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

Image as Rend 175Such, then, was Panofsky’s choice with regard to melancholy: hekept the synthesis and rejected the symptom. Which implied strangeblindnesses, or ‘‘scotomizations.’’ Which implied, for example, a denialof all connection between Melancholia I and the Saint Jerome, engravedthe very same year and almost as part of the same mentalgesture; 85 which implied a rejection from the Dürer corpus of thequite explicitly melancholic Man of Sorrows in Karlsruhe. 86 And notlooking at all at the one in the Small Passion of 1509–11, where Christis like a statue, like a crystal of melancholy, crumpled by the depth ofhis dereliction 87 (Fig. 5). An image exemplary and troubling: for itknows how to gaze at the viewer without recourse to anything in theway of eye contact. Dürer effectively forsakes his Christ on a tiny,arid, island-like base lost in the white of the page, as if the ChristianGod set himself apart,* withdrawn into silence, from the space ofhumanity, from the space of human history. But it is precisely thispresentation of withdrawal† that manages to grip the viewer in a veritablecaptation of his gaze. It is a rosary of intensities that flow backand take hold of us: first in the sharp, almost spiky rays of the nimbus,then in the crown of thorns that likewise hurls its lines, facing us(whereas that which ought to face us, the facies Christi, remainsaverted, despondent). And again in the central hollow where the twoknees come together, supporting the mass of the conjugated arm andhead, and through which flow the folds of what we already imagineto be a shroud. Finally, in the insistent frontality of the two stigmataon the feet—the only ‘‘eyes,’’ so to speak, in the face of which thestaunch believer is henceforth obliged to situate himself, to kneelmentally, in fantasy, before perusing the illustrated carmina of theengraved Passion.One cannot, before this—before this play of insistences that arediscreet yet carry a terrible violence—keep the synthesis and rejectthe symptom. We are here besieged‡ by the dimension of the symptom,to the very extent that the body of Christ withdraws into itselfbefore us in a kind of refusal to remain visible. It’s like looking intently*s’exceptait.†présentation de repli.‡investis.