Didi-Huberman and the Image

The sovereignty of the idea is a defining principle for art history, yet today it appears as one amongst a more generalised set of concepts for the so-called New Art History. Resisting the post-modern compulsion to ‘pluralise the term: new art histories’, as Bill Readings admitted during a symposium on the topic at the Mus ee d’Art contemporain de Montreal in 1994, meant the discipline again asked the related question: what is history? The idea was ascribed to the nineteenth-century emergence of the discipline in continental Europe. It is supposed to have reached its apotheosis with the arrival of the German art historian, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), to Princeton in 1935. If only things were so straight-forward. George Didi-Huberman (b. 1953), whose work begins with this rupture, is subject to an intensive study by Chari Larsson. Against both the Platonic and neoKantian modes of art history, the French philosopher of art has carefully arranged his post-structural method upon the topology of psychoanalytic symptom. This approach could be seen as the direct result of his academic coming-of-age in the 1970s and 80 s, perhaps. Yet Didi-Huberman has also worked tirelessly to reintroduce figures from Art History’s own history—in particular, the idiosyncratic wanderings of Aby Warburg (1866–1929). This focus means that the naïve utopianism of the 1990s (as the end of history) is key for understanding Didi-Huberman’s emergence as a spokesperson for the discipline. The companion to his breakthrough work from 1990, Confronting Images, appeared as Devant le Temps in 2000. Larsson’s analysis of an exhaustive set of Didi-Huberman’s published work, mostly in French, shows the importance of Natural History by Pliny the Elder (AD23/4-79), for example, in the 2000 study yet to appear in an English translation. Two years later Didi-Huberman’s book on Warburg—the founder of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg in 1926, an eccentric research library that was inaugurated by Ernst Cassirer—saw its publication in the context of the appearance of Warburg’s collected manuscripts under the title The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (1999), a project realised by the Getty Research Center in LA. It is obvious why this latter study has since been translated into English, while others by Didi-Huberman, such as Devant le Temps, are yet to be. Warburg’s collected writings had originally appeared posthumously in German in 1932. Of course, this nexus of German and French theory and its influence on English Art History still engulfs the discipline today, dwarfing its Florentine origins.