PHASMID THINKING

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• ekphrasis
• insects
• critique
• epistemology
• inverted intentionality

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Taylor & Francis wishes to thank the publisher of the journal aut aut: Rivista di filosofia e di cultura and Laura Odello for permission to publish a revised version of the original Italian article.

1 All the English translations of passages from Phasmes are made by the translator of this article.

Regardant son décor, le ‘fond’ vide d’animal, j’ai dû comprendre à un moment – moment où l’incertitude s’effondra, mais avec elle tout certitude aussi – que la vie de cet animal, le phasme, était ce décor et ce fond mêmes. J’ai peine à m’expliquer. D’habitude, lorsqu’on te dit qu’il y a quelque chose à voir et que tu ne vois rien, tu t’approches: tu imagines que ce qu’il faut voir est un détail inaperçu de ton propre paysage visuel. Voir les phasmes apparaître exigea le contraire: dé-focaliser, m’éloigner un peu, me livrer à une visibilité flottante, voilà ce que j’ai dû faire à peu près par hasard, ou d’un mouvement anticipant le peur. Mais les deux pas de recul me placèrent d’un coup devant l’évidence effrayante que la petite forêt du vivarium était elle-même l’animal censé s’y cacher.

2 “Le phasme est ce qu’il mange et ce dans quoi il habite … il y a une copie qui dévore son modèle.”

3 “c’est à chaque fois reposer la question du style que cette apparition impose.”

4 “que la pensée se fasse à l’objet apparaissant comme l’insecte nommé phasme se fait à la forêt dans laquelle il pénètre.”

5 See Didi-Huberman’s text of the presentation given at the reception of the Adorno prize in Frankfurt: “Image (de la) critique.” Editors’ note: this is published in English as “Critical Image/Image Critique,” trans. Chris Miller, Oxford Art Journal 40.2 (2017): 249–61.

6 For more about this discussion, see Wajcman, “‘Saint Paul’ Godard contre ‘Moïse’ Lanzmann”; Pagnoux; Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout and a further reply by Wajcman, “L’Image et la vérité”; Damisch. See Didi-Huberman, Remontages du temps subi (L’Œil de l’histoire, 2), for a response to Damisch. See Didi-Huberman, Écorces, for a response to Lanzmann’s claim that the photographs could not have possibly been taken from inside the gas chamber. Although it is only indirectly linked to the debate, see also Didi-Huberman, Sortir du noir, on László Nemes’s film Son of Saul, which touches upon the history of the photographs.

7 On this point, see my “The Most Sublime of All Laws: The Strange Resurgence of a Kantian Motif in Contemporary Image Politics.” The Didi-Huberman/Lanzmann debate is put in context with the arguments about the “unrepresentable” put forward by Lyotard, Nancy and Rancière.