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

38 Confronting Images‘‘plants’’ intended to obscure the real motive? Why would the motivehave been written down anyway? And for that matter, was a crimecommitted at all? That’s what Sherlock Holmes dreamed from thebeginning, of course, but something that he can’t, from where he is,absolutely swear to . . .The grandeur and misery of the historian: his desire will always besuspended between the tenacious melancholy of the past as an objectof loss and the fragile victory of the past as an object of recovery, orobject of representation. He tries to forget, but cannot, that the words‘‘desire,’’ ‘‘imagination,’’ ‘‘fantasy’’ are there precisely to remind himof a fault that makes constant demands of him: the past of the historian—thepast in general—stems from the impossible, stems from theunthinkable. We still have some monuments, but we no longer knowthe world that required them; we still have some words, but we nolonger know the utterances that sustained them; we still have someimages, but we no longer know the gazes that gave them flesh; wehave descriptions of rites, but we no longer know either their phenomenologyor their exact efficacy value. What does this mean? Thateverything past is definitively anachronistic: it exists or subsists onlythrough the figures that we make of it; so it exists only in the operationsof a ‘‘reminiscing present,’’ a present endowed with the admirableor dangerous power, precisely, of presenting it, and, in the wake ofthis presentation, of elaborating and representing it. 29Any historian might respond that he knows all about this, namelythe perpetual constraint of the present on his vision of the past. Butthat, precisely, is not all that’s in question. In question, too, is itscontrary: namely that the past, too, functions as a constraint. First asa Zwang in Freud’s sense, for the past offers itself to the historian as asovereign obsession, a structural obsession. Second, because it sometimesimposes itself as an alienating element of the historical interpretationitself—a vexing paradox. What would we gain, in fact, by fullyrealizing the program of interpreting the realities of the past usingonly the categories of the past, supposing that this has any concretemeaning? We would perhaps gain an interpretation of the Inquisitionarmed solely with the arguments—‘‘specific’’ arguments—of the inquisitor.Even if it were also armed with the arguments (the defenses