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

Image as Rend 143that, so to speak, eats away at the visible (the order of representedappearances) and murders the legible (the order of signifying configurations).From a certain point of view, moreover, this work or constraintcan be envisaged as a regression, since it brings us, with everstartlingforce, toward a this-side-of,* toward something that the symbolicelaboration of artworks has covered over or remodeled. Thereis here a kind of anadyomene movement, a movement whereby somethingthat has plunged into the water momentarily reemerges, is bornbefore quickly plunging in again: it is the materia informis when itshows through† form, it is the presentation when it shows throughrepresentation, it is opacity when it shows through transparency, it isthe visual when it shows through the visible.I am not sure, to be frank, whether ‘‘negative’’ is the right wordhere. It would be so only on condition that it not be understood asprivation pure and simple. That is why, in this optic, we are using thevisual and not the invisible as the element of this constraint of negativitywithin which images are caught, catch us. That is also why thenegative here has no nihilist or simply ‘‘negativist’’ connotations, anymore than it aims at a nostalgia or at any general philosophy of negativitywhatever. It is not a matter of establishing in aesthetics a dubiousgenerality of the unrepresentable. It is not a matter of appealingto a poetics of unreason, of the drive-driven, or to an ethics of mutecontemplation, or even to an apologia for ignorance before the image.It is just a matter of looking intently at the paradox, the kind oflearned ignorance to which images constrain us. Our dilemma, ouralienating choice was described a few lines back in rather crude terms;we must specify, reiterate that this choice is constitutively a constraint,and thus is not at all a matter of choosing one piece, of cuttingthrough‡—knowing or seeing: the ‘‘or’’ here being simply exclusionary,not reflective of an alienation—but of knowing how to remain inthe dilemma, between knowing and seeing, between knowing somethingand not seeing another thing in any case, but seeing something in anycase and not-knowing some other thing . . . In no case is it a matter*vers un en-deçà.†affleurer, which can also mean, in geology, ‘‘to outcrop.’’‡trancher, as in ‘‘cutting through a dilemma’’ or ‘‘cutting through the gordian knot.’’