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

History of Art, Reason 133There is a way, writes Kant; it’s the one that makes possible the ‘‘transcendentaldoctrine of the power of judgment’’ that he is in the processof working out. To the transcendental, then, will fall the role ofpassing over the head of all heterogeneity, by inventing ‘‘a third thing,which must stand in homogeneity with the category on the one handand the appearance on the other, and makes possible the applicationof the former to the latter.’’ 138 Kant calls this ‘‘third thing’’ the ‘‘transcendentalschema’’ (transzendentales Schema).What’s in question is a representation—the key word of the wholebusiness—that Kant requires be on the one hand ‘‘pure,’’ in otherwords emptied of all the empirical element, and on the other hand‘‘sensible,’’ in other words homogeneous with the empirical element.It would provide, then, the ideal intermediary principle between theperceptions of experience—or images—and the categories of the understanding.The ‘‘schematism,’’ then, designates the successful thoughmediated operation of subsuming the sensible under (or through) theintelligible. Or, conversely, of the sensible conversion of concept intoimage. The trick is played, the line is traced, the circle is again closed:a science of the manifold, of the sensible, a science of the image ispossible. So now we understand the status of this prodigious termthat was Kant’s schema. It provided a ‘‘formal and pure condition ofsensibility,’’ and at the same time it ‘‘realized the categories’’ in experienceor in the image; it was a ‘‘product of the imagination’’ (notbeing in itself a pure concept), but unlike the image, which is alwaysinadequate to the concept, it provided a ‘‘a rule of synthesis’’ homogeneousto the requisites of the pure understanding; so it ended up beingquite distinct from the image itself. 139 In short, it provided a rule ofconversion wherein the converted terms were not at all reciprocal:because ‘‘unchangeable and lasting,’’ because it provided a means forthe concept to become ‘‘the rule of the object,’’ and more generallybecause it posited itself as the very condition of all signification, 140 theschema clearly played the hand of the concept against that of theimage. It placed the terms in a dialectical relation only to consumeone of them, all the while pretending to comprehend it:From this it is clear that the schematism of the understandingthrough the transcendental synthesis of imagination comes