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

210 Confronting Imageseverything, I mean losing this aspectual minimum that makes us,before an old work of art, use the word ‘‘figurative’’ in a trivial, nonparadoxicalsense? Not at all. The Christ-stain from the SchnütgenMuseum is not only a stain, it is also a Christ—it is a stain here preciselybecause it is a Christ. So there’s nothing ‘‘abstract’’ in it. There’sonly a thought resemblance, not in its success—namely the idea of aSame that would be breached* and stabilized through the productionof its image—but in its crisis or its symptom. The fourteenth-centuryGerman artist plunged, so to speak, Christlike resemblance into thecentral ordeal of its disfiguration, a way of rattling, even convulsing,the permanence of its appearance. Just as a man having convulsionsnever completely ceases to be a man—despite our inability to engagewith him in the civilized way of Panofsky’s hat-tipping ‘‘gentleman’’—sodoes the Christ-stain remain the god, the immovable rockof the West, who here, in the image, engages with his pious viewersin a way that is anything but ‘‘civilized’’ or polite. The image henceforthno longer ‘‘speaks’’ to us in the conventional element of aniconographic code, it makes a symptom,† in other words, a cry or evena mutism in the supposedly speaking image. 142What is in play in this symptom-making is—still according toFreud—neither more nor less than an irruption, a kind of singularspurt, of the truth . . . at the risk, then, of undoing for a moment allrepresentational plausibility. 143 What happens here is that the radiance‡of a fundamental truth of Christianity came to breach and rendthe imitation of the crucified body that was the ‘‘norm.’’ The truth ofthe Incarnation has rent the plausibility of the imitation, the event ofthe flesh has rent the ideal appearance of the body. But what is thisevent? It is death, the death of God required by his very Incarnation.That’s exactly what the little folio sheet from the Schnütgen Museumbrings to the fore, presents, chromatically. That the divine Word—theeternal Word, the all-creating Word, if we are to believe Saint John—chose to become flesh, this meant, this required that at a certain momenthe be unmade and die, that he shed blood and be no longer*atteint.†elle fait symptôme.‡éclat.