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

Image as Rend 141Let’s also remember that other—and so beautiful—statement byPanofsky: ‘‘ ‘The relation of the eye to the world’ is in truth a relationof the soul to the world of the eye.’’ 3 Let’s remember its irreplaceablecritical value—the positivist hope of grasping the real here being rentright through—but let’s rend it in our turn, as one would rend thesynthetic unity and the transcendental schematism inherited fromKant. For the ‘‘relation of the soul to the world of the eye’’ is noneother than the not-synthesis of an insistence* that is itself torn betweenconsciousness and the unconscious, and of a ‘‘world’’ that coheresonly up to a point, beyond which logic reveals its flaw, its constitutionalflaw. If we want to open the ‘‘box of representation,’’ then wemust make a double split: split the simple notion of image, and splitthe simple notion of logic. For the two constantly agree to give thehistory of art the specific self-evidence of its simple reason. To splitthe notion of the image would be, first, to return to an inflection ofthe word that speaks neither of imagery, nor of reproduction, nor oficonography, nor even of ‘‘figurative’’ appearance. It would be to returnto a questioning of the image that does not yet presuppose the‘‘figured figure’’—by which I mean the figure fixed as representationalobject—but only the figuring figure, namely the process, the path, thequestion in action, made colors, made volume: to the still-open questionof knowing just what, on a given painted surface or in a givenrecess in stone, might become visible. We must, by opening the box,open its eye to the dimension of an expectant gaze: wait until thevisible ‘‘takes,’’ and in this waiting try to put our finger on the virtualvalue of what we are trying to apprehend under the term visual. Willit then be with passing time that we might reopen the question of theimage? And wouldn’t this be a way of returning to the precious injunctionpreviously formulated by Merleau-Ponty?The word ‘‘image’’ is in ill repute because we have thoughtlesslybelieved that a drawing† was a tracing, a copy, a secondthing, and that the mental image was such a drawing in*instance.†dessin.