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

184 Confronting Imagesto-be reposed question of the profound ‘‘symbolic’’ efficacy of images.But it is starting from this register, where the theoretical—fatally generalizing—dimensionof our stakes has been able to open out andmake itself explicit to a certain point, that their specifically historicaldimension now asks to be, if not developed, 107 then at least indicatedas the very motivation for the question with which we began.This ‘‘question posed’’ was effectively prompted by a tenaciousimpression that the efficacy of Christian images—their anthropologicalefficacy over the long term—could not be understood fully in thesimple terms of the ‘‘schematism,’’ the ‘‘symbolic form,’’ and the iconographismdeveloped by a humanist history of art having inheritedits fundamental notions—its totem-notions, we said—from Vasari onthe one hand (as regards the position of its object) and from neo-Kantism on the other (as regards the position of its acts of knowledge).*It’s not so much that we must purely and simply renounce aconceptual world endowed with a long history and, in many respects,with an indisputable pertinence. What is at stake, rather, is criticizing,in other words proceeding dialectically, putting things in perspective.It is quite obvious that the fabric in which the history of Christian artis woven can be envisaged globally under the authority of mimeticrepresentation, of the imitation inherited from the Greco-Romanworld. Such notions become magical and totalitarian only when theypretend to legislate absolutely, to occupy all of the terrain, in otherwords to ignore their own limitations by blocking access to their ownsymptoms, crises, and rends. That is why it is urgent to think representationwith its opacity, 108 and imitation with what is capable of ruiningit, partially or even totally. Our basic hypothesis comes down to situatingthe power of such a rend under the complex and open wordincarnation.When we cast an eye on the previously discussed Dürer woodcut(Fig. 5), what do we see at first? We see a body, admirably representedby an artist whose intense interest in the problems of bodily movement,the rules of proportion, etc. is now well known—thanks largelyto Panofsky. Some ten years after having engraved this block, which*connaissance.