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

History of Art, Practice 27an iconology that is singularly weakened: deprived of a code, deliveredup to associations. We have spoken of not-knowledge. We have,above all, by opening a caesura in the notion of the visible, liberated acategory that the history of art does not recognize as one of its tools.Why? Isn’t it too strange or too theoretical? Doesn’t it amount merelyto a personal view, an overly intellectual view, one that splits, if nothairs into quarters, then at least the visible in two?There are, as it happens, two ways of responding to such objections.The first is to document and defend the historical pertinence ofmy hypothesis. I think that the rift between the visible and the visualis ancient, that it developed over an extended period.* I think that itis implicit, and quite often explicit, in countless texts, in countlessrepresentational practices. And I do not think that it is so ancient—atany rate in Christian civilization—only because I attribute to it a stillmore general anthropological value. But a demonstration of this generalitywould entail retracing, step by step, the entire history in question—andthat history is long. For the moment, let’s make do with asketch, an overview of the problem. In any case, I am not unawarethat it is in the course of the research itself that the hypothesis inquestion will demonstrate its pertinence or, conversely, its misdirection.Christian art had not yet been born when the first Church Fathers,Tertullian in particular, had already effected a tremendous breach inthe classical theory of mimesis through which would surge forth a newand specific imaginary mode, an imaginary mode dominated by theproblematic—but central—fantasy of the Incarnation. A theology ofthe image, which had absolutely nothing to do with any artistic program,already provided all the fundamentals of an aesthetic to come:an aesthetic unthinkable at the time in terms of iconography or‘‘works of art’’—these words having, for the time being, no chance ofcorresponding to any reality whatever 14 —but an aesthetic just thesame, something like the categorical imperative of a disposition toreinvent in the face of the visible world. This attitude opened up aparadoxical field, one that combined a fanatical hatred of appearances,*dans la longue durée.