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Abstract
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.”
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
With special thanks to Dr Julie Beckers and Stephanie Heremans from KU Leuven. Editors' note: when English translations were not available, these were made by Michiel Rys, Stijn De Cauwer, and Laura Katherine Smith.
1 The main ideas of this talk can be found in Didi-Huberman, “Glimpses” 109–24.
2 In analogy with my point regarding “The Nameless Science,” I will not discuss in what way we would semantically define this kind of iconology (Bildwissenschaften, anthropologie visuelle, visual studies, etc.). For this, see Baert et al. with particular attention to the essays written by Ralph Dekoninck.
3 For the nymph as a paradoxical “non-existing” research topic and the extrapolating responsibility of Ernst Gombrich, see Weigel. The author provides evidence for the contrast between the small and experimental file of Warburg and the massive impact of it on the humanities. For these fragments, see Gombrich 65, 71, 106–27. Warburg reduced the nymph to her pagan origins: the maenads of the ancient mystery cults, the snake-bearer of Dionysus, mobile and erotic.
4 The Ninfa fiorentina file started with his study of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499, Venice). Aby Warburg first describes her in Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus” und “Frühling”: eine Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der italienischen Frührenaissance (13–16). See also Michaud 65–79, 168–223.
5
eingehenden Ausmalung des bewegten Beiwerks. Deren blasse Blöße, deren schöne Gesichtszüge und deren große Ruhe bewundert hatte, verschob er leicht den Blick: auf das flüssige Auseinanderfallen der Haare im Wind, auf den Zwischenraum der Luft, auf die einladende Wölbung des blumenbestickten Tuchs, das der jungen Göttin dargebracht wird. In eben jenen Bewegungsformeln, in jenen fließenden Gestalten erkannte er, fraglos, das grundsätzliche Pathos des Bildes.
6 On looking as a meaning-activating, performative act, see Bredekamp.
7 “Nicht nur eine ikonographische Formel all’antica, sondern eine Intensitätsformel, die im Kunstwerk die Fähigkeit des Lebens zur Bewegung und zum Bewegtwerden sichtbar macht.”
8 “das Begehren, das mit der vergehenden Schönheit kommt und geht, mit dem schwebenden Faltenwerk, mit der darüber streichenden Luft.”
9 “in ihren Kopien antiker Vorbilder verspürten die Renaissancekünstler das Bedürfnis, hier und da einen Windstoss hinzuzufügen.”
10 Aby Warburg was friends with the playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), but Warburg himself also wrote a play on social reform in Hamburg; see Russell 153–82.
11 Here I must refer to the topos of the encounter with the sleeping Nymph. It was developed in the fifteenth century on the basis of a rumor that somewhere on the riverbanks of the Danube it was possible to visit a statue of a sleeping nymph with a strange inscription. The nymph was said to ask visitors to let her sleep on and to drink from her spring in silence. The motif of sleep and silence, as well as its relationship to the nymphal locus genui forms a metaphor for the place of the arts and the relationship with the visitor-voyeur who can “activate” these arts, but who must also “respect” them in their immanence (sleep, the state of dreaming, nudity as genre); see Kurz 171–77; MacDougall 357–65; Barkan 133–66; Pataki.
12 “Qui voit quoi, dans une telle expérience? Qui regarde. Qui est regardé? Qui ‘expecte’? Qui est attendu? Nous sommes sans doute devant l’image – pour autant qu’elle soit souveraine – comme le phalène devant sa flamme.”
13 “La symétrie engage un mouvement, celui de l’ être-emporté-vers.”
14 Besides psychology, art historic pedagogy also focused on symmetry. Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), who was familiar with the work of Rorschach and Binswanger, saw many didactic advantages in the double projecting of mirror images; Didi-Huberman, Phalènes 56. Franz Boas has applied the idea of symmetry to ethnic art: “La symétrie constitue l’un des traits caractéristiques (qui) s’observent dans l’art de tous les temps et de tous les peuples” (62).
15
Au sortir de l’œuf, ils ont une forme provisoire qu’ils doivent remplacer plus tard par une autre. Ils naissent en quelque sorte deux fois: d’abord imparfaits, lourds, voraces, laids; puis parfaits, agiles, sobres, et souvent d’une richesse, d’une élégance admirables.
16 “Ouvrez la nymphe peu après qu’elle a filé; dans son linceul vous ne trouverez qu’une sorte de fluide laiteux, où rien n’apparaît, à peine de douteux linéaments qu’on voit ou que l’on croit voir […] Elle sent une force en elle, et une raison d’être, une cause de vivre encore, causa vivendi.” [He adds:] “C’est mort, et ce n’est pas mort; c’est, si l’on veut, mort partielle.”
17
Ich habe enorm zu tun, bin geistig leistungsfähig bis sogar unternehmungslustig, so dass meine hochverehrte Psyche wirklich anfängt die letzten Ausläufer selbständiger Denkens aus der Vorkriegszeit getreulich weiter auszuspinnen.
18 According to Roger Caillois (1913–78), travesty belongs to the mythography of metamorphosis and disguise. Its medium is textile. Travesty is often a feminine matter, employing the phantasm of likeness (resemblance). Travesty is essentially endogenous (from the self) (521–26).
19
Mais on comprend aussi que ces incarnations demeurent toujours à mi-distance de la chair et de l’air, du souffle et de la pierre […] c’est dans la teinte des cendres et des sarcophages que l’énergie, que la vie dionysiaques s’expriment le mieux (c’est dans les coloris du deuil que le désir passe le mieux: paradoxe, en effet); c’est dans la distanciation – donc la dénaturalisation – des couleurs que la peinture humaniste accède aux nouvelles formes du naturalisme.
20 (131b Plutarch, Letter of Consolation to Apollonius). σῶμα μὲν πάντων ἕπεται θανάτῳ περισθενεῖ, | ζωὸν δ᾽ ἔτι λείπεται αἰῶνος εἴδωλον: τὸ γάρ | ἐστι μόνον | ἐκ θεῶν. εὕδει δὲ πρασσόντων μελέων, ἀτὰρ | εὑδόντεσσιν ἐν πολλοῖς ὀνείροις | δείκνυσι τερπνῶν ἐϕέρποισαν χαλεπῶν τε κρίσιν. (The body of all men is subject to overpowering death, but a living image of life still remains, for it alone is from the gods. It slumbers while the limbs are active, but to men as they sleep, in many dreams, it reveals an approaching decision of things pleasant or distressful.) Translation after William H. Race. With special gratitude to Dr Han Lamers (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).
21 Audrey J. Butt dedicated a case study to the Akawaio, indigenous people of South America. She studied a custom in which the uttering of a wish or a curse is accompanied by blowing. Even over time and distance, the expulsion of air projects a particular request or cure. The author explains this custom by the fact that the Akawaio see the individual breath or respiration as the bearer of spirit or spirits; Butt 49–55.
22 “No better type of the artist’s mind, than the butterfly whose flight is but from one near object to another” (Bjerregaard 380–84).
23 The term is borrowed from German zoologist Richard Wolfgang Semon (1859–1918), who used it to describe a biologically inherent memory trail of a species (190); see Agamben, “Image et mémoire” 18: “Chaque événement agissant sur la matière vivante y laisse une trace, que Semon appelle engramme. L’énergie potentielle conservée dans cet engramme peut être réactivée et déchargée dans certaines conditions. On peut dire alors que l’organisme agit d’une certaine manière parce qu’il se souvient de lévénement précédent” (also after Gombrich 242).
24 Letter from Aby Warburg to Alfred Doren, 31 March 1923 [Warburg Institute Archive, GC/12740]:
Darum würde ich bitten, daß Du die Schopf-Fortuna, die Glückslocke, die vom Kairos herstammt, doch als Ergänzung zur Biologie der Schicksalssymbole miteinfügst, weil sie den sogenannten modernen Menschen im aufsteigenden Zustand seiner Frechheit zeigt.
25 I cannot discuss Warburg’s political engagement and his battle against ethnic racism here; for more information on that topic, see Gockel 117–34; Schoell-Glass 107–28.
26 “Bien sûr, tous les types de sexualité peuvent surgir dans un contexte de rivalité mimétique, comme toutes les problématique sociales d’ailleurs, mais ce qui nous intéresse ce sont les configurations mimétiques qui restent les mêmes, mis à part leur contenu spécifique.”
27 “l’image échappe.”
28 “circoncision de l’image.”
29 I cannot devote too much space to Girard’s patriarchal bias in his mimesis model. It should be clear by now that the mirror paradigm is innately phallocentric. The author pays no attention to the matriarchal aspects in mythology and religion. For an extremely critical reading of René Girard, see von Werlhof 355–90.
30 Here I refer to Marie-José Mondzain’s defense of the iconophile image. See also Baert, “Iconogenesis” 128–41.
31 According to Plato’s Timaeus, Chora (Khōra) is a place, an interval. See Derrida.
32 The author is acquainted with the matrixial borderlinking psychoanalysis and the art theory of Bracha Ettinger. The matrixial space is a space that may be characterized first and foremost as containing an energy or potentiality that has not yet manifested itself at the phallic level, only at the feminine, internal, uterine level. So-called in-sight is located in a liminal zone where transfer between the “I” and the “Other” is able to originate; it is a locus of a certain transformational potentiality. In the matrixial perspective, frontiers become co-poietically transgressive and limits become thresholds. A matrixial borderspace is as such a mutating co-poietic net with a co-poietic transformational potentiality, where co-creativity (“metramorphosis”) might occur. As such it equally entails a particular mode of meaning and knowledge production and is able to describe certain aspects of human symbolic experience.
33 Olsen (6) speaks of “harmful silences that are not natural silences.”
34
Toute pensée est hallucination […], mais des injonctions que murmurent les voix lorsqu’elles portent et transmettent les sons d’une langue. C’est ainsi que la grotte a pu fonctionner comme un producteur naturel d’échos, ceux-ci formant les images sonores de la voix lorsque les ondes sont réfléchies par les parois. L’image pariétale, si elle a pour conditions la nuit et le silence de la grotte, est ainsi bornée par les limites sonores, et invisibles, qu’indique l’écho.
35 Homer describes in the Odyssey how the nymphs in the cave, utilizing long stone looms, weave purple cloths. “In it [the cave] are mixing bowls and jars of stone, and there too the bees store honey. And in the cave are long looms of stone, at which the nymphs weave purple webs, a wonder to behold; and in it are also ever-flowing springs” (Homer 8–11 (Book 13, vs. 107–10)). The old looms made the textile grow from top to bottom, emulating the walls of glittering dung caves. Caves, with their glow and architectural ornamentation, are the principal spots of artistic inspiration and enchantment. It is apt that the cave constitutes the place where man recognizes this ekphrasis and further articulates this sense visually by leaving imagery of bison and handprints as seen in caves like the one in Chauvet, Dordogne. In the 2014 documentary (dir. Christian Tran) for Arte France, Les Génies de la Grotte Chauvet, which examines the ambitious project which aims to copy these spaces and their murals, the Catalan painter Miguel Barceló talks about both the artistic qualities and techniques of the murals. The owl of Chauvet is a remarkable paradigm here: she was drawn in a few seconds by moving ten fingers from top to bottom. The genius loci of this hand as well as its tender iconography may constitute the deepest and most moving ekphrasis of both wisdom and plastic beauty that man has ever realized. Or as Barceló says: tout est déjà là.
36 Maggini 42–51, 47. On antique nympholepsia, see Swinburne; Pache. On nympholepsia as a creative principle, related to inspiration, stupefaction and the muses; see Lokash 24–39, 35, regarding the disjunction between the poetic contemplation of sex and the real physical act (in Byron):
With the jarring image of the spirit “panting” – panting is an unambiguously physical act – the mind–body split collapses utterly, and the stanza settles into the world of corporeal things, like cushiony bosoms and audible heartbeats. Even if such poetic posturing and nympholeptic fantasy can temporarily elide the need for or take the place of physical satisfaction, the reality of the body simply cannot be ignored and will ultimately assert itself.
37 “Dans l’excès de pathos qu’il traverse à la clinique de Binswanger, il cherche à détruire Ninfa, une pièce maîtresse de sa science sans nom.”
38
Mnémosyne nous montre bien, en effet, que le génie de Warburg consistait justement en ceci qu’il était capable de relier les images par-delà leurs simples rapports de causalité […] La folie de Warburg fut donc, d’abord, un destin de son Denkraum. Sa “psychomachie,” une lutte menée dans l’espace de la pensée entre les astra et les monstra.
39
Pour sa part, la Besonnenheit est “le compas [der Compass] qui dirige l’action de l’âme [Thatkraft der Seele] vers la fin de sa félicité [den Zweck ihrer Glückseligkeit],” sans “adhérer à un seul objet” ou errer “sans Étoile polaire pour la guider”; de façon encore plus éloquente, Reil appelle cela “l’oreille de l’esprit [das Ohr des Geistes], une oreille que nous pouvons intentionnellement diriger,” avant d’être saisie par un objet et transformée en attention [Aufmerksamkeit].
40
La Mnémosyne invoquée ici n’est certainement pas le gardien bienveillant d’un trésor de délicatesses bibliophiles [Schatzhaus für bibliophile Kostbarkeiten], mais plutôt “le grand sphynx” dont Warburg souhaitait “soutirer, sinon le secret, au moins la formulation de son énigme [wenn auch nicht ihr Geheimnis, so doch die Formulierung ihrer Rätselfrage].” […] La manie, je le conjecture, est donc la solution que Warburg apporte lui-même à l’énigme de sa guérison, le résultat de sa Krankheitseinsicht, de la compréhension plus mature de sa maladie, et la sophrosyne peut-être la solution qu’il pourrait apporter à l’énigme de la manie elle-même.
41
L’ascension vers le soleil avec Hélios et la descente dans les profondeurs avec Proserpine symbolisent deux étapes qui appartiennent aussi inséparablement que les alternances de la respiration au cycle de la vie. Tout ce que nous pouvons emporter dans ce périple, c’est l’intervalle toujours fugitif entre impulsion et action [die ewig flüchtige Pause zwischen Antrieb und Handlung]; il nous appartient de prolonger plus ou moins longtemps cet espace de respiration avec l’aide de Mnémosyne (Aby Warburg).
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