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

28 Confronting Imageseven of the visible generally, with an intense and contradictory questdirected toward what I have called the requirement of the visual: a requirementfor the ‘‘impossible,’’ for something that was an Other ofthe visible—its syncope, its symptom, its traumatic truth, its beyond—and yet was not the invisible or the Idea, quite the contrary. Thissomething remains difficult to think, just as the paradoxes of the Incarnationare ‘‘impossible.’’But my most general hypothesis will be that, over the long term,the visual arts of Christianity actually took up this challenge. Thatthey realized, in their imaging material, this syncopization, this symptomizationof the visible world. They effectively opened imitation tothe subject* of the Incarnation. How did they manage to do this, andhow, in so doing, did they constitute the most image-rich religion thatever existed? Because the ‘‘impossible’’ paradoxes of the Incarnation,under cover of divine transcendence, touched the very heart of animminence that we might qualify, with Freud, as metapsychological—the imminence of this human capacity to invent impossible bodies. . . in order to know something of real flesh, of our mysterious, ourincomprehensible flesh. This capacity is properly called the power offigurability.We saw this: figurability stands opposed to what we habituallyunderstand by ‘‘figurative representation,’’ just as the visual moment,which it makes happen, stands opposed to, or rather is an obstacle to,an incision in, a symptom of, the ‘‘normal’’ regime of the visual world,a regime wherein we think we know what we are seeing, which is tosay wherein we know how to name every appearance that it pleasesthe eye to capture. Beyond the apparent contradictions of his apologetics,Tertullian really issued a kind of challenge to the image, oneamounting to: ‘‘Either you are merely the visible, in which case I willabhor you as an idol, or you open onto the radiance of the visual, inwhich case I will acknowledge in you the power to have touched medeeply, to have made a moment of divine truth surge forth, like amiracle.’’ The apparent discrepancy between the existence of powerfultheologies of the image and the virtual inexistence of a ‘‘Christian’’*motif.