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

Image as Rend 189that generally present themselves as simple cloths. That is why a capacityfor apparition has been attributed to them, articles that offer anappearance that is literally as effaced as possible . . . But it was preciselya question of fulfilling this paradox: it was a question of fulfilling thecontract, the sacrificial hurt, the ‘‘circumcision of the visible’’ evokedat the beginning of this book. That the appearance be ‘‘effaced’’ andthe external aspect sacrificed, that’s what corresponded exactly to theeconomy of humility evidenced by the Word itself’s becoming incarnate.We should not be surprised, then, to learn that such imageswere envisaged in the Middle Ages as veritable ‘‘Christophanies.’’Everyone attributed to them some great miracle, often the repetitionof one of those thought to have been performed by Jesus himself, forexample restoring sight to the blind.By declaring such images ‘‘divine productions,’’ ‘‘not made byhuman hands’’—according to an adjectival form, acheïropoïètos, introducedby Saint Paul precisely to characterize the ‘‘spiritual circumcision’’of Christians, the divine covenant and sanctuary 113 —their toohuman inventors basically tried to realize in an image something likea squaring of the circle: that is, an image that no longer would veil(as appearance) but would rather reveal (as apparition), that no longerwould need to represent but would efficaciously make present thedivine Word, to the point of actualizing the whole power of the miracle.114 But this denial of the pictorial in favor of an incarnational demand*had but one end, which was to offer itself as the absoluteparadigm of all iconicity, and thus of all painting activity. 115 A way ofpositing in painting itself, or in the history of art if one prefers, anabsolute object of desire for all religious iconography: an impossibleobject of the pictorial desire for incarnation.So we are before these rare, before these eminent icons as beforethe extreme form of a desire, made image, to bring the image outsideitself . . . in view of a flesh that it glorifies and in sense would liketo continue. The paradoxical structure of such a requirement largelyconditions the antithetical aspect of the vocabulary used to describethese images. It is a vocabulary that already evokes the avalanches of*revendication incarnationelle.