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. 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. (shrink)

From his very earliest writings, art was always important for Georges Bataille. Rather than something static, art, for Bataille, always involves an experience and an exigency towards freedom and even the impossible. It was apparent from the very form of Bataille’s art review Documents, which juxtaposed heterogeneous images, texts and topics, that art was intended as an experience. Bataille found in Andalusia the kind of art that triggers an exigency, an excess or a form of ecstasy in the viewer or (...) the participant, from the paintings of Picasso to flamenco performances. Art that evokes the potency for interior uprising is given form in the various figures of fleeting spirits, such as the will-o’-the-wisp or the genie called duende, as described by Lorca in “Play and Theory of the Duende” and illustrated in Calderón’s La dama duende [The Phantom Lady]. Bataille, who was moved by a performance he had witnessed at the Moulin Rouge, compared the spirited dance of the performers to the will-o’-the-wisps, the spirits that suddenly appear to unsuspecting wanderers, luring them off their path. Born in the marshes where the dead are buried, will-o’-the-wisps flare up, evoking an exigency in whoever beholds them. Thus, the will-o’-the-wisp or the duende exemplifies the potency of images, their flaring and fading away, and their ability to move us. (shrink)

This article explores the work of Didi-Huberman as both an “art historian” and a “philosopher of art.” In particular, Schwarte examines the political turn that Didi-Huberman’s recent works have taken, for example in relation to the ethics of “looking” developed in Images in Spite of All, and to the political philosophy expounded in works such as Peuples exposés, peuples figurants and in the Soulèvements exhibition. Schwarte questions why Didi-Huberman, instead of delivering a more systematic political philosophy, prefers to analyse specific (...) cases. Moving beyond these, Schwarte seeks in Didi-Huberman’s work possible criteria for distinguishing between emancipatory uprisings of the people, on the one hand, and what might be categorized as reactionary or even fascist uprisings, on the other. (shrink)