French Suite. Georges Didi-Huberman, an experiment in History of art

Abstract

Georges Didi-Huberman’s books articulate a dense knowledge to produce what he proposed to call “anthropology of the visual”. This position has a neowarburgian character, although at the beginning of his career he did not rely on Aby Warburg, which he had not yet integrated into his pantheon. Anthropology which no longer represents a risk, but a chance for the History of art. Artistic pictures, observed and analyzed with great critical attention, reveal processes that his in-depth knowledge of philosophy legitimizes him to call “dialectic”. His first ideas and arguments, disseminated in several books that followed each other at an annual pace, found in Warburg, around 2000, a model of confirmation and consolidation. Didi-Huberman’s historiography and philosophy of art were built through books which privilege artists, thinkers, critics (Fra Angelico, Giorgio Vasari, Erwin Panofsky, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein, Aby Warburg, Alberto Giacometti, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, os minimalistas, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Giorgio Agamben) who instigate a History of art which is a practical philosophy of image and time.