The Violence and Hope of Image Critique in Benjamin, Baudrillard, and Didi-Huberman

In this project I examine the methods and stakes of “image critique” in the work of literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), sociologist and social theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), and art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman (1953). Walter Benjamin’s work covers a vast array of subjects, from German Baroque mourning plays to his study of nineteenth-century Paris to his contemporary literary criticism. The common thread throughout his varied oeuvre is his particularly imagistic mode of perception and, inseparable from this, his theory and practice of criticism: both of artworks in particular and of society at large. The concept of the image acts as a point of entry to what Benjamin develops as the task of criticism. On the one hand, Benjamin theorizes images in terms of their “demonic” ambiguity of meaning, which underscores their susceptibly to perceptual and political exploitation. On the other hand, Benjamin introduces theories of the image that elucidate their unique revolutionary potentiality: their capacity to inspire a non-linear historical recognizability and a political “innervation.” For Benjamin, images are both a socio-political threat that muddle the interpretative capacities of humans and a possible coping strategy to deal with his main intellectual concern: modern experience. At stake in Benjamin’s image criticism is a theory of the relation between artworks and philosophy. For Benjamin, this is a particularly important relation because it posits images as sites of perceptual change, of new ways of seeing and interpreting our shared reality.

From this foundational and dialectical appreciation of the image, I analyze Jean Baudrillard’s work in terms of the implicit influence of Benjamin therein. I suggest that Baudrillard’s general method of image critique centers around his employment of the metaphor of immunity. On the one hand, Baudrillard employs the metaphor of immunity critically to describe a social system that perpetuates unfounded systems of difference and signification. On the other hand, Baudrillard’s form of social criticism also functions as a means to “inoculate” himself against the dominant system of what he calls “simulation.” This dual strategy of criticism echoes Benjamin’s method of image criticism: both thinkers recuperate the threat of referential ambiguity for the purpose of coping with experiential shifts in modernity and its wake. Baudrillard’s philosophy departs from Benjamin’s in that he pushes the earlier twentieth-century “critical theory” to what he calls a “fatal theory”: an analysis of the inevitable reversibility of all systems. From an analysis of his general form of critique, I explore Baudrillard’s “theory” of photography. Baudrillard argues that, due to the decline of the “original” with the advent of technological reproduction, the practice of photography offers the possibility to perceive (what has always been) the fundamental illusionality of the world. This is in contrast to Benjamin’s theory of reproducibility, which maintains that new technologies can reconfigure and reconstitute reality. Both Benjamin and Baudrillard understand images as “modes of perception” and yet while Benjamin holds onto the importance of philosophy as a discipline in search of “truth,” Baudrillard suggests that in response to an enigmatic world, the only option is to embrace seductive play.

From the implicit influence of Benjamin’s thought on Baudrillard’s theory of criticism, I explore Georges Didi-Huberman’s philosophy as a case that is explicitly influenced by Benjamin’s work. Since Didi-Huberman’s work builds upon Benjamin’s thought in a more direct manner by adopting and incorporating his philosophy of history in order to develop an open methodology of interpreting images in montages, I explore two central themes that Didi-Huberman isolates from Benjamin’s philosophy and further develops in his own work: the “aura” and “redemption.” One of Benjamin’s most well-known concepts, the “aura” is either understood in Benjamin’s oeuvre as simplistically tied to the classical arts and thus in decline as modern experience moves away from tradition or the aura is understood as a confusing and contradictory concept that Benjamin never defines clearly. Didi-Huberman highlights the tensions of the aura: its main capacity for deceit and its  problematic attachment to “the genuine.” I trace the way in which Didi-Huberman confronts and develops this concept in his own work in the context of postwar and contemporary art. In terms of “redemption,” I argue that Didi-Huberman does not so much challenge Benjamin’s theory of the concept as connect it to the way in which we “confront” images of atrocity and visual means of storytelling postwar (in a context Benjamin did not live to see). I specifically explore Didi-Huberman’s work on photography from the Holocaust and his short, letter-style book to film director László Nemes, Sortir du Noir (2015). Didi-Huberman orients himself in a Benjaminian lineage by underscoring the fragmented, partial pieces of reality that one may ‘rescue’ from images of our past in methods of association.

In differing manners and with different conclusions concerning the relation of images to reality, both later oeuvres echo Benjamin’s theory of criticism. As such, the flame of Benjamin’s work resides respectively in these two distinct afterlives, which themselves may be held in tension: one privileges a theory of reality as illusion, the other puts forth an ethics of engaging “torn fragments of the real.”