Beside Georges Didi-Huberman will participate Juan Barja, Fernando Guerrero, Benito Navarrete Prieto, Lucía Montes Sánchez, Juan Miguel Hernández León y Valerio Rocco.

“We had suffered greatly, and one day we told ourselves that it couldn't go on any longer. For too long, we had given up. Yet once again—as we had been able to do before, as others had so often done before us—we raised our arms above our shoulders, still marked by alienation, bent by pain, by injustice, by the desolation that had reigned until then. And it was then that we rose: we projected our arms forward. We lifted our heads. We found the free power to look ahead. We opened and reopened our mouths. We shouted, we sang our desire. We discussed with our friends how to act, we reflected, we imagined, we moved forward, we acted, we invented. We had risen.”

This book is an essay in the phenomenology and anthropology—and even a poetics—of acts of rebellion. It interrogates bodies through the psyche via the profound, paradoxical, dialectical link established between desire and memory. Just as there is a “that which looks at us” beyond “what we believe ourselves to be,” there is perhaps also a “that which raises us up” beyond “what we believe ourselves to be.” This is a question posed at the outset—or within—of our partisan opinions or actions: a question, therefore, posed to political gestures and imaginings. A question posed to the power to rise up, even when power is not in sight. This power is indestructible, like desire itself. It is a power to disobey. It is so inventive that it deserves attention that is both precise (because the singular, in this case, tells us more than the universal) and erratic (because uprisings arise in times, places, and on scales where they were not expected).

En The goblin ladyGeorges Didi-Huberman explores the ways in which Georges Bataille approached art. How did he tackle the task of writing, and what position did he adopt in his work? The author offers us a journey through multiple works by Bataille, with particular emphasis on the journal DocumentsHis position regarding art, he tells us, will always be dialectical, inextricably contradictory, so that it will invariably demand that art give form to an experience that is, at once, an exercise in cruelty or sacrifice and the fruit of a disquiet akin to the innocence of childhood. To help us visualize something like this, Georges Didi-Huberman's imagination migrates to the place where Bataille lived, in 1922, a series of artistic experiences through which, supremely, he gained access to the impossible. It was the decisive trip he made through Spain at the age of twenty-four, which would culminate in his participation in the celebrated Concurso de Cante Jondo, organized by Manuel de Falla and Federico García Lorca. With a beautiful and rich array of images, Georges Didi-Huberman brings together in this text two figures and two ecstatic operations, two experiences and two demands hurled at any art form that seeks to break free from the constraints of the expected and the possible, and that breaks with the procedures and forms governed by the established knowledge of the canon of styles. In this way, the excess that Bataille demands of art goes hand in hand with that brought about by the duende, invented by Lorca in the 1930s. The duende plays with art, distancing it from all academic formalism and bringing it close to its own annihilation, mortally wounding it and thus opening up its possibility of realizing and representing the impossible, that is to say—in Lorca's words—giving it "an air smelling of a child's saliva […] that announces the constant baptism of newly created things."

The event will be streamed live from this website.