Georges Didi-Huberman Research Articles

Georges Didi-Huberman, The Man Who Walked in Color. Translated by Drew S. Burk

Georges Didi-Huberman, The Man Who Walked in Color. Translated by Drew S. Burk

Poetic Incarnations. Body, Art and Necropolitic

This work talk about the emergence of blood as mimesis of the loss of bodies and lives in a context of necropolitic, but also as a spectral impregnation of absence through artistic actions. The presence of blood has compromised metaphorical strategies, such as figures resembling scenes of violence. And also has committed the blood itself as an abject flow, including metonymic strategies that generate poetics of secretions. From the theoretical elaborations of Georges Didi-Huberman, I am interested in addressing the imaginative link between incarnate and bleeding through the effect of cinnabar red. This text addresses actions of three artists. Ricardo Wiesse, Rosa Maria Robles and Teresa Margoles. But beyond the scenery of art, I try to think what is painted, what is disturbed, in the abject scenaries, stained by the catastrophe of the disincarnate bodies.

La imagen-luciérnaga: una aproximación al trabajo de Georges Didi-Huberman sobre la resistencia política y la estética de las imágenes supervivientes

In his research on art history, Georges Didi-Huberman takes images from distinct insects –butterflies, phasmidas, moths, flies etc.– to analyze visual objects and to assign them a value with respect to their image and historic position. In Survivance des lucioles (2009), the author takes the firefly as a symbol to reflect upon the power of several artistic manifestations with respect to their quality as images. In that sense, what is proposed is the idea that these insects survive as images (images survivantes) that –representing art, and metonymically humans– are bearers of an aesthetic and political resistance by emitting their dim lights (lucciole). Hereafter, the present paper (1) analyzes the definition of fireflies as images survivantes, as well as delves into how the author incorporates those images to the study of other insect-images such as butterflies or moths in previous studies; (2) examines the aesthetic and political value that Didi-Huberman confers to these firefly-images as cultural and divergent remains, in times of resistance; and, finally, (3) assesses Didi-Huberman’s position regarding the supposition that “fireflies have disappeared”, understanding this assumption as the disappearance of experience in its purest sense.

„Całe to «bohaterstwo» jest kłamstwem. Rzeczywistość jest horrorem” – „Wojna wojnie” Ernsta Friedricha jako montaż

Analiza pracy Ernsta Friedricha "Wojna wojnie". Odwołując się między innymi do Georges’a Didi-Hubermana, Jacques’a Rancière’a oraz Paula de Mana, autorka pokazuj montażowy, ironiczny oraz pedagogiczny charakter pracy. Album jest w tym ujęciu próbą stworzenia alternatywnej narracji na temat Wielkiej Wojny, mającą podważyć mit Pola Chwały. Friedrich próbuje go zastąpić wezwaniem do Człowieka i Miłości, nie rezygnuje więc z mitologizowania świata. Nawet jeśli nie udaje mu się położyć kresu konfliktom zbrojnym, to obrana przez niego strategia pozwala na dekonstrukcję dominujących obrazów wojny.

Another modern nymph: The pin-up as Aby Warburg and Georges Didi-Huberman’s nymph.

This article discusses a possible incarnation of Aby Warburg and Georges Didi-Huberman’s nymph. The work addresses the temporalities of the image of Alceu’s column Girls (Garotas) in the magazine O Cruzeiro. A humor and behavioral column that was edited from 1938 to 1964 in one of the most popular Brazilian magazines of the 20th century. The column was marked by its illustrations signed by Alceu Penna. The perceptions and chronicles of the image perpass questions related to its time of production, to its reproducibility, to the graphic industry. They were images surrounded by advertisements, behavior, morals and fashions in vogue in its historical production time. However, according to Georges Didi-Huberman, the image belongs to time. Multiple, impure, heterogenic, dialectic, anachronic times also permeate the images in study. Alceu’s Girls, the pin-ups, were analyzed as nymphs. Pin-ups were one of the landmarks of 20th century press and they divided the pages of periodicals with war. The Girls, like the modern nymph, who associate beauty with trauma.

The (in)visibility of the faceless women: ethics and politics on the photographic images by Teresa Margolles

In the opposite side of these moralizing pictures produced by traditional journalistic and photojournalistic narratives, the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles creates art works that disclose the vulnerable condition of women in the brutality of serial murders in order to connect individual suffering to a collective ethics of responsibility. In this text, the analytical work focuses on two of Margolles recent art works: La búsqueda (2014) and Pesquisas (2016). Taking the concepts of vulnerability and precariousness (Butler, 2006; Butler et al., 2016), we argue that the relation between violence and gender in Margolles’s art work is presented as resistance addressing a common as polemical public space (Rancière, 2004), and giving place to the possibility of an interpellation scene (Butler, 2015). We also consider that this photographic work, which articulates individual sufferings in a complex narrative capable to invite spectators to a careful and reflexive contemplation, give rise to a political and aesthetical gesture that can be related to a politics of the images as it is argued by Jacques Rancière (2010b) and Georges Didi-Huberman (2012). The political and aesthetical dynamics crossing Margolles photographs is also related to the ethical responsibility voiced by Emmanuel Levinas (1982) concept of face.

Iconoclastic images in the history of education: another look at children in revolt in two children’s films from the 1930s

There are images in the history of education that can be considered iconic, images that are, as Georges Didi-Huberman says, “full of future”. In this article, I want to consider two children’s films from the 1930s, Emil und die Detektive (Gerhard Lamprecht, Germany, 1931) and Zéro de conduite (Jean Vigo, France, 1933) that include several scenes portraying children in revolt against traditional authorities. Whereas the hitherto dominant visual imaginaries about childhood stressed children’s innocence, these films depict images that show children as subjects of political, collective actions, in line with the political mobilisation of those years. These images can be defined as iconoclastic in their explicit break or rupture with the icons of authority (teachers, statues, policemen, school buildings); in fact, film itself has been considered an iconoclast medium because of its adoption of movement against contemplation, and of the practices of fragmentation and montage that it imposes on the image. In my approach, I argue for the relevance of visual studies to the history of education, and particularly for the consideration of iconophilia and iconoclasm as particular politics of the image. The analysis of iconoclasm wants to point to its ambivalence, as the attack on images implies at the same time the production of new icons that become idolatrised and romanticised. In the case here considered, the image of children in revolt has become one of these new icons, which opened a space for desire and hope for a new world but whose politics may still need further interrogation.

Billedrummet som et levende atlas i verden En introduktion til Georges Didi-Hubermans billedpolitiske projekt og kuratoriske praksis

The Image as a Living Atlas in the World. An Introduction to George Didi-Huberman’s Image Theory Project and Curatorial PracticeThis article delivers both an overview of the ongoing work of art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (b. 1953) and an attempt at analyzing the incarnational conception of images that runs through Didi-Huberman’s image theory. In the Christian tradition, images are the result of an incarnational double-economy. Didi-Huberman’s early interpretations in Fra Angelico, dissemblance et figuration are central to our understanding of this incarnational economy. The visible is capable of entering our flesh; to control this incarnational invasion, Christian tradition has developed a reflexive capacity to read these invasions as images in acts of exegesis. This reflexive exegetical economy is pivotal for Didi-Huberman’s political position regarding our modern use and abuse of images. Confronted with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s conviction that we live in a fascistic state of emergency that blinds our senses with total illumination, Didi-Huberman insists in believing that the described reflexive double-economy is still enabling us to let the visible enter our bodies and light up the darkness of our flesh from within as images – thereby developing our imagination and freeing us from the deadening total image that is fascism.

Images Thinking the Political: On the Recent Works of Georges Didi-Huberman

Georges Didi-Huberman’s work has always been concerned with the critical examination of art history. From the very start of his academic career, the politics of art history as a discipline itself was a key focus, that is, the politics of a field delimited by strictly monitored borders and subject to particular aims. In his seminal book from 1990, Devant l’image, he questions the status of the discipline as well as its institutional and economic connections: ‘As an academic discipline, it never stops refining itself and producing new information: thanks to which there is of course a gain in knowledge. As an authority for the organisation of museums and art exhibitions, it likewise never stops expanding its horizons: it stages gigantic gatherings of objects: thanks to which there is a gain in spectacle. Finally, this history has become the cogwheel and guarantor of an art market that never stops outbidding itself: thanks to which people make money.’1

On the Artistic Propensity of Pathology: Georges Didi-Huberman and the Invention of Hysteria

On the Artistic Propensity of Pathology: Georges Didi-Huberman and the Invention of Hysteria

Aporias of Rock Art Interpretation

Aporias of Rock Art Interpretation

Georges Didi-Huberman, Écorces, and Otto Dov Kulka, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death – as Lager essays? Imagination and remembrance of the title formulations in relation to the formulation “anus mundi”

The article is an attempt at interpretation of two essays, which may be called „Lager” essays. These are Écorces written by G. Didi-Huberman and Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death written by O.D. Kulka, their books are deeply related as the negation or at least as the questioning of the title of autobiographical book Anus mundi written by W. Kielar. Both authors do not describe Nazi concentration camp as „the anus of the world”. Their imagination is a post-imagination, their memory is a post-memory. In her paper Kuczyńska-Koschany considers the condition of the essay as quasi-genre after the Holocaust, after the genocide and in reference to the experience of a Lager.

Cifra, signo y artilugio: el “ocho” de Guadalupe

Desde la reconsideración de los estudios asincrónicos y la resignificación de las imágenes, propuestos por Georges Didi-Huberman, en este estudio de caso se explora la emergencia de una “imagen espontánea”: el número ocho que en el tobillo de la imagen guadalupana de México detectaron el pintor Miguel Cabrera y el historiador Mariano Fernández de Echeverría y Veytia. Una cifra enigmática que devino en signo exegético y acabó, por efecto de los juegos retóricos, en un artilugio de hondo mensaje profético, incluso libertario. El número ocho, además, resultó una práctica pictórica inherente al concepto de vera effigie o casi una manera de autentificar las copias del ayate de Juan Diego. Este signo devoto y promisorio no escapó, sin embargo, a la crítica ilustrada y racionalista del siglo XVIII pese al prestigio del pintor que lo reportó en su dictamen Maravilla americana de 1756.

Декаданс-література: специфіка образності

This article is devoted to the imagery problem of the decadence-literature (as a general phenomenon that periodically repeats itself) and of the literature of the decadency (as an oeuvre of crisis developments in art of the late 19th and early 20th century). The decadence-literatureis a manifestation of the irreducibility. It is proposed to analyze the imagery based on the context of the modernist interpretation of the image / icon. Before the image was considered together with its mimetic foundation – as an imitation of the external world. But here the image is freed from its mimetism, and it turns into a kind of "immediate ontology" (it is the Gaston Bachelard’s term). The classical structure of the image (plot, storyline, composition) ceases to play a leading role, and gives way to a writing. The decadence-literature image lets visual elements into literature. Therefore,there is a displacement from the ontology of the image to the image as an ontology in the research of imagery. It is also important to use the methodology proposed by Georges Didi-Huberman and Paul Virilio: the combination of the hermeneutic approach in the philosophy of image with elements of psychoanalysis, and the method of dromology, which is the connection of special aspects of the physics, mathematics and philosophy. The methodology of the School of Sociology of Imagination is also appropriate. The image of the decadence-literature is marked by symbolism, imaginism (it isalso known the same direction in literature – with the same name). There is also the "genres-werewolves" when a work is called, for example, poetry in prose. A personality of the writer-author plays a great role here: the decadence-literature is saturated with a psychology and a biography that is turned insideout. It is the expression of the world of unforgiven, restless personalities, which is explained by the principle of creation from an absence, emptiness, depressive and melancholic states (nostalgia, fatigue, sweet melancholy). It's interesting that decadent moods contribute to creation here. Distinctive features of the authors of decadence-literature: soreness, tenderness, hypersensitivity, a difficult life path and an unstable world. The imagery that is generated by creativity of these individuals is marked by a special attitude to time and space, it is also directed to the past in an attempt to find a lost paradise - that existed before the crash.

Introduction to Newsreel 55: Which Side Are You On?

Introduction to Newsreel 55:Which Side Are You On? Maja Krajnc In the cinema of independent Slovenia (considered in the field of film history to be a segment of post-Yugoslav cinema), documentary film has lately been gaining ground. While Filmografija slovenskih celovečernih filmov: 1931–2010 (Film-ography of Slovenian feature films: 1931–2010) contains only one documentary title made between the end of World War II and 1991, in recent years the situation has changed to the point that the main awards at the Festival of Slovenian Film, or Festival Slovenskega Filma, have gone to feature-length documentaries. The first title to receive such an award was Miran Zupanič's Otroci s Petrička (Children from Petriček Hill, 2007), a documentary about attempts at ideological indoctrination after World War II that had not spared even the youngest inhabitants of Slovenia. In 2014, the main award went to Siniša Gačić's Boj za (A fight for), which deals with the expansion and subsequent disintegration of the Slovenian version of the Occupy movement. Among the documentaries of more recent date, we come across works of highly diverse content, vision, and approaches, focused both on important social questions and on various aspects of individuality in the forms of subjective or first-person documentary. But the common denominator of these films is still in the endeavor to, on the one hand, right the wrongs of the (recent) past and, on the other hand, to draw attention to the current problems in the social and political sphere. In the broadest sense, such documentaries belong to the framework of political film, with the most radical ones expressing their commitment both at the level of content and in the questioning of the formal determinations with which they probe social reality. An example of such a documentary is Newsreel 55 (Nika Autor, 2013), which Andrej Šprah considers one of the most important recent developments in Slovenian filmmaking, specifically in the sphere of committed political documentary film. In the text that follows, Šprah examines this film project, created collectively by the Newsreel Front under the leadership of Nika Autor. Autor is a cineaste and visual artist who entered the film world in 2010 by exploring the refugee question and the restrictive asylum policies in Slovenia with her short Postcards and the feature-length Report on the State of Asylum Seekers in the Republic of Slovenia, January 2008–August 2009. She continued her documentary engagement with In the Land of Bears (2012), a feature-length work presenting the struggle of the exploited and humiliated seasonal workers from Bosnia and Herzegovina in Slovenia. The film shows the difficult position of workers with virtually no rights who, having been left without pay or any social rights, organized themselves in an activist initiative of invisible [End Page 95] workers of the world and strove to right the wrongs committed by the exploitative Slovenian employers and state. In Newsreel 55, which deals with current political events through a revitalization of the newsreel genre, Nika Autor expanded her individual commitment and joined forces with Marko Bratina, Jurij Meden, and Ciril Oberstar, who all work in the fields of theory and art, to establish the Newsreel Front collective. In his discussion of the film Newsreel 55, Šprah analyzes in detail various forms of newsreels as types of oppositional film practices through the perspective of political documentary. He shows how the revitalization of certain initiatives and formal elements of the past can establish the possibility for a cinema of active resistance along with a reflective approach that addresses social reality and at the same time reflects on the status of current political documentaries in Slovenia—and the world. On the one hand, the theoretical framework of Šprah's study coincides with the references we come across in the film itself. This is the case, for example, with Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image as an examination of the "real image of the past"; with Georges Didi-Huberman's questioning of the (im)possibility of representing the most chilling traumatic facts of the past in his "Four Pieces of Film Snatched from Hell"; and with Bertolt Brecht, whose critique of capitalism...

Images after all / Images despite everything: problems and controversies surrounding the representation, from "Shoah" to "Son of Saul"

This article intends to investigate the controversies and problems surrounding the Holocaust (Shoah) representation, from three essays by Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (2003), Ecorces (2011) and Sortir du noir (2015). These texts address the “unimaginable” and the “unrepresentable”, philosophical and aesthetic, and refute it by analyzing four photographs captured by members of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944. In comparison with the cinema, from Shoah to Son of Saul, passing through Night and Fog and Kapo, we updated the quarrel of images, more and more current and far from being closed

Uma ninfa à perseguir cabeças: Imagens de Salomé na coluna Garotas do Alceu

O trabalho aborda as temporalidades das imagens da coluna Garotas do Alceu da revista O Cruzeiro. As pin-ups ilustradas por Alceu Penna para a coluna Garotas foram imagens envoltas a publicidades, comportamentos, morais e modas em voga em seu tempo histórico de produção. Contudo, segundo Georges Didi-Huberman, a imagem pertence ao tempo. Tempos múltiplos, impuros, heterogêneos, dialéticos, anacrônicos também perpassam a imagem em questão. As Garotas do Alceu, as pin-ups, foram também analisadas como ninfas moderna que associa o belo ao trauma. Entre as garotas e as ninfas, as apresentações de Salomé e das cabeças decapitadas foram aqui destacadas e analisadas.

Forma, informe, formação: considerações sobre o saber morfológico em Georges Didi-Huberman

O teórico francês Georges Didi-Huberman desenvolve um campo lexical que atrela a ideia de imagem à forma, à plasticidade, ao ritmo e à força de sua aparição. Todo um vocabulário morfológico é desenvolvido a partir da observação tanto de espécies animais, como as falenas, quanto do reino vegetal, e mesmo de obras artísticas teoricamente destituídas de dinamismo, como as do minimalismo. Diante da extrema variabilidade de matérias sobre as quais a teoria didi-hubermaniana se detém, o presente artigo visa investigar as condições em que a noção de forma se apresenta como operador conceitual, de modo a compreender os outros paradigmas da arte que o crítico francês elabora, apoiado em uma reformulação do conceito. Enviado em: 18 de outubro de 2016.Aprovado em: 01 de dezembro de 2016.

Por uma arqueologia crítica das imagens em Aby Warburg, André Malraux e Jean-Luc Godard

Este trabalho apresenta uma releitura da proposta de arqueologia crítica da história da arte formulada por Georges Didi-Huberman, para refletir sobre três distintas experiências de investigação de imagens conduzidas ao longo do século XX: o Atlas de Imagens Mnenosyne de Aby Warburg (1924-1929); o Museu Imaginário de André Malraux (1947-1953) e a série História(s) do Cinema de Jean-Luc Godard (1988-1998). O objetivo é compreender de que modo os procedimentos desenvolvidos por cada um deles, a partir de um certo entendimento das noções de tempo e montagem nas imagens, dialogam com a proposição de Didi-Huberman e constituem efetivamente um exercício de arqueologia crítica.

The Feel-Bad Film . By Nikolaj Lübecker

In this book Nikolaj Lübecker offers an astonishing engagement with contemporary trends in European and avant-garde cinema. He cuts through recent discussions of new French extremism to offer a scintillating, urgent, and original take on the subject. The book opens by conjuring two scenes, from Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963) and Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), that can be seen as both unpleasant and disconcerting. Evocation of these scenes leads Lübecker towards his formulation of ‘the feel-bad experience’: ‘the film produces a spectatorial desire, but then blocks its satisfaction; it creates, then deadlocks, our desire for catharsis’ (p. 2; original emphasis). In so doing, he argues, films raise political and ethical questions. Lübecker identifies a series of strategies that allow him to distinguish between the works and feelings of different directors, and thus nuance and stratify his discussion. Informing the project is a wide-ranging analysis of ideas about spectatorship and reception in moves from Aristotle to Brecht. A provocative Introduction leads to a series of scintillating readings that, with unstinting intellectual courage, take the reader close to demanding material. The early chapters on Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke are perhaps the most brilliant with expert, controlled close readings. Lübecker suggests that in these films we experience ‘unbearable intimacy’ with scenes that are ‘excruciating’ in their emotional charge (p. 26), yet we are also invited to engage intellectually with the material. He argues: ‘on the one hand, we are not given the distance that Brecht recommends; on the other, we are deprived of the cathartic release that Artaud and Bataille aim for. This is the source of the “feel-bad” experience; this is how von Trier puts a deadlock on catharsis’ (p. 27). The book offers a very rich compendium of film references and associations, whilst allowing a major argument to emerge. There is discussion of Redacted (dir. by Brian De Palma, 2007) through Georges Didi-Huberman and Boris Groys, a reading of Elephant (dir. by Gus Van Sant, 2003) through Merleau-Ponty and Bataille, and of Claire Denis through Butler. Lübecker is also passionately engaged with the work of other critics. His rereadings are achieved in a fearless move to confront uncertainties and in an acknowledgement of our vulnerability as viewers. His book is unremittingly open to contradictions. Even as he thinks about the ethical in film, he refuses to see this cinema as only ethically efficacious, writing, close to the end: ‘So even if it is true that cinema can be an excellent partner when we seek to make sense of the world (an excellent partner also because no “answer” it gives will be definitive), it is equally true that cinema can help to make life opaque and strange’ (p. 174). There is something gripping, tonic, and assaultive in Lübecker’s writing. What he has done here is to track, explain, imagine the force of and reason for contemporary cinema’s multiple and varied encounters with distress, sickness, and contradiction.