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

22 Confronting ImagesThe men of the Middle Ages did not think otherwise what constitutedfor them the fundament of their religion: namely the Book,Holy Scripture, every particle of which was apprehended as bearingwithin it the double power of event and mystery, of immediate (evenmiraculous) attainment and unattainability, of the near and the distant,of self-evidence and obscurity. Such is its considerable fascination,such is its aura. Holy Scripture was not for men of the period alegible object in our general understanding of the term. They wereobliged—their faith required this—to mine the text, to open it up, toeffect* there an infinite arborescence of relations, associations, andfantastic deployments wherein everything, notably things not in the‘‘letter’’ of the text (its manifest meaning), could flourish. This is notcalled a ‘‘reading’’—a term that suggests a process of narrowingdown—but an exegesis—a word that signifies going beyond the manifesttext, a word that signifies an openness to all the winds of meaning.When Albertus Magnus or his followers glossed the Annunciation,they saw in it something like a crystalline unique event, and at thesame time they saw in it an absolutely extravagant efflorescence ofinclusive or associated meanings, of virtual connections, of memories,of prophecies touching upon everything, from the creation of Adamto the end of time, from the simple form of the letter M (the initialof Mary) to the prodigious construction of angelic hierarchies. 7 TheAnnunciation was for them neither a ‘‘theme’’ (save, perhaps, in themusical sense) nor a concept, nor even a story in the strict sense—butrather a mysterious, virtual matrix of events without number.It is in this associative order of thought—an order by nature subjectto fantasy, requiring fantasy—that we must again pose our gaze tothe white wall† of Fra Angelico. This whiteness is so simple, yes. Butit is so altogether like the blank inside of the little book held by theVirgin: which is to say that it has no need of legibility to carry anentire mystery of the Scriptures. Likewise, it purged its descriptiveconditions, its conditions of visibility, so as to allow the visual eventof the white its full figuring force. It figures, then, in the sense that in*pratiquer, which can mean ‘‘to make’’; ‘‘to open up’’; ‘‘to bore,’’ ‘‘to drill,’’ or ‘‘to cut[a hole in].’’†pan.