On moths and butterflies, or how to orient oneself through images. Georges-Didi Huberman's art criticism in context

Art historians question two fundamental objects: firstly, history as narrative, and secondly, the image as a form of representation. While most art historians are implicit philosophers of history and the visual, very few are so explicit about their philosophical background as Georges Didi-Huberman. After all, his intellectual acumen is well known. The question that this essay addresses concerns a concrete episode in Georges Didi-Huberman's reflection on images, namely the frequent elaborations on butterflies and moths as objects of visuality.1 What do these images of fragile insects add to our understanding of images and to art historiography? My hypothesis is that they question the status of the image in the modern art historical discourse. The seemingly chaotic movements of butterflies and moths denote the fact that images are apparitions whose potentiality is unravelled when seen and thought of in broader relations to other images. To think the potential of images means to 'weave' them in wider constellations. Moreover, these constellations of images modify the temporality implicit in any history of art. Instead of thinking temporality as a diachronic narrative (the chronological story of artefacts), an alternative would be to conceive it as the anachronistic montage of heterogeneous images. With Didi Huberman, the mode of writing history is that of the atlas of images and its significance consists in the ability to distil remerging visual forces. The visual has in Georges-Didi Huberman an anthropological and hermeneutic value as it pictures how humanity represents itself throughout history. In order to see this, we need to integrate his conception of art history into the broader context to which it directly or indirectly relates.