Sublime Images and Temporalities of Trauma in Georges Didi-Huberman: Art as “Domestication of the Horrible”

Abstract

The article analyzes the work of theorist Georges Didi-Huberman, focusing on his approach to “sublime images” and the “temporality of trauma,” in dialogue with thinkers such as Freud, A. Warburg, and W. Benjamin. Didi-Huberman explores the sublime as an aesthetic category that captures the impact of images that freeze time and inscribe traumatic memories, often associated with historical violence. The text traces the evolution of the concept of the sublime from Antiquity, with Longinus, to its modern reformulation by Burke, Mendelssohn, and others, highlighting its connection with trauma, which emerges in the 20th century as a central metaphor to express subjectivity in a context of catastrophes. Influenced by Warburg, Freud, and Benjamin, Didi-Huberman rejects an aestheticizing view of art, emphasizing its capacity to reveal cultural “horror” and the “repressed.” Through concepts such as Warburg’s Pathosformel, he explores how images carry traces of violence and pain, functioning as archives of collective memory. The sublime, in this sense, is reinterpreted as a disruptive force that confronts the viewer with death and chaos, but also as a means of “domesticating the horrible,” as proposed by Nietzsche. The article highlights Didi-Huberman’s reluctance to explicitly adopt the concept “sublime,” preferring approaches that emphasize the materiality and complex temporality of images. Thus, his work proposes an archaeology of images that interweaves art, trauma, and history, challenging harmonious narratives and revealing the fractures of modernity.
Keywords: Sublime images; Historical trauma; Aesthetic Shock; Representation; Unimaginable