Reading Georges Didi-Huberman’s Devant Le Temps: History, Memory and Montage

This article focuses on the critical and explanatory analysis of Georges Didi-Huberman’s Devant le Temps (2000), here considered as a pivotal work of his extensive oeuvre. Devant le Temps extends some of the most important aspects explored a decade earlier, in Devant L'Image (1990), establishing numerous contact points with some of Didi-Huberman’s later works, namely those dedicated to Aby Warburg and the subject of the atlas in the history of art. Through the interweaving of these different moments, we seek to analyse some of the concepts governing the theory of art history and of aesthetics developed by Didi-Huberman, stressing some key concepts such as image, time, memory, anachronism and symptom. That way, we will also communicate with several important authors who directly, or indirectly, influenced the practice of the history of art advanced by Georges Didi-Huberman.