Confronting Images

Confronting Images

Author: Georges Didi-Huberman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780271024714

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According to Didi-Huberman, visual representation has an "underside" in which intelligible forms lose clarity and defy rational understanding. Art historians, he contends, fail to engage this underside, and he suggests that art historians look to Freud's concept of the "dreamwork", a mobile process that often involves substitution and contradiction.


The Surviving Image

The Surviving Image

Author: Georges Didi-Huberman

Publisher: Penn State University Press

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780271072098

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Originally published in French in 2002, examines the life and work of art historian Aby Warburg. Demonstrates the complexity and importance of Warburg's ideas, addressing broader questions regarding art historians' conceptions of time, memory, symbols, and the relationship between art and the rational and irrational forces of the psyche.


Images in Spite of All

Images in Spite of All

Author: Georges Didi-Huberman

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-10-15

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 0226148165

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Of one and a half million surviving photographs related to Nazi concentration camps, only four depict the actual process of mass killing perpetrated at the gas chambers. Images in Spite of All reveals that these rare photos of Auschwitz, taken clandestinely by one of the Jewish prisoners forced to help carry out the atrocities there, were made as a potent act of resistance. Available today because they were smuggled out of the camp and into the hands of Polish resistance fighters, the photographs show a group of naked women being herded into the gas chambers and the cremation of corpses that have just been pulled out. Georges Didi-Huberman’s relentless consideration of these harrowing scenes demonstrates how Holocaust testimony can shift from texts and imaginations to irrefutable images that attempt to speak the unspeakable. Including a powerful response to those who have criticized his interest in these images as voyeuristic, Didi-Huberman’s eloquent reflections constitute an invaluable contribution to debates over the representability of the Holocaust and the status of archival photographs in an image-saturated world.


Critical Image Configurations

Critical Image Configurations

Author: Stijn De Cauwer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9780367199791

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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.


Invention of Hysteria

Invention of Hysteria

Author: Georges Didi-Huberman

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004-09-17

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0262541807

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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. In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures." Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.


The Eye of History

The Eye of History

Author: Georges Didi-Huberman

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2018-03-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262037874

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An exploration of the interaction of aesthetics and politics in Bertolt Brecht's “photoepigrams.” From 1938 to 1955, Bertolt Brecht created montages of images and text, filling his working journal (Arbeitsjournal) and his idiosyncratic atlas of images, War Primer, with war photographs clipped from magazines and adding his own epigrammatic commentary. In this book, Georges Didi-Huberman explores the interaction of politics and aesthetics in these creations, explaining how they became the means for Brecht, a wandering poet in exile, to “take a position” about the Nazi war in Europe. Illustrated with pages from the Arbeitsjournal and War Primer and contextual images including Raoul Hausmann's poem-posters and Walter Benjamin's drawings, The Eye of History offers a new view of important but little-known works by Brecht. Didi-Huberman shows that Brecht took positions without taking sides; he used these montages to challenge the viewpoints of the press and propose other readings, to offer a stylistic and political response to the inescapable visibility of historical events enabled by the photographic medium. Brecht's montages disrupt and scrutinize this visibility by juxtaposing representations of war found in magazines with his own epigrams—a “documentary lyricism” that dismounts and remounts modern history. The montages created meaningful disorder, exposing the truth by disorganizing—a process Didi-Huberman calls a “dialectic of the monteur.” These works are examples of “the eyes of history”—when seeing may simultaneously deepen and critique historical knowledge. The montages Didi-Huberman argues, are Brecht's most Benjaminian works.


Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion

Author: Philippe-Alain Michaud

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2024-09-10

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1890951811

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A compelling analysis of the work of art historian Aby Warburg and its radical implications for the study of visual images Aby Warburg (1866–1929) is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that bears his name. His followers included some of the celebrated art historians of the twentieth century, such as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the decipherment and interpretation of symbolic material. As Philippe-Alain Michaud demonstrates in this important book, Warburg’s project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a “critical iconology” to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture. Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Giorgio Vasari, Warburg’s method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. Using procedures of “montage-collision” he brought together pagan artifacts with masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, the astrology of the ancient Near East with the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals with the sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was not only the recognition of the radical heterogeneity of objects but the discovery within the art work itself of lines of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism. Michaud provides us with a book that not only is about Warburg but also extends his intuitions and discoveries into analyses of other categories of imagery like the daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Loïe Fuller. This edition also includes a foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman and texts by Warburg not previously translated into English. Chosen as one of the best art books of 2004 by the Washington Post and Bookforum.


Uprisings

Uprisings

Author: Georges Didi-Huberman

Publisher: Editions Gallimard

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782072697296

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"Thousands of representations of the gesture to say "NO," to shout "STOP," or to raise the banner "THEY SHALL NOT PASS" exist. They are known by women, men, and children, by workers, artists, and poets, by those who cry out and those who are silent, by those who weep, who mourn and those who make them. 'Uprisings' is a montage of these words, gestures, and actions, which defy submission to absolute power"--Page 8.


Law and the Image

Law and the Image

Author: Costas Douzinas

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1999-08

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780226569536

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Discussing the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image, this book includes coverage of the history of the relationship between art and law, and the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law.