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

90 Confronting ImagesWinckelmann’s celebrated Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums in 1764,the premises of Vasarian history seem to have run their course, aboveall if we remember the self-glorifying agenda—the inscription of thecity of Florence on the ‘‘pediment’’ of this history of all the arts (Fig.2)—that presided over the Medician enterprise of the Lives. Beginningwith Winckelmann, the history of art will be a bit more consciousthat it must reflect upon its point of view, which is to say upon thelimits of its first principles, and try not to understand Greek art interms of Renaissance thought or even of Classicism. 10 In short, thehistory of art began to undergo the test of a real critique of knowledge—aphilosophically grounded critique, a critique in which the formidablespecter of cognitive specularity was already active: the arthistorian would attempt that first acrobatic feat of not inventing hisobject in his own image as knowing subject. Or at least of knowingthe limits of this invention.The tone is set: it will be the Kantian tone. Kant, as we know,began to produce about this time a grand critical theory whose empirewould spread far beyond the strict philosophical community. Kantshaped entire generations of intellectuals and scholars, above all inGermany, which would become, contemporaneously, the true cradleof the ‘‘scientific’’ history of art. 11 Through Kantism, the whole structureof knowledge was shaken to its foundations—this was the decisivemoment of antithesis produced by the critical philosophy—andthen reconstituted itself on firmer foundations, regrounded itself in amagisterial synthesis. How could the history art have remained imperviousto this great theoretical movement? I would like to propose thatpost-Vasarian art history—the history of art whence we come andwhich is still practiced—is partly of Kantian inspiration, or more accuratelyneo-Kantian ...even when it does not know this. Such wouldbe the extension, but also the limit, of its cognitive ‘‘simple reason.’’It is already troubling, for an art historian, to think that a book halfof which is devoted to aesthetic judgment could be regarded by itsauthor as the completion of a systematic journey commenced withThe Critique of Pure Reason. 12 Not only did Kantian philosophy notleave the question of art outside its fundamental inquiry, it made ofit an essential exhibit in its analysis of the human faculties as a whole.