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

The Detail and the Pan 237Painting or DepictingThe whole problem comes down to this ‘‘counterpoint,’’ of course.So far I have only stated the obvious, something that’s perfectly banal.By saying: ‘‘What painting shows is its material cause, in other words,paint,’’ all I have produced so far is a kind of tautology, which mustnow be worked, gone beyond, filled out. I stress this for one reasononly: the history of art ignores its effects more or less constantly. Thisis the very tactical negligence of a knowledge that tries or pretends toconstitute itself as a science, ‘‘clear and distinct’’: it would very muchlike its object, painting, to be clear and distinct, too, as distinct (divisible)as the words of a sentence, the letters of a word. When lookingat paintings, the art historian generally detests letting himself be troubledby effects of the paint; or indeed talks about them as a ‘‘connoisseur,’’evoking the ‘‘hand,’’ the ‘‘impasto,’’ the ‘‘manner,’’ the ‘‘style’’. . . It is not a philosophical happenstance that the whole literature ofart continues to use the word subject for its contrary, in other words,the object of the mimesis, the ‘‘motif,’’ the represented. This makes itpossible, precisely, to ignore both the effects of enunciation (in short,of fantasy, of the subject position) and the effects of gush, of subjectility(in short, of material), with which painting, eminently, works—andraises questions. 18Panofsky, in his famous methodological introduction to Studies onIconology, implies that the question has been settled. The word descriptionappears in his three-level schema only to designate simple preiconographicrecognition, the so-called primary or natural subjectmatter, the least problematic one: as if, in all cases, this recognitioncould pertain to a binary logic of identity, between ‘‘it is’’ and ‘‘it isnot,’’ as if the question of the quasi, for example, should not be posed,or required its resolution, its dissolution in advance. ‘‘It is obvious,’’writes Panofsky, ‘‘that a correct iconographical analysis in the narrowersense presupposes a correct identification of the motifs. If theknife that enables us to identify a St. Bartholomew is not a knife but acork-screw, the figure is not a St. Bartholomew.’’ 19I am not in the process of suggesting that painting is a pure materialchaos, and that we must consider nil the figurative meanings un-