IMAGES RE-READ

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• montage
• images
• politics of images
• Georges Didi-Huberman
• images and words

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

The publisher wishes to thank Les Presses du réel for permission to publish this translation of text that appeared originally in Penser l’image III. Lire les images, edited by Emmanuel Alloa and published in 2017.

1 Editors’ note: Didi-Huberman prefers to use the plural “peoples” instead of “the people” singular.

2 Editors’ note: the image was published in Illustrated London News on 1 July 1848 (Uprisings 69).

3 Editors’ note: Insurgés tués pendant la Semaine sanglante de la Commune, 1871, by Andre Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (Peuples exposés, peuples figurants 98; Uprisings 245).

4 Editors’ note: the still can be seen in Didi-Huberman, Remontages du temps subi 138–39.

5 Editors’ note: these lines were actually written by Ruth Berlau, who edited the first edition of Brecht’s War Primer.