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

36 Confronting Imagesporary categories to interpret past realities’’? Such, in effect, is theconsequence, for the very notion of history, of the discourse of specificity.Such is its most radical, most self-evident, most pervasive formulation.Tertullian never stated—in these exact words, we mustunderstand—the difference between the visible and the visual; theMiddle Ages never spoke about the unconscious; and if medieval textsrefer to the significans and the significatum, it is certainly not in thesense of Saussure and Lacan. Conclusion: the visual does not exist inTertullian, the unconscious does not exist in the Middle Ages, and thesignifier is nothing but a tic of contemporary thought. There’s nothing‘‘historical,’’ nothing medieval in all that.The argument is, in more ways than one, enormous;* it has theweight of a self-evidence in which, in the eyes of many, a wholediscipline seems grounded (and the ‘‘weight’’ here could be calledgravity); but it also has the weight of an epistemological naïveté thatis extremely tenacious despite some decisive critical work, notablythat of Michel Foucault (and in this sense the ‘‘weight’’ would becalled clumsiness or inertia). For one perceives soon enough that sucha ‘‘self-evidence’’ engaged from the outset a complete philosophy ofhistory ...aphilosophy of history that itself has a history and that,from confused sediments, has never ceased camouflaging its ins, thebetter to exhibit, on the screen of self-evidences, the outs of its ownpractice.† So it is as a historian that we must respond to the ‘‘historian’sblow,’’ but also as a dialectician, and proceeding from the simplest—theaporias of practice—to the most complex—the aporias ofreason.Thus we must begin our interrogation of the ‘‘historian’s-blow’’ propositionby positivizing it,‡ in other words by reversing it: is it possible,in practice, to interpret the realities of the past using categories fromthe past—from the same past, of course? And what then would be thecontent of this ‘‘same’’? What can the ‘‘same’’ be for the historical*énorme, which can also mean ‘‘outrageous.’’†n’a cessé de camoufler ses tenants pour mieux exhiber, sur l’écran des evidences, ses propresaboutissants pratiques.‡en le positivisant.