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

236 Appendix: Detail and Paning gives us to look at. A major consequence follows from this primacy:we ought to look at the material, says Aristotle, as a mother; forit pertains above all to desire—Aristotle here uses the verb éphièmi,which means in this context: to let oneself, unawares, and no lessimperiously, go toward . . . In other words that it does not pertain to alogic of contraries, which is the logic of form:Then, if we were to think of ‘‘existence’’ [ón] . . . we mightthink of shortage [i.e., lack of form] as the evil contradictionof this good but of matter as a something the very nature ofwhich is to desire and yearn towards [éphiestaï] the actuallyexistent . . . But how can either form or shortage really desireform? Not form itself, because it has no lack of it; and notshortage, which is the antithesis of form, because the termsof antithesis, being mutually destructive, cannot desire eachother. So that if (to borrow their own metaphors) we are toregard matter as the female desiring the male . . . 16Such would be in this sense the aporia of the detail, the aporia ofall close knowledge of painting: even as it aims for a more preciseform, the close-up gaze manages only to undo matter and form, and,doing this, despite itself, it condemns itself to a veritable tyranny ofthe material. A tyranny that also comes to ruin the descriptive idealtied to the ordinary notion of the detail: the close-up gaze producesnothing more here than interference, obstacle, ‘‘contaminatedspace.’’ 17 So the operation of partition becomes impossible or artificial;that of the exhaustive addition of parts verges on pure theoreticaldelusion. Instead of the visible being cut up into signifying units, whatfalls to us in the close-up gaze is—still according to Aristotle’sterms—a material, namely something not defined, a simple protension,a desire. Exit the logic of contraries, exit definition, exit the clearand distinct object of a representation. It might be supposed then thatto any hermeneutic that tries to delimit or discern it in its form, in itsdefinition, painting never stops opposing its indistinct material, preciselyin counterpoint to its figurative and mimetic vocation.