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230 Appendix: Detail and PanIn common-sense philosophy, the detail seems to encompass threeoperations, more or less self-evident. First that of getting closer: one‘‘enters into the details’’ as one penetrates the rarefied air of epistemicintimacy. But this intimacy entails some violence, perverse withoutany doubt; one gets close only to cut up, to break down, to take apart.Such is the basic meaning of the French word découper, its etymologicaltenor—a pruning or cutting—and the first definition of it in Littré:‘‘the separation of a thing into several parts, into pieces,’’ which opensup an entire semantic constellation on the side of profit and exchange,of detail commerce.* Finally, through an extension no less perverse,the detail designates an exactly symmetrical, even opposite operation,one that consists in gathering all the pieces together, or at least accountingfor them in full: ‘‘to detail’’ is to enumerate all the parts of awhole, as if the ‘‘cutting up’’ had served only to make possible acomplete accounting, without remainder—a sum. So a triply paradoxicaloperation is in play here, one that gets closer the better to cut up,and cuts up the better to make whole. As if ‘‘whole’’ existed only inbits, provided these can be added up.Such a paradox, however, defines something like an ideal. Thedetail—with its three operations: proximity, partition, addition—would be the fragment as invested with an ideal of knowledge and oftotality. This ideal of knowledge is exhaustive description. Contrary tothe fragment whose relationship to the whole only puts it into question,posits it as an absence or enigma or lost memory, the detail inthis sense imposes the whole, its legitimate presence, its value as responseand point of reference, even as hegemony.The great favor currently enjoyed by the detail in interpretationsof works of art does not result solely from the ‘‘common-sense philosophy’’whereby, to know a thing well, one must know it ‘‘in detail.’’Its presuppositions are certainly more complex, more strategic. I makeno pretense of analyzing them here—that would entail a veritablehistory of the history of art—but I will suggest that this methodologicalfavor perhaps derives from the serene connivance of what wemight call an ‘‘understood’’ positivism and a Freudism that is, let’s*commerce de détails. Vente au détail means ‘‘retail,’’ as opposed to en gros, ‘‘wholesale.’’