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

188 Confronting Imageshand were images in which mimesis always endured the disfiguringordeal of a veritable symptom, of a visual mark or trace of disfiguration.As if the flesh of the Word here came to act against the bodyitself.I call ‘‘prototypical’’ those rare, exceptional images for whichChristianity, eastern and then western, first laid claim to cult status,which presupposed two things at least: first, that these images touchedthe region of greatest desire, a region impossible to all other images,a region where the image, ‘‘miraculously,’’ made itself virtus andpower of incarnation . . . These images from elsewhere,* these rareimages, by touching limits, indicated ends—be they untenable—for allother art images. And that is why a history of them should be written,a history in which we would try to understand by what work—psychic and material—such limit-images managed to appear in theeyes of their spectators as critical images (in all senses of the adjective)and just as much as what I’d like to call desire-images: images bearingends (here again, in all senses of the word) for the image.The most striking examples, as is well known, are the Mandylionor Holy Towel of Edessa—the earliest explicit mention of which, as avenerated image, dates from the mid-sixth century—Veronica’s Veil,and the Holy Shroud of Turin, before which today’s Christians stillkneel on the very solemn occasions of its ostension. Of these ‘‘achiropoïètes’’images, in other words images ‘‘not made by human hands,’’one retains above all the structural connections, extremely elaborated,that here conjoin the element of legend (bearer of the ‘‘ends’’ dreamedfor the image in rite and discourse) with concrete procedures of presentationor ‘‘presentability.’’ What strikes one immediately, to getright to the point, 112 is the triviality, the extreme humility, of the objectsthemselves, which have nothing to show but the tatters of theirmaterial.† Old linen handkerchiefs or calcinated shrouds, in the endthey display only the supposed—but exorbitant—privilege of havingbeen touched by divinity. They are relics as much as icons. That iswhy a capacity to reveal has so long been attributed to them, articles*images d’autre part.†que le haillon de leur matière.