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

20 Confronting Imageslost usage of knowledges of the past: we can still read the SummaTheologiae by Saint Antoninus, but we no longer have access to theassociations, to the meanings summoned up by the same Saint Antoninuswhen he contemplated Angelico’s fresco in his own cell at SanMarco. Saint Antoninus certainly wrote some known passages abouticonography (in particular, that of the Annunciation), but not a wordabout his co-religionist Fra Angelico, much less about his perceptionof the intense whites of San Marco. It just wasn’t in the mores of aDominican prior (or part of general writing usage) to record the rattlingforce given rise to* by a gaze posed on the painting—whichobviously does not mean that the gaze did not exist, or that it wasindifferent to everything. We cannot content ourselves with relyingonly on the authority of texts—or on the search for written‘‘sources’’—if we want to grasp something of the efficacy of images:for this is made up of borrowings, certainly, but also of interruptionseffected in the discursive order. Of transposed legibilities, but also ofa work of opening—and thus of breaking and entering, of symptomformation—effected in the order of the legible, and beyond it.This state of affairs disarms us. It constrains us either to remainsilent about an essential aspect of art images, for fear of saying somethingunverifiable (and it is thus that historians often oblige themselvesto say nothing except quite verifiable banalities), or to use ourimaginations and risk, in the last resort, unverifiability. How couldwhat we are calling the realm of the visual be verifiable in the strictsense, in the ‘‘scientific’’ sense, given that it is not itself an object ofknowledge or an act of knowledge, a theme or a concept, but only anefficacy on gazes? We can, however, advance a little. First by changingperspective: by noticing that to posit this notion of not-knowledgeonly in terms of a privation of knowledge is certainly not the bestway to broach our problem, since it is a way of keeping knowledgein its privileged position as absolute reference. Then we must reopenprecisely what seemed unlikely to provide Angelico’s fresco—so ‘‘simple,’’so ‘‘summary’’—with its most direct textual source: we mustreopen the luxuriant and complex Summa Theologiae, which, from Al-*suscitée.