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

Image as Rend 209act is, once again, an act of unction. An unction whose very name—whose common name—was called christos (the anointed one) andthus rearticulated, admirably, the immediate gesture of the painter onthe absent object of his religious desire.This example makes it easier to understand how a single, simple,even reckless act of painting could have managed to manifest all themystery and all the virtuality of a given of belief, even of exegesis.For there was an act of exegesis in this presentation of a Christ notrepresented exactly, but simply anointed (christos, then) with color.There was here simple event and virtuality, absolute risk of the handand thought of a mystery, there was here visual shock and exegeticalflow. 139 In short, there was symptom, and thus there was disfiguration,violence done to the classic iconography and imitation of a body suspendedon a cross. It must be repeated once more how much thesymptom, knot of the event and of the virtual structure, answers fullyhere to the paradox stated by Freud about figurability in general:namely that figuring consists not in producing or inventing figures,but in modifying figures, and thus in carrying out the insistent work ofa disfiguration in the visible. 140 But it must likewise be said that historyhere converges with* the theoretical or metapsychological statement,for in the same period in which the image in the Schnütgen Museumwas realized, a Dominican in the north of Italy composed a dictionary,one that was famous and read everywhere in Europe until the sixteenthcentury, in which the definition of the verb to figure expoundedFreud’s statement almost word-for-word: namely, that ‘‘to figure’’—inthe exegetical sense—was in fact equivalent to the verb ‘‘to disfigure,’’because it consisted precisely in ‘‘transposing to another figure’’ (inaliam figuram mutare) the very given of the meaning ‘‘to be figured.’’ 141Which places us one more time before figures as before the disquietingpower of something to over-determine itself, to constantly estrangeitself.†We are before the image, then, as before that which continuously‘‘estrange itself.’’ What does this mean? Are we in the process of losing*vient à la rencontre de.†s’étranger.