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

History of Art, Reason 125But in another sense, Panofsky’s requirement effectively went muchtoo far—too far in its wish to ground the history of art not only as ahumanist discipline but as an idealist one. Perhaps the key to Panofsky’sfinal hesitations can be found by considering as a trap—and analienation—the logic of choice that, from the very beginning, controlledhis whole enterprise. This trap, this logic are the selfsame onesof philosophical idealism, which suggests the following hypothesis:that after thinking he had found in art images a privileged object, an‘‘ideal’’ object of thought, he could not help, proceeding forward, butshut himself up in it, get stuck in it, and lose himself in it. So true isit that the image can devour the Idea at the very moment the Ideathinks it can absorb the image . . . Panofsky’s CAUTIUS is not only acall for prudence; it is the cry of someone who went too far into theshifting sands of philosophical idealism, and who found only the worstbranch—that of positivism, of iconography in a shrunken sense—toprevent his sinking and losing forever the singular truth of art images.In short, this whole game of theoretical advance and retreat is butan effect of the aporia wherein idealism gets caught when faced withthe question of images. However powerful, however useful it mightbe, the iconological hypothesis was ill formulated from the outset—because it had been formulated with Kant, or with a ‘‘neo-Kant.’’ Sowe must turn backward yet again, upstream of the American ‘‘iconography/iconology’’argument, to understand the theoretical instrumentsthat made possible Panofsky’s articulation of the newdiscipline. 109 What Panofsky called in 1939 the ‘‘invisible’’ themes andconcepts of ‘‘intrinsic meaning’’ expressive of ‘‘general and essentialtendencies of the human mind’’ were called ten years earlier, underthe immediate philosophical authority of Ernst Cassirer, symbolicforms. Here, then, is the third master expression, the third magicalformula: the Idea of the system.This Idea, Panofsky described it in 1932 in terms of ‘‘essential meaning’’(Wesenssinn) and ‘‘ultimate content’’ (letzter wesensmässiger Gehalt).110 It enabled him, in the last resort, to get rid of all equivocationsand explain all ‘‘highly complicated combinations.’’ It is a ‘‘super-instance.’’The singular phenomena of art are deduced from it as froman a priori beyond. Its sphere of interpretation, Panofsky goes on to