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278 Notesnaissance approchéé (Paris: Vrin, 1927). Today, advanced disciplines such as themorphogenetic geometry of disasters strive not so much for models of precise descriptionas for ones that will facilitate the affirmation, as a process unfolds in time, that a form isbecoming significant. See René Thom, Semio Physics: A Sketch, trans. Vendla Meyer (Redwood,Calif.: Addison-Wesley, Advanced Book Program, 1970), 9.22. In a way consistent with the logical formulation ‘‘Your money or your life!’’ asdiscussed by Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book xi. The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), chap. 16, ‘‘TheSubject and the Other: Alienation,’’ 203–15. Note that the artist in Balzac’s admirable‘‘philosophical tale,’’ Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, finds himself confronting precisely this alienationquandary. See Didi-Huberman, La Peinture incarnée (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 47–49.23. ‘‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes,’’ in the words of Martin Heidegger. See ‘‘The Age of theWorld Picture,’’ in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays,trans. William Levitt (1938; New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 115–54.24. This is one conclusion drawn by Derrida in the course of his analysis of the Schapiro-Heideggerdebate, an analysis that construes both authors’ ‘‘desire for attribution’’ asa ‘‘desire for appropriation.’’ See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Restitutions,’’ in The Truth in Painting,trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),255–382. For Schapiro’s text, ‘‘The Still-Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heideggerand Van Gogh,’’ see Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society(New York: George Braziller, 1994), 135–42. (This collection also includes Schapiro’s laterruminations about the debate: ‘‘Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh’’ [1994], 143–52.)25. When it was established in 1968, the Revue de l’art (see note 20 above) describedits program as one of encouraging a ‘‘discipline that would take complete charge of theoriginal ‘products’ called works of art’’—a discipline vaguely yet radically distinct fromanthropology, psychology, sociology, and aesthetics (André Chastel, L’Histoire de l’art, finset moyens [Paris: Flammarion, 1980]). Curiously, after this birth under the aegis of selfisolation—andof totalization: ‘‘take complete charge’’—the second issue of the periodicalopened with a lament about the very real ‘‘intellectual isolation’’ (cloisonnement intellectuel)of art historians (ibid., 20). But such a state of affairs was fostered by the journal’s veryprogram. Note also the case, again made by André Chastel, for the history of art as anindependent discipline in the entry ‘‘L’Histoire de l’art’’ in the Encyclopédie Universalis, 2(Paris: E.U., 1968), 506–7.26. Any attempt to impose order, however much rooted in common sense, entails aset of logical, epistemological, and rhetorical choices; it is these that shape the specificcharacter of any catalogue. For an almost Lévi-Straussian examination of the Cinquecentoalong these lines, see P. Falguières, Invention et mémoire: Recherches sur les origines du muséeau xvie siècle, forthcoming.27. See, for example, Bazin, Histoire de l’histoire de l’art, 322ff.28. It is worth quoting the beautiful opening lines of George Duby’s L’Europe auMoyen Âge (Paris: Flammarion, 1984): ‘‘Let us imagine. That is what historians always mustdo. Their role is to assemble the remains and traces left behind by men of the past, toestablish and critique the evidence scrupulously. But these traces, especially those left bythe poor, by everyday life, are scarce, discontinuous. For remote periods such as the onein question here, they are extremely rare. A framework can be erected from them, but itis very fragile. Between its widely spaced supports is a gaping uncertainty. Thus when itcomes to Europe in the year 1000, we must use our imaginations’’ (13).