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

History of Art, Practice 29art until toward the end of the third century, this discrepancy doubtlessstems, in part, from the fact that early Christianity did not try toconstitute for itself a museum of works of art; it sought first of all toground, within a space of ritual and belief, its own visual efficacy, itsown ‘‘visual art’’ in the broad sense, one that might manifest itselfthrough very different things: a simple sign of the cross, an accumulationof tombs ad sanctos, even the imposed spectacle of a martyr acceptingdeath in the center of an arena.In this era of beginnings, we must remember, Christianity was veryfar from having rejected the Mosaic ban of images. 15 If Tertullian, andquite a few other Church Fathers and, later, many mystical writers,began by accepting the visible world, the one in which the Word haddeigned to become flesh and undergo humiliation, this was on theimplicit condition of its being made to suffer a loss, a sacrificial injury.It was necessary somehow to ‘‘circumcise’’ the visible world, to beable to lance it and place it in crisis; failing that, almost to extenuateand sacrifice it in part so as to give it a chance at miracles, sacraments,transfigurations. Which would be designated by a key word in thisentire economy: a conversion. In effect, nothing less than a conversionwas required to find within the visible itself the visible’s Other, whichis to say a visual index and symptom of the divine. Now we understandbetter how it was that Christians first laid claim not to thevisibility of the visible—to what remained mere appearance, the venustasof figures of Venus: in short, idolatry—but to its visuality: inother words, to its character as ‘‘sacred,’’ shattering event, to its incarnatetruth traversing the appearance of things like a momentary disfigurement,the scopic effect of something else—like an effect of theunconscious. Getting right to the point, we could say that what Christianityultimately summoned from the visible was not mastery, butthe unconscious. Now, if we are to make sense of this expression—the‘‘unconscious of the visible’’—we must turn not to its opposite, theinvisible, but to a phenomenology that is trickier, more contradictory,more intense also—more ‘‘incarnate.’’ It is this that the visual event,the visual symptom, tries to designate.The history of art fails to comprehend the vast constellation ofobjects created by man in view of a visual efficacy when it tries to