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

234 Appendix: Detail and Pana rent consciousness. It evokes in the epistemological order what Balzacrecounted, in the order of pictorial creation, about The UnknownMasterpiece: figurelessness* will be the lot of anyone who stalks thething itself in his representations. It also evokes what Lacan calls, inthe order of subject formation, an alienation: this is a logical choice,an alternative in which we are constrained to lose something in any case.An operation that might be exemplified by a threat of the type: ‘‘Yourmoney or your life!’’ where the money of the victim will be lostregardless of his decision. 10 I will suggest here that every paintingthreatens us with: ‘‘The painting or the detail!’’—the paint being lostregardless.† Lost, and yet there, right in front of us—and therein liesthe whole drama.In Bachelard’s formulation, this drama of the detail is stated inaccordance with the most classic dividing lines: reality versus thought,description versus category, matter versus form:In order to describe the detail that escapes the category, it isnecessary to judge the perturbations of the material underneaththe form. Suddenly, the determinations oscillate. Thefirst [not proximate] description was clear: it was qualitative,it developed itself in the discontinuity of numbered predicates.Quantity brings its riches, but [also] its uncertainty.With delicate determinations intervene deeply irrational perturbations.. . . On the level of the detail, Thought and Realityseem to come undone, and we might say that bydistancing itself from the order of magnitude in which wethink, Reality somehow loses its solidity, its constancy, itssubstance. To sum up, Reality and Thought founder togetherin the same Nothingness, in the same metaphysical Erebus,sons of Chaos and Night. 11Now what Bachelard says in the field of the so-called exact sciences12 will be said a fortiori in the fields of history and semiology. For*le sans-figure.†Wordplay: peinture means both ‘‘painting’’ and ‘‘paint.’’