The Dance of Joyful Knowledge: Inside Georges Didi-Huberman's Monumental Note Archive

“To summarize, I would say that the first work is slow, modest, obsessive: it is the creation and accumulation of cards in confrontation or dialogue with certain texts or certain images. The second is fast, exhilarating, joyful, made of discoveries: it is the reassembly of the cards, like a successful card game, on a vast table where the layout of ... See more

Step into Georges Didi-Huberman’s studio! A philosopher and art historian, he meticulously collects fragments of texts, photographs, and images of all kinds. As a craftsman of thought, he assembles them to create visual and textual constellations to capture our reality.

This vast constellation of 148,000 notes shows that the art of creative note-making is alive and well. And this is not just an archive but a philosophy of thinking and writing. Didi-Huberman’s three-stage creative rhythm: patient collection, exhilarating reassembly, and musical composition, shows how fragments, properly arranged, may reveal unexpec... See more

As soon as there was a box, there were other boxes and other boxes still. The file is a tool for memorization, a technical prosthesis for thought that allows one to forget many cumbersome, even paralyzing, things. But we must know how to put an end to obsessive activity and the love of repetition, in order to open ourselves more radically to the ad... See more