Introduction: How to Read Dictionaries Diagonally, or ‘The Secret Relations of Things’

Summary

A project of composing a philosophical dictionary on the work of Georges Didi-Huberman immediately runs into trouble. To fit into an encyclopaedic form his voluminous, highly diverse and multifaceted writings in art history, image philosophy, photography, cinema, critical aesthetics and psychoanalysis, to name only the key areas, risks becoming reductive and clichéd. What is more, any reference guide to Didi-Huberman’s work that seeks to systematise or offer a comprehensive overview of his ideas will inevitably jar against his philosophical (and perhaps also ethical) commitment to the plurality and irreducibility of visual forms – paintings, photographs, films – which challenges attempts at systematisation or linear sequencing. Such an encyclopaedic undertaking would contrast with Didi-Huberman’s attention to modes of viewing, reading and listening that resist the paradigm of masterful gaze, of object appropriation and of the certainty of knowledge. Rather, he explores relational and non-appropriative modes of engagement with images, texts and sounds – a fleeting glimpse; ‘a new inflection of the gaze’ (BL, 58); a sudden stir, movement or affect; a surprising occurrence, chance encounter, ‘intrication’ (SI, 325) or ‘implexity’ (IL, 24). The subject finds themselves regarded, touched or ‘rubbed’ (frotté) by the image (BS).

Didi-Huberman helps to articulate what is troubling about the encyclopaedic project when he unfavourably compares dictionaries and archives to atlases (see AH; AA). While an atlas embodies visual epistemic form that is multifaceted, juxtapositional, non-linear and ‘impure’, a dictionary, in its classical form, sets out to classify and organise the world, and to compress a philosophical body of work into absorbable and self-contained information units. This model of reading a text or of viewing an image is akin to an act of absorbing and ‘metabolising’ the object and is utterly foreign to Didi-Huberman’s project (see Hagelstein’s entry on phantom). For Didi-Huberman, images (and texts) defy the subjective urge for appropriation. Instead, they are capable of exerting effects in and upon the world; of intruding, incriminating or demanding a response from the viewer/reader. Images and words alike, Didi-Huberman writes, ‘brandish and position themselves like weapons in a battleground’ (FH, 277).

Didi-Huberman writes that while a dictionary ‘dreams of being [the] catalogue [of words and images], ordered according to an immutable and definitive principle’, an atlas ‘is guided only by changing and provisional principles, ones that can make new relations appear inexhaustibly […] between things and words that nothing seemed to have brought together’ (AA, 5).