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

Image as Rend 219referential category of the history of art, but even the very existenceof this history of art as a ‘‘humanistic’’ discipline. 164 One would alsohave to kill the image in order to guarantee the self-referential conceptof Art. To kill the image, in other words, to mend it or close it up, todeny the violence in it, its essential dissemblance, even its inhumanity—everythingthat Grünewald, among others, had so magisteriallyput to work—in order to revive and reassert the value of an examplethat Panofsky ultimately chose to put aside. The history of art wouldhave to kill the image so that its object, art, might try to escape theextreme dissemination imposed upon us by images—from the onesthat haunt our dreams and float by in clouds to the ones, ‘‘popular,’’horribly ugly, or excessive, before which five thousand of the faithfulwillingly kneel as one. To kill the image, this was to want to extractfrom a subject that is always rent, contradictory, unconscious, in asense ‘‘stupid,’’ the harmonious, intelligent, conscious, and immortalhumanity of man. But there is a world of difference between the Manof humanism, that ideal, and the human subject: the former aims onlyfor unity, whereas the latter thinks itself only as divided, rent, fatedto die. 165 We can understand images—and their rending efficacy—onlyby calling into question the ‘‘humanism’’ that Vasarian and then Panofskianart history clearly made its alibi.Now killing the image was for Vasari nothing other than a new way—more radical, perhaps more ideal—of killing death. With its galaxy ofelect artists ‘‘having never perished,’’ the history of art invented foritself a Parnassus of demigods whose principal quality was their havingall been heroes, champions of resemblance. What the uneasy prologuesby Theophilus and Cennini tell us, by contrast, is that,basically, no artistic image can be anything but a mourning for resemblance,a vestige of the loss of the divine image brought about byAdam’s transgression. And if resemblance, from a Christian point ofview, is thinkable only as an immense drama, that is first becausethrough his transgression and the loss of his ‘‘being in the image of,’’Adam did nothing other than invent death for us. Not to resemble(God), that’s another way of saying: we are all going to die. So weunderstand how the desire to recover the (divine) image superimposes