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

44 Confronting Imagesauto-teleology. The thought of the ‘‘end,’’ in this field as in others,belongs to a thought of ‘‘ends,’’ or rather of their definition, of theircategorical identification starting from an act of birth and an idea oftheir development.So the ‘‘modern’’ notion of the end of art is actually as old as thehistory of art itself: not the history of art in the genitive subjectivesense, for a practice need not be enlightened about its end to be efficaciousand to develop in the historical element in general; but I wantto discuss this order of discourse constituted in view of giving specificmeaning to a set of practices—within the perspective of a meaning ofhistory. Not only does the history of art desire its object to be past, 38the object of a ‘‘simple past,’’ so to speak; at the limit, it desires itsobject to be fixed, extinguished, worn out, withered, finished, andfinally discolored: in short, an object that has passed away. A strangedesire, then, and desolate, this work of mourning carried out by reasonin the face of its object, having secretly and in advance assassinatedit.We need only read the very first western text to posit, explicitlyand at length, the project of a history of art—only one part of a muchlarger encyclopedic project—to encounter immediately, from the firstlines, this notion of the end of art. I refer, of course, to the celebratedbook xxxv of Pliny’s Natural History. Pliny here announces at the outsetits color, so to speak—the color of that which is past:And first we shall say what remains to be said about painting[dicemus quae restant de pictura: alternatively, what ‘‘remains’’of painting, in the sense that Cicero could write pauci restant:little remains, all else is dead], an art that was formerly illustrious,at the time when it was in high demand with kingsand nations and when it ennobled others whom it deignedto transmit to posterity [posteris tradere]. But at the presenttime it has been entirely ousted [nunc vero in totum pulsa]. 39The conjugation, here, of two apparently contradictory themes alreadyconveys something about the status accorded its object by ahistory of art in the process of instituting it: it had to be ousted (pulsa),