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

History of Art, Reason 99is almost repulsive. And his supplementary example, a painting byFranz Marc, would have been just as discomfiting to academic historiansand students searching for a comfortable model. 39In 1932, then, Panofsky’s gesture is not that of an engaging communicationbut that of a question, a difficult question fairly bristling withphilosophical scare quotes—scare quotes of doubt that, for example,surround from the outset the verb ‘‘to describe.’’ This undoubtedlymakes for a loss, as the text progresses, of serenity and pedagogicalgenerosity. For it is hollowed out, from end to end, by a work of antithesis,by incessant critical examinations in which every term, placedunder threat, is petrified the better to be broken down. It is no longereven a question of starting with what is simplest, with fundamentals,for from the outset their very existence is called into question. Panofskyindeed sets out from the formal level of vision—but only to sayimmediately that it does not exist, cannot exist. Let’s have a look athis argument:If, let’s say—to take an example at random—we are facedwith the problem of ‘‘describing’’ [beschreiben] the famousResurrection by Grünewald, we already know from our firstattempts that, on closer examination, we cannot retain, in allits rigor, the distinction that is so often made between apurely ‘‘formal’’ description and an ‘‘objective’’ description,at least not in the realm of the plastic arts . . . In a purelyformal description, one could not even use words like‘‘stone,’’ ‘‘man,’’ and ‘‘rock’’ . . . In effect, even to call thedark patch at the top a ‘‘night sky’’ and the curiously articulatedlight patches in the middle a ‘‘human body,’’ and, aboveall, to say that this body is situated ‘‘in front of’’ the nightsky, would be to relate something that represents to somethingthat is represented, a spatially ambiguous formal elementto an unequivocally three-dimensional presentationcontent[Vorstellungsinhalt]. Surely there need be no discussionof the practical impossibility of a formal description inthis strict sense. Every description—to some extent, even beforeit is begun—must change the meaning of purely repre-