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

The ExorcistxxiWarburg was a man who, in a sense, tempted the devil and ended upfalling mad amid his books before raving for five long years withinthe walls of psychiatric hospitals in Hamburg, in Jena, and then inthe celebrated clinic in Kreuzlinger directed by Ludwig Binswanger,Freud’s great friend. The maker of Mnemosyne, that heterodox anddisturbing montage of images capable of sounding together in harmoniesthat elude all historicist demonstration. 12 The poet or prophetof the Grundbegriffe, those unpublishable manuscripts of ‘‘gushing’’thoughts, obsessions, and ‘‘idea leakages’’ mixed together into an exaltationof theoretical reflection itself. 13 The phantom, the unredeemedsoul who still wanders—less and less silently—through the (social)body of Leah, our beautiful discipline called the History of Art.In his curriculum vitae of Panofsky, published in 1969, WilliamHeckscher felt obliged to emphasize this feature:[Panofsky] disliked ‘‘unreliable’’ people. Of William Blake hesaid, ‘‘I can’t stand him. I don’t mind if a man is really mad,like Hölderlin. True madness may yield poetical flowers. ButI don’t like mad geniuses walking all the time on the brinkof an abyss.’’ 14It is probable that, like the exorcist in The Dybbuk, Panofsky was justas uncomfortable with the ‘‘knowledge without a name’’ on whichAby Warburg insisted as he was determined in his attempt to exorciseits ‘‘unreliable’’ tenor. He was in Hamburg the very year that the‘‘mad genius,’’ in a famous seminar on the history of art, evoked theabysses that the historian-‘‘seismograph,’’ the historian of temporaltremors and faults, had to skirt. 15 But Panofsky, wanting to warn usabout this ‘‘unreliability’’ and the accompanying dizziness, acted as ifthe abysses did not exist. As if those who are ‘‘unreliable,’’ those ‘‘sufferingfrom vertigo,’’ were inevitably wrong from the point of viewof historical reason.Now it was not so much the altered person—Warburg himself—that Panofsky wanted to exorcise from his own iconology. The dybbukthat he exorcised was the alteration itself: the alteration effected byimages themselves on historical knowledge built on images. Two things