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

130 Confronting ImagesThat the symbol might thus reveal the spirit to itself, this meantthat unity and synthesis had been presupposed from the outset, evenas the abstract ‘‘One’’ of traditional metaphysics was felled by Cassirer’sneo-Kantian critique. Everything was contrived such that, at agiven moment, the manifold could just the same come to coil in theOne, and ‘‘each particular cultural energy’’ contribute ‘‘in its particularway’’ toward the establishment of a ‘‘new synthesis of ‘I’ and‘world’.’’ 130 This meant that the symbolic forms of art were destinedto gather the sensible diversity of signs into the fold of a so-calledgeneral spiritual ‘‘meaning’’—a meaning at the end of the day intelligible,stateable as such in the discourse of knowledge. 131 Not only didthe sensible seek out the intelligible to attach itself to it; its way of‘‘articulating’’ with it—as is repeated by both Cassirer and Panofsky—finally permitted it the ultimate conversion: to become intelligible.Art consequently became intelligible in its generality as in its singularity,it became the Intelligible itself expressed in the accidental formsof the sensible.Grounding a knowledge of art in reason, then, required—first in Cassirer,then in Panofsky—finding, at whatever cost, a congruence andeven a subsumption, whereby the sensible manifold of figural phenomenamight find, in order to be wholly encompassed by it, a frame, amold, a general grammar of intelligibility. This was an act of synthesisand even, in the Kantian sense, an act of synthetic unity. There is,within the expression ‘‘symbolic form,’’ the heavily laden notion,philosophically speaking, of form—which immediately brings to mindthat of Idea. Like Kantian ideas, the symbolic forms of Cassirer andPanofsky would have been apprehended within an optic of regulatingprinciples that ‘‘systematize syntheses’’; like Ideas, they would havebeen apprehended first from the point of view of subjectivity—as actsof the world of culture and not of the world per se—but then reobjectivized,so to speak, in their regulatory authority and in theircommitment to the ‘‘ultimate unity’’ of things. 132 We might even riskthe hypothesis that Panofsky’s famous tripartite ‘‘synoptical table’’ orschema—in 1932, it will be recalled, he made us pass from the ‘‘phenomenalmeaning’’ to the ‘‘signifying meaning,’’ then to the ‘‘essential