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History of Art, Reason 137of singular images. Always sticking closely to Kant’s text, Heideggerspecifies: ‘‘This synthesis is neither a matter of intuition nor of thinking.Mediating ‘between’ both, so to speak, it is related to both. Thusin general it must share the basic character of the two elements, i.e.,it must be a representing.’’ 153 Now we understand: this box is just thephilosophical notion of representation taken to its logical conclusion(but whose pertinence to what we call ‘‘representations’’ when welook at works of art is questionable). This box aimed at a process—apackaging process that Heidegger aptly calls, after Kant, a representingunifying. 154 Now in this unifying, the image can exist only as a ‘‘pureimage’’: an image emptied of the irrational economy to which itssensible singularity nonetheless destines it. 155 But the ‘‘transcendentalsubjectivity’’ has nothing to do with such irrationalities. From thatpoint forward it controls the whole game, for it alone is made capableof synthetic a priori knowledge, it alone can formulate the ‘‘groundlaying’’and the ‘‘essential determination.’’ 156Has the ground been laid, the essence totally determined? Andafterward? What conclusion are we to draw from these results? Perhapsthis: that the history of art, by adopting the schema or moreloosely the tone of the Kantian doctrine, made itself directly subservientto the two constraints that Heidegger, as early as 1927, recognizedat the heart of Kantism. On the one hand, its metaphysical character:thus did the history of art become married without knowing it (rather:actively denying it) to a movement, a method aiming to regroundmetaphysics, and more exactly to make metaphysics into a science. 157By doing this, the history of art made its own desire to become ascience subservient to the neo-Kantian formula of a science spontaneouslyconceived as metaphysics. On the other hand, Heidegger articulatedvery well the logical limit of this whole system: a limit inaccordance with which Kant, likewise spontaneously, reshuffled histranscendental logic into the customary procedures of simple formallogic. 158 Adhering to such a system, the history of art did withoutunderstanding its objects from a phenomenological or anthropologicalpoint of view. Kant, to quote Heidegger again, posited that ‘‘this mannerof investigating the mind and the human being is not an empiricaldiscussion. The only opposite he knew was rational discussion. But