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

16 Confronting Imagesthe simple, nonexistent out-of-frame of the painting to the ideal beyondof the entire oeuvre.There is, however, an alternative to this incomplete semiology. Itis based on the general hypothesis that the efficacy of these images isnot due solely to the transmission of knowledge—visible, legible, orinvisible—but that, on the contrary, their efficacy operates constantlyin the intertwinings, even the imbroglio, of transmitted and dismantledknowledges, of produced and transformed not-knowledges. It requires,then, a gaze that would not draw close only to discern andrecognize, to name what it grasps at any cost—but would, first, distanceitself a bit and abstain from clarifying everything immediately.Something like a suspended attention, a prolonged suspension of themoment of reaching conclusions, where interpretation would havetime to deploy itself in several dimensions, between the grasped visibleand the lived ordeal of a relinquishment. There would also be, inthis alternative, a dialectical moment—surely unthinkable in positivistterms—consisting of not-grasping the image, of letting oneself begrasped by it instead: thus of letting go of one’s knowledge about it. Therisks are great, of course. The beautiful risks of fiction. We wouldagree to surrender ourselves to the contingencies of a phenomenologyof the gaze, perpetually subject to projection and transference (in thetechnical sense of Freud’s Übertragung). We would agree to imagine,the sole safety-rail being our poor historical knowledge, how a fifteenth-centuryDominican named Fra Angelico could in his workspass on the chain of knowledge, but also break it up to the point ofits unraveling completely, so as to displace its paths and make themsignify elsewhere, otherwise.We must return, for that, to what is simplest, in other words tothe obscure self-evidences with which we began. We must momentarilyleave behind everything that we thought we saw because weknew what to call it, and return henceforth to what our knowledgehad not been able to clarify. We must return, then, this side of therepresented visible, to the very conditions of the gaze, of presentationand figurability, that the fresco proposed to us at the outset. Then wewill remember our paradoxical sense that there wasn’t much to see.We will remember the light against our face and above all the omni-