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

History of Art, Practice 49is an external activity—the wiping-off of some drops of rainor specks of dust from these fruits, so to speak—one whicherects an intricate scaffolding of the dead elements of theiroutward existence—the language, the historical circumstances,etc., in place of the inner elements of the ethical lifewhich environed, created, and inspired them. And all this wedo, not in order to enter into their very life but only to representthem (vorstellen) in our imagination. But, just as the girlwho offers us the plucked fruits is more than the Naturewhich directly provides them—a Nature diversified into theirconditions and elements, the tree, air, light, and so on—because she sums all this up in a higher mode, in the gleamof her self-conscious eye and in the gesture with which sheoffers them, so, too, the Spirit of Fate that presents us withthose works of art is more than the ethical life and the actualworld of that nation, for it is the inwardizing in us of theSpirit which in them was still [only] outwardly manifested. 48This text is admirable, notably because it is, even in its lesser articulations,dialectical in what I would call the uneasy sense of the word.Admittedly, it concludes with the idea of a history that has internalizedand superceded the world of its object, and thus with the ideathat syntheses effected by ‘‘self-conscious’’ historians are ‘‘superior’’to their past object . . . But this is also a text that does not elide themorbid implications of the Nachträglichkeit. It knows that the discourseof history establishes only ‘‘an intricate scaffolding of the deadelements’’ of a past. It knows and says that the advent of the historyof art signifies the death of God as much as the death of art. In short,Hegel does not forget the loss entailed by all knowledge—a loss of‘‘the affective life of their being there,’’ as he remarks of the immemorialand enigmatic statues of ancient Greece. A loss to which we todaycan reference the urgency of our questioning of the visual efficacy andanthropological dimension of those visible objects that are the said‘‘works of art’’: ‘‘The admiration we experience on seeing these statues. . . is powerless to make us kneel,’’ Hegel noted in his lectureson aesthetics. 49 If they adhered closely to the teaching of such a text,