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

History of Art, Reason 135that would encompass, like portmanteau universal models, the diversityof singular works from a given period: 146The schematism by which our understanding deals with thephenomenal world . . . is a skill so deeply hidden in thehuman soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick thatNature here employs. 147This sentence has everything to seduce the historian of art: a magicformula is uttered, capable of multiple effects, including that ofgrounding a certainty. It speaks of the ‘‘mystery’’ of the way phenomenalmysteries become subservient to the not-mystery of schematurned ‘‘stereotype.’’ It affirms the mystery (of the given) and its solution(in the concept). What’s more, it contains some simple and famouswords to which the whole of aesthetic thought since antiquitysupposedly was dedicated: the words ‘‘art’’ (Kunst, in Kant’s very text),‘‘soul’’ (Seele), and ‘‘nature’’ (Natur). Finally, it anticipates or implicitlypresupposes the celebrated concluding formulation, wherein thewhole transcendental doctrine of judgment qualifies the notion ofschema:We can only say this much: the image is a product of theempirical faculty of reproductive imagination, the schema ofsensible concepts (such as figures in space) is a product andas it were a monogram of pure a priori imagination [gleichsamein Monogramm der reinen Einbildungskraft ‘‘a priori’’], throughwhich and in accordance with which the images first becomepossible, but which must be connected with the concept, towhich they are in themselves never fully congruent, only bymeans of the schema that they designate. 148Transposed into the terms of an implicit program for the historyof art, Kant’s formulation takes on a strange resonance: what’s atissue, basically, is passing from the image to the monogram—sincethe monogram pertains to the schema, is adequate to the concept,and is open to science—what’s at issue, then, is making a history of