Critical Image Configurations: The Work of Georges Didi-Huberman

The Work of Georges Didi-Huberman

Stijn De Cauwer, Laura Katherine Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429534690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This book illuminates a variety of the key themes and positions that are developed in the work of art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, one of the most influential image-theorists of our time.

Beginning with a translated exchange on the politics of images between Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman, the volume further contains a translation of Didi-Huberman's essay on Georges Bataille's writings on art. The articles in this book explore the influence of Theodor Adorno and Aby Warburg on Didi-Huberman's work, the relationship between 'image' and 'people', his insights on witnessing and memory, the theme of phasmids and his reflections on aura, pathos and the imagination.

Taken as a whole, the book will give readers an insight into the rich and expansive work of Didi-Huberman, beyond the books that are currently available in English. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

jacques rancière

translated by elise woodard, jorge rodriguez solorzano, stijn de cauwer, and laura katherine smith

IMAGES RE-READ
the method of georges didi-huberman

There was a time when politics required reading images in order to discover what they were hiding, what they were made to hide. In this way, Roland Barthes taught us how to identify all the mythologies and naturalizations of bourgeois domination contained within advertisements for a new laundry detergent or a new brand of pasta. Jean-Luc Godard taught us how to transform images, too rapidly seen in films, into a blackboard where all the tricks of an ideology could be displayed. Then these readings were discredited. In contrast to the platitudes of the studium, which restored to images their meaning or the history that they illustrated, we then learned to oppose the punctum, the having-been-transmitted by a shroud covering a corpse or a bandage on a little girl’s finger or the simple memory of a glass of milk or a bottle that falls in a Hitchcock film. It seems we are living today in a third phase, wherein, once again though differently, one focuses on these images in which one read, the day before yesterday, the lies of ideology and, yesterday, the illusion of significations; a phase of re-reading images wherein a new equilibrium is established between the dialectical virtues of their deciphering and the power of their simple being-there and of their silent pathos.

Georges Didi-Huberman’s approach illustrates this third time well. His work on images has recently revealed political implications that were not previously as obvious. We have seen him re-think figures under the rubric of the exhibition of peoples,¹ which he had previously considered under the less compromising aspect of the evolution of fallen drapery. At the same time, we saw him engage with unexpected terrain by returning to paradigmatic political readings: those of the Brechtian dialectic or of the most Brechtian of contemporary artists, Harun Farocki.

This re-reading of images and of their previous readings is founded on a certain faith in the politics of images. By “politics of images” two things can be understood: a politics regarding images and a politics entrusted to images. The first sensitive issue, no doubt exacerbated by the disagreement over four photographs from Auschwitz, is an affirmation of the power of images as such. Against the vehement opponents of the Christian idolatry of images, against the critics skilled in showing their hidden aspects, or against the denouncers of the spectacle, Georges Didi-Huberman takes the side of images. He even gives them the privilege of the potency that one normally attributes to their redemption, namely art. In this respect, his interpretation of the work of Steve McQueen dedicated to the British soldiers who died in Iraq serves as a good example. He shows that there is no problem with the fact that the art gallery walls are covered with boards of stamps in their honour. What the authorities prohibit is precisely what provokes disorder in the ordinary world of images, namely the circulation of these images in the form of genuine stamps produced by the Post Office and posted on envelopes (Didi-Huberman, Sur le fil 55). If art has any power, it rests mainly in the images that it sets or re-sets into circulation. This is not what the enlightened doxa describes: the uniform light of the market-oriented world where human activity is transformed into a spectacle and all differences are blurred. Images are the small lights that penetrate this horizon of indifference. They are not passive copies of things and beings; they are the gestures that bring them into existence. The politics of images is not something derived from their interpretation but rather something inherent in their very disposition. Hence the provocative title: The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions [Quand les images prennent position]. What should catch our attention in the perhaps all-too-simple opposition the author makes between taking a position [prise de position] and taking a side [prise de parti] is the political short circuit that this produces in favour of images (Quand les images prennent position 118). This opposition is, in fact, misleading. Individuals can be said to take a side or to take a position. Either way, these words only indicate a tendency of the mind [tendance de l’esprit], a willingness that does not by itself produce any disruption in the order of the sensible. The same does not hold if one says that images take a position. An image is always a certain disposition of the visible. In a certain way, it has at its disposal the bodies that it represents; it occupies a certain place and exposes something there. In short, the image is always already a position; it is always already on the terrain that politics must occupy. Its taking a political position can thus be thought of as a simple modification of the position that it always takes by its very being. This becomes even more the case if one thinks of politics according to an essential paradigm, which is that of appearance. On this point, Georges Didi-Huberman remains very close to Hannah Arendt: a people is first of all an appearance, a coming into visibility. The position of images is thus immediately one with the exhibition of peoples.

Yet since this exhibition has a very particular format, a new type of reading is necessary. There are in fact several ways of thinking about the appearance of a people. One can think of them as a subversion of the sensible order. This is, for example, what the illustration of a barricade from June 1848, which a conservative English journal treats like a theatre scene, shows.² It is an image of disorder and parody, of course, but also an image that we can see positively as an image of the appearance of the people. The people who are uncounted make themselves count. They create their space of appearance by subverting the normal distribution of space. It is not just that the workers who should be in the sweatshop are in the street. They are even blocking the streets, using the cobblestones and carts for traffic and furniture designed for the comfort of the home. The appearance of the people manifests itself like a disorder of time and space. However, the kind of appearance privileged by Georges Didi-Huberman in Peuples exposés, peuples figurants is altogether different: there, the emergence of the people is less an indication of subversion than one of precarity, the precarity in number, in the first place. The plural, in this context, is not a modification of the sensible landscape by an assembled collective but only the merging of singularities produced by an operation: the military operation that produces the alignment of corpses of communards³ or the artistic operation that reunites the photographs of babies by Philippe Bazin (Peuples exposés, peoples figurants 97–105, 40–55). And the apparition itself is not so much the lifting of a prohibition of visibility as instances on the verge of non-being: photographs of babies that have difficulty bearing the new light of day, old people in a nursing home all close to crossing to the other side, or communards brutally illuminated as dead. The image and the people connect only on the verge of disappearance, constantly exposed to a double peril of undifferentiating underexposure and blinding overexposure. They connect there as survivors, living in spite of all, between the two perils of disappearing into the night and of being blinded by the light. That is what separates this exposed humanity – in the sense in which the Oedipal infant or dead Polynices was once exposed – from that of Steichen’s “family of men,” the shadow of which seems to linger in Peuples exposés, peuples figurants. The children there are without a mother and the old people without a family. But it is also what separates the dead photographed by Disdéri from the people whom they illustrated a few days earlier posing on the barricades. What creates a rupture in the image is therefore not the conflict over the distribution of the sensible. It is survival [survivance], the way in which the famous notion of “naked life” is divided [se dédouble] by living on [survivance], like the beating of a tempo opposite to that which leads to disappearance. Survival as an active principle of the division of time is what gives Didi-Huberman’s politics of images its singular dynamics. Images as visual forms and images as figural operations are seen there through the prism of an “image” that itself has nothing visual even if an angel serves as its emblem: Benjamin’s dialectical image – an image that is in its essence only a relation between temporalities: the arresting, inverting and overlapping of times. The surviving image, the image as an active division of time, at work in every exposed body is what supports the tensions present in Didi-Huberman’s “reading” of images, in his manner of speaking, in the way in which he speaks about the visual forms that he shows and comments on. The most obvious principle of this reading is the calling into question of the conceptual frame within which images are normally “read,” namely the frame of the opposition between activity and passivity. To say that images “take positions” is above all to reject the traditional assignment of images to passivity. Images are active. They are gestures. In this sense, the argument he makes regarding the four images from Auschwitz is valid for any image. These blurry images do not show extermination, the detractors argue, and, in any case, they were wrong in wanting them to. But what they showed from the start, Didi-Huberman responds, is the gesture of those who took it, the gesture of radical humanity that consists in taking images in spite of everything, in risking one’s life in the improbable hope that these images of humanity on the verge of annihilation reach their destination, that they move an addressee that worries about humanity as such. What constitutes the politics of the image is first and foremost the passion of the image-taker, a passion that is inseparable from the peril incurred by the subject it “takes.” Georges Didi-Huberman proposes thinking about the politics of images starting from a triad borrowed from Erich Auerbach: mimetic realism, figural operativity, and passion. But at each of those levels operates a fundamental equivalence: that of pathos and activity. Passion is precisely passivity turned again into activity, suffering that transforms itself into energy. But this reversal has two aspects: “passivity” becomes active while keeping the strength of the “pathos.” For the “normal” contrary of the image passively registered is the image actively manipulated. And we know that the same critics who call victims unrepresentable inevitably accuse the image of the victims, whom they do not want to know, of being manipulated. What is opposed to the play of reversals is thus the living identity of opposites. That is what distinguishes the readings of images undertaken by Georges Didi-Huberman. The activity of the image is also the activity of a suffering, of a being in danger, of a witnessing always threatened by silence on the lives threatened with disappearance.

Significant, in this respect, is the analysis of Esther Shalev-Gerz’s installation Between Listening and Telling (Blancs soucis 67–113). This title expresses the principle of complementarity that characterizes the majority of her installations. In her work there is someone who speaks and someone who listens, sometimes the same person who listens to herself; or there is someone who watches or listens, together with an image that follows the effect of what she sees or hears on her face; or there is an archaeological object, a hand that holds it, and a voice that speaks about it. In her installations, there is always communication between a matter of concern and a form of attention. This installation is no exception. While visitors watch videos bearing the testimonies of the survivors of Auschwitz, a giant screen isolates silent moments from these testimonies – moments when the witnesses stop, think of what they want to say, of how to formulate it. Now, in Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis, these moments of attention are presented as moments of blockage, of breakdown of speech, which he does not hesitate to compare to the famous silence of Abraham Bomba in Shoah (Blancs soucis 77–86). He does not, however, agree with the thesis of the detractors of the image, but in order to refute it, in order to show that the image is active, he needs to imbue this activity with its coefficient of suffering. The image that takes position is the image that survives its own impossibility. That is to say, it is the image that exposes at once an impossibility and the victory, in spite of all, over this impossibility.

Georges Didi-Huberman seeks to advance this dialectic of active pathos or pathic activity beyond the views of the artists trained in a different understanding of dialectics, that of the Marxist tradition of visual critique. The latter focuses not so much on what the image allows to survive in an overlap between times but, more traditionally, on the relationship between what the image shows and what it conceals. For Brecht, it is a relatively simple dialectic between the “naturalness” of the visible and the history that it conceals. For Farocki, this dialectic is complicated by the Adornian critique of history itself, understood as a history of technical reason. But in both cases this dialectic is carried out in a canonical form: the words must clarify how images operate, under the guise of their apparent passivity, or, conversely, what they fail to show even when they claim to ensure an absolute mastery of the visible. In both cases, Georges Didi-Huberman must reframe the “reading of images” produced by these activists of dialectics in order to do justice to the identity of the active and the pathic as well as to its core: the image as survival. In both cases, to do that he must rearrange the relationship between visual form, words, and time. I will focus, on the one hand, on his analysis of Farocki’s film Images of the World and the Inscription of War and, on the other, on his analysis of images of Brecht’s War Primer.

Farocki’s dialectic actually articulates two oppositions. First, there is the double operation proper to the active image, the operative image, which is to conserve and destroy at the same time. This is the defining characteristic of the military image that is focused on its target, but also of the image that faithfully preserves the architectural details of houses bound to be destroyed, and even of the camp executioners who cannot keep themselves from filming those who, when sorted, are sent immediately to death. The second opposition is the one between what the image is intended to capture – the industrial installations of IG Farben in the aerial photography of Auschwitz taken by the US Army on 6 April 1944 – and what it unintentionally shows – the camp buildings and in particular the adjoining gas chamber that the operators do not see since they are not looking for it. In fact, in order to see it, two things are necessary. First, one must possess knowledge about what was happening there, knowledge provided by two witnesses who escaped from Auschwitz. Second, an enlargement of the image must make it possible to show those who subsequently know that these white spots are holes on the roof through which gas was distributed and that the black coil was the line of those waiting for the registration office. But to show it means to read what ultimately no one has seen, not even the Americans who took the pictures, nor the camp guards, nor the victims, nor us. For if we understand that this coil is a line, we never see with our own eyes what the filmmaker describes: “They are seen waiting to be tattooed, to have their heads shaved, to be assigned work.” The reading of the operative/blind image thus goes through an operativity of the demonstration that consists in increasing knowledge and enlarging the image so that it reveals the object of this knowledge. Now, in relation to this “operative” enlargement, it is significant that Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis consists in restoring pathos to the operation. Here we are told that in Harun Farocki’s demonstration, the images of Auschwitz “fall upon us” (Remontages du temps subi 135). From this “fall” onward, he puts all the operations that contribute to knowledge and readability under a concept that unites the strength of an activity with a weakening effect in an exemplary way: the filmmaker, he tells us, proceeds with a series of “cuts” of the image. “Cutting” is once more the unity of the active and passive. It is the activity of a lumberjack, but also an activity that makes the work of death appear on the image, not by the accumulation of certainties, for which Farocki accounts, but by a succession of breaks. The demonstration of the dialectician explaining what is on the image can thus become a “position” of the surviving image.

Once again, this tension between two dialectics manifests the distance between the two commentaries on the same image, that of the woman who detaches herself from the line of arrivals subjected to the sorting operation.⁴ Here again, it is the double framing, the double enlargement that authorizes the commentary by isolating the face of the woman. But this “enlargement” gives place to very different ties between a face, words, and time. Indeed, here Farocki makes a strange remark or a remark of strangeness – a remark in Godard’s fashion – on the woman’s gaze. He tells us that the gaze of a woman who sees herself seen is the gaze of the woman she used to be, the gaze of the city-dweller on passers-by and storefront windows, who still searches vainly to frame this lost scene. Georges Didi-Huberman does not mention here Farocki’s hand cutting the photo, nor his dialectician’s irony surrounding the manner in which a social habitus persists in this gaze focused on what radically denies it. What matters to him here is the manner in which this woman is torn from that death to which she is at the same time sent, this split in time that goes hand in hand with the way in which she is singularized in the crowd of victims: a singularization which can be summarized in a word, in the name of the woman that the image has allowed us to find. What counts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Critical Image Configurations: The Work of Georges Didi-Huberman
• 1 Images Re-read: The Method of Georges Didi-Huberman
• 2 Image, Language: The Other Dialectic
• 3 La Dama Duende [The Phantom Lady]
• 4 The Readability of Images (and) of History: Laudatio on the Occasion of the Awarding of the Adorno Prize (2015) to Georges Didi-Huberman
• 5 He or She Who Glimpses, Desires, is Wounded: A Dialogue in the Interspace (zwischenraum) between Aby Warburg and Georges Didi-Huberman
• 6 The People-Image: The Political Philosophy of Georges Didi-Huberman
• 7 Eyes Wide Open: What the Eye of History Compels Us to Do
• 8 Phasmid Thinking: On Georges Didi-Huberman’s Method
• 9 Re-Imagining the “Loss of Place”: Georges Didi-Huberman and the Aura after Benjamin
• 10 Searchingfor Fireflies: Pathos and Imagination in the Theories of Georges Didi-Huberman
• Index