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

History of Art, Practice 39and screams) of the tortured, this interpretation would nonethelessbecome a vicious circle. Marrying the past in imagination is necessary,but it is not sufficient. We thereby gain access, without doubt, to thesubtleties of a given period, which we then try to understand throughits own intelligibility. But we must also know how to smash the ring,break its hymen, insofar as we want to understand the intelligibilityitself. This can be achieved only at the price of a distanced gaze: it issuspended in the present and knows this, knowledge that in turn rendersit fruitful.The situation, here again, is that of the alienating choice, a choicethat is always perilous. There is, on one side, the danger of contemporarylogocentrism: the danger of a strictly Saussurian or Lacanian approachthat would strip* the Okhamist signum or ‘‘reference’’ of itssubstance. 30 There is, on the other side, the danger of an empty totalitarianismin which the past—the supposed past, which is to say theideal past—would act as absolute master of the interpretation. Betweenthe two, the salutary practice: to proceed dialectically. For example,the fruitfulness of an encounter in which viewing the past withthe eyes of the present would help us to clear a hurdle, and literallyto plunge into a new aspect of the past, hitherto unperceived, anaspect buried since then (for such is the veritable plague of the historian:the insidious work of the since then), and which the new gaze, Ido not say naive or virginal, will suddenly have revealed.What is it, in the history of art, that justifies such encounters, suchqualitative leaps? Often, the history of art itself—I specify immediately:the history of art in the subjective genitive sense, which is tosay in the sense that art is the bearer of its own history, as opposedto the objective genitive sense (where art is understood first as theobject of a historical discipline). Much too often we confuse, we collapsethese two understandings of the history of art, doubtless becausewe dream of an objective discipline that could speak wholly in thename of a subjective practice. Obviously, that’s not the way thingsare. The history of art in the subjective sense is too often ignored bythe objective discipline, even though it preceded and conditions it.*décharnerait.