georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

3The History of Art Within the Limits of Its Simple ReasonAn origin is not only something that happened once and will neverhappen again. It is every bit as much—and even more exactly—something that in the present comes back to us as from a great distance,touches us most intimately, and, like an insistent butunpredictable work of return, delivers up its sign or its symptom.From time to time, then, but approaching ever closer to our present—apresent obligated to, subject to, alienated from memory. 1 Thuswe would be mistaken to think of ourselves as definitively liberated,when we do art history today, from the ends inherent in this discoursewhen this discourse was invented. Vasari, however far he might befrom our manifest preoccupations, bequeathed to us ends, the endsthat he assigned, for reasons good, bad, or irrational, to the knowledgethat bears the name the history of art. He bequeathed to us afascination with the biographical component, a sovereign curiosityabout the particular species of ‘‘distinguished’’ individuals—in allsenses of the word—to which artists belong, an excessive affection, orconversely a mania for clinical judgment, with regard to their everyaction and gesture. He bequeathed to us a dialectic of rules and theirtransgression, a subtle interplay between a regola and a licenza thatcan, it all depends, be deemed the worst or the best.More fundamentally, as we saw, Vasari suggested to us that oneday (and this ‘‘day’’ bore the name of Giotto) art managed to be rebornfrom its ashes; that it had thus managed to die (in that long nightcalled the Middle Ages); and that it bears within itself, as its essentialcondition, the constant risking of a new death on the far side of itshighest achievements. Between Renaissance and second death, Vasariinterposed, to save everything and justify everything, a new problematicsof immortality: an immortality constructed and loftily proclaimed