim to enrich the state-authorised narrative of victimization and humiliation with narratives of individual people. The photographs summon the survival, or afterlife, of those depicted, sometimes smiling into the camera. We suggest that the photographic archive may afford identification of miners, enabling their lives to be honoured as well as mourned and their ghosts to be appeased. Collaborative development of a traditional Hungry Ghost festival could fold memorial sites together with intangible cultural heritage to offer visitors opportunity to commemorate both death and life through integrating history with culture.

Too Close to Nature: On the Representational Problems of Death Masks and Life Casts

Abstract While historians of art have found death masks and life casts conceptually problematic, it is also noteworthy that these objects have received scant attention from philosophers of art. In this paper, I begin to redress this omission by offering examples of how the philosophy of art can help us understand these images. Two problems stand out: the problem of representation, for example, what type of representation a death mask is; and the problem of style and historicity, for example, whether images imprinted from nature can indicate styles, and whether these images can evolve and transform along art-historical lines. After considering these problems, I conclude that these images are constrained in what they can and cannot represent. While there is a long tradition of imprinting from nature, this practice shows little discernible change over time. An unchanging tradition cannot claim to exhibit a history, a least in a narrative sense familiar to art history. The following investigation opens a dialog between Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and practitioners of theoretical art history, including Ernst Gombrich and Georges Didi-Huberman, both of whom offer differing views on how these images can be treated.

Nachleben der Antike, Time, and Restitution: Notes for a Nocturnal Jurisprudence of the Image

Justice is usually represented as a feminine figure holding a pair of scales and a sword. The history of that image is relatively recent and has attracted a great deal of attention. However, a different appreciation of it may come from a “nocturnal” jurisprudence seeking to foreground its presence and effects in the transmission of modern culture and so also of law. In this essay, I take my cue from Aby Warburg and the Pathosformeln that, he suggested, can be glimpsed through certain material objects inherited from the past—specifically, Dürer’s The Death of Orpheus and other related visual art. I then consider what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the image of the image’ emphasising the timely quality of those images and I ask, with Georges Didi-Huberman, whether it might not be high time to “return” that which those images ostensibly show. The associations established in this essay between those different insights may help to recognise the extent to which the innumerable images to do with justice found at the four corners of the world can make the cognitive and emotional experience of those encountering them a rather more complex and potentially problematic affair than it may be at first supposed. What, on closer inspection, can those images give us to see? Are the ancient configurations they sometimes transmit not made up of crystals of historical memory carrying dormant energies that could be suddenly reignited in unpredictable ways? Should the task ahead not be, in some cases, one of restitution—the inapparent gift that turns the “blotted-out” into something striking that can be then handed over and known? These, I argue, are some of the questions a “nocturnal” jurisprudence of the image can be about.

Merging Philosophical Traditions for a New Way to Research Music: On the Ekphrastic Description of Musical Experience

Abstract This article addresses the subject of the ekphrastic description of experiencing music. It shows the main differences between ekphrasis and commonly used analysis in music theory and musicology. In approaching the problem of ekphrasis with what is called pure music, I emphasize its ancient understanding, thus differing from Lydia Goehr (2010) and Siglind Bruhn (2000, 2001, 2019). The ekphrastic analysis of the first movement of Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19 conducted in this article uses the methodology developed by Gottfried Boehm (2014) and Georges Didi-Huberman (2005, 2015, 2017, 2018) in the discipline of art history. This article aims to delineate a new way of researching the art of music, an essential feature of which is the combination of the traditions of analytic philosophy and phenomenology.

The Empreinte in Sculpture and Printmaking


 My personal experiences of living and working in Australia as an artist and immigrant from South Africa have made me aware of the importance of memories. The methodologies I apply in my art practice support the idea of lost or faded memories. Some memories are glimpses, faded and fractured, while others stretch out and become thin and complex like silkworm threads. 
 
 
 Georges Didi-Huberman's empreinte almost acts like a trace or imprint. It is omnipresent, leaving dents and marks on surfaces and objects from the beginning of time. The empreinte finds its origins through contact and movement, impacting the natural transference of shape or form from one plain or surface to the next as an operational chain that forms part of our visual experience. In relation to the empreinte, I will argue that there are parallels between my sculptural work Selfportret ||Self-portrait (Suspense) and that of printmaking. 
 
 
 The mould and the press function as storage for memories; it reflects the artist’s past actions, feelings, and thoughts from the negative shape into a positive empreinte. Forms and surface textures exist as empreintes on the surface of the mould or substrate. The empreinte always requires contact. 
 
 
 I utilise the empreinte throughout my sculptural practice as a tool to signify the fading of memory. The notion of vague memories and the empreinte supports my practice-based methodology of exploring form and visual imagery through various mediums. When I place a medium into a mould, I need to visualise how the positive cast will appear once de-moulded. This inverted or upside-down thinking is akin to that used for printmaking. This paper will investigate the close interrelationship between my sculptural practice and printmaking. 

Corps affecté, corps éprouvé : existence des œuvres de Judith Scott et Frida Kahlo

ObjectivesThe aim here is to grasp the ways in which the creative body appears in the works to which it gives form. The works of Judith Scott and Frida Kahlo will be of particular interest to us in their ability to account for the incarnation and the existence of their bodies as experienced through the exploration of creation. MethodThis study attempts to give substance and environment to the works that are the object of our reflection through the dialogue of psychoanalysis, which questions the body at work and the body of the work under the aegis of Didier Anzieu; the phenomenology of Henri Maldiney, who is interested in the emergence of the work in the movement of Gestaltung; and the aesthetics of Georges Didi-Huberman, who is interested in the body, the flesh of images. ResultsThinking of the creative body as a « cutting body” allows us to glimpse the phenomena of the presence of the bodies at work and the body of the work. Their encounter does not perhaps emanate from a situation of loss or original lack but from a welcoming and shaping of what exists. DiscussionThe psychoanalytical approach does not seem sufficient to explore the sensoriality and bodily experiences at work in creation. Making links with aesthetics and phenomenology thus makes it possible to open up the time and space of creation to the effects of presence that inscribe the work and its creator in an ecology of gestures and forms. ConclusionThe creative body, tested and marked by pain and disability, the creative body outside a stable and normalized family genealogy, puts the work to the test as a « cutting body” that appears where it is cut, extends itself, and pushes the marks of its suffering.

The group of paintings "Oświęcim/Auschwitz" (1947–1955) by Xawery Dunikowski – the artistic testimony of borderline experience

This article presents an analysis of Xawery Dunikowski’s post-war paintings, a testimony to his stay in the Auschwitz concentration camp, i.e. the canvases of the cycle Oświęcim/Auschwitz (1947–1955). Based on this infrequently discussed kind of art, an attempt has been made to describe the visual representation of borderline experience, which, according to Georges Didi-Huberman, is a “tear-image” or a glimpse of an incomprehensible unprecedented truth, urging to a particularly cruel imaginability or, as Luiza Nader puts it, an expression of “affective memory”. At the same time, the considerations contribute to the research discourse on whether or to what extent it is possible to express the experience of a Konzentrationslager (or, more broadly, the Second World War) in visual representation. The complex issues and stylistics of these works are discussed in the light of methodology concerning the trauma of a witness, an affective observer, a surviving victim (Jacek Leociak, Aleida Assmann, Dominick LaCapra) and its evocation in the image (Didi-Huberman, Nader) thus allowing to consider them as a necessary artistic catharsis of the author of Tchnienie/A Breath of Air. At the same time, it has been pointed out that the painting of Dunikowski, a sculptor, individually reformulated in the artistic medium, non-masterly and in search of their own expression, is a recontextualising confirmation of his status as a modernist artist.

In search of a queer pathos: Connections between Aby Warburg and Queer Studies

The paper investigates connections between queer studies and the contributions of Aby Warburg to image theories, specifically the notion of time as a fundamental conceptual operator in the work of Warburg and his main exegete, Georges Didi-Huberman, from whom we sought help in the endeavor of envisioning a queer pathos that would survive in visual culture. Time is also at the core of a certain criticism by some authors of queer studies to the notion of chrononormativity as biopolitical regulation. This paper attempts to understand how Warburgian notions of Nachleben and Pathosformel help to investigate how abject and anachronistic gestures which keep reappearing as a queer symptom in culture, disorganizing a “natural model” of history of art and breaking with the history of progress that organizes relations between gender, body and sexuality according to disciplinary temporal schema.

A History of Violence

Through experimental writing and conceptual photography, my PhD uses my own biography to investigate the consequences of societal transformation processes in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The focus is on the period of regime change known as the »Wendezeit« in the late 1980's to the early 1990's in East Germany. To date, this subject has been analysed primarily by scholars of history and cultural sciences, while approaches to this topic by artistic researchers are still rare. With my research, I would like to reveal causes for the outbreaks of violence that accompanied this radical shift. The objective of my PhD is thus to submit critical testimony to the silence about seldom-discussed side effects of the transformation during and after the turnaround which Germans call the »Wende«. Based on the example of (my own) individual history, it demonstrates how authoritarian regimes and structures impacted on three generations of citizens, and how they affected the individuals. Throughout an experimental narrative, outbreaks ofsenseless violence are treated as side effects of disruptive transformation processes, just as are ambivalent situations in which actors of social change recognise themselves to be simultaneously victims and perpetrators of violent incidents. Since personal memories and historical documents served as the basis of this work, the central challenge of my artistic research was to carve out generalisable elements from individual examples, and to try out and experiment with various textual and photographic formats to find an adequate way to present the research material. Important sources of inspiration for this process included works like Alexander Kluge’s »Lebensläufe« (‘Case Histories’), Primo Levi’s »Ist das ein Mensch?« (‘If This Is a Man’), Walter Benjamin’s »Denkbilder« [Thought-Images], Klaus Theweleit’s »Männerphantasien (‘Male Fantasies’), Georges Didi-Huberman’s »Bilder trotz allem« (‘Images in Spite of All’), Claude Lanzman’s documentary film »Shoah«, and W.G. Sebald’s novel »Austerlitz«. The result of my research is an experimental book that portrays the multidimensional nature, polyphony and complexity of the subject, and offers the readers an opportunity to deal with the material in the way they desire, and perhaps to make it useful for their own work and research.

Dança em mudez: Mário Cesariny leitor de Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

The essay is dedicated to Mário Cesariny's critical exercise on Maria Helena Vieira da Silva paintings. We seek to think how the poet engages in this dialogue to elaborate a thought about the image and its temporalities. Articulating his texts to the work of authors such as Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin and Georges Didi-Huberman, we seek to circumscribe Mário Cesariny's work in a theoretical scene that dedicates itself to the disarticulation of pre-established knowledge about the arts and their historical materiality. The siren's song and the texture's sewing unfold throughout the pages as images that move the reading that is conceived here.

Research as Montage : Notes on a Georges Didi-Huberman Exhibition

Research as Montage : Notes on a Georges Didi-Huberman Exhibition

Szubverzív anakronizmus a művészettörténetben

Subversive Anachronisms in Art History– The Case of Magical “Socialist” Realist Painting –
 By using the term „subversive anachronism” I mean to invoke Georges Didi-Huberman’s concept of „sovereign anachronism”, which is itself the product of a montage of theories. Following Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg, Didi-Huberman constructs the phenomenon of intellectual montage in the historical sense, which frees the concept of anachronism from its negative scientific connotations. In this spirit, anachronistic associations of artists, aesthetes and art historians can critique and destabilise the existing social, political and aesthetic order. Tibor Csernus and his best-known ‚followers’ in the history of Hungarian art, László Lakner and Gyula Konkoly, were described early in their careers as surrealist naturalists and magical realists, respectively. Magic realist painting is based on the hybridisation of different realities (real and fictitious), while Csernus, Lakner and Konkoly adapted the German and American magic realist painting of the interwar period to the Hungarian reality of socialist realism. In a superb and anachronistic way, this adaptation mixed together the ideologies and visual cultures of different periods and different chronotopes (early German Lowland painting, Dutch Baroque Realism, German and American Magical Realism between the two world wars, French Surrealism, American Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and Hungarian Socialist Realism)
 Keywords: critical iconology, avant-garde, magical realism, montage, Aby Warburg, Georges Didi-Huberman, Tibor Csernus, László Lakner, Gyula Konkoly

‘It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine’

Just as R.E.M.’s lead singer Michael Stipe repeats, ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine’, this article adopts a cautiously hopeful attitude towards ends as paradigmatic shifts away from colonial, ordered and fixed ways of understanding the world. Some ends are not destructions, conclusions or stagnations; but are alternatives from ‘the world as we know it’, which is both desirable and ‘fine’. On the other hand, some ends, such as species extinction, are devastatingly final. Historical, cultural, biological and technological ends are encapsulated in two works of art created more than 500 years apart: German printmaker woodcut print Rhinoceros and British artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s 2018 video installation The Substitute. These two renderings traverse a range of moments from the rhinoceros first entering western European visual culture to the extinction event of one rhinoceros subspecies. Philosophical themes emerging from these works are explored through Franz Fanon’s articulation of the colonial subject, Jacques Derrida’s ideas on invention and Georges Didi-Huberman’s firefly image. Fanon, Derrida and Didi-Huberman call for radical change in which ends are necessary to projects of liberation and interconnectedness.

Imagens Sobreviventes: uma análise de Édipo Rei (1967), de Pier Paolo Pasolini

The article intends to analyze the relations between literature, theater and cinema, through a filmic analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s adaptation of Sofocles’ Oedipus Rex. The study is based on the concepts of Nachleben and Pathosformel, by Aby Warburg; and montage, according to Sergei Eisenstein, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Georges Didi-Huberman, Marcel Martin, Vincent Amiel, among others, associating their thoughts with Pasolini’s own personal writings on cinema’s language. The objective of the article is to understand how Pasolini absorbs the elements of Classical Antiquity and transforms them through the resources of the cinematographic language, in a dialogue between cinema and other arts.

Languages of Trauma: History, Memory, and Media ed. by Peter Leese (review).

Reviewed by: Languages of Trauma: History, Memory, and Media ed. by Peter Leese Todd Meyers Peter Leese, Julia Barbara Köhne, and Jason Crouthamel, eds. Languages of Trauma: History, Memory, and Media. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. 408 pp. Ill. $75.00 (978-1-4875-0896-8 9). Languages of Trauma is a probing collection of essays that explores where and how language and other forms of expression are made available for communicating and representing the experience of trauma. The fifteen essays that make up the volume are categorically interdisciplinary and unequivocally rigorous in their respective fields. The essays move across psychology, psychoanalysis, medicine, literary studies, anthropology, sociology, history, performance, drama, and film. By giving these perspectives and approaches equal footing, the editors resist the tendency to offer a single disciplinary framework that might otherwise seek to explain or minimize the complex realities of trauma and its aftermath. The essays together refuse the proposition that trauma is somehow beyond representation, echoing in part the thesis of Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, a study in response to the critique that the Shoah is beyond comprehension and thus beyond representation, showing the photograph’s ability to “speak the unspeakable.”1 But here the question is not whether representation or speech is possible; the question is, what forms do we expect these things to take? The essays in the volume move outward from existing languages of trauma in order to test how trauma finds words and images. Throughout the authors engage disciplinary repertories for presenting and re-presenting trauma’s experiential knowledge and the language of memory in order to question if these modes of showing and thinking are sufficient, but also critically, to ask, sufficient for what? As the editors write in their “Introduction,” the effort is not to explain or remediate trauma, but to show “how traumatic memory strives to be articulated” (p. 4). Representational forms are key, and in the essays these forms travel between imagination and the hardened realities of violence and injury, through images, cultural languages, modes of telling and listening, and visual cultures. The essays represent a broad range of disciplinary perspectives, cases, and voices, and are equally impressive in their quality. Still, a few essays stand out. Bridget E. Keown examines the diaries and personal writings of nurses during the First World War, which tell a story not often heard, one that is not male-centered, and one that absorbs the deep trauma of war in all its graphicness and plotlessness, recorded in an atmosphere of threat, worry, and care. Jason Crouthamel finds a different focus in the diary letters of German soldiers and offers a delicate analysis of what the author calls the “languages of religion and nerves,” two overlaid ways that soldiers came to understand their bodily circumstances, situated somewhere between fate and fragility. Jennifer Anderson Bliss shows how Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel on the World Trade Center braids the trauma of the terror attacks [End Page 471] and the Shoah, which produces a complicated form of historical memory that is piercingly exact and at the same time, untethered from a single event. In the essays, words and memories are not neatly held in place; they move out of their historical particulars and swerve wildly into others. The lived aftermath of the 1965/66 Indonesian Massacre is the subject of two essays. Dyah Pitaloka and Hans Pols look at how the recognition of victimhood during and after the mass killing of accused communists is performed by the Dialita choir and Teater Tamara. These performances, which are full-throated acknowledgments of suffering and hope, puncture the instrumental silence used by the “masterminds” of the genocide. These acts of recognition seem to contradict the conceit of Joshua Oppenheimer’s film, The Act of Killing, discussed in an essay by Julia Barbara Köhne, which repeats the apocryphal claims that the memory of the genocide has fallen into oblivion.2 As Köhne’s essay explains, Oppenheimer’s film shows how slippery the inversion of victim and perpetuator can be, especially when the perpetuators themselves retell events. But in the reenactments of killings by the killers that...

Historical time and Latin American uprising

Following on some of the ideas proposed by Georges Didi-Huberman in an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, this article offers reflections on uprising as a repetitive, sovereign, and collective gesture of a search for freedom. First, we define this idea of the uprising based on a series of recent works by authors such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, and Jacques Rancière. We will try to think about the relation between revolt, revolution and crisis, emphasizing the temporary characteristics of these terms. Following that, we specifically address the relationship between uprisings and the suspension of historical time that has been clearly proposed by the Italian historian Furio Jesi in Spartakus. This leads us to a review of the same notion of suspension from Walter Benjamin’s perspective, while also considering proposals made by Giorgio Agamben and Aby Warburg as fundamental interlocutors. Finally, we will discuss the current state of the concept through the lenses of some recent occurrences in Latin America.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

SPEP Plenary Address

ABSTRACT In Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Stanley Cavell says, the film camera, a “somatogram,” reads fits and fidgets as a post-Cartesian cogito of embodied thinking. Giorgio Agamben sees the cameras of motion studies at Salpêtrière in the 1880s as dehumanizing normalizers of gesture, but Georges Didi-Huberman claims that what they recorded as hysteria was solicited by them and sometimes refused. Which is it? Does the camera humanize, normalize, or solicit gesture? I consider the question with Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits (2015). Like Mr. Deeds, The Fits foregrounds non-sovereign body movements, but its protagonist, Toni, agonistically engages the camera’s gaze, extracting from it the respect she deserves. I argue that Toni may be seen as responding to Salpêtrière, and also to Thomas Eakins, in whose attic, in the 1880s, a young Black girl was photographed naked, on a couch. Is her stare a refusal of the white gaze or a coerced pose? Toni’s own stare suggests she avenges such historic wrongs in acts of cinematic agonism. In The Fits, the camera that might have been Toni’s reader/partner (Cavell), betrayer (Agamben), or groomer (Didi-Huberman) becomes a mystical mechanism of remediation and Toni, the ghost in its machine.