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

The Detail and the Pan 235history, even more than the observational sciences, lacks the capacity—whichmust be incessant—of ‘‘rectifying thought before the real,’’thanks to which a knowledge will have some chance of constructingitself in the very hollow of the most ‘‘delicate’’ perturbations. 13 Andwhat is said about the phenomena of experimental physics (transformablein accordance with regulated criteria, thereby making possiblethe induction of a law) will be said a fortiori about a painting,which lets itself be manipulated very little, ‘‘varying’’ only withchanging light, for example, or according to its differentiation withinan abstract series wherein it is made to figure.In any case, Bachelard’s appeal to chaos and night is not withoutinterest for those of us who, when looking at a painting from closeup, have felt as though thought and reality, form and matter, werecoming undone. For it isn’t so much the minutia of the detail thatcalls into question the hermeneutic of the pictorial whole (and eventhe possibility of describing it); it is first of all its essential chaotic vocation.We could restate this in Aristotelian terms: close-up knowledgeof a painting loosens its formal cause from its material cause.In absolute terms—and even if this sounds paradoxical—the paintingoffers nothing of its formal cause for seeing: its quiddity, its algorhythmin a sense, its eidos: in short, no definition, in the strict sense,of what a painting represents; of what it takes the place of. The paintingdoes not offer its formal cause for seeing, it offers it to us for interpretation.Proof: no one agrees about this formal definition. And still less,let it be said in passing, about the final cause, that in view of which apainting represents this like this, instead of that like that. What thepainting shows is, primordially, on the order of a like this: traces orindices of its efficient cause (Aristotle understands this to mean anythingon the order of a decision, whether voluntary or involuntary, inthe sense that the father is the cause of the child). 14 But above all,what painting shows is its material cause, which is to say paint. It is notby chance that Aristotle’s two most prominent examples of materialcause are ‘‘material [as] the cause of manufactured articles,’’ in thesense that bronze is the cause of the statue, and ‘‘parts [as] causes ofthe whole,’’ in other words the materiality of the fragment 15 ...So the material cause would have a certain primacy in what paint-