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

190 Confronting Imageschiasma and oxymorons that will characterize all negative theologyand the syntax of mystics. Thus the Mandylion, from the beginning,was qualified as ‘‘graphic-agraphic’’ 116 : a way of combining in a singleobject heterogeneous semiotic models; a way of imagining semioticmiracles, so to speak. Now the astonishing thing is the fact that thepresentation of concrete objects should have succeeded in bringing offsuch a fiction. The relative—and desired—effacement of these iconsresulted, notably, in a foregrounding of their indexical character, theircharacter as traces, as vestiges of a contact, and thus their characteras ‘‘relics.’’ When Alfonso Paleotti wrote his ‘‘explication’’ of the HolyShroud of Turin at the end of the sixteenth century, he produced whatis only, at best, the paradoxical system of a description of bloodytraces in which—a supplementary yet fundamental paradox—it is theopening of the body and not the body itself, the rent body and not theform of the body, that guides the whole descriptive and exegeticalargument. 117So the ‘‘prototypical’’ images of Christianity are nothing but puresymptoms: shown traces of the divine, and shown as such to the end ofconstructing a mystery, magical efficacy, veneration. That is why theaffirmation of such a contact—that of the living face of Christ withthe Mandylion, of the suffering face of Christ with Veronica’s Veil, ofthe body of the dead Christ with the Holy Shroud—wouldn’t workwithout the operation of procedures requiring something reciprocal,namely the non-contact of humans. What has touched the god oftenbecomes untouchable par excellence: it withdraws into the shadow ofthe mystery (and is constituted forever as an object of desire). Thusthe Mandylion was draped with the imperial purple and borne insolemn procession; thus did it occupy a royal throne, and serve as apalladium, namely an apotropaic image, in Byzantine military expeditions.Georges Pisidès would compare its effect on the enemy to thatof a petrifying Gorgon who knows how to keep at a distance anyonewho dared look upon it. 118Veronica’s Veil also served as a palladium: it protected Rome, theysay, from all pestilence 119 —which did not prevent it from suffering, in1527,* a fate analogous to that of the Mandylion, which was stolen*An allusion to the sack of Rome.