Georges Didi-Huberman
Georges Didi-Huberman

Thinking through Insects

Author(s): Tomasz Swoboda
Subject(s): Studies of Literature, French Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Georges Didi-Huberman; insects; history of art; ephemeral; aesthetics
Summary/Abstract: If the author of The Eye of History has accustomed us to his way of finding passages between the human and the non-human, between the animate and the inanimate, between words and images, by highlighting these small flying insects in his three collections of essays, he not only imitates their way of being and applies it to the volatility of his own attempts but also, as he often does, he accounts for a certain possibility, namely that of thinking by insects, instead of thinking for oneself. Indeed, far from reducing them to a simple figure of speech, Didi-Huberman allows stick insects, moths but especially fireflies, to metamorphose thought itself to open it up to other possibilities, in particular those of the nocturnal and of the invisible. This article verifies these possibilities and sketches this “phasmatic” poetics, which goes beyond the border of poetics proper to lead to questions such as the approach of traces or the ephemeral.

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