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

Image as Rend 191during the sack of Constantinople in 1204. But Veronica’s Veil reappearedand in 1606 was the object of a solemn translation. It wasplaced inside one of the four monumental pillars of Saint Peter’s Basilica,where even today it seems to support, opposite the wood of theCross, the very edifice of Christianity. It is sometimes shown to thefaithful, but from such a height that only its frame shines forth, a framemade of crystal, gold, and precious stones, a frame that designates asmuch as conceals it. To say this is not only to put a finger on theobjective irony of an ostentatory procedure. For the ‘‘irony,’’ like theprocedure, is an integral part of the notion of image that here tries toelaborate itself. Dante already sensed this, he who compared a pilgrimcome from afar to contemplate the relic to someone who can ‘‘neversate his hunger’’—we understand his hunger for visibility, his hungerfor appearance—before something that he nonetheless knows to be avera icona of his God. 120 For the ‘‘true’’ portrait—true through its contact,a truth not apparent through its appearance—required the implementationof its withdrawal, according to a dialectic that WalterBenjamin doubtless would have called the ‘‘aura,’’ and Maurice Blanchot‘‘fascination.’’ 121 Let’s make do here with insisting on the requirementof such a dialectic of ‘‘presentability’’: it grounded for everyonethe virtuality of the image, and so its transitory, hazardous, symptomalcapacity to make appearance.* It permitted the image-object, that isolable,accidental, palpable, and destructible reality, to be constitutedas an image-paradigm, namely a matrix of relations in which the humantried to think itself as image of its god.That the human should be in the image, 122 this literally meant thatit belonged to the image, that it was its subject. So it wasn’t necessarythat anyone exactly see the ‘‘true image’’ of his god, in the shadowylight of a basilica in Constantinople or Rome. It was necessary ratherthat while looking at it they feel subject to the image,† subjectus in itsproper sense—‘‘thrown under . . .’’—and thus that he feel himselfunder the gaze of the image. What was necessary was that the spectatorof the image be at once dispossessed of all mastery over it and pos-*faire apparence.†qu’il se sente en la regardant sujet de l’image.