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

The Detail and the Pan 251anything between the lacemaker’s fingers but two white lines—lessthan half a millimeter wide—white lines that everything supports myconstruing as two iconic signs, details of two threads being unwoundfrom two small wooden bobbins on either side of the bent indexfinger. Did Claudel see a needle where I see thread, and the ‘‘pupil ofa blue eye’’ where I see two almost closed eyelids? There could beno better expression of the precariousness of every ‘‘delicate’’ visiblerecognition. Unless we were to read Claudel’s text on a completelydifferent level, apart from all photographic delicacy, apart from allexactitude, and far from the visible ‘‘paradise of necessity’’ that henonetheless ascribes to Vermeer’s painting: then we would have tounderstand his ‘‘Look!’’ as an injunction to imagine a needle behindthe four closed fingers of the lacemaker, 40 and to metaphorically conjureup an eye, its pupil, and its blueness in the surface, colored, moving,of the ‘‘fabric’’ on which the same hand rests. In any event, both ofthe two readings put the detail as such, with its descriptive vocation,into aporia: either it is highly debatable, or it is proposed as invisible.To avoid remaining in a purely aporetic mode, however, the followingwould have to be conceded: whether it’s a matter of ‘‘lookingfor a needle’’ in the picture-cum-haystack or of ‘‘finding the thread’’in the labyrinth of shapes, it is still a detail that is being sought andthat will be found, not only because the visible element in question istenuous, delicate, but also because such delicacy is there to resolve adifficulty, to decide on a meaning in the visible. It’s how every detail isconnected, intimately or distantly, to an act of line, which is the actthat constitutes stable differences, the act of graphic decision, of distinction,thus of mimetic recognition, thus of signification. It is generallythrough operations of line—threads, needles, even knives orcorkscrews—that images are made signs, and that signs are madeiconic.There is, in the little painting by Vermeer, an area that is closer andmore salient than all these found (or findable) details between thelacemaker’s fingers (Fig. 17). Claudel did not look at this zone, did notremark it. Nonetheless, it creates a burst of color in the foreground ofthe work; it occupies so remarkable and so large an area there that