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

History of Art, Practice 37discipline? How are we to grasp the ‘‘sameness’’ of a vanished rite, ofa medieval gaze, of an object whose world has passed, in other wordswhose world has crumbled? There is in every historian an empathicdesire (a desire that is absolutely justified); it can sometimes becomean obsession, a psychic pressure, even a Borgesian delusion. Such adesire names simultaneously the indispensable and the unthinkable ofhistory. Indispensable, because we can comprehend the past, in theliteral sense of ‘‘comprehend,’’ only by surrendering to a kind of hymenalbond: by penetrating the past as well as ourselves, in otherwords by feeling that we have married it in order to grasp it completely,while in return we are, by this act, gripped by it ourselves:grabbed, clasped, even stupefied. It is difficult to misconstrue, in thisempathic movement, the deeply mimetic character of the historicaloperation itself. Like the conservator who goes over with his ownhand every brush stroke of a picture that he ‘‘restores to life,’’ andabout which he can have a feeling of being its quasi-creator, of knowingeverything about it—likewise, the historian will place the words ofthe past in his mouth, the dogmas of the past in his head, the colorsof the past before his eyes ...and thus will proceed in the hope ofknowing it carnally, this past, even, in a sense, of anticipating it.This mimetic character is, at bottom, only the conquering advanceof the desire discussed above. As for the ‘‘conquest’’ itself, whosestrictly verifiable solidity cannot help but be exceptional, it will revealunder many aspects its consistency as fantasy. It will be, at the veryleast, an act of the imagination. 28 It can be deployed, as in Michelet,within a veritable poetics of the past (which, again, is not to say thatit is ‘‘false,’’ although it will indeed produce inaccuracies). But it willalways be the relative victory of a Sherlock Holmes who has arrivedat the scene much too late to investigate: some clues may have disappeared,unless they are still there, among millions of others that haveaccrued since; neither the number nor the name of all the players inthe drama can now be remembered; the weapon used to commit thecrime has disappeared or been wiped all too clean by time; it mightbe possible to infer the motive from extant documents—but aren’tthere other pertinent documents that are lost or that remain hidden?Couldn’t the documents in hand be deliberately misleading, so many