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

208 Confronting Imagesrepresentational at all in the image. The stain will be here, on thelevel of a simple, hastily painted folio sheet, like the figural equivalentof the appeal to the symptom that the Incarnation required of, obsessively,Christian bodies.A simple stain of color, then, to conclude. An act of painting whereappearance, split, rushes to its ruin. A gesture fatally irrational at thetime of its production: the opposite, then, of Vasari’s disegno. Andwould iconography be in all of this? Iconography demands attributes,whereas the color here—like the visual white of the Annunciationevoked at the beginning of this book—is a color-subject: it is what supportsthe whole event of the image. It neither names nor describes (itrefuses to describe even so as to be able fully to exist, to come forth).But it invokes. It desires. It even implores. That’s why it has not thearbitrariness of a pure happenstance but the over-determined powerof a symptom formation. It is a knot of tension, but at the same timeit manifests a whole work of figurability in which the ‘‘omission’’ ofthe described body (a kind of Freudian Auslassung) indicates the forceof an intense condensation, and leaves in the color a displaced vestigeof flesh. It is also the color of an astonishing compromise, in whichthe alternative—either the body, or its wound—is left behind in favorof something that covers (pigment used just the way Leonardo recommended,per via di porre)* and opens at the same time. Here, color allat once covers and spurts.But what does it invoke? Here is the mystery of its figurability.Here, at the same time, is the place of its most immediate presentedself-evidence. For a single name sufficed in the fourteenth century tosay the ‘‘whole’’ of this pictorial and pious gesture. It was the nameChristus, the proper name of the incarnate Word, the object of pietypar excellence, the name bearing all mysteries, all hopes, all anxieties,and all ends. But the genius of this image resides also in the fact thatthis immense spectrum of virtualities had need of but one act—throwing a thick red liquid at a parchment surface—to be realized,there, as elective symptom of the great desire that was at work. This*per via di porre, ‘‘by means of addition’’ (as in painting), as opposed to per via di levare,‘‘by means of subtraction’’ (as in carved sculpture).