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

186 Confronting Imagession, but the no less categorical imperative to imitate the disfiguringordeal into which Christ had first plunged.We see better now how the two terms ‘‘incarnation’’ and ‘‘imitation’’must be situated with respect to each other: the first presupposesa symptomization of the second, which makes of thesecond—henceforth altered—a vocation to the symptom of the bodyas much as to the body itself. Saint Francis of Assisi imitated Christ,not through the appearance of his body, but through the symptomaticdisfiguration that his body agreed to receive or to incorporate. Ourhypothesis, in its most extreme form, would consist quite simply inpresupposing that Christian visual art sought also to imitate the bodyof Christ in the same terms that a given saint might have: in otherwords by imitating, beyond the appearances of the body, the process or‘‘virtue’’ of opening effected once and for all in the flesh of the divineWord.Thus the Incarnation—as the major imperative of Christianity, asits central mystery, its crux of belief, the response to a determinedphenomenology and fantasy—permitted and required of images adouble economy whose inventive power was extraordinary: first it gavethem access to the body (something that art history has always seenand analyzed quite well): then it asked them to change the bodies(something that art history has examined much less closely). The Incarnationof the Word was the access of the divine to the visibility ofa body, so it was an opening to the world of classical imitation, thepossibility of making bodies consequential* in images of religious art.But it was just as much a sacrificial and threatening economy bearingupon bodies, and thus an opening in the world of imitation, an openingof the flesh effected in the envelope or mass of bodies. Such wouldbe the elementary dialectic activated with the Christian invention ofthe theme† of the Incarnation: something that, in a sense, would linethe great fabric‡ of classical imitation in which images display themselves;something that, in another sense, would introduce a rend atthe center of the same fabric. Perhaps the aptest metaphor, in the end,*de faire jouer les corps.†motif.‡tissu, whose other meaning as organic ‘‘tissue’’ henceforth comes into play.