Confronting Images
Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art
336 pages | 18 illustrations | 5.5 x 8.5 | 2004
ISBN 978-0-271-02471-4 | cloth: $63.95 sh
ISBN 978-0-271-02472-1 | paper: $35.00 sh
"Art history, Didi-Huberman argues, has had to kill the symptomatic image, deny its violence and its dissembling, in order to preserve its true object, art. Confronting Images is arguably the most important book-length analysis of the conceptual foundations of the discipline, and critique of the discipline, in any language." —Christopher Wood, Yale University
"Though Devant l'image resembles The Pleasure of the Text in its central dialectic, it actually does what Barthes never did: it makes the essential move toward historicizing the text (or image) that builds representational failure into itself, looking for historical reason both for a particular images failure to represent, and for art historys own insensitivity or blindness to this aspect of depiction." —Norman Bryson, Art Bulletin (review of the French edition)
When the French edition of Confronting Images appeared in 1990, it won immediate acclaim because of its far-reaching arguments about the structure of images and the histories ascribed to them by scholars and critics working in the tradition of Vasari and Panofsky. According to Didi-Huberman, visual representation has an "underside" in which seemingly intelligible forms lose their clarity and defy rational understanding. Art historians, he goes on to contend, have failed to engage this underside, where images harbor limits and contradictions, because their discipline is based upon the assumption that visual representation is made up of legible signs and lends itself to rational scholarly cognition epitomized in the "science of iconology."To escape from this cul-de-sac, Didi-Huberman suggests that art historians look to Freuds concept of the "dreamwork," not for a code of interpretation, but rather to begin to think of representation as a mobile process that often involves substitution and contradiction. Confronting Images also offers brilliant, historically grounded readings of images ranging from the Shroud of Turin to Vermeers Lacemaker.
Georges Didi-Huberman is on the faculty of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His books include Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (1995), Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtri&eagrave;re (2003), and L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (English edition forthcoming from Penn State Press).
John Goodman is an art historian and translator.