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

Image as Rend 185already indicates an extreme attention to the depiction of musculature,for example, Dürer published his famous Vier Bücher von menschlicherProportion (Four books on human proportion), whichPanofsky regarded as nothing less than ‘‘a climax which the theory ofproportions had never reached before nor was to reach ever after.’’ 109All this is indisputable, but insufficient: for the body here representedby Dürer indicates by its withdrawal alone that it is not simply ‘‘makinga show’’ of itself.* The image that Dürer gives us is, so to speak,sucked into its center by the opening—again, the wound—into whichChrist’s gaze has definitively plunged. What does this mean? That thebody in question is presented to us in a way that indicates a flesh in it,be it wounded. Dürer’s Christ loses himself† in the opening of hisflesh to the end of making present to the pious viewer that openingand death were the lot—even the radical meaning—of the Incarnationof the divine Word among men. Thus is the beautiful body seen tobe breached in its flesh by the very meaning of the divine ‘‘madeflesh.’’ Thus is flesh made symptom in the body, to the point of discreetlyaltering its posture: we need only see how concentrating onthe two stigmata in the feet—such that the two puncta make for agaze-effect‡—required a kind of torsion in the body itself, in the visiblerepresentation of the figure’s feet.In sum, this corresponds exactly to the first definition that Freudgave of the symptom: it replaces, he said, an impossible ‘‘change inthe external world’’—understand, in the Christological context of Dürer’sprint: the human world of original sin—with a ‘‘change in thesubject’s own body’’ (eine Körperveränderung)—understand here thesimple word stigma in the most paradigmatic sense that might begiven it, that of a mark, stain, or prick introduced into flesh. 110 Butnever, in the whole Christian tradition, has the Incarnation of theWord been thought otherwise than as the sacrificial alteration of asingle body in view of saving all others from destruction, fire, andeternal torment. Which entailed, just the same, altering all of them abit, by requiring of them, no longer the Hebraic ordeal of circumci-*qu’il n’est pas simplement ‘‘en représentation.’’†s’abîme.‡fassent lien, séquence, effet de regard.