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

History of Art, Reason 87doesn’t explain very much. The originary always returns—but it doesnot return straightforwardly. It resorts to detours and dialectics, whichhave their own histories and strategies. If we interrogate ourselvestoday about our actions as art historians, if we ask ourselves—and weshould do this constantly—at what cost the history of art that we produceis constituted, then we should interrogate our own reason, as well asthe conditions of its emergence. This would be, I repeat, the task of aproblematized history of the history of art. We cannot undertake thishere, but we can at least sketch a movement. We can at least track,in the guise of a specific symptom, how the inventor himself, Vasari,has been read, imitated, criticized, perhaps inverted, and perhapsrighted again by the best of his offspring. It is not a question here ofconstituting the critical fortune of the first great art historian: thatwould be to revert too quickly to the naive, fundamentally Vasarianidea that it is men alone, historians of art alone, who make the historyof their discipline ...It is a question, rather, of following the detoursof a problem that is otherwise difficult and fundamental: of broachingthe inventive power of a discourse over the object that it purports to describe.Every field of knowledge constitutes itself by imagining itself fullyachieved, by ‘‘seeing itself ’’ in possession of the sum of knowledgethat it does not yet possess, and for which it is constituted. It constitutesitself, then, by devoting itself to an ideal. But in so doing, it alsorisks dedicating its object of study to the same ideal: it bends theobject to this ideal, imagines it, sees it, or rather foresees it—in short,it informs and invents it in advance. So it is perhaps no exaggerationto say that the history of art began, in the sixteenth century, by creatingart in its own image, so as to be able to constitute itself as an‘‘objective’’ discourse.Has this image changed? Have we gone back to it? And above all:Have we, can we escape from such a process of specular invention? Toanswer this question, we must listen attentively to the tone adoptedby the history of art—the one that still shapes us—toward its object.The movement that reveals itself in this history is that of a dialecticwhereby things are negated or inverted only so as to be subsequentlyreissued into the bosom of a single synthesis, or rather into the bosomof a single abstract process of synthesis, regardless of manifest or ex-