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

The Detail and the Pan 269man with answers: he thinks that the enigmas of the visible have asolution, one that might come down to the ‘‘least thing,’’ a thread,for example, or a knife; he cleans his glasses, he takes himself to beSherlock Holmes. A person fond of pans, by contrast, is someone wholooks in a way consistent with a purposely suspended visibility. Hedoes not expect, from the visible, a logical solution (rather, he senseshow the visible dissolves all logic); like Dupin in Poe’s ‘‘The PurloinedLetter,’’ he will put on dark glasses and let what he is looking forcome to him; and when he finds it, it is not the end of a series—alast word understood as answer—but one specific word in an endlesssequence, a ferreting out of questions. The man of the detail, then,writes romans à clefs in which the questions posed at the beginningare answered at the end. If the man of the pan were permitted to dolikewise, he would write ekphrases that are endless, reticulate, aporetic.So the detail is a semiotic object tending toward stability and closure,while the pan, by contrast, is semiotically labile and open. Thedetail presupposes a logic of identity whereby one thing will definitivelybe the opposite of another (either knife, or corkscrew): whichpresupposes, fundamentally, a transparence of the iconic sign, whichpresupposes in turn an active, figured figure, a certainty of existentialjudgment regarding things seen. But the pan reveals only figurabilityitself, in other words, a process, a power, a not-yet (the Latin for thisis præsens), an uncertainty, a ‘‘quasi’’-existence of the figure. Now itis precisely because it shows figurability at work—in other words,incomplete: the figure figuring, even, we might say, the ‘‘pre-figure’’—thata pan disturbs the picture, like a relative disfiguration; suchis the paradoxical nature of the potential figure. While the detail permitsof description and attribution that is univocal, or that aspires tobe such (‘‘this is a white thread’’), the pan summons forth only disquietingtautologies (‘‘this is . . . a filet of red paint’’) or no less disquietingcontradictions (‘‘this is . . . a filet of ecru threads . . . but that are likeblood . . . but that flow from a cushion . . . but that turn back onthemselves . . . but that fall again like rain . . . but that make a stainor a landscape’’ and so forth). So we might also say that interpretationof the detail tends toward something like a secondary elaboration of