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APPENDIX: THE DETAIL AND THE PANThe Aporia of the DetailIt is a fact of experience endlessly repeated, inexhaustible, piercing:painting, which has no offstage, which shows everything, all at onceand on a single surface—painting is endowed with a strange and formidablecapacity for dissimulation. It will never stop being there, beforeus, like a distance or a power, never altogether like an act. Whyis this so? As much, doubtless, because of its material status—the paintmaterial—as because of its temporal, ontological position; also, indivisibly,because of the ever defective modality of our gaze. The numberof things that we do not make out in painting is confounding.We can never know, heuristically speaking, how to look at a painting.That’s because knowing and looking absolutely don’t have thesame mode of being. Thus, faced with a risk that the entire cognitivediscipline of art is collapsing, the historian and the semiotician willtend implicitly to evade the question: about this painting, whose integralmeaning ceaselessly eludes him, he will say: ‘‘I haven’t seen itenough; to know something more about it, now I ought to see it indetail . . .’’ See it, and not look at it: for seeing knows better how toapproach, anticipate, and even mimic the act, supposed to be sovereign,of knowledge. So to see in detail will be the little organon of anyscience of art. Doesn’t that seem obvious? I will however suggest aline of questioning: What can rightfully be meant by detailed knowledgeof a painting?This text is a longer version of a paper presented at the International Center of Semioticsand Linguistics in Urbino, Italy, in July 1985, at the colloquium ‘‘Fragment/Fragmentaire’’chaired by Louis Marin. It was first published in the periodical La Part de L’Oeil,no. 2 (1986): 102–19, with the title ‘‘L’Art de ne pas décrire, Une aporie du détail chezVermeer.’’ [Previous translation by A. C. Pugh of a shorter version, ‘‘The Art of NotDescribing. Vermeer: The Detail and the Patch,’’ History of the Human Sciences 2 (1989):135–69. Newly translated for the present volume.]