Critical Image/Imaging Critique

Georges Didi-Huberman and translated by

Chris Miller

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In any language, giving thanks is the most obvious thing imaginable.1 If you 1. Speech delivered on receiving the Theodor W.
learn just one expression in a foreign language, it has to be ‘thank you’. And so, Adorno Prize, 11 September 2015 at Frankfurt-
am-Main.
here in front of you all, I can only say, first and foremost, danke, vielen Dank,
danke schön, recht herzlichen Dank. Saying ‘thank you’ is ‘the least one can do’, 2. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of
History’, VI, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn
French courtesy proverbially tells us – the least one can ethically do. It is also, (London: Fontana/Collins, 1982), p. 247.
at a personal level, the most emotional way of registering one’s gratitude. But it
is, in another respect, the least obvious thing imaginable; nothing is more
difficult to convey and communicate fully because nothing is more likely to be
fossilised, encysted in conformism. And conformity is not the same thing as
courtesy. A prize-giving ceremony is, for instance, just such a situation as might
throw up conventional utterance. In a celebrated sentence, written in 1940 for
the sixth of his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin an-
nounces: ‘In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away
from a conformism that is about to overpower it.’2
Well, in my view, this requirement covers not just every era but indeed
every instant and every sentence – every situation in which we are called upon
to speak – in particular when it comes to saying, quite simply, ‘thank you’. And
this evening I must, in order to thank you, attempt to strip my thanks of the
conventional formulae (the conformism) by which they might be overpowered.
What is more commonplace – but what, too, is more precious and unique than
saying ‘thank you’? Saying ‘thank you’ is like saying ‘mum’: it is a ‘shifter’, in
linguistic parlance. Everyone has a mum; nothing more commonplace than
that. But everyone has their own mum; nothing more singular than she. And so
it is with ‘thank you’? two small words but fraught at once with the broadest
ethical universality and the greatest imaginable singularity in respect of who
gives thanks, who receives them, and the reason gratitude is in order.
In thanking the School of Frankfurt, which has so kindly honoured me
with the Adorno Prize, the least I can do today is therefore to bring to light
certain philosophical problems as inherent in this very ‘gratitude’ or
‘acknowledgement’ (this Anerkennung, around which Axel Honneth has rightly
constructed his critical, ethical, and political theory) as they are in ‘discourse
ethics’ (the Diskursethik of which Jürgen Habermas has, in turn, made the
kingpin of his philosophical and political praxis). The fact that this prize derives
from the name of Adorno or bears that name, places me in a still more difficult
– I should say demanding – position. It would be easy for me to thank critical
theory in general for the way that it has sharpened my scrutiny of the historical
world, and, indirectly, of the world of images immanent therein. But I feel that
I owe to Theodor Adorno – to his thought – a further effort of gratitude, one
very much in his own style: an anxious acknowledgement, so to speak.
It is a gratitude torn between two powers, those of the anguish of thinking
and of the desire to imagine. At this point, I remember in Adorno’s Dream Notes
the confused, harrowing dream of the night of 5–6 October 1945. Though I

# The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved OXFORD ART JOURNAL 40.2 2017 249–261
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcx027
Georges Didi-Huberman
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes, trans.
Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2007),
pp. 40–1 (Traumprotokolle, C. Gödde and H.
Lonitz (eds) (Frankfurt-on-Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 2005), pp. 46–8).
252 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 40.2 2017
quote only fragments of his account, it will, I hope, lose none of its emotional
tonality, its fundamental Stimmung: ‘there was to be a kind of academic
celebration for a historian or a politician.. . . The entire company was brought
down to the ground in a goods lift. There was no room in it for me so I
remained on the upper floor. Then the scene changed. There was a classroom
full of children, with a high-school teacher (in reality he was not a high-school
teacher at all, but only a primary-school teacher), and an adjoining room.. . .
After Hanns’s failure to respond, the high-school teacher fell to cursing, saying
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that such ignorance would inevitably turn the entire ceremony into a disas-
ter.. . . Then I had an idea.. . . But before I could properly present my ideas, I
woke up’.3 Was it the dream image that prevented Adorno, that night, from
‘presenting’ his idea? And might it be possible to construct a form of critical
thought, and even ‘present’ it, in a sort of ‘academic celebration for a histo-
rian’, through the vehicle not of the concept as such but of something like a
simple image?
*
There is a photo of Theodor Adorno – no doubt very familiar to all his
readers – in which he is seen sitting at his desk in solitary and typically
‘philosophical’ chiaroscuro (Fig. 1). The photo is by Ilse Mayer-Gehrken and
dates from the 1960s. Both Adorno’s hands are placed on a text, a typescript
that he is shown reading or rereading. Behind him is a very orderly bookcase.
The pages on the table might suggest a visual relationship constituted within the
photographic space by the white of the paper (traversed by lines and letters),
the white net-curtain in the background (traversed by vertical folds), and the
sort of floating, ghostly surface, also white (and also striped) that appears above
Adorno’s right hand.
It is the two hands that ultimately fascinate me in this image: they seem to be
holding the leaves in place, as if to stop them trembling (in French we say
trembler comme une feuille, ‘tremble like a leaf’, whether the leaves are of paper
or belong to a tree). And I can well imagine texts read by Adorno trembling
with fear at his critical acuity. Exact but implacable, critique is frightening
because it calls into question what had seemed permanently inscribed. Indeed,
the very word designates a form of authority whose purpose is to cast doubt on
any form of authority. The typescript on Adorno’s table is, we can be sure,
undergoing a severe examination. Now we understand why the left hand gently
but firmly holds the paper down. The right hand is, meanwhile, ready to
take up the biro on the table in order to cross out or add a word, modalise a
verb, reject a noun, sharpen an adjective or, who knows, strike out an entire
passage . . .
In short, confronted with a gaze all the more critical for being so close to
despair, we see, embodied in this photograph, a gesture supremely Adornian,
that of putting thought through the riddle of critique. Let us be clear about this
word ‘riddle’: we are not talking about enigmas. Nor about execution, machine
guns, and targets ‘riddled’ with bullets. This is the riddle as filter. So that
instead of the white page constellated with graphic signs, I begin to imagine
Adorno holding in his hands a virtual riddle, the grid intended to ‘separate the
wheat from the tares’: his critical filter. We know that the etymology of the
word ‘criticism/critique’, like its close kin ‘crisis’, lies in the Greek verb
krinein, whose linguistic group refers to the immemorial agricultural technique
of riddling cereal grain. The root *krin-y or *krin-je, recorded by Pierre
Chantraine in his Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, and more recently
by Robert Beekes in his Etymological Dictionary of Greek, thus gave us words such
 Critical Image/Imaging Critique

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Fig. 1. Ilse Mayer-Gehrken, Theodor W. Adorno, c.1967 (# Ilse Mayer-Gehrken Suhrkamp Verlag).

as kresera in Greek (which refers to a ‘bolting cloth for sieving flour’) and the
Latin cribrum (sieve or riddle).4
André Leroi-Gourhan, in his great anthropology of technologies, connected
the elaboration of textures with the functions of bolting and riddling; warp and
weft ensure superficial homogeneity but their openwork structure, however
tight the weave, underpins vital discriminatory functions such as the winnowing
of grain and the filtering of future foodstuffs.5 By way of extrapolation, one
might say that every (fully comprehensible) text should itself be fabricated like a
riddle or sieve, becoming a critical instrument par excellence through which to
learn to discern (another word from this same linguistic constellation) the world.
So, I am not surprised that the main examples given by the linguists (Bailly,
Chantraine, and Beekes) for the Greek verb krinein should be, first, a passage
from the Iliad (5.500–01) concerning the agricultural gesture of ‘culling grain
from dry husk’, and subsequently a passage from Plato’s Theaetetus on the philo-
sophical gesture of distinguishing ‘the real from the unreal’ (that is, separating
theory from opinion).6
4. Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de
la langue grecque. Histoire des mots, II (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1970), pp. 584–5. Robert Beekes,
Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Leyden-Boston:
Brill, 2010), p. 781.
5. André Leroi-Gourhan, Evolution et techniques, I.
L’homme et la matière (Paris: Albin Michel, 1943;
ed. 1971), pp. 270–5. André Leroi-Gourhan,
Evolution et techniques, II. Milieu et techniques (Paris:
Albin Michel, 1945; ed. 1973), pp. 143–6.
6. The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, Homer, 5. pp.
576–7 (London: The Softback Preview, 1997), p.
180; Plato, ‘Theaetetus’, in Collected Dialogues,
trans. F.M. Cornford (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1971), p. 855.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 40.2 2017 253

Georges Didi-Huberman
7. Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
[1927–1929]. Gesammelte Schriften, II-1, ed. M.
Warnke and C. Brink (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2000; 2nd revised ed., 2003), pp. 14–15.
254 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 40.2 2017
The coherence and continuity of these two examples can be inferred from
the semantic crystal quite simply constituted by the gesture implied in the verb
krinein, the gesture of krisis or critique: in each case, the object is to separate,
sort, choose, and decide (only in the passive does krinein refer to the ‘critical
state’ of a patient). The kriter is the judge, the one who settles matters, who
accurately discriminates, and on whom we call to distinguish the true from the
false. A very powerful gesture, this is not necessarily a gesture of power – quite
the contrary. Nor is it inevitably a brutal one: the oneirokrites or interpreter of
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dreams is able to play with nuance and, though he may ‘sift’ a dream with his
interpretations, he never ‘judges’ it. This is why the verb krinein often means to
‘evaluate, appreciate’, that is, to be sensitive to the thousand and one nuances
of the thing to be ‘criticised’.
If we envisage critique as a gesture – an anthropological paradigm and a
process before becoming a conceptual paradigm and a result – we will find it
easier to understand the profound kinship between the Homeric gesture in the
treatment of grain and the Socratic gesture in the treatment of truth. And then
we find ourselves obliged to acknowledge that a gesture from the culture of the
field is much more elaborate and subtle than it seemed, while a gesture of
philosophical culture may also be more archaic and vital than it had seemed. To
understand this fully, we need no Jungian archetypes or Heideggerian
foundations. By contrast, the work of Aby Warburg might, as so often, prove
helpful: when, on the first plate of his atlas of images, Mnemosyne, we find
objects of very long duration used for the divinatory interpretation of viscera,
we are tempted to see this as something like an allegory of critique.7 That
allegory, in its turn, suggests that we should see critique itself as something
more than an activity: a Pathosformel, a formulation of the pathos of thought itself.
Not the pathos of ‘pensive’ or melancholic thought but that of active, alert
thought, the kind that will be capable of decision and may therefore induce
dissent by perforating the self-evidence of the world.
To criticise, riddle, sieve: we are thus in the presence of a process; here
thought cooperates with a gesture, a gesture with a tool, and the tool with
precisely the material that we must sieve, ‘riddle’, or ‘criticise’. There are
many kinds of sieve and riddle, each adapted to a particular use, whether in
agriculture, philosophy, patisserie, or mineral prospecting. But in each case, we
are presented with material sieved by a tool, with a tool set in motion by a
gesture, and a gesture mobilised by thought. Close kin to the ethnological
research of Ernesto de Martino (itself in many respects kindred to Warburg’s
work on ‘survival’ or Nachleben), Vittorio de Seta’s film Il mondo perduto (‘The
Lost World’) contains an admirable sequence on riddling gestures, which he
filmed in Sicily in the 1950s rather as they might have been hymned by some
Homeric bard. But this cinematographic poem very exactly documents the
multiple dialectics at work in the activity of ‘separating the wheat from the
chaff’: the wheat must be harvested with the billhook and brought together in
great sheaves, then loaded onto mules who will tread it under their hooves as a
first threshing. Thus, one must strike the cereal to divide it. But there is also a
more subtle and lighter-touch operation – all but a choreography – of uprising:
admirable images of the grain that goes up in clouds, flares, fireworks, as a nec-
essary gesture in the very operation of the riddle. Is it, then, a condition of cri-
tique that everything must be thus thrown up into the air? Does the gesture of
critique imply a preliminary gesture of upheaval?
 Critical Image/Imaging Critique

*
It is true that Adorno seems mostly to criticise – and to do so very bitterly:
he goes so far as to say that every truth is, as such, bitter: ‘das allein is die 8. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models:
bittere Wahrheit’ (‘this alone is the bitter truth’),8 but without revolt or Interventions and Catchwords, trans. H.W. Pickford
revulsion. He seems never to want to destroy, as if too many things around him (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998),
had already been destroyed. And yet he manifests his rebellion with admirable 71 (Gesammelte Schriften [hereafter GS], R.
Tiedemann (ed.) (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp
energy, for example when he reiterates, in Negative Dialectics, his old ‘protest Verlag, 1973–86), vol. X-2, p. 533).
against reification’ (Protest gegen Verdinglichung), the cry of critical anger that he

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raises against generalised social and psychic alienation.9 Since truth, as he says in 9. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans.
E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2007), p.
the same book, manifests itself in oppression or pain, it falls to critique, or even 89 (GS, vol. VI, pp. 96–9).
to a ‘metacritique’, to clarify the costs of liberty at the level of ‘practical
10. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 14, pp. 211–97
reason’ itself (Freiheit. Zur Metakritik der praktischen Vernunft).10 And all this is (GS, vol. VI, pp. 21, 29 and 211–94).
bracketed between despair and philosophical responsibility, that binary tension
11. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia,
with which – it is no coincidence – the entire trajectory of Minima Moralia Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N.
concludes.11 Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 247 (GS, vol.
Adorno shouts his criticism, in however constricted a voice: a cry that IV, p. 281).
returns upon itself. A mere conceptual filter is not enough for him. This is why 12. Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 25, 113 (GS,
one reads, in Minima Moralia, that ‘the world is systematised horror’ and that vol. IV, pp. 26, p. 126).
‘sociability itself connives at injustice’.12 This is why Adorno sees Nazism and 13. Adorno, Critical Models, ‘The Meaning of
fascism (for example in his 1959 text, ‘The Meaning of Working through the Working Through the Past’, p. 90 (GS, vol. X-2,
Past’) as something that survives not only against but within contemporary p. 556).
democracies: the worm is in the fruit.13 This is why Adorno inveighs against 14. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of
the ‘jargon of authenticity’ in Heidegger as having an ‘alleged original Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will
meaning’, governed by the ‘elevated diction’ of a ‘superior language’ perfectly (Evanston, IL: North-Western University Press,
1973), pp. 6–8 (GS, vol. VI, pp. 416–21).
at one with the ‘Fascist manner’.14 This is why what we call ‘culture’– in fact a
‘pseudo-culture’, an ‘administrated culture’, a ‘cultural industry’ – seems to 15. Adorno, Minima Moralia, §96, pp. 146–8
him no more than ‘an incorporation of barbarity’ or a mere ‘lid over [the] (GS, vol. IV, pp. 165–7) ‘culture industry’,
‘incorporation of barbarity’; Theodor W.
refuse’ of history.15 Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, trans.
To venture to say that Adorno ‘shouts his criticism’ is not merely to suggest E. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
the suffering tenor in his bitter observation of the world. There is a pathos in Press, 2000), p. 130, ‘lid over refuse’; cf.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Theory of Pseudo-
Adorno’s critique, which is not reducible to a single kind of emotion; on the
Culture’, Telos, 20 March 1993, pp. 15–38, and
one hand, it covers a very wide range, from disoriented anguish to razor-sharp Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Culture and
scrutiny and from systematic analysis to the revolt of thought; on the other, if Administration’, in The Culture Industry, unknown
he expresses himself, even in his most elaborate texts, so well, it is only because translator (London and New York: Routledge,
2001), p. 131 ‘administrated . . . culture’.
he teaches a profound methodological and philosophical lesson. Before being
able to discern what, in a given field, constitutes ‘the grain’ and ‘the chaff’, we 16. Max Horkheimer, ‘The Current Situation of
have to ask, how is critique conducted? What kind of riddle does Adorno use? Social Philosophy and the Tasks of Institute of
Social Research’, in Horkheimer, Between
And, above all, how does he shake it, what gesture did he invent so that the Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings,
bolting cloth so perfectly fulfils its critical function? trans. J. Torpey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
In the last analysis, the answer is very simple: the riddle is called dialectic and 1993), pp. 1–14; see <https://www.marxists.
org/reference/archive/horkheimer/1931/
the gesture by which it is so distinctively manipulated is the power of negativity. It
present-situation.htm> [accessed 11 July 2017].
should be no surprise that, in regard to his instrument, Adorno from the outset
turned to the finest manufacturer of philosophical filters: Hegel. As early as 17. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 16 (GS, vol. IV,
p. 14).
1931, Max Horkheimer was exhorting ‘social philosophy’ to start again with
Hegel in its attack on any ‘anti-historical, pessimistic and well-meaning’
philosophy.16 Starting with the dedication of Minima Moralia, Adorno declared
himself to be of the Hegel ‘school’ and ‘in accordance with [Hegel’s] thought’,
though he would nevertheless like to inflect that thought towards negativity.17
Hegel must therefore be criticised: not in order to reject him, but, on the
contrary, in order to separate out ‘the grain’, to sift and shake Hegel, to
‘riddle’ him in the light of the new conditions that contemporary history
imposes.

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 40.2 2017 255

Georges Didi-Huberman
18. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 72 (GS, vol. IV,
pp. 79–80).
19. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Preface’, in Hegel:
Three Studies, trans. S. Weber Nicholsen
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), p. xxxvi
(GS, vol. V, p. 250).
20. Adorno, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in
Hegel: Three Studies, p. 5 (GS, vol. V, p. 255).
21. Adorno, ‘The Experiential Content of
Hegel’s Philosophy’, in Hegel: Three Studies, p. 83
(GS, vol. V, p. 320).
22. Adorno, ‘Notes on Philosophical Thinking’,
in Interventions, p. 127 (GS, vol. X-2, p. 599), cf.
in the same volume ‘Hegel’s unparalleled insight’
in ‘Why Still Philosophy’, Interventions, p. 11.
23. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 153, 145 (GS,
vol. VI, pp. 148–9, 156).
24. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Die revidierte
Psychoanalyse’, GS, vol. VII, p. 40.
25. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Sociology and
Psychology’, Part 1, New Left Review, I/46 (Nov–
Dec 1967), p. 68 (GS, vol. VIII, p. 42).
256 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 40.2 2017
‘It is the concern of dialectics’, we read in Minima Moralia, ‘to cock a snook
at the sound views held by later powers-that-be on the immutability of the
course of the world . . . Dialectical reason is, when set against the dominant
mode of reason, unreason.’18 Hence in Hegel: Three Studies, written between
1957 and 1963, he began to forge a ‘revised conception of the dialectic’.19 This
radical modification or inflection was intended to fully concretise ‘the tendency
of idealism [in Hegel] . . . to move beyond itself’.20 To criticise, therefore, is to
show that ‘the chaff’ itself – the places where Hegel, according to Adorno, falls
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or ‘fails’ – is made of a substance immemorially mingled with ‘the grain’; to
criticise Hegel’s work means ‘wresting truth from it where its untruth is obvi-
ous’.21 Hence these unexpected formulations by which Adorno seeks to under-
line everything that brings him ‘into conflict with Hegel’s unsurpassed insight
into philosophical thinking’.22 Hence the gamble of Negative Dialectics: to think
out a fundamental process in which, Adorno says, ‘the contradiction weighs
more heavily now than it did on Hegel, the first man to envision it’, till it runs
the risk of some paradoxical ‘logic of disintegration’.23
In order that ‘the contradiction [should thus weigh] more heavily . . . than it
did on Hegel’, Adorno had to use the filter differently, saving as precious what,
in the eyes of any idealist, could only be waste matter beyond any prospect of
‘spiritualisation’. And, to venture upon a ‘logic of disintegration’, Adorno had
to wield the sieve in a way that went beyond any merely discriminatory
function (heavy/light, cheap/precious, false/true). He had to suggest an
irreducible contradiction in the logical operation itself. At this point, we must
surely admit that the critical operation is something more than merely
separating ‘the wheat’ clearly and distinctly from ‘the tares’? You shake the
riddle to obtain that separation but your very gesture renders the operation
impure. A remnant appears: dust rises up. As if the dust were unaware that, after
riddling (and therefore separation) had been accomplished, everything should
have found its own place, it spreads out anarchically in space, indeed it rises up
into the face of the riddlers themselves, as we see in the extraordinary images
filmed in Bombay by the documentarist Michael Glawogger in his 1988 film
Megacities. Is this insurgent dust ‘wheat’ or ‘tare’? Astra or monstra?
To understand the inevitability, indeed, the fertility of this process, we need,
perhaps, to turn from Hegel to Freud. And this is what Adorno, along with his
friends Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, did; as early as 1946, he argues
for a ‘radical psychoanalysis’ (radikale Psychoanalyse) as against the ‘neo-Freudian
revisionists’ capable of nothing more than ‘integrating psychic processes into
the social status quo’, that is, into the unjust world of reification.24
Consequently, thought about society must be supplemented by an approach to
the psyche. To the struggle of consciences, to the relations of power, of
domination and servitude, and to the different processes of recognition (to take
up Hegel’s terminology in The Phenomenology of Mind, which recurs throughout
critical theory), desire as a power and a fundamental psychic process must be
reattached or reimplied. And this is a power that will never be ‘transcended’
(according to the terms of the standard dialectic) because desire continues to
disorientate and subvert everything from its underlying position, from its own
unconscious dialectic (that non-standard dialectic of which Bataille and later
Lacan attempted to set out the principles). This is, in any case, why one can
never separate problems of society from questions of the psyche, ‘social deter-
minants’ from ‘instinctual structures’, as Adorno put it in an article from 1955
on the relations between sociology and psychology.25
In short, one should never lose sight of the component of (social) struggle
intrinsic to any desire, just as one should never overlook the element of
 Critical Image/Imaging Critique

(psychic) desire intrinsic to any social or political relationship. It is striking, for

example, that the intense sexual motifs of the Dream Notes – sodomy and
‘babamüll’ (a practice about which we are finally told nothing at all), a brothel
with a glass woman, genital torture, St Charles Borromeo completely absorbed
into the anus of ‘the man on the cross’, and a ‘prick-washing machine’26 –
constitute a melodic line whose ground bass remains political anguish, with its
endlessly recurring motifs of scenes of execution, concentration camps, the
kingdom of the dead, or the end of the world . . . In a dream dated November
26. Adorno, Dream Notes, pp. 14–15, 18–19, 47,
53, 75 (Traumprotokolle, pp. 2–21, 25–6, 53–4,
60–61, 84–5).
27. Adorno, Dream Notes, p. 12 (Traumprotokolle,
p. 19).

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28. Adorno, Critical Models, pp. 75, 73, 73, 83
1942, for instance, Adorno sees himself walking with his father through the (GS, vol. X-2, pp. 535, 554).
streets of London during an air raid: ‘everywhere there were large notices, 29. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Free Time’, trans. G.
banners actually with the inscription PANIC. It was as if people were being Finlayson and N. Walker, in The Culture Industry
instructed to panic rather than being warned not to do so’.27 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp.
Later, in the 1960s, Adorno again demonstrated his critical perspicacity by 190, 197 (GS, vol. X-2, pp. 648, 655).
expressing – as did Pier Paolo Pasolini – his suspicion of the much-vaunted ‘sex- 30. Adorno, ‘Theory of Pseudo-Culture’ n. 15,
ual liberation’: he mainly saw in it ‘libidinal energy . . . displaced onto the pp. 15–38; Adorno, ‘Culture and
power that dominates it’, a ‘neutralisation of sex’ or desire, with its ‘new, Administration’, 107–31 (GS, vol. VIII, pp. 222–
58). See also GS, vol. X-1, pp. 291–301.
deeper form of repression’, and, finally, a cultural sign of ‘society’s complicity
with the principle of violence’, which everywhere subordinates beings who are
subjected to reification.28 And what is true of ‘sexual liberation’ is also true of
‘free time’, the appearances of which Adorno scorned, reminding us of the self-
evident truth that ‘organized freedom is compulsory’ and that much still has to
be done before we encounter any ‘chance of maturity (Mündigkeit), which might
just eventually help to turn free time into freedom proper’.29 This is one way
of saying that the critical filter is not activated exclusively to discriminate be-
tween true and false: its movement is indefeasibly connected to the human ges-
ture by which, from the complex turbulence of the light and the heavy grain,
something will rise up, like the very index of our desire for liberty.
*
One fact of experience is, alas, reduplicated by a philosophical topos: images
often confuse us. They disturb or move, fascinate or startle us; by dint of which,
they are reputed (according to a very long-standing philosophical tradition de-
riving from Plato) to expose us to the risk of confusing everything – being and
appearance, truth and illusion; in short, of being unable to distinguish ‘the
wheat’ from ‘the tares’. In this perspective, nothing can seem more alien to the
critical function than the image itself. What, in that case, does it mean to ex-
tract from the etymology of the word critical the image of a riddle or sieve? Is it
a way of confusing everything? Of drowning critique in the indistinction of the
image? Is not etymology, to take up Adorno’s own terminology, strongly
aligned with the ‘jargon of authenticity’? And does not the image of the sieve
lead one to expect something like an archetype: the mythological image of an
activity (critique) that strives precisely to disalienate us from all mythological
thought? How, then, could a critical theory allow itself to be invested by the
power of confusion that images vector?
One thing is certain: there can be no critical theory without a critique of
images. An ‘integrated’ society – a reified or alienated society such as the
author of Minima Moralia quite rightly detests, is a society constantly besieged
by a host of ignominious images by turns violent or salacious. Since the
philosopher’s death, things have not – the fact is notorious – improved; on the
contrary. Now all of that is, in Adorno’s own terms, oriented or ‘adapted’, in
the Darwinian sense of the term, by something that he called Leitbild, a word
generally translated into English as ‘masterplan’ (blueprint, road map) or
‘paradigm’.30 (So fashionable has this word become in management discourse, I
am told, that its root in Bild (‘image’) is practically inaudible.)

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Georges Didi-Huberman
31. Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 148, 146 (GS,
vol. IV, pp. 165–7).
32. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 140, ff. (GS, vol.
IV, pp. 157–9).
33. Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 4.
34. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 204 (GS, vol.
VI, pp. 204–7).
35. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans.
R. Hullot-Kentor (London and New York:
Continuum, 2011), p. 1 (GS, vol. VII, p. 9).
36. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 15 (GS, vol. IV,
p. 13).
37. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature,
Volume 2, trans. S. Weber Nicholsen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 250 (GS,
vol. XI, p. 603).
38. Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume 2, p. 251.
39. This refers to the final passage in ‘Cultural
Criticism and Society’, in Theodor W. Adorno,
Prisms, trans. S. Weber Nicholsen and S. Weber
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), p. 34: ‘The
more total society becomes, the greater the
reification of the mind and the more paradoxical
its effort to escape reification on its own. Even
the most extreme consciousness of doom
threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural
criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of
the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes
even the knowledge of why it has become
impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification,
which presupposed intellectual progress as one of
its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind
entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to
this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-
satisfied contemplation’ (GS, vol. X-1, p. 30).
40. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’.
41. Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 106.
42. Adorno, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Catchwords’, part
2 of Critical Models, p. 126 (GS, vol. X-2, pp.
597–8).
258 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 40.2 2017
When, in Minima Moralia, Adorno speaks of the culture industry as an
‘incorporation of barbarity’ based on ‘the systematic exploitation of the ancient
fissure between men and their culture’,31 we understand the extent to which
images play a crucial role in the creation of this unhappiness (which Freud
confined himself to calling a ‘discontent’). The Enlightenment having failed to
completely ‘wipe out the power of images over man’, should we not, Adorno
wonders, rethink contemporary philosophy on the basis of a ‘picture-book
without pictures’ (Bilderbuch ohne Bilder).32 If, on the one hand, metaphysics is
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indeed that ‘form of philosophy which takes concepts as its [exclusive]
objects’,33 must it not constantly rid itself of images? And if, on the other hand,
materialism – closer kin, one might think, to the sensible world – seeks
coherence, should it not posit itself as imageless materialism (Materialismus
bilderlos)?34 As to the justification of art itself – art, great art, autonomous art!
– Adorno could not avoid, right at the beginning of his Aesthetic Theory, calling it
brutally into question: what is artistic liberty worth in a society of such
restricted liberty?35
The more so because, after 1945, humanity had had to live with (outlive) the
fact – the ‘unimaginable’ fact, there seemed at first no other way of saying it –
that Auschwitz was made possible by a thought, a decision, by a process
inherent in Western culture itself. This is why Minima Moralia opens with the
expression ‘melancholy science’ (traurige Wissenschaft).36 The Nietzschian era of
‘gay science’ and the full and joyous affirmation of our power of being is a thing
of the past; power had just taken everything, massacred everything, condemned
everything to bitterness. Under those conditions, what sense could be
attributed to a Kantian aesthetic problem such as that of the ‘judgement of
taste’, when an entire epoch had condemned itself so radically and merited no
more than a general ‘judgement of distaste/disgust’? Adorno was undoubtedly
in despair at a history whose harshness he had personally experienced. But he
gave to the despair that he highlighted the courageous term ‘objective despair’
(objeckitive Verzweiflung): it was, he said, a structural despair, one of whose
collateral effects was to ‘pass judgement on the affirmative character of art’.37
In short, art ‘must renounce lightheartedness of its own accord’,38 and what
remains for it is a ‘tearless weeping’, such as Samuel Beckett’s characters still
contrive.
It is in this context of ‘affliction in culture’ that in 1949 he wrote the
excessively famous sentences – often reduced to five words – on the barbarity
or impossibility of writing poems after Auschwitz.39 Adorno’s purpose was to
highlight the bankruptcy of language, critical or poetic, before what he termed
the ‘absolute reification’ of humanity within the perimeter of the camps.40 In
1965, in Metaphysics, he suggested that, faced with ‘millionfold death’ and
infinite violence, no nuance could be permitted in language –‘the word alone is
a disgrace in the face of what one would like to say’ – and this demonstrated
language’s bankruptcy.41 In 1969, the year of his death, Adorno persisted with
this diagnosis of bankruptcy. It occurs when language and emotion in the face of
history become incommensurable, that is, when it is no longer possible to
express anything whatsoever: ‘It is impossible to write stylistically well about
Auschwitz; one must renounce subtle nuances in order to remain faithful to the
emotional impulses underlying them, and yet with this renunciation one in turn
falls in with the universal repression.’42
*
As we know, Adorno went back on his words of 1949. In Metaphysics (1965),
he wrote: ‘I would readily concede that, just as I said that after Auschwitz, one
 Critical Image/Imaging Critique

could not write poems – by which I meant to point to the hollowness of the
resurrected culture of that time – it might equally be said, that one must write
poems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics, that as long as there 43. Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 110.
is an awareness of suffering among human beings, there must also be art as the
objective form of that awareness.’43 In Negative Dialectics (1966), he declared 44. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 362 (GS, vol.
VI, p. 355).
that ‘perennial suffering (das perennierende Leiden) has as much right to
expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to 45. Theodor W. Adorno, Correspondance avec Paul
Celan (1960–68), trans. C. David (Caen: Nous,
say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems’.44 The book had

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2008), p. 79.
been sent to Paul Celan and, in his very last letter to the poet, Adorno
discreetly referred to the importance he attached to this recalibration.45 It 46. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 24 (GS, vol. VII,
p. 35).
would be wrong, however, to see in these phrases either a reversal or a
disavowal of his previous self; it is nothing other than a ‘dialecticisation’ of what 47. Adorno, Notes to Literature II, p. 82 (GS, vol.
XI, p. 97).
is unnameable (through an ethics of language) and what is unimaginable
(through – who knows? – an ethics of images). It is as if he were determined 48. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 39 (GS, vol. VII,
p. 53).
that his words should never smack of synthesis or reconciliation but remain
within the painful ‘bitter truth’. 49. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Curious Realist:
Bitter truth: the entire power of critique as such is directed towards the word On Kracauer’, in Notes to Literature II, pp. 58–9
(GS, vol. XI, p. 389).
‘truth’. But in the word ‘bitter’, we find all the power of images. Critique thus
requires the image too; in its absence, truth will only be one truth among many 50. Adorno, ‘The Curious Realist’, pp. 58–9.
and not the ‘bitter truth’ that looks us in the eye and moves us to our very 51. Adorno, ‘The Curious Realist’, p. 62 (GS,
soul. In relation to truth, one can and one must, yet again, return to Hegel: vol. XI, p. 392).
‘Hegel’s thesis that art is consciousness of plight has been confirmed beyond 52. Adorno, Prisms, pp. 241, 229.
anything he could have envisioned’.46 In relation to bitterness, it is to Heinrich
Heine that Adorno first returns, in a magnificent text entitled ‘Heine the
Wound’ (Die Wunde Heine), in which he says that the poet ‘transfigures the loss
of all images, transforming that loss itself into an image’.47 Later, Adorno
would recur to Samuel Beckett, saying that he had admirably articulated a
‘ground zero’ (Nullpunkt) from which ‘a . . . world of images (Welt von Bildern)
springs forth’.48
If there is a single issue that should engage the entirety of critical thought in
relation to our ‘bitter truths’, it would therefore be to work conjointly with
Heine and with Hegel: to find the critical space in which image and dialectic
can converge. Now, this place existed concretely in Adorno’s life: it was at a
table of the café Westend in Frankfurt-on-Main’s Opernplatz, where, in 1913,
thanks to Siegfried Kracauer, his friendship with Walter Benjamin began. Much
later, after countless historical and intellectual peripeteias, Adorno asserted the
exemplary role for all critical theory of these two. . . But how are we to
describe them? As writers? Non-academic philosophers? Or precisely as critics?
Kracauer, the ‘curious realist’ (der wunderliche Realist), was the man through
whom ‘suffering entered into the idea . . . in undistorted, unmitigated form’.49
‘Without being able to account for it’, Adorno writes in this text dated 1964,
‘through Kracauer I perceived for the first time the expressive moment in phi-
losophy (das Ausdrucksmoment der Philosophie)’.50 How, then, could we fail to be
struck by the form that Kracauer’s critical questioning of the world of history
always took, that of a ‘phenomenology of little images’ (Bildchen-
Ph€anomenologie),51 whether these were cinematic or photographic?
But Walter Benjamin’s contribution was still more overwhelming and
radical. In 1950, when Adorno wrote that the ‘the picture-puzzle (Bilderr€atsel)
. . . distinguished everything that [Benjamin] ever wrote’ or described his
friend’s theory as displaying qualities that ‘intellectual departmentalisation oth-
erwise reserves for art’,52 did this not amount to a confession: that, without
images, a critical thinking could ultimately be neither critical nor dialectical?
Was he not paying homage to the critical power of the imagination in Benjamin,

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Georges Didi-Huberman
53. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Introduction to
Benjamin’s Schriften’, in Notes on Literature,
Volume 2, pp. 226, 228 (GS, vol. XI, pp. 570,
574).
54. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter
Benjamin’, in Prisms, p. 239; cf. ‘dialectic of
images’ in ‘Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften’,
p. 228 (GS, vol. XI, p. 575).
55. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Benjamin’s
Einbahnstrasse’, in Notes to Literature II, p. 323 (GS,
vol. XI, p. 680).
56. Gilles Moutot, Essai sur Adorno (Paris: Payot,
2010), pp. 620–35.
57. Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 125.
58. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 110 (GS, vol. IV,
p. 123).
59. Adorno, ‘Words from Abroad’, in Notes to
Literature II, pp. 289, 291 (GS, vol. XI, pp. 643,
646).
60. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 408 (GS, vol.
VI, p. 400).
61. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 18 (GS, vol. IV,
p. 17).
62. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in
Notes to Literature II, trans. S. Nicholsen Weber,
vol. 1, (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993), p. 4 (GS, vol. XI, pp. 10–25, and for
following notes).
63. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 14.
64. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 13.
65. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 16.
66. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 8.
67. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 22.
68. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 19.
69. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 23.
70. Victor Klemperer (1880–1961), Jewish by
birth and a convert to Protestantism, scholar and
diarist, was from 1920 Professor of Romance
Languages at Dresden University; he was forced
out of his professorship as a Jew under the Nazis.
He survived the Nazi period in Germany and
recorded his experiences in his diaries, I Shall
Bear Witness (1933–41) and To the Bitter End
(1941–45) (translator’s note).
71. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Imagination (Paris: PUF,
1981), p. 162 (translator’s note).
260 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 40.2 2017
to this ‘philosophical imagination (philosophische Phantasie)’ that makes of the
singular ‘image’ (Bild) the very crystal – should I say ‘eye’ – of history?53 Does
this not commit critical theory to continued reflection on that far-from-
exhausted Benjaminian concept: the ‘dialectical image’ (dialektische Bild)?54 Is
this not, finally, a recognition of the fundamental coexistence – not for a synthe-
sis but precisely for a ‘negative dialectic’ – of the image and the concept; a co-
existence that the Benjaminian practice of ‘images of thought’ (Denkbilder)
attempts in its own way to embody, in cases where, as Adorno is willing to ad-
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mit, ‘image and language . . . are [indissociably] linked’?55
Under these conditions, how should one exercise one’s critical discernment?
How best riddle or sieve? Gilles Moutot, in his great Essai sur Adorno, showed
that Adorno had long dreamt of something like ‘exact imagination’ (exakte
Phantasie).56 He even dreamed of an ‘extreme imagination’, as when he wrote
in Metaphysics that ‘if there is any way out of this hellish circle . . . it is probably
the ability of the mind to [exercise] an imagination . . . an ability to think
extreme negativity’.57 Yet all of that is simultaneously confronted with the
contingency, the precarious condition of images, which are, alas, neither
ultimately exact nor absolutely extreme. They are as incomplete as they are
necessary. To paraphrase what Adorno himself says of foreign words, they are
like ‘the Jews of language’.58 Well used and carefully scrutinised – which is
always difficult – they mark the ‘incursion of freedom’ (Einbruch von Freiheit) or
the ‘negative power’ (Negative Macht) at work in the flux of visual
conformism.59 But they can never escape their extraterritorial or transversal
condition, as if their very power, which is the power of desire and movement,
also constituted their essential precariousness.
Such is the paradoxical power and fragility of images. On the one hand, they
are unsuited to the generality of the concept, since they are always singular:
local, incomplete, in short, insubstantial – micrological, in so many words (but
it is precisely on ‘the micrological view’ that Negative Dialectics concludes).60
On the other hand, they are universally open: never entirely sealed off, never
completed, and this exactly matches the fragmentary form of writing
recommended by Adorno as consubstantial with the ‘disconnected and non-
binding character’ of thought.61 This is why ‘The Essay as Form’, though pub-
lished posthumously, remains a central text for understanding what critique
means even when the image is summoned alongside conceptual thought. For the
essay, at once ‘feet on the ground’ and ‘head in the clouds’,62 is the genre that
‘gently challenges’63 the ideal of clear, distinct perception, though this challenge
does not attenuate its truth, complexity, or critical tenor. (Of this genre,
Benjamin was, Adorno tells us, the ‘unsurpassed master’.64) It has no ‘over-
arching concept’ (Leitbild),65 but concentrates on an ‘image’ (Bild) that has to
cause ‘the totality to light up in a partial feature’ and does so in nonconformist
fashion, ‘in a kind of experimental method’.66 And thus its ‘affinity to the visual
image’ (Affinit€at zum Bild)67 allows it to be ‘more dialectical than the dialec-
tic’,68 and ultimately permits the emergence of a profound truth through ‘viola-
tions of the orthodoxy of thought’.69
There is no critical theory without a critique of images. But nor is there any
such theory without a critique – of discourse and image – by images themselves.
Just as words (those of Victor Klemperer, for example)70 can criticise other
words (those of Joseph Goebbels, for example), images are themselves capable
of becoming critical tools. They are, as Jean-Paul Sartre long ago said, acts not
things,71 active confrontations on the battlefield of ‘culture’. They do not
merely illustrate ideas: they produce ideas or produce effects critical of ideas.
Which is exactly what Francisco Goya declared at the time of the great Kantian
 Critical Image/Imaging Critique

Critiques: images, too, are able to criticise the world. But to do this, one must
take as many risks and precautions with them as with words. It was, after all, in
an image and the paradoxes thereof – the feminine allegory of Hope sculpted by 72. Walter Benjamin, ‘Travel Souvenirs’, from
Andrea Pisano on the south door of the Baptistery in Florence – that Benjamin ‘One-Way Street’, in One-Way Street, trans. E.
found the radical, dialectical, and ‘negative’ meaning of the hope that he felt Jephcott and K. Shorter (London: New Left
when confronted with the historical world, and Adorno, who quotes Benjamin, Books, 1979), p. 83.
no doubt felt just the same way: ‘Sitting, she helplessly stretches out her arms
for a fruit that remains beyond her reach. And yet she is winged. Nothing is

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more true.’72

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