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

252 Appendix: Detail and PanImage not availableFIG 16Louvre.Jan Vermeer, The Lacemaker (detail), c. 1665. Oil on canvas. Paris,one is tempted to ascribe to it some strange power to bedazzle, toblind. Furthermore, it is more difficult to speak about this zone thanabout a detail, for the detail is conducive to discourse: it helps to tella story, to describe an object. And while the detail allows itself to becontained in its delicacy, within its outline, such a zone by contrastexpands brusquely, creates within the picture the equivalent of anexplosion. While we can conceive of a detail as ‘‘cleansed of all material,’’such a zone by contrast proposes, against the grain of representationalfunction, a blaze of substance, color without a fully controlledlimit: and it opposes its material opacity—which is dizzying—to allmimesis thinkable as an ‘‘act of the lens.’’ Finally, it is something likean accident: it will never be able to introduce us to Claudel’s ‘‘paradiseof necessity.’’ It is an accident, troubling and infernal in that sense—but a sovereign accident.What, exactly, does it consist of ? In this case, a flow of red paint.Joined here by another one that is white, less convoluted but no less