Survival of the fireflies

Description

"Through readings of Dante, Pasolini, Walter Benjamin, and others, Didi-Huberman seeks to understand this strange, minor light; he argues that the fireflies are still out there, burning and shimmering in the dark, hidden in marginal spaces and dreams, in works of art and resistance"-- Machine generated contents note: 1. Hells? -- The great heavenly light (luce) versus small lights (lucciole) in the infernal bolgia of evil counselors -- Dante inverted in the period of modern warfare -- In 1941, a young man discovers flashes of desire and innocence in fireflies -- A political question: Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975, neofascism and the disappearance of fireflies -- The people, their resistance, their survival, destroyed by a new dictatorship -- Hell made real? The Pasolinian apocalypse today: reproached, approached, experienced, expanded -- 2. Survivals -- Have the fireflies all disappeared, or might they survive in spite of a/I? Denis Roche's poetico-visual experience of intermittence: reappearing, redisappearing -- Minor lights: deterritorialized, political, collective. Pasolini's political and sexual despair. No living community without a phenomenology of its presentation: the luminous gestures of fireflies -- Walter Benjamin and dialectical images. Every means of imagining is a means of politics. Politics of survivals: Aby Warburg and Ernesto De Martino -- 3. Apocalypses? -- Interrogating the contemporary through paradigms and a philosophical archaeology: Giorgio Agamben with Pasolini -- The "destruction of experience": apocalypse, grief for infancy. Between destruction and redemption -- Derrida's critique of the apocalytic tone in philosophy, and Adorno's un-thought of the resurrection -- In a theory of survivals, there is neither radical destruction nor final redemption. Image versus horizon -- 4. Peoples -- Lights of power versus lights of counterforces: Carl Schmitt versus Benjamin. Agamben beyond any distinction -- Totalitarianism and democracy according to Agamben, via Schmitt and Guy Debord: from acclamation to public opinion. Peoples reduced to unification and negativity -- Philosophical archaeology, for Benjamin, demands the "rhythmic" of blows and counterblows, acclamations and revolutions -- 5. Destructions? -- Image versus horizon: the dialectical light breaks across the horizon in an intermittent way -- Recourse of the image versus horizons without recourse. Decline is not disappearance. Declination, incidence, bifurcation -- The invaluable versus devaluation. The impure temporality of desire versus the time without recourse of destruction and redemption. Making words and images appear -- 6. Images -- Making dreams appear: Charlotte Beradt or firefly-knowledge. Bearing witness and seeing the future -- Retreat into obscurity, glimmers. Georges Bataille during the war: crack, eroticism, inner experience. Political elucidation of nonknowledge -- The indestructible, the community that remains: Maurice Blanchot. Particles of humanity in the "gap between past and future": Hannah Arendt and the "diagonal force." -- The kingdom's lights versus the flashes of peoples. The firefly-images of Laura Waddington. Organizing pessimism.