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

142 Confronting Imagesour private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind,then neither the drawing nor the painting belongs to the initselfany more than the image does. They are the inside ofthe outside and the outside of the inside, which is possiblebecause of a duplicity of awareness,* and without which wewould never understand the quasi-presence and imminentvisibility that make up the whole problem of the imaginary. 4We can understand, then, how thinking about the image mightrequire something like opening up a logic. The objection Heideggerformulated against ‘‘science’’ and Kant’s metaphysics can shed morelight on our topic. For the world of images—if we can call it a world;let’s say instead: the unfolding, the rain of stars of singular images—never offers its objects to us as terms in a logic susceptible of beingexpressed as propositions, true or false, correct or incorrect. It wouldbe presumptuous to affirm the strictly rational character of images, asit would be incomplete to affirm their simple empirical character. Infact, it is the very opposition of empirical versus rational that doesn’twork here, that fails to ‘‘apply’’ to artistic images. What does thismean? That everything eludes us? Not at all. Even a rain of stars hasits structure. But the structure we are talking about is open, not in thesense Umberto Eco used the word ‘‘opening’’—foregrounding awork’s communicative and interpretive potential 5 —but in the sensethat the structure will be rent, breached, ruined at its center as at thecrucial point of its unfolding. The ‘‘world’’ of images does not rejectthe world of logic, quite the contrary. But it plays with it, which is tosay, among other things, that it creates spaces there—in the sense thatwe speak of ‘‘play’’ between the parts of a machine—spaces fromwhich it draws its power, which offers itself there as the power of thenegative. 6Which is why we must try, before the image, to think the negativeforce within it. A question less topographical, perhaps, than dynamicor economic. A question of intensity more than of extension, level, orlocale. There is a work of the negative in the image, a ‘‘dark’’ efficacy*du sentir.