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

254 Appendix: Detail and Panstupefying. It gushes forth from the cushion at the lacemaker’s left. Itunravels madly before us, like a sudden affirmation, without apparentcalculation, of the picture’s vertical and frontal existence. Its outlineseems to wander; its very schema makes a stain:The impastos (subtle as they are), the modulations of value, everythingseems to be the result of chance: liquid paint somehow left toits own devices; the erratic play of a brush that seems, at times, tohave left the surface, a brush that has lost its capacity for precision,for formal control (as in the detail ‘‘facing’’ it: the two threads betweenthe lacemaker’s fingers). So this pictorial ‘‘moment,’’ in its characteras colored intrusion, presents us with a stain and an index ratherthan with a mimetic or iconic form in Peirce’s sense. With a materialand accidental cause rather than with a formal and final cause. Witha radiance of scarlet, applied, almost thrown down, all but blindly,and which the painting presents to us frontally, insistently: it is a panof paint.To be sure, the general economy of an oeuvre like Vermeer’s is amimetic economy. Insofar as this zone of the picture is made visibleto us, we indeed see that there is nothing there to see but a thread, amad unraveling of paint—material paint—but nonetheless we seesomething, we construe this material, thanks to the mimetic contextfrom which it surges forth. 41 In this way, despite everything, we thinkwe see it clearly: we recognize, almost without reflection, some redthread spilling out of a sewing basket. It is nonetheless true that Vermeerhimself puts visual recognition, the attribution of mimeticmeaning, if not into aporia, then at least into crisis and antithesis: forhe shows us, in the same little picture, two antithetical threads. First,a mimetically ‘‘legitimized’’ thread, as thin in the painting—less that