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

xviPreface to the English EditionSaxl and later Edgar Wind and Rudolf Wittkower—remains admirable,absolutely necessary for the very comprehension of this longuedurée. By making us aware of signifying complexities that can sometimesbe operative in the visual arts, iconology has, so to speak, defloweredthe image. How could anyone complain about that?But être averti can also be understood negatively: in the sense ofkeeping at a distance something of which one is wary. In this case, theperson in question is one who is well informed—in the history of art,we would say that he is scholarly, erudite—but also one who is alertto a danger that he absolutely must ward off in order to keep intactthe very conditions of his knowledge, to make possible the sereneexercise of his erudition. From this point of view, Panofsky’s workbears the stamp of an emphatic closure, a veritable buffer zone meantto protect the discipline against all imprudence and all impudence: inother words, from all hubris, from all immoderation in the exerciseof reason. That is why Panofsky’s books often feature a preliminary‘‘warning.’’ The most telling of these is the one in the 1959 edition ofIdea:If books were subject to the same laws and regulations aspharmaceutical products, the dust jacket of every copywould have to bear the label ‘‘Use with Care’’—or as it usedto say on old medicine containers: CAUTIUS. 3Panofsky knew well that it is the professional brief of the art historianto manipulate the pharmakon: the substance of the images that hestudies is a powerful substance, attractive but altering. It brings relief,which is to say that it brings to scholars the most magnificent answers,but CAUTIUS! It quickly becomes a drug, even a poison for those whoimbibe it to excess, who adhere to it to the point of losing themselvesin it. Panofsky was a true and profound rationalist: his whole problemwas to ward off the danger posed to the pharmacist by his own pharmakon.I mean the danger posed by the image to those whose professionit is to know it. How can we know an image if the image is thevery thing (Panofsky never forgot his Plato) that imperils—throughits power to take hold of us, which is to say its call to imagine—the