Agamben and Didi-Huberman: Rejuvenating Pessimism Through Philosophy

Two books published simultaneously in autumn 2009—Giorgio Agamben's Nudités (Rivages/Payot) and Georges Didi-Huberman's Survivance des lucioles (Minuit)—offer a chance to reexamine pessimism in contemporary thought. Both authors share references to Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault, whose work emphasizes temporal anachronisms and discontinuities. Didi-Huberman praises Agamben's ability to 'disturb his time' but warns that Agamben risks absolutizing this disturbance into a radical pessimism that declares experience destroyed. Didi-Huberman counters with Benjamin's concept of 'organizing pessimism,' arguing that even in dire situations, remnants of experience survive—like fireflies (lucioles), a term borrowed from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini first used 'lucioles' in a 1941 letter to describe luminous, elusive beings resisting fascist searchlights; in a 1975 article, he lamented their impending disappearance under a new 'radically new fascism.' Didi-Huberman reads this ambivalence as a tension between despair and the possibility of resistance. He applies the same critique to Agamben: while Nudités contains rigid pronouncements—e.g., that critics have replaced artists, or that biometric identification reduces identity to DNA—it also offers figures of irreducible subjectivity, such as the surveyor in chapter 'K.' and the ignorant dancer in a 'zone of non-knowledge.' These, Didi-Huberman suggests, are ways to organize pessimism and rejuvenate it.