Counter-Sights and Counter-Times.

In conversation with literary scholar Sigrid Weigel, philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman explores possible ways out of the present.

Drawing on the political dimensions of Walter Benjamin’s and Hannah Arendt’s thinking, philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman outlines possible ways out of the present in his essay “The Survival of the Fireflies,” in which he asked to which part of reality—the opposite of a whole—can the image of fireflies as a form of resistance turn? In his talk for the exhibition “The Opposite of Now,” followed by a conversation with literary scholar Sigrid Weigel, Didi-Huberman raises the new question of what significance a political allegory can have today.

Georges Didi-Huberman is a French philosopher and art historian whose research spans the visual arts, the historiography of art, psychoanalysis, the human sciences, and philosophy. He has taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris since 1990. He has published extensively on the history and theory of images, from the Renaissance to contemporary art. In 2020, he was awarded the Aby Warburg Prize of the City of Hamburg. 

Sigrid Weigel is a scholar of literature and cultural science. She served for many years as director of the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research and has taught at the University of Hamburg, the University of Zurich, the Technical University of Berlin, and Princeton University, among others. Her research lies at the intersection of literature, the history of knowledge (and science), visual studies, psychoanalysis, and political theory. She has received many honorary doctorates and awards, among them 2016 the Aby Warburg Prize of the City of Hamburg.