Den form, der aldrig hviler

Bidrag til kritik af Georges Didi-Hubermans billedmorfologi

Resumé

Where did formalism go? Has it ever been gone? Responding to these questions, this article considers the work of Georges Didi-Huberman as a revival of a new kind of formalism, or rather, a morphology. The point of departure of the article is a critical account of the attraction in the mid-1990s to Georges Bataille’s notion of  “the formless” in the competing works of Didi-Huberman and Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. In contrast to the latter work that never evades a Greenbergian bourgeois notion of artistic autonomy, the work of Didi-Huberman could be seen as a more radical break with this tradition. Returning to the work of Warburg, Bataille, and even Goethe, Didi-Huberman’s morphology of images contests the autonomy and privilege of the art form in the very writing of art history, which is seen as a ‘formal’ practice of montages of heterogeneous times and pathos formula, a practice that inscribes a politics of the sensible within the very agency of images. However, this “politics” is unable to account for the social conditions, that is the social forms, of art and images. This implies a decontextualized and quasi-metaphysical ‘formal’ politics that problematically abstracts any power or resistance from the real abstractions of capital.