Volume 2, Issue 2, 2021
Sacrifice and Other Uprisings
Magdalena Zolkos
Pages 379-400
https://doi.org/10.5840/jcp20223933
The Nocturnal Order of Visuality: Images, Dreams, and Uprisings in Didi-Huberman
Didi-Huberman conceptualizes images as unstable and incongruent events in disagreement with the art historiographic discourses that reduce visuality to the contents of representation. I analyze the link between Freud¡¯s dream-theory and Didi-Huberman¡¯s philosophy of images, focusing on the notion of dreams and images as instance of (up)rising against repression and erasure. Didi-Huberman does not simply ¡°apply¡± psychoanalysis to disrupt the dominant art historiography; his interpretation of the dream book speaks to his originality as a reader of Freud who brings to the fore the importance of visual categories in psychoanalysis. Viewing images as disunified and ¡°rent¡± has also political implications. The name of this power in Didi-Huberman¡¯s project is anadyomene (¡°she that rises¡±); the imaginal rhythm of pendular dialectical movement between appearance and disappearance. I discuss Didi-Huberman¡¯s analyses of photographs of camps and ghettos, and of uprisings, which highlight the link between the imaginal unconscious and aesthetics of anadyomene, and political subjectivization and resistance.