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

The Detail and the Pan 233on the givens of this elementary phenomenology, celebrating theenigma or ‘‘wonder’’ of a painting’s not showing the same thing from adistance and from close up. The whole critical fortune of Titian, forexample, revolves around the disjunction between the effects producedby his work when viewed from a distance—the ‘‘inimitableperfection’’ of flesh and fabric—and when viewed at close range—theimperfection, even aberration, likewise inimitable, of the ‘‘broad andeven coarse sweeps of the brush’’ with which he covered his canvases:‘‘insomuch that from near little can be seen [i.e., in the way of figures],but from a distance they appear perfect,’’ to quote a celebratedpassage by Vasari; and no less celebrated are the pages that Diderotdevoted to the same problem, before the paintings of Chardin. 8 Inshort, the detail poses one question above all others: where to lookfrom? And it is not perception that is in question here, but rather thedwelling* (or place) of the subject: there whence painting is thought.Bachelard stated the problem in terms that are doubtless ‘‘raw’’:advances in detailed knowledge generally go exactly against the grainof systematic knowledge, because the one moves ‘‘from the Objectiveto the Personal,’’ whereas the other moves ‘‘from the Personal tothe Objective.’’ 9 He nonetheless indicated the essential thing about it,namely, a division of the subject of close-up knowledge. It’s as if thedescribing subject, by dint of cutting something local out of somethingglobal, came to disassociate his very act of knowledge, his observation,never seeing the very ‘‘something local’’ within the very‘‘something global’’ that he thinks he is taking stock of. Worse: it’s asif the describing subject, in the very ‘‘tearing-to-pieces’’ movementthat constitutes the operation of the detail, instead of proceeding tothe serene reciprocity of a totalization, redirected despite himself andonto himself the first, violent act of disintegration. A cognitive subjectcutting up the visible the better to totalize, but undergoing himselfthe effect of such a scission. Let’s imagine a man for whom the wholeworld is a puzzle: he will end up experiencing the fragility—the potentialmobility, in other words the loss—of his own limbs.When Bachelard discusses the detail he is basically telling us about*aître, homonymous with être, ‘‘being,’’ ‘‘to be.’’