Georges Didi-Huberman and Walter Benjamin

Art History and the Time of the Images

Abstract

Determined to show that the humanist model of art history hierarchizes and excludes the subject’s matter, Georges Didi-Huberman resorts to the ideas about history presented by Walter Benjamin. The German thinker distrusts the purpose of the historian who rationalizes the facts, explaining them through causality and motivations, and often emphasizing the progressive character of the historical process. The possibilities of reading the past are based, here, on the perception of an afterlife of the past, and not on historical continuity, the conception rethink, in our text, the relationship between the German thinker and the french art historian.