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

102 Confronting Imagesabove the explicit formulation. Kant himself, however, wasunable to say more about this. But with any philosophicalknowledge in general, what is said expressis verbis must notbe decisive. Instead, what must be decisive is what it setsbefore our eyes as still unsaid, in and through what has beensaid. . . . Of course, any interpretation, if it is to wrest whatthe words want to say from what they actually say, mustresort to violence [Um freilich dem, was die Worte sagen, dasjenigeabzuringen, was sie sagen wollen, muss jede Interpretation notwendigGewalt brauchen].’’ We must acknowledge that thesesentences also apply to our modest descriptions of paintingsand to our interpretations of their content, insofar as these donot remain on the level of mere observation but are alreadyinterpretations. 42It is readily understandable that, banished from the German universitysystem by the Nazis and given a warm welcome by American academia,Panofsky should have been inclined to leave behind, on theshores of the old world, the different forms of violence latent, in variousways, in his Grünewald example: the intransigent severity of hiscritique and, above all, his appeal to a Heideggerian interpretivemodel. But once again we cannot leave to one side the question ofknowing the cost of Panofsky’s having chosen to tip his hat ratherthan to combat the intuitionism of art historians. Just the same, it isremarkable that in Panofsky’s American work—note that after 1934,and until his death, he never again used the German language 43 —thecritical tone has been completely subdued, and the destructive ‘‘negativism’’inverted in the thousand and one ‘‘positivities’’ that the masterof Princeton finally bequeathed to us. From Germany to America:it’s a bit like the moment when the antithesis dies and the synthesis—optimist, positive, even positivist in some respects—takes over. It’s abit like a desire to pose all questions having suddenly been replacedby a desire to give all the answers.But we must introduce some nuances. First, by insisting on thefact that the critiques of first principles articulated by Panofsky in his