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

122 Confronting ImagesSo it is indeed the concept, the mind, signification, and ‘‘literarysources’’ that have the last word when it comes to the knowableintrinsic content of a painting or a sculpture. Along this bias, the historyof art in a sense expanded the knowledge of which its object issusceptible (and even requires)—but in another sense it informed itsobject with its method, its specific form of expression, which is conceptual,never looking for anything but signification, and, accordingly,manipulating ‘‘literary sources’’ endlessly. Thus did the objects of thehistory of art undergo a kind of ordeal by disembodiment: the colorsof painting were required—a requirement that would long remain inforce—to say ‘‘yes’’ or ‘‘no’’ with regard to a work’s ‘‘theme,’’ ‘‘concept,’’or ‘‘literary source’’; in short, they had to decline themselves inblack or white. 102 . . . Iconology, then, delivered up all images to thetyranny of the concept, of definition, and, ultimately, of the nameableand the legible: the legible understood as a synthetic, iconological operation,whereby invisible ‘‘themes,’’ invisible ‘‘general and essentialtendencies of the human mind’’—invisible concepts or Ideas—are‘‘translated’’ into the realm of the visible (the clear and distinct appearanceof Panofsky’s ‘‘primary’’ and ‘‘secondary’’ meanings).The operation is massive—I have called it ‘‘magical.’’ May Isuggest, yet again, that Panofsky had an inkling of this? It remainsincontestable, in any case, that the successive changes made in ‘‘Iconographyand Iconology,’’ especially the addition in 1955 of a longpassage on the two respective suffixes, manifest a kind of oscillationas to the ends of the new discipline. The text is shot through withhesitations, with a play of advance and retreat, of repulsion and attraction,as to the ultimate consequences that iconology carried within it.It’s a bit as though Panofsky interrupted a movement, asked himselfall of a sudden: ‘‘In the end, am I in the process of bringing them, ifnot the plague, then at least the madness of magical interpretation,the certainty of the insane?’’ The gesture of recoil manifests itself firstin an uncertainty, a hesitation about forging ahead: How far will we,how far will you—you my readers, my disciples—take iconology? Itis a question that any inventor worthy of the name ought, at somepoint, to ask himself. Panofsky indeed put it to himself, by reversing