Georges Didi-Huberman

Dante a, autrefois, imaginé qu'au creux de l'Enfer, dans la fosse des " conseillers perfides ", s'agitent les petites lumières (lucciole) des âmes mauvaises, bien loin de la grande et unique lumière (lute) promise au Paradis. Il semble bien que l'histoire moderne ait inversé ce rapport : les " conseillers perfides " s'agitent triomphalement sous les faisceaux de la grande lumière (télévisuelle, par exemple), tandis que les peuples sans pouvoir errent dans l'obscurité, telles des lucioles. Pier Paolo Pasolini a pensé ce rapport entre les puissantes lumières du pouvoir et les lueurs survivantes des contre-pouvoirs. Mais il a fini par désespérer de cette résistance dans un texte fameux de 1975 sur la disparition des lucioles. Plus récemment, Giorgio Agamben a donné les assises philosophiques de ce pessimisme politique, depuis ses textes sur la " destruction de l'expérience " jusqu'à ses analyses du " règne " et de la " gloire ". On conteste ici ce pronostic sans recours pour notre " malaise dans la culture ". Les lucioles n'ont disparu qu'à la vue de ceux qui ne sont plus à la bonne place pour les voir émettre leurs signaux lumineux. On tente de suivre la leçon de Walter Benjamin, pour qui déclin n'est pas disparition. Il faut " organiser le pessimisme ", disait Benjamin. Et les images - pour peu qu'elles soient rigoureusement et modestement pensées, pensées par exemple comme images-lucioles - ouvrent l'espace pour une telle résistance.

Survivance des lucioles

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria.

Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière

Invention of Hysteria

Aby Warburg's History of Art

The Surviving Image : Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms

as crônicas de Clarice Lispector

A vertical das emoções

Shane B. Lillis

Four Photographs from Auschwitz

Images in Spite of All

Kabuklar, Fransa’nın yaşayan en önemli ve en üretken sanat tarihçi ve düşünürlerinden Georges Didi-Huberman’ın Türkçede yayımlanan ilk kitabı. Bu kısa ama güçlü metin, ismini yazarın Haziran 2011’de Auschwitz Müzesi’ni ziyareti sırasında “soykırımın sessiz tanığı” huş ağaçlarının birinden kopardığı kabuklardan alıyor.

Özellikle fotoğraf üzerine çalışmalarıyla öne çıkan Didi Huberman'ın bu ziyaret boyunca çektiği fotoğraflar metne eşlik ediyor. Kabuklar, bizi mekân, hafıza, tanıklık, görme ve tahayyül etme üzerine düşünmeye davet eden kişisel ve şiirsel bir deneme, aynı zamanda keskin bir müze ve müzecilik eleştirisi.

Kabuklar

Écorces

Que emoção? Que emoção!

Niki Giannari

" Apatrides, sans-foyer. Ils sont là. Et ils nous accueillent Généreusement dans leur regard fugitif, nous, les oublieux, les aveugles. Ils passent et ils nous pensent. " (Niki Giannari) " Passer. Passer quoi qu'il en coûte. Plutôt crever que ne pas passer. Passer pour ne pas mourir dans ce territoire maudit et dans sa guerre civile. Avoir fui, avoir tout perdu. Passer pour tenter de vivre ici où la guerre est moins cruelle. Passer pour vivre comme sujets du droit, comme simples citoyens. Peu importe le pays, pourvu que ce soit un Etat de droit. Passer, donc, pour cesser d'être hors de la loi commune. Dans tous les cas : passer pour vivre. Mais là où vous avez fui les murs clos des caves bombardées, vous avez trouvé une frontière close et des barbelés au camp d'Idomeni. " (Georges Didi-Huberman)

Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte

Sobrevivência dos vaga-lumes

Pierre Bourdieu

Judith Butler

Alain Badiou

Sadri Khiari

Jacques Rancière

What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations. Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj i ek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time.

What Is a People?

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Dietmar Elger

Gerhard Richter

Over the sixty years of his career Gerhard Richter has produced a standard-setting oeuvre whose thematic and stylistic diversity has no equal among the art of our time.

Pictures / Series

Em Agosto de 1944, membros do Sonderkommando conseguiram fotografar o processo de extermínio em curso nas câmaras de gás de Auschwitz-Birkenau. À luz da questão 'ver (voir) uma imagem pode ajudar a conhecer (savoir) melhor?', escrutinam-se as condições de vida e de morte nos campos de concentração e nas câmaras de gás, as peripécias que rodearam a captura e transmissão destas fotografias, e constrói-se uma fenomenologia das mesmas. Apesar das lacunas documentais e do interdito constituído pelo famigerado carácter da Shoah, a experiência dos campos suscitou a imaginação, o que importa compreender para que se compreenda o valor das imagens - tão necessárias quanto lacunares - na história e na constituição do conhecimento histórico. Contra a imagem-toda, mostra-se como apesar de tudo a imagem pode tocar o real, rompendo a barreira fetichista. Discute-se a 'legibilidade' das imagens documentais, a partir de Freud e de Benjamin. Salienta-se o conhecimento proporcionado pela montagem, com Shoah de Lanzmann e História(s) do Cinema de Godard sobre a mesa. Distingue-se a semelhança da (falsa) aparência e da assimilação (identitária). Reevoca-se a 'redenção pela imagem', de Benjamin e de Kracauer. Interroga-se a imbricação entre imaginação e ética, a partir de Arendt. Pensa-se a cultura e o seu mal-estar à luz da imagem na época da imaginação dilacerada.

apesar de tudo

Imagens

nudità, sogno, crudeltà

Aprire Venere

"Este libro se interroga sobre la manera en que se representa a los pueblos: cuestión indisolublemente estética y política. Hoy los pueblos parecen más expuestos que nunca. Están, en realidad, subexpuestos en la sombra de sus puestas bajo la censura o -con un resultado de invisibilidad equivalente- sobreexpuestos en la luz artificial de sus puestas en espectáculo. En una palabra, están, como ocurre con demasiada frecuencia, expuestos a desaparecer. Sobre la base de las exigencias planteadas por Walter Benjamin (una historia solo vale si da voz a los?sin nombre?) o Hannah Arendt (una política solo vale si hace surgir aunque sea una?parcela de humanidad?), se examinan aquí las condiciones de una posible representación de los pueblos. Examen que pasa menos por la historia del retrato de grupo holandés y los?retratos de tropas? totalitarios que por la atención específica prestada a los?pueblos humildes? por los poetas (Villon, Hugo, Baudelaire, por ejemplo); los pintores (Rembrandt, Goya o Gustave Courbet); los fotógrafos (Walker Evans, August Sander o, un ejemplo contemporáneo, Philippe Bazin). El cine, por su parte, llama figurantes a los?pueblos humildes? frente a los cuales obran y se agitan los?actores protagónicos?, las "stars", como suele decirse. De ahí que los figurantes encarnen un objetivo crucial, histórico y político del cine mismo desde su nacimiento -La salida de los obreros de la fábrica Lumière- hasta sus elaboraciones modernas en Eisenstein o Rossellini, e incluso mucho más allá. Un extenso análisis se dedica aquí al trabajo de Pier Paolo Pasolini y su manera de recuperar a los "pueblos perdidos" en sus "gestos sobrevivientes", conforme a un proceso que permite esclarecer los análisis de Erich Auerbach (para las formas poéticas), Aby Warburg (para las formas visuales) y Ernesto de Martino (para las formas sociales). Sin olvidar algunos ejemplos más contemporáneos, como el filme del realizador chino Wang Bing titulado, precisamente, El hombre sin nombre."

Pueblos expuestos, pueblos figurantes

Daniele Comberiati

Alessandro Zaccuri

Gian Maria Annovi

Silvia De Laude

Gianfranco Marrone

Roberto Chiesi

Luca Scarlini

Andrea Cortellessa

Lorenzo Morviducci

Arianna Agudo

Ludovica del Castillo

Flaminia Albertini

Davide Luglio

Corinne Pontillo

7 Vedere, Pasolini. Editoriale di Engramma n. 181, a cura di Andrea Cortellessa e Silvia De Laude 13 Alessandro Zaccuri, Il demone del non finito. Pasolini e la pratica della pittura. 19 Luca Scarlini, Pittografie del Verbo. Torsioni figurative della parola, torsioni verbali dell’immagine in Italia negli anni ‘60. 33 Lorenzo Morviducci, Una Roma sentimentale. 45 Arianna Agudo e Ludovica del Castillo, Doppio movimento. La lunga strada di sabbia di Pier Paolo Pasolini e Paolo Di Paolo. 67 Silvia De Laude, “Un romanzo aperto verso l’avvenire”? Sopralluoghi nei dintorni di Una vita violenta. 123 Georges Didi-Huberman, con una nota introduttiva di Andrea Cortellessa, Sintagmi di vita e paradigma di morte. Presentazione di: Georges Didi-Huberman, Sentire il grisou, Orthotes, 2021. 139 Flaminia Albertini, La rabbia di Pasolini. Un film scritto, una poesia cinematografata. 161 Roberto Chiesi, Le ombre immobili. La fotografia nel cinema di Pasolini. 175 Gianfranco Marrone, Traduzione e soggettività. Ancora su Pasolini e il cinema. 199 Davide Luglio, Le cose e le immagini. Dalla transustanziazione del segno alla polisemia della realtà. 223 Corinne Pontillo, Pier Paolo Pasolini e Roland Barthes. Tracce fotografiche di un dialogo mancato. 239 Gian Maria Annovi, Pasolini, autoritratto per voce sola. 265 Daniele Comberiati, Pasolini fumettista. Un’analisi di La Terra vista dalla luna attraverso gli strumenti.

e181 | Vedere, Pasolini

A noted French thinker's poignant reflections, in words and photographs, on his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman tears three pieces of bark from birch trees on the edge of the site. Looking at these pieces after his return home, he sees them as letters, a flood, a path, time, memory, flesh. The bark serves as a springboard to Didi-Huberman's meditations on his visit, recorded in this spare, poetic, and powerful book. Bark is a personal account, drawing not on the theoretical apparatus of scholarship but on Didi-Huberman's own history, memory, and knowledge. The text proceeds as a series of reflections, accompanied by Didi-Huberman's photographs of the visit. The photographs are not meant to be art—Didi-Huberman confesses that he “photographed practically everything without looking”—but approach it nevertheless. Didi-Huberman tells us that his grandparents died at Auschwitz, but his account is more universal than biographical. As he walks from place to place, he observes that in German birches are birken; Birkenau designates the meadow where the birches grow. Didi-Huberman sees and photographs the “reconstructed” execution wall; the floors of the crematorium, forgotten witnesses to killing; and the birch trees, lovely but also resembling prison bars. Taking his own photographs, he thinks of the famous photographs taken in 1944 by a member of the Sonderkommando, the only photographic documentation of the camp before the Germans destroyed it, hoping to hide the evidence of their crimes. Didi-Huberman notices a “bizarre proliferation of white flowers on the exact spot of the cremation pits.” The dead are not departed.

Bark

For Georges Didi-Huberman, artist James Turrell is an inventor of impossible spaces and unthinkable sites, of aporias, of fables. Creator of some of the most fascinating works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Turrell uses as his medium the most elemental material of sight and art: light. One crucial aspect of his work is the fabulation of place and vision with its foundation deep in history. Didi-Huberman takes the reader on a journey between the impossible limit of the horizon and the arrival into a site of reverie and light, from the story of Exodus to the Pala d'Oro of San Marco's Basilica in Venice, through art history and the origins of religious worship, finally plunging into Turrell's cadmium dust and light, into the Painted Desert of his installation Roden Crater. For the esteemed art historian, Turrell's artistic practice becomes the equivalent of walking along endless pathways in the desert, in "minuscule cathedrals where man discovers himself walking in color."

The Man Who Walked in Color

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929) is a prescient work of mixed media assemblage, made up of hundreds of images culled from antiquity to the Renaissance and arranged into startling juxtapositions. Warburg’s allusive atlas sought to illuminate the pains of his final years, after he had suffered a breakdown and been institutionalized. It continues to influence contemporary artists today, including Gerhard Richter and Mark Dion. In this illustrated exploration of Warburg and his great work, Georges Didi-Huberman leaps from Mnemosyne Atlas into a set of musings on the relation between suffering and knowledge in Western thought, and on the creative results of associative thinking. Deploying writing that delights in dramatic jump cuts reminiscent of Warburg’s idiosyncratic juxtapositions, and drawing on a set of sources that ranges from ancient Babylon to Walter Benjamin, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science is rich in Didi-Huberman’s trademark combination of elan and insight.

Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science

What would a sculpture look like that has as its task to touch thought? For the French philosopher and Art Historian, Georges Didi-Huberman, this is the central question that permeates throughout the work of Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. Through a careful study of Penone’s work regarding a sculptural and haptic process of contact with place, thought, and artistic practice, Didi-Huberman takes the reader on a journey through various modes of thinking by way of being. Taking Penone’s artwork “Being the river” as a thematic starting point, Didi-Huberman sketches a sweeping view of how artists through the centuries have worked with conceptions of the skull, that is, the mind, and ruminates on where thought is indeed located. From Leonardo da Vinci to Albrecht Dürer, Didi-Huberman guides us to the work of Penone and from there, into the attempts of a sculptor whose works strives to touch thought. What we uncover is a sculptor whose work becomes a series of traces of the site of thought. Attempting to trace, by way of a series of frottages, reports, and developments, this imperceptible zone of contact. The result is a kind of fossil of the brain: the site of thought, namely, the site for getting lost and for disproving space. Sculpting at the same time what inhabits as well as what incorporates us.

Site, Contact, Thought, Sculpture

Being a Skull

Georges Didi-Huberman

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