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

History of Art, Reason 117metaphysics, which dreams a world for the ‘‘humanities’’ where studyingimages would save us from all violence. How could we fail tosupport such a program, how remain unmoved by the fact that it wasarticulated precisely when Europe was collapsing? We must, however,take account of the fact that Panofsky here gave rise to another slippage,another denial: he forbade himself—and forbade the history ofart—from seeing, or rather from confronting the moment when imagesdo violence, are themselves acts of violence. Parts of medieval andeven renascent art, however, answer this dark constraint. 84 But to thisPanofsky turned his back, ready to risk disembodying a part of theobjects that he studied. (He likewise turned his back on Nazism’sparticularly frightening value of presenting itself as a work of art sculptedfrom the flesh of peoples . . . How could an art historian acceptthe terrifying power of what was supposed to constitute its ‘‘humanity,’’its beautiful object of study?)The word ‘‘humanism’’ indeed acts, then, in this great installationof ends, like a magic and pacifying word. It passes triumphantly fromthe status of object of study to that of theoretical program—congruentwith that object, but applied also, surreptitiously, to all others. 85 Itbehaves like a tightrope walker in the middle of all these antinomies,all these aporias, which it pacifies and subsumes. It makes all these‘‘two-fold aspects’’ into a single legible surface, like those anamorphicdevices that synthesized singular dissemblances into a single ‘‘universal’’resemblance. 86 The history of art, when it calls itself a ‘‘humanisticdiscipline,’’ does nothing but appeal to synthesis, but conjure awayall of the violence, deception, and ‘‘inhumanity’’ that images are—andalways have been—able to foment. The history of art as a ‘‘humanisticdiscipline’’ does nothing but trace a magic circle, within which itcloses in on itself, pacifies itself, and recreates images in the image ofits own thought: its humanistic Idea of art.There was also, in the word disegno as Vasari used it, something likea reference to alterity: it was nature, the famous nature to which allart was required to conform. By criticizing ‘‘the relation of the eye tothe world,’’ by panning all natural givens, Panofsky discovered thefunctional value specific to the ‘‘world of the eye.’’ But by immedi-