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

History of Art, Practice 31ing, too, insofar as the destiny of gazes is always a matter of a memoryall the more efficacious because it is not manifest. With the visible, weare of course in the realm of what manifests itself. The visual, bycontrast, would designate that irregular net of event-symptoms thatreaches the visible as so many gleams or radiances, ‘‘traces of articulation,’’*as so many indices. . . . Indices of what? Of something—awork, a memory in process—that has nowhere been fully described,attested, or set down in an archive, because its signifying ‘‘material’’is first of all the image. The whole point now being to know howto include, within the historical method, this—visual—efficacy of thevirtual. But what, within the history of art, might the virtuality of awork of art mean? Will we be constrained, in order to think such avirtuality, to call upon the doubtful aid of an invisible realm of Ideas,lining the fabric of forms and colors? Isn’t it obvious, moreover, thata picture ‘‘manifestly’’ shows all of itself, without remainder, to thosewho know how to interpret its slightest detail? What, at bottom, cansymptom mean in a discipline wholly committed to the study of objectsthat are presented, offered, visible? This is without doubt the fundamentalquestion.But we should pose the question again on yet another level. How dosuch categories—the symptom, the visual, the virtual—concern thepractice of the history of art? Aren’t these categories too general, ortoo philosophical? Why insist on questioning a ‘‘visual’’ apparentlyused by no one to extract everything that we can know about worksof art? So we must listen to the principled objections, in any case tothe suspicions that this question can raise in a domain that todayjustifies itself by the internal progress of its method, and thus by itslegitimacy—a legitimacy that we must, in turn, interrogate against themeasure of its own methodology, in other words of its own history. 19The first suspicion concerns the very form of the interrogation,what we might call its philosophical tenor. It is curious, althoughreadily observable, that the academic practitioners of a discipline sogreatly indebted, in its history, to philosophical thought—a debt that*marquages d’énonciation: in the sense of radioactive traces.