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

Image as Rend 187is the Lacanian metaphor of the ‘‘button tie’’:* it holds the fabric inplace—its structural vocation is eminent—for the very reason that itpricks and perforates it—a way here of indicating its no less eminentvocation as symptom.The term ‘‘incarnation,’’ in the full extent of its signifying spectrum,would then provide the third approximation for renouncing thetheoretical magic of the imitazione and even of the iconologia inheritedfrom humanism. Against the tyranny of the visible presupposed by atotalizing use of imitation, against the tyranny of the legible ultimatelypresupposed by a certain conception of iconology modeled after Ripaand Panofsky, taking into consideration, in the visual arts of Christianity,the theme of the Incarnation would make it possible to open thevisible to the work of the visual, and legibility to the work of exegesisand of the over-determined proliferation of meanings. From the ByzantineEast to the Tridentine West, the incarnational requirementmanaged to bring forth in images a double power of visual immediacyand authentically exegetical elaboration. 111 Such is the theoretical—even heuristic—power of the symptom. Such is its power of openingand of germination. The symptom, called forth, desired by the incarnationaleconomy, marks in images that prodigiously fecund, efficaciousconnection between event and virtuality. The event will disturbthe codified order of iconographic symbols; the virtuality, for its part,will disturb the ‘‘natural’’ order of visible imitation. All this in a dynamicthat itself uses an immense spectrum of possibilities, and thatcan be as discreet or as explosive as possible.Comparing the theme of the Incarnation to a system of ‘‘buttonties,’’ situated here and there across the great fabric of Western mimesis,suggests to us something like a ‘‘counter-history’’ of art, not anoppositional history, but a history that would proceed dialecticallyand give counter-subjects—to use a musical term—to the great mimetictheme of figurative representation. Now it is striking to note thatthe principal ‘‘prototypical’’ images of Christianity were on the onehand massively devoted to the theme of the Incarnation—to whichthey generally pretended to bear direct witness—and on the other*point de capiton. Cf. Bruce Fink, Lacan to the Letter (Minneapolis, 2004), 113.