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

104 Confronting Imagesorigin, certainly, but because its quest is for a priori principles thatmight govern the play of the human faculties as well as the organizationof philosophical knowledge. 50 It allows the inadequacy of the aestheticidea to the concept only to facilitate the subsumption of thatvery inadequacy. Perhaps its only appetite, in the end, is for absorbingthe sensible into the intelligible, and the visible into the Idea. 51Is there not, in this tension toward synthesis, a curious taste for areturn to the thesis? We cannot yet answer this question. First, yetagain, we must read Panofsky from what was his own point of view,namely the point of view—laid claim to, rendered automatic or spontaneous,and finally mitigated—of the strain of neo-Kantism extendingfrom Wilhelm Windelband to Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer.We must try to locate the boundary turned passing-gate between acritical use of Kantism (opening, emptying self-evidences, dislodgingthe heavy rocks of trivial thought) and its specifically doctrinal, metaphysicaluse, in which I am arguing that its lucidity is lost, is petrifiedinto a new rock, much more imposing and still more immovable.Such, then, is the twofold aspect of the appeal to Kantism in thedomain of art history: it enabled critical operations of the most salutarykind; but it was at the same time consumed by a desire for ends thatgave fundament and doctrine, that completed the metaphysical loopand closure of the question of art.Thus when Panofsky denied to the concept of historical time—inparticular, the historicity of art—any ‘‘natural’’ self-evidence, he strucka decisive blow against the ambient positivism, 52 as well as againstWölfflin’s ‘‘psychological’’ intuitions about the universal roots of variousstyles in the plastic arts; but at the same time, he aimed to groundan objective knowledge of artistic phenomena in ‘‘metaphysical conditions’’defined along Kantian lines. The critical philosophy denied all‘‘natural’’ causality to history and psychology, but then required moreitself: namely, a historicity grounded metaphysically, and a psychologyof forms constructed metapsychologically:In the case of such universal cultural phenomena, it willprobably never be possible to find a real explanation, whichwould necessarily entail the exhibition of a causality. . . . But