Georges Didi-Huberman Research Articles

Imágenes robadas a la represión chilena. Redes transnacionales de denuncia y cine contrainformacional durante la dictadura de Augusto Pinochet

En 1982, la película No olvidar —rodada por el cineasta chileno Ignacio Agüero denunciando la desaparición de quince pobladores de Isla de Maipo a pocos días del golpe de Estado que derrocó a la Unidad Popular— fue editada y difundida en Suiza. Por su parte, Miguel Littín —exiliado desde 1973— ingresó clandestinamente a su Chile natal en 1985 para filmar Acta General de Chile, estrenada en España en 1986. ¿Cómo, durante una dictadura tan represiva como la encabezada porel general Augusto Pinochet pudieron registrarse imágenes con una intención contrainformativa y difundirse en Europa? Reconstruyendo estas dos experiencias a partir de diversas fuentes históricas, el presente artículo demuestra la colaboración entre opositores al régimen de Pinochet que se encontraban en el país, exiliados y actores europeos, tanto en la producción como en la distribución de estos materiales. En este trabajo se analiza particularmente los modos en que participó la Association Internationale de Défense des Artistes victimes de la répression dans le monde (AIDA) en dichas redes transnacionales. El artículo postula que frente a la “maquinaria de la desimaginación” —como Georges Didi-Huberman conceptualizó a las políticas de invisibilización de la violencia del régimen nazi—, estos productos audiovisuales contribuyeron a la construcción de un discurso visual de denuncia que atravesó fronteras para sensibilizar la opinión pública transnacional y presionar a los Estados perpetradores de crímenes contra los derechos humanos.

Síntoma y pérdida en dos obras de Yishai Jusidman.

El presente artículo se propone problematizar dos pinturas del artista Yishai Jusidman a partir de los conceptos de síntoma y pérdida presentes en la obra de Georges Didi-Huberman. Las piezas en cuestión llevan por título Majdanek y Auschwitz, mismas que formaron parte de la exposición Azul de Prusia, llevada a cabo en el Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo de la UNAM (2016-2017). Mediante el análisis de ambas representaciones pictóricas se establecerá una reflexión respecto a lo no visible, como condición de posibilidad crítica capaz de situarnos en el intersticio entre lo sensible y lo inteligible. Asimismo el artículo se propone valorar el estatuto de la mirada a partir del concepto de memoria, en tanto facultad articuladora de tiempos heterogéneos, así como los conceptos de imagen velo e imagen desgarro para diferenciar entre aquellas que han sido pensadas según las necesidades de la historia y aquellas que nos incitan a pensar y producir otras imágenes.

O corpo que se manifesta na imagem

O presente artigo propõe uma reflexão sobre as fotografias produzidas pelo coletivo Mídia Ninja das manifestações em protesto contra o assassinato de Marielle Franco – vereadora do Rio de Janeiro pelo PSOL – no dia 14 de março de 2018, na região central da cidade. Em momentos de luto como esse, os corpos se colocam nas manifestações como barreiras para o avanço de abusos e como defesa de seus direitos. Tendo como base as investigações do filósofo e historiador da arte Georges Didi-Huberman a respeito das imagens e gestos dos levantes, interrogo sobre a potência dos corpos que aparecem nas imagens fotojornalísticas. Também, partindo da proposição de W. J. T. Mitchell, procuro pensar as fotografias do levante que pedem justiça por Marielle Franco a partir de um deslocamento do poder para o desejo.

La Santa delle cause perse e dei casi impossibili: usi artistici dell’ex-voto in 'Ex-voto offert au sanctuaire de Sainte-Rita de Cascia' di Yves Klein e 'I miracoli di Val Morel' di Dino Buzzati

The Saint of the Desperate Cases and Lost causes: Artistic Uses of the ex-voto in Ex-voto offert au sanctuaire de Sainte-Rita de Cascia by Yves Klein and I Miracoli di Val Morel by Dino BuzzatiThis article presents a comparative study onYves Klein’s Ex-voto offert à Sainte-Rita de Cascia and Dino Buzzati’s I miracoli di Val Morel. Firstly, it discusses how the votive forms of ex-voto circulate in contemporary art, following previous researches on the insertion of non-artistic elements in art by Julius von Schlosser and Georges Didi-Huberman. Secondly, it accounts for the interpretation of ex-voto as a performative art in a comparative analysis of Klein’s and Buzzati’s artworks. Finally, with a focus on Il colombre by Buzzati and the offert composed by Klein, it draws conclusions on the transformation of the ex-voto from devotional to contemporary art forms in both authors.

Festa sobre escombros: o ato de festejar como estratégia de sobrevivência à guerra

Lançado pela primeira vez com apoio da UNICEF, O diário de Zlata, de Zlata Filipović, é um registro sobre a Guerra da Bósnia (1992-1995), decorrente do desmantelamento da Iugoslávia. A autora, à época, era uma pré-adolescente, habitante de Sarajevo, e é por meio de seu olhar que somos apresentados ao cotidiano da guerra, aos desafios enfrentados diariamente pelas vítimas do conflito e também às estratégias de sobrevivência que elas constroem. Dentre essas estratégias, estão a própria escrita de um diário e, surpreendentemente, a celebração de festas. Com base nessa constatação, o presente artigo propõe uma leitura da valorização que Zlata dá a essas festas, uma interpretação inspirada em conceitos caros ao trabalho de três teóricos: Georges Didi-Huberman, com a ideia de sobrevivência associada à imagem dos vaga-lumes; Michel de Certeau, atento à invenção do cotidiano; e Peter Pál Pelbart, que reflete sobre biopolítica, comunidade e o par assujeitamento/soberania.

Algunos trozos de película. Algunos gestos políticos: Conversación con Georges Didi-Huberman

Esta conversación con Georges Didi-Huberman, pensador e historiador del arte francés, reflexiona sobre dos de sus obras: Cortezas e Imágenes pese a todo —centrada la primeraen su visita a Auschwitz-Birkenau y la segunda, en las fotografías testimoniales que miembros del Sonderkommando lograron tomar de Auschwitz-Birkenau en 1944—, para reflexionar con su autor sobre la imagen, lo inimaginable y la imaginación, desde un punto de vista político y filosófico.

"Patonómica": Aby Warburg o la filología de las imágenes

This article aims to develop a philological approach to Aby Warburg’s work by propounding a theory that, defined as Pathonomica, allows of taking a step from Iconology toward Literary Hermeneutics, bringing closer the semiotic relationship between space and time arts. A particular attention is given to Warburg’s “Pathos Formula” and his principles of orientation, repetition, and distance, all of them defined as linguistic devices, as well as to the orality of interjections, which are comparable to the engrams produced by the emotive experience of images. The propose is twofold: on the one hand, and following a line already drawn by Georges Didi-Huberman, we attempt to demonstrate the fruitful opening of hermeneutical possibilities of Warburg’s ideas about the liaison between life and word that holds the image; and, on the other hand, to point to a new interpretative way that may constitute a principle to further research into the expression of emotions in literary texts.

Sublime Historical Experience, Real Presence and Photography

AbstractIn addition to the testimony of the author’s own “sublime historical experience” during a visit to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, this essay draws on Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis of four photographs from the Holocaust in his Images in Spite of All to demonstrate the power of Ankersmit’s argument. It speculates on the relationship between such experiences and theological notions of “real presence,” which also seek to collapse the distance between past and present and confound conventional historicist notions of temporal continuity and contextual determination. Against Ankersmit’s claim that sublime historical experiences occur only when a civilizational transformation causes nostalgia for a lost past, it argues that they may also be felt when traumatic events for whose return no one yearns disrupt the intelligibility of historical narratives and meaningful representation.

Rasa, płeć, choroba. Sposoby reprezentowania czarnych kobiet w kontekście epidemii AIDS w Stanach Zjednoczonych

Race, sex, disease. Modes of representing black women in the context of the AIDS epidemic in the United StatesIn this article I try to outline the ways of representing black women in the context of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. The point of departure for prospecting for such images is the development of the feminist thought and women cinema practices, described by E. Ann Kaplan and Alexandra Juhasz, which diverge from a unified category of women towards a multicultural aspect of femininity. In the face of rendering HIV/AIDS dominantly from a white male perspective in the most popular motion pictures about the disease, I begin with Georges Didi-Huberman assumption, according to which, under a layer of popular images of disasters, there are always different depictions yet to be discovered. Referring to the concept of minoritarian strategies, formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I attempt to make a formal and stylistic analysis of four films, two documentaries and two features. Simultaneously I try to demonstrate that actions taken by women involved in different levels of film production cross the traditional opposition between the mainstream and independent cinemas. The films analyzed in this article are: Sandra’s Web: A Mother’s Diary 1996, dir. Beverly Peterson, Wilhemina’s War 2015, dir. June Cross, Life Support 2007, dir. Nelson George, and Precious 2009, dir. Lee Daniels.

Un cine impuro para salvar la Historia del Arte: algunas notas sobre el pensamiento de las imágenes del cine en Jacques Rancière y Didi-Huberman

Jacques Rancière y Georges Didi-Huberman son buenos ejemplos de una reciente ola de pensamiento que desde la filosofía política y la antropología del arte, se sirven del cine para apelar a la potencia política de lo impuro en las creaciones artísticas, emparejada, con frecuencia, con la idea de resistencia al tiempo presente. Algunos procedimientos del cine de vanguardia y el cine moderno de los años sesenta, permiten generar un tercer espacio que nos sitúe más allá de ciertos principios rígidos de la Modernidad o de una Posmodernidad antivisual, desmaterializada y despolitizada (en sus versiones reducidas), así como de los modelos temporales que ambas proponen. De la mano de uno de los directores esenciales de los años sesenta, Jean-Luc Godard, analizaremos cómo la valoración del cine en Rancière y Didi-Huberman ha posibilitado un giro crítico y reflexivo en el pensamiento de las imágenes.

IMAGEM DIALÉTICA E IMAGEM CRÍTICA: CONCEITOS BENJAMINIANOS PARA PENSAR ARTE E EMANCIPAÇÃO

Este artigo é uma apresentação do conceito de “imagem dialética”, enquanto ponto de convergência no vasto pensamento de Walter Benjamin. Na formulação geral aqui exposta, busca-se iniciar a reflexão sobre o papel da experiência estética nas possibilidades de emancipação do sujeito no capitalismo tardio. Propõe-se um ponto de partida para articulações com a situação contemporânea através do conceito de “imagem crítica”, elaborado por Georges Didi-Huberman.

Narrativa afetiva de uma artista educadora

O artigo apresenta uma narrativa de uma artista educadora considerando aspectos de seu período de formação e de atuação, no âmbito do ensino superior, enfatizando a relação de interdependência que há entre a arte e o ensino da arte. A narrativa tem como principal fundamento a perspectiva fenomenológica e mais especificamente as concepções de percepção e intersubjetividade proposta por Maurice Merleau-Ponty, em diálogo com os conceitos de percepção e afecção de Henri Bergson, que mobilizam a produção artística e a relação de ensino; e a permanente reversibilidade entre o que vemos e o que nos olha, proposta por Georges Didi-Huberman, que traz a emoção como força mobilizadora. Destaca-se também a importância da experiência estética no ensino da arte, segundo a abordagem de John Dewey. O entrelaçamento dessas perspectivas nos leva a considerar a importância da relação afetiva no processo de formação e atuação do artista e do educador.

HE OR SHE WHO GLIMPSES, DESIRES, IS WOUNDED

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

IMAGE, LANGUAGE

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

SEARCHING FOR FIREFLIES

In Survivance des lucioles, Georges Didi-Huberman cites sections from a letter in which Pier Paolo Pasolini describes an encounter with a swarm of fireflies. The sight of the fireflies triggers reflections on various topics on the part of Pasolini. However, at the end of his life, Pasolini lamented the fact that fireflies had disappeared in modern society, serving as a metaphor for the fact that he had lost all hope in the consumerist society in which he was living. Pasolini’s reflections on fireflies illustrate Georges Didi-Huberman’s theories on the current state and politics of images in contemporary society. In this article, several key features of the politics of images, according to Didi-Huberman, are clarified, in particular, the role of pathos and imagination. It is on the role of pathos and imagination that Didi-Huberman’s views will diverge from the theories of other prominent theorists of images, such as Jacques Rancière, Roland Barthes, W.J.T. Mitchell and Bruno Latour. By clarifying these diverging views, the theories of Didi-Huberman can be formulated more precisely.

IMAGES RE-READ

In this text, Jacques Rancière critically discusses the work of Georges Didi-Huberman on images. He disagrees with various claims seemingly made by Didi-Huberman about images, such as that they can “take position” or that they are “active.” Rancière argues that Didi-Huberman adds another form of dialectics to the simpler form of dialectics adopted by Bertolt Brecht and Harun Farocki in their works, namely one that also involves a layering of different temporalities. However, both in Brecht’s War Primer and in Didi-Huberman’s analysis of it, all the potencies credited to images as such are actually potencies of the words that accompany the images. Rancière comes to the conclusion that to “put images in motion,” as Didi-Huberman wants to do, or to regard them as being “active,” he has to put words, his own poetic and extensive writings, in motion.

PHASMID THINKING

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

RE-IMAGINING THE “LOSS OF PLACE”

This article examines the ways in which Georges Didi-Huberman conceptualizes the notion of the “aura” after Walter Benjamin’s famous and elusive rendering of the term. The central focus is on the way in which Didi-Huberman theorizes the aura to showcase its capacity for transformation – specifically in terms of its connection to “place” and in terms of what he calls a “memory trace.” After an introduction, the article is divided into five sections, followed by a conclusion. The first two sections act as a foundation from which to investigate Didi-Huberman’s engagement with the aura. Therein, I explore the aesthetic debates surrounding what kind of knowledge artworks can produce and specifically how language can, most reductively, objectify the way in which artworks are critiqued, on the one hand, or produce elusive and romantic readings of artworks, on the other. Furthermore, I explore the way in which the notion of aura is engaged in Benjamin’s work upon which Didi-Huberman largely draws for his own understanding of the term. The subsequent two sections outline what I call Didi-Huberman’s two-part proposal of the aura re-imagined; this entails what he calls the “supposition” of the aura and the “secular” aura. Didi-Huberman takes Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings as a point of entry to think how the aura can be hypothesized after Benjamin. In the final section, I look to the artworks of James Turrell as they are investigated by Didi-Huberman and to one of his short books, Being a Skull, to describe how artworks can function as vertiginous places, which implicate our conception of space in general. Didi-Huberman’s “dialectics of place” both complexifies Benjamin’s equating of place with the aura as uniqueness and smooths over some edges of his paradoxical thinking.

EYES WIDE OPEN

In this contribution, I plumb the depths of Georges Didi-Huberman’s abiding notion of the “eye of history” and, in particular, I explore to which responsible acts this notion might hold us. Does a reader of texts or viewer of an image have a right to claim a certain status as witness if the experience of being present at the crime is “merely” by the proxy of a text or an image? This is a fundamental ethical question and, consequently, a profoundly political one that Didi-Huberman’s abiding exploration of the “eye of history” asks. I attempt to answer it by reading a variety of texts by the prolific author. In particular, however, I test what Didi-Huberman speculates in Images in Spite of All about what went through the mind of Alex, the Sonderkommando who took four furtive shots from an Auschwitz gas chamber, against what I’ve learned recently after having discovered the Hiroshima photographs made on 6 August 1945 by hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) Yoshito Matsushige.

Imaginar, pese a todo: problemas y polémicas en torno a la representación del Holocausto, de Shoah a El hijo de Saúl

Este artículo intenta investigar la polémica y los problemas en torno a la representación del Holocuasto (Shoah), a partir de tres ensayos de Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (2003), Écorces (2011) y Sortir du noir (2015). Estos textos dialogan con lo inimaginable y lo irrepresentable, filosófica y estéticamente, y lo refutan, por medio del análisis de cuatro fotografias capturadas por miembros del Sonderkommando en Auschwitz-Birkenau en agosto de 1944. En comparación con el cine, desde Shoah a El hijo de Saúl, pasando por Noche y niebla y Kapo, actualizamos la querella de las imágenes, cada vez más actual y lejos de haber terminado.