CRITICAL IMAGE CONFIGURATIONS

Georges Didi-Huberman has written over fifty books in French; an impressive body of work to which new titles are added every year. His work, which investigates images in their theoretical, historical and political dimensions, has become a widely admired reference point across the Humanities. This is not only due to the richness of his theoretical reflections but also because of the sheer beauty of his writing style, which has opened up his readership beyond the academic world. In 2015, Didi-Huberman received the Theodor W. Adorno Award – an award that recognizes outstanding achievement in philosophy, theatre, music or film (an English translation of Sigrid Weigel’s laudatory speech delivered on this occasion is included in this special issue).

Didi-Huberman’s books are only gradually being translated into English, among other languages. This increase in translations still only gives English-speaking scholars but a glimpse into the dizzying scope and range of his impressive oeuvre, which Jacques Rancière, in his text in this issue, describes as an “infinite library” (this issue 17). Until a few years ago, it was only Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (1995), Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of Salpêtrière (2003), Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (2005) and the much-debated Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (2008) that were available in English. More recently, there have been some new important additions, such as his seminal study of Aby Warburg: The Surviving Image, Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms (2017) and two English-language volumes of the “L’Œil de l’histoire” [The Eye of History] series, which currently consists of six books, will be released in 2018: The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions and Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science. Apart from these major works, a series of remarkable shorter works have been translated into English including, for example, The Man Who Walked in Color (2017) and Bark (2017).

Still, however impressive these translated books may be, the works available in English cover only a small portion of the large range of topics, artists and theorists that Didi-Huberman has selected for close study. His books range from engaging the work of Georges Bataille, André Malraux, Harun Farocki, Sergei Eistenstein, Steve McQueen and Jean-Luc Godard to reflections on the nymph, moths (phalènes) and fireflies (lucioles) or evocations of “the people” in cinema and photography. In engaging with these topics, Didi-Huberman draws on the work of a large number of theorists to develop his arguments and finds affinities beyond their sometimes seemingly incompatible conceptual approaches. In addition to his three most influential sources of inspiration, namely Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg and Sigmund Freud, other notable intellectual influences range from Michel Foucault to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, from Adorno to Gilles Deleuze, from Georges Bataille to (post-)Lacanian psychoanalysis, thus demonstrating his interest across domains of philosophy, art history and anthropology. It only takes reading through one book, for example, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, to find reflections on the work of those big thinkers mentioned above and many more including, but certainly not limited to: Charles Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Plato, Marcel Mauss, André Leroi-Gourhan, Marcel Broodthaers, Gerhard Richter, Jorge Luis Borges, Katsushika Hokusai, Francisco Goya, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Fernand Deligny, August Sander, Eugène Atget, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Kraus, Auguste Le Bon, Émile Benveniste, Ludwig Binswanger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Heartfield.

The sheer number of references and topics covered in his books reveals a crucial feature of Didi-Huberman’s writing style and approach, which can perhaps be overlooked when one reads only one of his texts. Didi-Huberman’s work, whether an individual book or his entire oeuvre taken together, recalls the atlases he describes in Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science. Didi-Huberman points out that the sheer magnitude, scope and inexhaustibility of a picture atlas such as Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas breaks all frames (Atlas 13). Though it is an epistemological and critical tool, a map or a cartography, the atlas does not aim for a form of complete knowledge or to present a total picture. As Didi-Huberman writes:

[The atlas] deconstructs, by means of its sheer exuberance, ideals of unicity, of specificity, of purity, of integral knowledge. It is a tool, not to exhaust in a logical sense every given possibility, but for the inexhaustible opening of possibilities not yet given.¹ (13)

It is not the aim of the atlas to assimilate diverse phenomena into categories or to claim that heterogeneous phenomena are in fact similar: “Against all aesthetic purity, it [the atlas] introduces the multiple, the diverse, the hybridity of any montage”² (ibid.) The juxtaposition of images, or text and images, in the atlas traces affinities and correspondences – often unexpected and surprising ones – between elements that remain heterogeneous. The diversity in form, theoretical framework and historical context is never glossed over, but remains distinct, while the affinities are explored in the intervals between them (one can think of the Warburgian Zwischenraum, which can be translated as “interspace,” as discussed by Barbara Baert in this issue). This way of working produces what Didi-Huberman calls “transversal knowledge” (ibid.). In the atlas or the montage technique in general, an empirical approach is combined with an imaginative approach; a scholarly eye for detail and striking passages are combined with the imaginative drive to connect and always passionately seek further because, for Didi-Huberman, as was the case for Warburg, pathos is crucial in his project. In line with this kind of approach, the atlas is never finished; its ordering is always provisional and never complete, which is precisely why Didi-Huberman calls the atlas a form of knowledge-in-movement. Montage, he claims, never hastens to conclude or come to a halt (Images in Spite of All 121).

Knowledge that is “impure” is knowledge which is open to the unintended, to fleeting insights, to the fragmentary and to the singular. Such a knowledge does not try to “grasp” things in their entirety but finds instead glimpses or flashes of unexpected revelations, which trigger the desire to explore further. Didi-Huberman understands this desire as a continually re-ignited movement, a curiosity propelled further by changing configurations. Making connections between images seen for the first time or images looked at again, as if for the first time, constitutes the ever-evolving knowledge-in-motion of the atlas. Such an approach means that, in Didi-Huberman’s work, one can find topics, passages or reflections that recur in various books; for example, elements rearranged in another part of his work to reveal new affinities with other elements. Didi-Huberman’s interest in montage reflects, moreover, his own methodology for both looking and writing. Reading his work like a vast montage or atlas also explains why Didi-Huberman does not find it unsound to bring together thinkers who adopted mutually incompatible theoretical frameworks and who wrote in vastly different contexts. Such an approach avoids philosophical rigidity or dogmatism in favour of making connections on a broad array of topics. Didi-Huberman has no problem with comparing Warburg to Freud or with retaining the notion of “dialectics” while using Foucault and Deleuze, who both explicitly rejected thinking in terms of dialectics. With an impressive prolificacy and following what Hannah Arendt deemed a Benjaminian ability to pearl dive “the rich and the strange,” Didi-Huberman collects and arranges diverse passages that he considers relevant for his vast project (Arendt 51). The “anxious gay science” that is making an atlas perfectly allows heterogeneous elements to be juxtaposed and their correspondences to be revealed, while they retain their singular features.

In his most recent book Aperçues (2018), Didi-Huberman reflects explicitly on his writing practice. He contemplates the fact that he is increasingly more inclined to record fleeting observations and impressions (aperçues in French), brief reflections on topics that exist more at the margins of his works, or better still, that traverse them. Working à travers, across or transversally, is how he refers to this approach (21–23). By recording such impressions in writing as short, fragmented reflections, similar to what Benjamin called Denkbilder, Didi-Huberman wants to “rescue” fleeting impressions from falling into oblivion. In doing so, however, he is well aware of the sheer boundlessness, or even impossibility, of the task he has set himself: “Each section of the world deserves its own book. And even each instance of each section”³ (15). Though he knows that this would require an infinite number of books, he nevertheless regards his work as an attempt to do just that: “I have the tendency to regard my own work as the craft of the impossible recollection of each appearance destined to be forgotten”⁴ (ibid.). The aim of such a project does not lie in the compiling of a large number of impressions for their own sake but, rather, each impression serves as an entry point for new explorations in itself. Each impression opens its own unlimited array of associations, in the same way that one might enter a large, labyrinthine library and find oneself suddenly entering an intriguing passage leading to yet another room, stumbling through an open door, losing oneself in a book for which one was not searching. As Didi-Huberman writes: “One never reveals one’s desire more than when one diverges from one’s straight path to a side track”⁵ (22). The written impressions serve as Benjaminian monads or crystals in which multiple other phenomena are refracted and briefly intersect. Or, in Didi-Huberman’s Proustian imagery, each impression serves as a key to new reminiscences, that fall upon him like the fragrance of hawthorn blossoms or the taste of a madeleine in In Search of Lost Time, triggering unexpected and involuntary memory traces:

Writing some phrases, some paragraphs, some “impressions” is nothing other than cherishing the traces of minuscule but decisive events, which is to say that they open up paths of infinite possibilities. Events that each rightly deserve much more, as if each phrase, each paragraph, was the key to an ever-new search for lost time.⁶ (19)

When we consider Didi-Huberman’s interest in impressions that lead to ever-new side tracks, bifurcations and forking paths, it is not surprising that he makes a connection to the work of Jorge Luis Borges. In Atlas, he considers Borges’s work in terms of an oeuvre concerned with lists, collections, encyclopedias and libraries. Borges’s work is regarded as an atlas of various experiences (and Borges did indeed write a book entitled Atlas at the end of his life). Didi-Huberman describes the writing of Borges in the following manner: “Writing […] from this point of view, consists in forming an atlas or an unsettling cartography of our incommensurable experiences (which is very different from constructing a narrative or a catalogue of our commensurable experiences)”⁷ (Atlas 76). Furthermore, Didi-Huberman is drawn to the enigmatic objects in Borges’s work, such as the Aleph or the Zahir – objects in which the entire world is contained and refracted.

But one cannot evoke Borges without thinking of infinite, if not impossible, projects; universal libraries and infinitely bifurcating paths, not to mention the typically Borgesian uncertainty about the reality or falsehood of fascinating fragments of knowledge. In Aperçues, Didi-Huberman recounts a dream he had, which reads like a Borges short story. Having always loved working in libraries, Didi-Huberman explains that, for him, the closing time of libraries always brings with it a certain anxiety. In his dream, he is offered the keys to a magnificent library, with a vast number of treasures, such as the Farnese Palace in Rome, the Villa I Tatti in Fiesole or the Warburg Library in London, in which he can work all alone, undisturbed. But then suddenly one letter disappears from all the books; then another letter and another, making the books unreadable. This is the way in which the library announces its closing. When all the letters have disappeared, not only is the library closed but the entire collection of books has disappeared (32). The Borgesian desire for the infinite library remains out of reach. For Didi-Huberman, as was the case for one of his favourite authors, Georges Bataille, aiming for the impossible does not make a project naïve or misguided, far from it. He constructs his vast oeuvre, in which certain topics or reflections sometimes recur in different texts and new contexts, as motifs recurring in various forms, with the same restless drive that made Benjamin and Warburg embark on their respective infinite life projects: the Arcades Project and the Mnemosyne Atlas.

Didi-Huberman compares images with fleeting creatures such as butterflies, moths, fireflies or, as in his text La dama duende in this special issue, with a will-o’-the-wisp, appearing suddenly before unsuspecting wanderers, sometimes luring them off their path. In Phalènes, he uses the example of a person suddenly seeing a butterfly (343–46). Only when the butterfly darts off through the air, fluttering its wings, does it reveal its full splendour, though its startling beauty is fleeting and moves quickly out of sight. Intrigued, the person starts walking to maintain her view of the butterfly; she is moved by what she sees and what she sees produces movement. Didi-Huberman writes that if she were to catch a butterfly and pin it down on a board, the butterfly would lose a crucial aspect; namely, its vivid movement, the fluttering wings which reveal in turn their upper- and under-sides, startling and captivating the viewer (345). Similarly, to understand images, they must be “put into motion,” which is what happens in the process of creating a montage or a picture atlas. To do justice to images and their implications: all the emotions, desires and historical traces that are connected with the image, one not only needs to develop an adequate epistemological approach, which entails connecting and arranging images in order to see what they can reveal, but also an adequate aesthetic approach, an attention to the form of their arrangement. This combination of an epistemological and an aesthetic approach is precisely what the atlas achieves. One finds this double aspect also in Godard’s montages, the video installations of Harun Farocki or a filmic essay such as La Rabbia by Pier Paolo Pasolini. With regard to La Rabbia, Didi-Huberman writes that Pasolini uses both his critical and his poetic abilities to make his filmic commentary about images in his time (Sentir le grisou 44–45). To be able to see the fleeting, transforming and affective nature of images requires a poetics that is able to grasp this. This is why Didi-Huberman’s books are not only a vast accumulation of insights and reflections on various images and texts but are also characterized by a shamelessly beautiful, poetic and moving style of writing.

The style of Didi-Huberman’s works is the topic of discussion in the unique dialogue between Jacques Rancière and himself – two of the greatest contemporary French theorists of images, included in this issue. According to Rancière, it is Didi-Huberman’s elaborate, affective, beautiful and even excessive language that evokes those gestures, pathos, overlapping temporalities, dialectics and motion that he wishes to see in images such as, for example, those used in Brecht’s War Primer and Journals. To put images “in motion,” Rancière claims, Didi-Huberman has to make his words “dance” (this issue 17). The images are simply there: all the activity, the dialectical movement, the potency of images to attest to the survival of traces or gestures, is the effect of Didi-Huberman’s extensive writing. Images, for Rancière, as he has keenly argued in all his books on the topic, do not need special operations such as artistic montages, they do not require being “put into motion,” for us to understand what an image shows.

Didi-Huberman responds that he does not understand why Rancière, a thinker for whom the “distribution of the sensible” is so central, wants to draw such a strict division between images that are merely “there” and words that are “active.” Didi-Huberman prefers Merleau-Ponty’s view, who wrote: “Every analysis that disentangles renders unintelligible” (268). Rather than disentangling, he wants to trace precisely everything that is entangled with the image. To do justice to everything that is implied in and by images, all the gestures it might contain and emotions it might trigger, a special writing style is required. In Aperçues, Didi-Huberman describes this style by explaining the term ekphrasis:

Phrasis indicates first of all discourse as such, the act of describing something by means of words or writing. An ekphrasis, then, would be the opening, the flight of discourse out of itself with the aim to describe something which seems at first impossible to describe.⁸ (35)

And he adds: “What the visible world proposes to writing is a chance to form ‘ekphrases,’ phrases that move beyond themselves and that take us beyond the conventions that discourse so often tends to fall back on”⁹ (36). Didi-Huberman often repeats that such an approach is not without risk but, for him, this is a risk one must take. He finds himself in agreement with Cornelius Castoriadis, who writes that images have no boundaries. To render the limitlessness of images requires an equally boundless, excessive, exuberant writing style: “This means that my psychic dance with an image is itself also without boundaries, without limits. Writing is situated precisely at a vertigo-inducing limit, on the tightrope of the risk one has to take”¹⁰ (20).

• • •

This special issue begins with the text “Images Re-read: The Method of Georges Didi-Huberman,” by Jacques Rancière, in which he problematizes Didi-Huberman’s approach to images, some of his claims, such as that images can “take position,” and his interpretation of the dialectics at work in Brecht’s War Primer. This is followed by Didi-Huberman’s response to Rancière in the form of a long letter, “Image, Language: The Other Dialectic.” This sharp interaction between two such influential contemporary theorists of images is a unique contribution to the debates about the politics of images in general. The remarks and questions they present to each other also help to clarify crucial aspects of their respective theories, such as the “distribution of the sensible” in the work of Rancière or the relation between words and images, as well as emotions and images, in the work of Didi-Huberman. The interaction between Rancière and Didi-Huberman is followed by the text La dama duende [The Phantom Lady] by Didi-Huberman in which he reflects, in his characteristic poetic style, on the importance of Andalusia in the work of Georges Bataille and his appreciation for art as that which paradoxically articulates impossibilities. In particular, Didi-Huberman investigates Bataille’s interest in the figure of the will-o’-the-wisp as a border-being between the rational and the irrational, which is illuminated by the notion of duende, as it was employed by Federico García Lorca and Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

In “The Readability of Images (and) of History,” a translation of the laudatory speech presented during the ceremony in honour of Didi-Huberman’s receipt of the Theodor W. Adorno Award, Sigrid Weigel reflects on the influence of Adorno on Didi-Huberman’s philosophy of images, especially echoed in Images in Spite of All and Bark. Following this, Barbara Baert’s contribution, entitled “He or She Who Glimpses, Desires, is Wounded: A Dialogue in the Interspace (Zwischenraum) between Aby Warburg and Georges Didi-Huberman,” explores seven cases used by Didi-Huberman: the nymph, the butterfly, the passer-by, the surface and the disappearance, the dance in gallop, the silence of the image and sophrosyne. These examples, or “glimpses” as Didi-Huberman calls them, also reveal Warburg’s strong influence on his work.

Didi-Huberman’s most recent work has tended towards a stronger political focus. This is reflected in his analyses of gestures of uprisings and the relationship between images and “the people.” In “The People-Image: The Political Philosophy of Georges Didi-Huberman,” Ludger Schwarte clarifies, but also problematizes, these political readings of images by Didi-Huberman, including a list of direct questions to the philosopher. Robert Harvey employs Didi-Huberman’s insights on images, witnessing and memory to theorize his impressions during a visit to Hiroshima in “Eyes Wide Open: What the Eye of History Compels Us to Do,” while Emmanuel Alloa focuses on Didi-Huberman’s theme of the little insects called phasmids to develop his theoretical approach to images in “Phasmid Thinking: On Georges Didi-Huberman’s Method.” Laura Katherine Smith traces the subtle differences between Benjamin’s and Didi-Huberman’s use of the notion of the “aura” in “Re-imagining the ‘Loss of Place’: Georges Didi-Huberman and the Aura after Benjamin.” Didi-Huberman’s retheorizing of the aura in terms of place is clarified by means of his readings of the works of Barnett Newman and James Turrell. Finally, Stijn De Cauwer analyses the role of pathos and imagination in Didi-Huberman’s theories of images in “Searching for Fireflies: Pathos and Imagination in the Theories of Georges Didi-Huberman,” departing from Didi-Huberman’s reading of Pasolini’s reflections on fireflies in Survivance des lucioles. He also explores how Didi-Huberman’s theories of images, pathos and imagination diverge from those of Roland Barthes, W.J.T. Mitchell, Jacques Rancière and Bruno Latour.

The reader who wishes to get acquainted with the work of Didi-Huberman by beginning with one translated book or text is, perhaps, unaware that she has only opened one small tome of the immense Borgesian library, the vast atlas constructed with the same restless determination as Warburg and Benjamin that is Didi-Huberman’s oeuvre. While the text might, like a monad, reflect in a compact manner the general style, topics and reflections that characterize his work in general, the reader will get to see only one or a few gestures of the infinite dance with images to which Didi-Huberman has devoted his entire life. But, then again, the ability to learn how to catch a glimpse of a gesture is exactly what Didi-Huberman would like to teach us. With this special issue, we hope to give the reader insight into the rich and expansive work of Didi-Huberman beyond the books that are currently available in English.

Notes

We wish to thank several people here who have helped in various ways to make the production of this special issue possible. Thanks first to the contributors to the issue, especially to Georges Didi-Huberman. Thanks are due to Mieke Bleyen for her help in liaising with some of the contributors of this issue and in editing and revising. Thanks to Emmanuel Alloa for his help in getting the permission to translate the Didi-Huberman and Rancière exchange. Additionally, we wish to thank the Research Unit Literary Studies of KU Leuven, led by Bart Philipsen, for providing us with the funds necessary to translate some of these contributions into English. Thanks are due to the FWO (Research Foundation Flanders) and the SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) which, by providing support to the co-editors, helped to make this project possible. Thanks to all those who helped in the translation process: Christopher Woodall for his translation of three of the articles in this issue; thanks to Michiel Rys and Jan Vanvelk for their translation of Sigrid Weigel’s text and help with other questions; thanks to Elise Woodard and Jorge Rodriguez Solorzano for their translation of the exchange between Didi-Huberman and Rancière. Thanks to Clarissa Colangelo for help with some Italian sentences and thanks also to Anneleen Masschelein, Stéphane Symons and Joost de Bloois for their comments.

1

[L’atlas] déconstruit, par son exubérance même, les idéaux d’unicité, de spécificité, de pureté, de connaissance intégrale. Il est un outil, non pas de l’épuisement logique des possibilités données, mais de l’inépuisable ouverture aux possibles non encore donnés.

2 “Contre toute pureté esthétique, [L’Atlas] introduit le multiple, le divers, l’hybridité de tout montage.”

3 “Chaque parcelle du monde mérite son livre. Et même chaque instant de chaque parcelle.”

4 “J’ai tendance à regarder mon propre travail comme cet artisanat de l’impossible arrachement de toute apparition à l’oubli.”

5 “On ne révèle jamais mieux son désir que lorsqu’on bifurque de la voie directe sur une voie de travers.”

6

Écrire quelques phrases, quelques paragraphes, quelques “aperçues,” ne serait rien d’autre, alors, que chérir les traces d’événements minuscules mais décisifs, c’est-à-dire ouverts sur des champs de possibilités infinis. Événements dont chacun, en droit, mériterait beaucoup plus, comme si chaque phrase, chaque paragraphe, était la clé d’une toujours nouvelle recherche du temps perdu.

7

Écrire – qu’il s’agisse de Fictions ou de chroniques, de poèmes ou d’essais documentaires – consisterait donc, sous cet angle, à former l’atlas ou la cartographie dépaysante de nos expériences incommensurables (ce qui est très différent de faire le récit ou le catalogue de nos expériences commensurables).

8

La phrasis désigne le discours en tant que tel, l’acte d’exprimer quelque chose qui semblait d’abord impossible à exprimer. Une ekphrasis sera donc l’ouverture, la sortie du discours hors de lui-même en vue de décrire quelque chose qui semblait d’abord impossible à exprimer.

9 “Ce que le monde visible propose à l’écriture, c’est une chance de former des ‘ekphrases,’ des phrases qui sortent d’elles-mêmes et nous sortent de conventions où le discours tend si souvent à se reposer.”

10 “Cela voudrait dire que ma danse psychique avec une image est elle-même sans frontières, sans limites. L’Écriture se situera exactement sur une limite vertigineuse, sur le fil du risque à prendre.”