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

140 Confronting Imagesmented—a torment endured as much as enacted, as can be read inthe German texts of Panofsky himself—even suicidal. For by refusingthe prisoner’s misery as much as the maniac’s triumph, anyone whobreaks through even a patch of the wall already runs the risk of deathfor the subject of knowledge. Which is to say that he runs the risk ofnot-knowledge. But this risk will be suicidal only to him for whomknowledge is the whole of life.We find ourselves yet again in the situation of the alienatingchoice. Let’s give it a radical, if not exaggerated formulation: to knowwithout seeing or to see without knowing. There is loss in either case. Hewho chooses only to know will have gained, of course, the unity ofthe synthesis and the self-evidence of simple reason; but he will losethe real of the object, in the symbolic closure of the discourse thatreinvents the object in its own image, or rather in its own representation.By contrast, he who desires to see, or rather to look, will lose theunity of an enclosed world to find himself in the uncomfortable openingof a universe henceforth suspended, subject to all the winds ofmeaning; it is here that synthesis will become fragile to the point ofcollapse; and that the object of sight, eventually touched by a bit ofthe real, 1 will dismantle the subject of knowledge, dooming simplereason to something like a rend.* Rend, then, will be the first word,the first approximation with which to renounce the magic words ofthe history of art. This will be the first way of challenging Panofsky’snotion that ‘‘the ‘naive’ beholder differs from the art historian in thatthe latter is conscious of the situation.’’ 2 † There is indeed the naïvetéof the spectator who knows nothing, but facing it there is also thedouble naïveté of he who folds‡ knowledge completely into truth,and who believes moreover that it makes sense to pronounce a sentencesuch as: ‘‘I am conscious of everything I do when I see an artimage, because I know it.’’*déchirure.†The French translation of this phrase reads: conscient de ce qu’il fait, ‘‘conscious ofwhat he does.’’‡rabattre, which figures in many idiomatic expressions pertaining to sewing but canalso mean ‘‘to pull down,’’ ‘‘to shut down,’’ ‘‘to close’’; hitherto rendered as ‘‘to collapse(into).’’