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

The Detail and the Pan 245and to the first appearances on the daguerreotype plate offigures drawn by a surer and sharper pencil than Holbein’s,by which I mean a ray of sunlight. The canvas brings to bearon its line a kind of intellectual silver, a magic retina.Through this purification, through this stilling of time that isan act of the glass and the tain, an arrangement external tous is introduced even unto the paradise of necessity. 32So Claudel speaks to us, about this painting, of pencils and sharplines (of graphics, then), he speaks of delicacy (of detail, then), a delicacy‘‘cleansed of all matter,’’ purified likewise of all temporality: Vermeer’spainting offers itself to vision as a ‘‘stilling of time,’’ rather aswe speak of a still from a movie. And finally, there’s the reference toa ‘‘paradise of necessity,’’ in other words, something that evokes insovereign fashion the metaphysical exigency of an eidos of the visibleworld. In a certain sense, Alpers again takes up the thread of thisideality when she presupposes a Vermeerian ‘‘subject’’ of the gazethat is absolute, non-human: what is in play, she repeats, still aboutthe View of Delft, ‘‘is the eye, not a human observer.’’ 33 As if the eyewere ‘‘pure’’—organ without drive. And as if the ‘‘purity’’ of the gazesignified the act of observing everything, capturing everything, retracingeverything: in other words, detailing the visible, describing anddepicting it, making of it an aspectual sum without remainder.Now it is perhaps likewise not by chance that the author Alpersnever cites—despite his preeminence in the critical fortune of Vermeer,and especially as regards the View of Delft—is Marcel Proust.For Proust was very far from looking for some pseudo-‘‘photographictime-still’’ in the visible; he sought there on the contrary a tremblingduration, what Blanchot called ecstasies—the ‘‘ecstasies of time.’’ 34Correlatively, Proust did not seek in the visible the arguments of description;he rather sought there a fulguration of relations: ‘‘In a description,one can make the objects that figured in a place beingdescribed succeed one another indefinitely,’’ he said, ‘‘but truth willbegin only when the writer takes two different objects, sets out theirrelation.’’ 35 . . . Both Proust’s statement and his practice teach us theextent to which writing is the opposite of describing. And no less