“Socialisme ou barbarie” | Claire Pagès: An Interview with Vincent Descombes

Claire Pagès: I would like to ask you about your involvement in the “Socialisme ou barbarie” group, and invite you to perform a kind of “retrospection.” Before that, please clarify something. Could you recall for us the period when you were associated with the group, since it went through several phases, with several splits… Did you join after the split in 1963-1964 between a tendency led by Castoriadis and Mothé (who kept the name “Socialisme ou barbarie” and the journal) and a heterogeneous grouping that took the name “Pouvoir Ouvrier” (which included Philippe Guillaume, Jean-François Lyotard, Pierre Souyri, and Alberto…

Georges Didi-Huberman | The Supposition of The Aura: The Now, The Then and Modernity (Walter Benjamin)

Walter Benjamin and History Edited by Andrew Benjamin Continuum 2005  

Georges Didi-Huberman | Light against Light

    The disappearance of the fireflies—when the blinding glare of spotlights crushes the weak glimmer of glowworms in the night—is an excellent poetic allegory, a lovely “speaking image” on which to build something like a general poetics of light. This allegory has become familiar to us through the intervention of a great poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini.1 So we cannot be surprised that artists and thinkers have elevated this allegory in the field of aesthetics, and that it may lend itself as the title of an art exhibit. And yet its sole purpose is to ask, stubbornly, over and over…