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

246 Appendix: Detail and Panreadily apparent, in the celebrated passage in La Prisonnière about Vermeer’spicture, is the extent to which painting is the contrary of describing.The View of Delft is presented there neither as a description ofthe world as it was in the seventeenth century—its topographical orphotographic capture, its ‘‘descriptive surface,’’ to quote Alpers—noras a metaphysical celebration of some visible ‘‘paradise of necessity.’’On the contrary, it is a question of ‘‘material’’ and ‘‘layers of color,’’on the one hand: and here we are led back to the bedrock of colorsfrom which every painted representation draws its background or itsground, as one prefers; of upheaval and mortal tremors, on the otherhand—something that might be called a trauma, a shock, a volley ofcolor. Let’s reread:Finally, he was before the Vermeer . . . finally, the preciousmaterial of the tiny yellow patch of wall [pan de mur jaune].His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child on ayellow butterfly he wants to grasp, upon the precious littlepatch of wall. ‘‘That’s how I ought to have written,’’ he said.‘‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over themwith several layers of color, made my sentences precious inthemselves, like this little yellow patch of wall.’’ Meanwhile,the gravity of his dizziness did not escape him. . . . He repeatedto himself: ‘‘Little yellow patch of wall with a slopingroof, little yellow patch of wall.’’ Meanwhile, he collapsedonto a circular sofa. . . . He was dead. 36‘‘Petit pan de mur jaune’’ (Fig. 14): one might well ask oneself—andI can imagine a translator hesitating over this—which noun the adjectivejaune qualifies. But the equivocal nature of such a relation introducesus precisely to a real conceptual distinction that the whole text,in its very dramaturgy, brings forth; and this distinction touches thevery core of our problematic—what I have called ‘‘close-up knowledge’’of a painting. For someone who sees the painting by Vermeer,in other words, someone who apprehends what is represented in accordancewith a phenomenology of recognition and identification;someone who might go to Delft to see ‘‘if it’s the same,’’ or who, like