Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art
Art history, Didi-Huberman argues, has had to kill the symptomatic image, deny its violence and its dissembling, in order to preserve its true object, art. Confronting Images is arguably the most important book-length analysis of the conceptual foundations of the discipline, and critique of the discipline, in any language. --Christopher Wood, Yale UniversityI cannot think of any more important book in the recent history of art. Confronting Images is just what the English-speaking art-historical community needs to help it out of the impasse of debates around cultural studies and visual literacy. --James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of ChicagoThough Devant l'image resembles The Pleasure of the Text in its central dialectic, it actually does what Barthes never did: it makes the essential move toward historicizing the text (or image) that builds representational failure into itself, looking for historical reason both for a particular image's failure to represent, and for art history's own insensitivity or blindness to this aspect of depiction. --Norman Bryson, Art Bulletin (review of the French edition)I cannot think of any more important book in the recent history of art. Confronting Images is just what the English-speaking art-historical community needs to help it out of the impasse of debates around cultural studies and visual literacy. --James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of ChicagoThough Devant l'image resembles The Pleasure of the Text in its central dialectic, it actually does what Barthes never did: it makes the essential move toward historicizing the text (or image) that builds representational failure into itself, looking for historical reason both for a particular image's failure to represent, and for art history's own insensitivity or blindness to this aspect of depiction. --Norman Bryson, Art Bulletin (review of the French edition)