Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Georges Didi-Huberman. Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science. Trans. Shane Lillis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. 366 pp. 

Review by Stijn De Cauwer

19 March 2019

Though he is best known in the English-speaking world for his book Images in Spite of All (2008), Georges Didi-Huberman’s oeuvre spans more than fifty books in French. In recent years, some of the most remarkable books from this immense body of work have finally been translated into English and with Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, the University of Chicago Press has made one of Didi-Huberman’s best and most rewarding books available in English. The French original from 2011 was the third installment in a series that Didi-Huberman titled The Eye of History (L’Oeil de l’histoire), which, at the moment, consists of six thematically related books. Whereas with the translation of the first installment, The Eye of History: When Images Take Position (2018), the publishers chose to foreground the series title and make it the title of the book, the publishers of Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science chose instead to omit the series title altogether.  

The central question in the books in the series is how images––or better, a montage of images––can provide a form of knowledge about various forms of oppression and suffering throughout the course of history, conjoined with a desire to rise up against this oppression and to cope with the burden: a predicament for which the mythological figure of Atlas serves as an emblem. In Atlas, Didi-Huberman uses Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas project as his point of departure for analyzing how various forms of montages of images, from August Sander to Gerhard Richter, serve as a form of “knowledge-in-motion,” combining an empirical attention with imagination, to “read what was never written” (a phrase from Hugo von Hofmannsthal famously used by Walter Benjamin, who is besides Warburg the other important guide for Didi-Huberman). 

The book itself offers a wealth of reflections on artists such as Francisco Goya, Charles Baudelaire, Katsushika Hokusai and others, and explores theoretical insights from Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Theodor Adorno. The sheer number of artists and theorists that make an appearance in the book and that Didi-Huberman discusses is truly overwhelming. When reading the book, which pairs many images with Didi-Huberman’s beautiful sentences––Jacques Rancière has described Didi-Huberman’s books as a “poem-picture”[1]––it becomes apparent that the style of the book reflects its topic: just like the atlas, Didi-Huberman imaginatively traces affinities and correspondences between various artists and theorists without glossing over their differences.       

According to Didi-Huberman, the atlas breaks the frames through which we conventionally see images because of the sheer exuberance of the material it presents. The atlas is also never finished: the configurations of images it makes can always be re-configured to reveal new insights in a process that Didi-Huberman describes as “inexhaustible.” Similarly, in Atlas, and throughout his entire, ever-expanding oeuvre, Didi-Huberman seems to be driven by the same inexhaustible, tireless, and excessive desire to bring art works and theoretical insights into configurations, sometimes extracting elements from older works and inserting them into a new context, revealing what he calls in his beautiful book from 2018, Aperçues, a “transversal” form of knowledge.[2]

Given Didi-Huberman’s love for never-ending atlases and his unstoppable need to add new books to his already vast oeuvre, always chasing after insights which urge him to produce evermore of his poetic writings, like a person chasing after a swirling butterfly (an image he likes to use), it comes as no surprise that Jorge Luis Borges is also amongst the authors that feature in Atlas. Much like Borges, Didi-Huberman is fascinated with infinite libraries and bifurcating paths leading one to unexpected new insights. As he writes in Aperçues: “One never reveals one’s desire more than when one diverges from one’s straight path to a side track.”[3] Didi-Huberman’s immense body of work is veritably starting to resemble a Borgesian library, an endless project of the same scope and ambition as Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas or Benjamin’s Arcades Project. With Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, the English reader has now one of the best entry points into the fascinating and ever-expanding universe that Didi-Huberman has been creating and in which it is a great pleasure to lose oneself. 

[1]Jacques Rancière, “Images Re-read: The Method of Georges Didi-Huberman,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23 (2 Aug. 2018): 17.

[2]Georges Didi-Huberman, Aperçues (Paris, 2018), p. 13; my trans.

[3]Didi-Huberman, Aperçues, p. 22; my trans.