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

124 Confronting ImagesSo a second gesture of recoil presents itself. He would shuffle thequestion of ends one last time. He would seem to have reached thatweary lucidity of some old men, and in the same moment to haverenounced far too many things. Did the herald of theoretical rigorconclude by reducing ‘‘logos’’ to the level of the simplest and mostgeneral reason? Did he ultimately turn his back on the German Kunstphilosophieof his origins, contenting himself with the positivities offeredby the too simple reason of Anglo-Saxon ‘‘pragmatism’’? Wemight think so. 106 We might also think that the question has to bemore complex, and that we must always, even in the most transparentof pragmatisms, take into account automatic philosophical models ortheir vestiges, in other words the always masked and transfiguredpresence of initial schemas and thought choices. All the same, it remainstrue that Panofsky ended by presenting his iconological projectwith the embarrassed, hesitant gesture of someone who had gone toofar: too far in theoretical rigor, too far into reason itself. This attitudeis consistent in much of Panofsky’s work in the years 1956–66, a decademarked by a surprising, and disappointing, return to iconographicanalysis in the narrow sense of the term. 107In order to understand such a turn backward, we must doubtlessslightly displace—get some perspective on—the theoretical choice thatpresented itself to Panofsky in the prickly environs of all these questions.It is certain, on the one hand, that the requirement of an iconologicalsynthesis transcending the descriptive approach to works of artwent very much farther than any of the positivist positions (historicalor philological) to which the history of art still so often pays allegiance.Before writing the American version of his text, which ratherinsists on the authority of ‘‘literary sources,’’ Panofsky had alreadygone farther in his article of 1932 by underscoring the fact—the essentialfact—that works of art are able to foment their signifying constellations,their associations or ‘‘highly complicated combinations’’ (ashe says himself about Grünewald), without need of texts. 108 A meanswhereby the history of art might hope to open a road for itself—royalbut delicate, to be sure—outside the tyranny of the legible that alreadycharacterized the humanist iconology of Cesare Ripa.