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

The Detail and the Pan 271everything; here, form is ground, because it represents much less thanit self-presents, as colored material, as a colored surging-forth.The detail is useful: it can have descriptive value (this is the threadof Vermeer’s daughter, who is making lace) or iconological value (onecan imagine an art historian trying to prove that, the painter havingread Ovid in 1665, The Lacemaker is a personification of Arachne). Ineither case, the logical relation is transparent: ut-ita. Conversely, thepan tends to bog down the hermeneutic, because it proposes onlyquasis, hence displacements, metonymies, hence metamorphoses (andif this red filet is really meant to evoke Arachne, this would only beto suggest to us its very body in the midst of disfiguration). The pan inthis sense is a risk for thought, but the self-same risk that paintingproposes when it comes forward, when it makes a front: for whenthe material of representation comes forward, everything representedis at risk of collapse. And interpretation owes it to itself to take thisrisk into account, so as to take its measure, to indicate—if only toindicate—the ‘‘intractable’’ that constitutes its object.Now it should be clear how the object of the pan is not the objectof the detail. The object of the detail is an object of representation ofthe visible world; even elevated to the level of a symbol, it presupposes,in the final analysis, an object of reality, one that it strives todelineate and render legible. Conversely, the object of the pan, asintrusion—presence—of the pictorial in the representational systemof the picture, is a real object of paint / of painting,* in the sense thatLacan situated the ‘‘real object’’ of the gaze as a ‘‘pulsatile, dazzling,and spread-out function’’ in the picture itself: a function connected to‘‘unexpected arrival,’’ to trouble, to encounter, to trauma, and thedrive. 74 In this ‘‘objet’’ (object) we must first hear the word jet (gush),and the prefix that indicates the act of placing there before us, the actof what presents a front to us—of what looks at us—when we look.In this object, simultaneously intense and partial, insistent althoughaccidental, in this contradictory objet we must understand the fragilemoment of a disfiguration that nonetheless teaches us what figuringis.*objet réel de la peinture.