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

18 Confronting Imagesand paradoxical. Irrefutable, because its efficacy is straightforward: itspower alone imposes it before the recognition of any appearance—‘‘there’s white,’’ quite simply, right in front of us, even before thiswhite can be thought as the attribute of something represented. Andit is, then, paradoxical as much as sovereign: paradoxical, because virtual.It is the phenomenon of something that does not appear clearlyand distinctly. It is not an articulated sign; it is not legible as such. Itjust offers itself: a pure ‘‘appearance ‘of something’ ’’* that puts us inthe presence of the chalky color, long before it tells us what this color‘‘fills’’ or qualifies. All that appears, then, is the quality of the figurable—terriblyconcrete, illegible, presented. Massive and deployed. Implicating†the gaze of a subject, its history, its fantasies, its internaldivisions.The word virtual is meant to suggest how the regime of the visualtends to loosen our grip on the ‘‘normal’’ (let’s say rather: habituallyadopted) conditions of visible knowledge. Virtus—a word that Angelicomust himself have declined in all its shadings, a word whose theoreticaland theological history is prodigious, particularly within thewalls of Dominican monasteries since Albertus Magnus and SaintThomas Aquinas—designates precisely the sovereign power of thatwhich does not appear visibly. The event of virtus, that which is inpower, that which is power, never gives a direction for the eye tofollow, or a univocal sense of reading. Which does not mean that it isdevoid of meaning. On the contrary: it draws from its kind of negativitythe strength of a multiple deployment; it makes possible not oneor two univocal significations, but entire constellations of meaning, ofwhich we must accept never to know the totality and the closure,constrained as we are simply to make our way incompletely throughtheir virtual labyrinth. In short, the word virtual here designates thedoubly paradoxical quality of the chalky white that confronted us inthe little cell in San Marco: it is irrefutable and simple as event; it issituated at the junction of a proliferation of possible meanings,*A concept expounded by M. Heidegger in Being and Time (1927) and rendered by hisFrench translators as phénomène-indice; the key passage is quoted in the Appendix, endnote56.†impliquant, which can also mean ‘‘implying.’’