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

The Exorcistxxvpresenting ideas in a lucid and organic, euphonious as wellas logical way—so very different from the ‘‘woolen curtain’’that so many Continental scholars, above all German andDutch, interposed between themselves and their readers. 24In a text of 1953 entitled ‘‘Three Decades of Art History in the UnitedStates: Impressions of a Transplanted European,’’ Panofsky clearly articulatedhis retrospective distaste for the German theoretical vocabulary(he was horrified, for example, by the fact that the word taktischcan mean both ‘‘tactical’’ and ‘‘tactile’’). 25As a man alert to the dangers of unreason—which he saw even inthe double meanings of ordinary words—Panofsky wanted to exorciseit from the very landscape in which his thought operated, the historyof images. To exorcise means to separate, to disentangle at all costs:to disentangle expressive adhesions (the pathos of empathy) exteriorto the sphere of meanings; to disentangle the obscure, impure survivalsexterior to Renaissance clarities and ideals; to disentangle symptomaticreturns (the pathos of the unconscious) exterior to the worldof symbols.But one cannot disentangle ‘‘pure reason’’ from ‘‘pure unreason’’(and thus from the Kritik der reinen Unvernunft that Warburg pretended,on his side, to confront) 26 except by disincarnating the intrinsicpower of images. Heir to Kant, the Enlightenment, and the teleologyof the symbol invented by Cassirer, Panofsky did not understand thatthe image—like everything pertaining to the human psyche—requiresof us a rationalism not of the Enlightenment but, so to speak, of theClair-Obscur: a tragic rationalism expressed by Warburg in the face ofwhat he called the ‘‘dialectic of the monster,’’ and by Freud in theface of what he called the ‘‘discontents of civilization.’’ But Panofsky,supported in this by the Anglo-Saxon context, wanted the unconsciousto be nothing but a mistake: which entailed exorcising all of thedark—but efficacious and anthropologically crucial—parts of images.Such, doubtless, is the principal limit of the knowledge that he bequeathedto us. This is not, to be sure, a reason to exorcise Panofskyhimself, only an incitement to read him and reread him—but critically,as true admiration requires.