This thesis is a critical examination of the work of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. In an astonishing body of work spanning thirty years and over forty books, Didi-Huberman’s contribution to the discipline remains one of the most underdeveloped areas of historiographical enquiry. His vast and complex oeuvre stands at the intersection of multiple domains and extends from the ancient Roman concerns of Pliny the Elder through to contemporary art. Nevertheless, to study the full range of Didi-Huberman’s writing reveals an overwhelmingly consistent critique of idealism underpinning the discipline of art history. This thesis argues that what is at stake in Didi-Huberman’s work is a deeply visual tradition rethinking its relationship to representation. To understand this claim further, this thesis seeks to approach Didi-Huberman’s project in terms of the Foucauldian heritage he lays claim to: how is art history possible? What are the conditions of its emergence? If the founding principles of the discipline have been constructed along Humanist and Enlightenment lines of reason, knowledge and objective truth, what has been silenced, omitted and neglected from this narrative? It is through the privileged interlocutors who feature prominently in his writing, Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg, that we can measure the epistemological displacement performed by Didi-Huberman. Chapter one commences by examining Didi-Huberman’s turn to early and medieval Christian theology and some of the paradoxes pertaining to representation and Christian art. This facilitates a rethinking of the entire philosophical and historical tradition in which the history of art has been understood. Particular attention is paid to key operative principles in Didi-Huberman’s idiom, including an elaboration of the symptom and the pan. What emerges is a sustained re-engagement with the material, sensual aspects of images, providing an important update to the linguistic paradigms characterising the work of the previous generation of philosophers and art historians. Once this narrative of representation as imitation has been dismantled, art history understood in linear, chronological and progressive terms can no longer be sustained. Chapter two examines Didi-Huberman’s critique of art’s historicity and his corresponding utilisation of anachronism as a productive mode of understanding the temporal complexity of images. Didi-Huberman’s retrieval of alternative modes of time and temporality is examined in relation to the great experimental montage projects of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Chapter three focuses on the role of the imprint as a continuation of Didi-Huberman’s ongoing theoretical inquiry into modes of representation that exceed the disciplinary preoccupation with mimesis. As such, it builds on the two previous themes of materiality and anachronism. This chapter draws on the medieval theology of Thomas Aquinas to establish Didi-Huberman’s distance from Anglophone understandings of indexes, imprints and moulds. The final chapter returns to the theme of montage as a mode of political engagement. This leads to Didi-Huberman’s ultimate assault on representation’s idealism: to develop a theorisation of the image that exists anterior to thought itself.