Critical Gestures

Georges Didi-Huberman's Critical Gestures (Gestes critiques, Klincksieck, 2024) presents itself as a propaedeutic itinerary seeking to compose the 'astronomical' cartography, as it were, of the history of critique and its 'gestures'. With this book, Didi-Huberman ultimately composes a critical compendium of the strategies and fighting tools of critique, articulated as a series of continuous and multiple struggles permeating our culture, the eternally reiterated struggles of thought against domination and brutalisation. He shows us how these delicate but nevertheless revolutionary gestures live and keep on surviving through the interstices of history, as creative vessels of desire and utopia, always waiting for their rediscovery and the reaffirmation of their call for humanity's emancipation.

The comets of critique: characterization of critical gestures

In its first part, the book composes a historical anthology of all those 'critical gestures' and expressions of 'critique' that managed to leave a durable sign of 'insubordination' in our culture and ultimately redirect the course of the history of philosophy and of thought. Didi-Huberman's approach here, nevertheless, isn't merely historical or chronological: the book rather aims for a conceptual and anthropological mapping of these critical gestures, as they're all equally irreducible to any arbitrary and coherent history of 'critical thought'. There isn't 'one' critique: there is, if anything, a multiplicity of gestures and critical singularities, in the form of 'comets' as Didi-Huberman represents them, that split and disrupt the apparently unitary and irreversible course of history and of the powers that lead it. These are to trace new unexpected paths outside of the commonly established trajectories, against uniformity of thought, following their own 'line of flight', to use a Deleuzian concept. Precisely in this sense, all critical gestures share some fundamental traits in their empirical 'action' or ethos. In his book, Didi-Huberman tries to outline them in order to define the practical and political endeavours of critique as a 'difficult art'.

Difficult art in so far as critique ceaselessly needs to avert and avoid all symmetrical risks of 'brutalisation' of discourse; it does so by remaining wary of all mindless and therefore conformist acquiescence to the norm on one hand, and all purely antagonistic and partisan fanaticism on the other hand. Critique thus puts forward its power of dissent within the uniformity of consensus through differentiating or 'discriminating' that which is undifferentiated, stable and taken for granted by virtue of its own authority. Critical gestures are in this sense 'delicate'; they demand a certain kind of distancing or displacing of the critic, as well as a high amount of attention and care towards the object of their critique. The critic's vocation to upset and unsettle the public as well as himself ('s'inquiéter') – something that's entailed in the immanent and dialectical position of critique vis a vis the critiqued – comes directly from his urge to call for a different authority and a different liberty, namely an authority founded within thought itself and the liberty deriving from its very employment, following Kant's definitive synthesis of the Enlightenment in the well-known Latin maxim, 'sapere aude!' ('dare to know').

In this regard, as Didi-Huberman argues, critique proceeds essentially from an ethical necessity, from a form of 'courage' that sets the liveable space of the deployment of 'desire' as utopian power of imagination. From Socrates to Lorenzo Valla, from Spinoza to Diderot, Kant, Marx, Warburg, Benjamin and Foucault, critique has managed throughout history to preserve the frail nature of truth and of its delicate pursuit through its gestures, never hegemonic, always ready to question and deconstruct the oppressive domain of power over reason, all the while testing the tools of reason itself.

Utopia, or the art of building constellations

Miguel Abensour's utopic thought is at the core of the second part of the book, which presents a fully-fledged homage to the life and work of the French philosopher, and constitutes a model for the broader definition of critique that Didi-Huberman aims to propose. What Abensour (1939-2017) attempted to do, among other things throughout his forty-years and longer activity as founder and editor of the editorial collection Critique de la politique at Payot editions, then at Klincksieck, was precisely to compose the weave – or the constellation – of history's 'oblique' insurgences of critical thoughts and thinkers – to use Didi-Huberman's metaphor, the 'comets' of critique.

By going beyond Althusser's rereading of Marx through the notion of a fundamental 'epistemological break' that separates the early 'ideological' or 'utopic socialism' from the late 'scientific socialism', Abensour invites us to reconsider the ability of Marx's work to 'renew', rather than 'abolish', the sense and necessity of utopia.

By going beyond Marx himself and by appealing to Critical Theory in particular, Abensour pushes dialectical and materialist critique's path further towards a 'diagonal' struggle against 'domination':this new anthropological and 'pluridimensional' concept encompasses and exceeds the economic and political reality of capitalistic 'exploitation', in the terms of a larger social and psychological reality, one concerning multiple levels of our reality, up to the social, cultural and aesthetic ones. It is this oblique or transversal trajectory of critique that characterizes what Abensour qualifies as 'critical imagination', thus underlining the central role that the philosopher wants to hand back to the imaginative faculty. According to Didi-Huberman, we may here appreciate how the Abensourian path potentially intersects with Aby Warburg's 'nameless science', his 'Kulturwissenschaft' ('science of culture'). Most notably, in the 'configurative' art of 'building constellations', that is, of connecting singularities between them through imaginative intuition, composing complex schemes of 'readability' that go beyond the 'classic antinomies between reason and imagination'. Lastly, in the idea of the 'persistence' of utopic ideas or, as for Warburg, the survival or 'outliving' (Nachleben) of images and myths that migrate through history, oftentimes without any apparent necessity or linear correlation, revealing the historical coexistence of these dimensions – the scientific and the imaginative – and their always renovated potential for emancipation.

The impossibility of any ultimate realisation of utopic ideas doesn't take away anything from their dreaming or desiring power which always strives towards a new beginning, a new and emancipating state of things. This desire of freedom and emancipation, therefore, is intrinsically 'anarchical' – following the Greek root of the term, 'an-àrchein', without an 'archè', that is, without a principle, a master, a unifying principle that imposes its unilateral dominion upon the subjects. At issue is a desiring power that goes spontaneously against the reign of the 'One' – the tyrant or the Hobbesian Leviathan – and that of metaphysical hierarchy, advocating for one of multiplicity and emancipatory imagination, one able to 'host the stranger' and accept difference and alterity.

Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation represents, finally, an adequate analogy for this necessity of a constant dialogue, the infinite task of critique that survives and lives on especially in the plural nature of words and particularly in the literary body of all those books that carry on their message. Books as a literal means of transportation and preservation of man's desires and imagination: something that Levinas will call the 'utopia of books'. We may now understand the meaning and importance of Abensour's editorial work through Didi-Huberman's resumption of his task – in this sense as repetition of his critical gesture: an archaeological work of rediscovery and 'liberation' of all those hidden traditions, those literary comets silently crossing humanity's sky, the utopic activity of creating new constellations of thought, by invoking their dormant and prophetical potential to emancipate the present, again and again.

The 'time' of critique – main theme and interest of the work: some critical points

What ultimately constitutes the main interest of Didi-Huberman's book, we may argue, is precisely the question of the operative, ethical and historical configuration of critique, a phenomenon that isn't merely located or incarnated in the contingent gestures of its authors, but lives a life of its own, as it were, simultaneously inside and outside of history. The struggle of thinkers of all ages against their present largely exceeds any specific state of affairs or actuality. Critique, in this sense, must be situated in a dual temporality: in the historically contingent landscape of its occurrence – its political, cultural, and social conditions – on one hand, and in the open and limitless horizon of thought itself on the other hand. From this perspective, a fundamental tension can be observed between these different dimensions and their temporalities: on one hand, a cultural heritage – thoughts and images – that continually resurfaces from the past to shape or assert itself in the present, functioning like a repressed unconscious of civilization – what Aby Warburg conceptualised as 'Pathosformeln' or 'pathos formula'; on the other hand, a hierarchical structure of the present, with its rules, norms, institutions and powers, that determines the organisation and distribution of all social and cultural exchanges in a self-preserving way – always serving power for its own sake.

The figure of the critical thinker or the intellectual, as it emerges from Didi-Huberman's book, thus becomes a fundamental figure or social player that serves as a catalyst for the irruption of thought and its temporal openness in the present. By their nature, all products of thought – from the conceptual to the artistic ones, be it Kant's concept of 'Aufklärung', or Goya's unsettling engraving series, Los Caprichos or Los desastres de la guerra – embody this a-temporal nature of culture that oversteps the chronological as well as the geographical boundaries of actuality. The reactivation of the past, operated on each occasion by the intellectual through his or her specific critical gesture, doesn't simply imply a form of challenge or affront towards the existing powers of his present; it equally paves the way for a possible future, even if it's only a virtual one. This is precisely the retroactive force of culture and its proactive and utopic potential: it doesn't just invoke a past, it also inevitably modifies the present by giving it a new perspective, by subjecting it to an unforeseen openness that constitutes already a new 'possibility' arising from the impossible.

On this account, Didi-Huberman's assessment resonates with the messianic conception of history (and art) of Walter Benjamin – although we might wonder if the 'conversing' or 'delicate' approach of a democratic critique, as envisioned by the former, can possibly match, in a strictly political sense, the more radical idea of a dialectical image bringing about the interruption of history and preparing revolutionary conscience and praxis in the name of a classless society, as intended by the latter.[1] In Benjamin's work, the past — understood as that which must be redeemed, as the reservoir of human oppression, injustices, and struggles — becomes, when recovered as a 'dialectical image' by the historian, philosopher, or artist, a disruptive force: an explosive actualisation of its revolutionary potential in the messianic 'now of knowability', an intensive and fleeting moment that is immediately projected into a call for redemption, into a revolutionary conscience. Time is thus conceived as an open and dialectical space, characterised by contractions, interruptions and retroactive movements that contradict any conception of an empty and homogeneous time, like the Kantian or neo-Kantian linear and chronological conception.

The eventual questions or objections that we might finally raise, then, concern the definition itself of this infinite and delicate task of the critic. This question is eloquently portrayed by Didi-Huberman in his book through the numerous figures of thinkers, artists and intellectuals, culminating in the utopic thought of Miguel Abensour: couldn't this operative and ethical definition of what a critical gesture 'looks like' and 'wants to do' possibly contradict in a way the sense of these very gestures, which is their ability to generate ruptures, gaps and intervals in the space of thought, to bring about each time something new and unexpected? Doesn't precisely this model of a democratic, utopic ethic of critique—illustrated through the Abensourian thought and grounded in the axiomatic presupposition of an 'ethical evidence'[2] that underlies critique—risks turning once again into the base for a mere 'ideal'? Such an ideal could potentially enclose critique within a circular but nonetheless 'empty and homogeneous' space, the space of an 'infinite task', where the very revolutionary forces that were once invoked are already arranged in a predetermined axiological order.[3] While this necessity of repetition is indeed constitutive of all critical gesture in its ever actual fight against the always recurring forms of power and conformism, the form of its insurgence, we may argue in agreement with Didi-Huberman, always remains unforeseen and irreducible to the forms of consensus, even when these come in the form of a renewed humanistic and democratic universality.

As philosophy produces through its conceptual creations the spectrum of always new questionings, new problems, it also poses its own ethic and evaluations, its own revolutionary or democratic modes of existence or 'becomings'. In this respect we could argue that in order to define its critical activity, 'utopia' – to quote one of Abensour's own masters, Gilles Deleuze – is perhaps 'not a good concept because, even when it is opposed to History, it still refers to it and is inscribed in it as an ideal or as a motivation. But the becoming (devenir) is the concept itself. It is born in History, and falls back into it, but is not part of it. It has no beginning or end in itself, only a middle'. [4] Critique, as accurately presented by Didi-Huberman, is always the recurrence, the repetition of a fight, of a struggle. Its gestures nonetheless exceed their diachronic dimension: just like Warburg's 'pathos formula', they establish a complex relation with time, as unconscious stratifications permeating and passing through history; as pure events of thought, they are always 'untimely' in the Nietzschean sense, outside of history, against the present and in favour of a different time.

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Notes

[1] In his notes to 'On the concept of history' (1940), Benjamin specifically insists on this critical difference between the Marxist stance on the classless society as messianic or revolutionary point of subversion of history, and what the 'Social Democrats' historically produced through their reduction of this dialectical – thus immediately pragmatic – idea of a classless society into a mere 'ideal', in the frame of a positive and 'infinite task' of democracy that reaffirms the inexorability of an 'empty and homogeneous' time and ultimately suppresses all its revolutionary potential (cf. Tagliacozzo, T., History, Redemption and Messianic Time in Walter Benjamin. «B@BELONLINE, 9 Nuova Serie 2022(1)», pp. 181-189).

[2]What Abensour conceives as the necessary reversal of the Hobbesian ethical-anthropological principle of 'man is a wolf to man', towards the 'ethical evidence' of 'man is a man to man', as the basis for a possible refoundation of interhuman relations in the sense of a renewed, pluralistic and 'insurgent' democracy (cf. Gestes critiques, p. 333 ff.).

[3]Following here again the argument of Benjamin's own critique of the social democratic 'progressive' or 'reformist' reaction in front of the revolutionary stance, in his essay 'On the concept of history' (1940) as well as in the related Notes.

[4]Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu'est-Ce Que La Philosophie?, Collection 'Critique' (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991), p. 112.

Author

Alex Benini (Université Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne/ Università di Bologna)