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

Image as Rend 227Death as their brace,* so to speak. Their major paradigm. Why?Because Christianity placed death at the center of all its imaginaryoperations. That was its major risk, or its principal ruse—or ratherboth at once: to thematize death as rend, and to project death as ameans of mending all rends, of replacing all losses. A way of includingdialectically (such is the ruse) its own negation, by making death intoa rite of passage, a mediation toward the absence of all death. A wayalso of opening itself (such is the risk) to the somber insistence of analways-returning negativity. But the height of the risk and of the rusewill have been, from the outset, to delegate onto the person of Godthe very ordeal of this insistent death. The Christian economy of salvationas much as the mystery of the Incarnation succeeded in advancein setting these two extraordinary paradoxes the one into theother: the first made die what is by definition immortal; the secondmade death itself die. Thus did men imagine killing their own deathby giving themselves the central image of a God who agrees to diefor them (in other words, to die in order to save them from death).But to do this, it was necessary to let death insist in the image. Toopen the image to the symptom of death. For just as anyone whosays ‘‘I don’t love you’’ nonetheless pronounces the word of love, soanyone who talks of resurrection lets the work of death insist withinhim. Christians—Saint Bernard at the foot of his crucifix, the believercontemplating the engraved melancholy of his God, and the old Florentinewoman fixed in her own cast—have all lived in the double desireto kill death and to imitate death at the same time: in other words, toidentify with the death of their God in an imitatio Christi, so as tobelieve that they have killed their own death, always in the image oftheir resurrected God. Adam was born in the image of, but the immenseweight of his sin constrained all others to the obligation to die,to die in the image of, to reenact constantly the sacrificial death of theincarnate Word, guarantor of their resurrection, even in their own actof being born. We need only recall the terrible sentences with whichSaint Paul introduces Christian baptism in order to understand thedegree to which death functioned here as the motor of all religiousdesire, of all ritual catharsis, of all transformation, and hence of allfigurability. 182 It was necessary to die in order to be able to resemble.*portant.