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

50 Confronting Imagesart historians would discover the inevitably open, split status of theirobjects: objects henceforth placed under their gaze, but deprived ofsomething that we of course no longer want anything to do with:something that has effectively passed away. Something, however, thatmade the whole life of these objects, their function and their efficacy:something that in turn placed everyone under the gaze of the object ...The difficulty being, henceforth, to look at what remains (visible)while summoning up what has disappeared: in short, to scrutinize thevisual traces of this disappearance, which I will otherwise call (andwithout any clinical connotations): its symptoms. 50A paradoxical task for the history of art? A task all the more paradoxicalbecause the ‘‘neo-Hegelian’’ tone generally adopted by thediscipline shuns a patient rereading of Hegel, or, at any rate, shunsthinking its own position dialectically. It retains only the dream of,the demand for absolute knowledge, and thereby falls simultaneouslyinto two nets,* into two philosophical traps. The first is of a metaphysicalnature; we might call it the quiddity trap, as this word stillevokes a celebrated remark ostensibly made by Solon and reportedby Aristotle: we can only advance a truth about someone (‘‘Socratesis happy’’) after his death (‘‘if Socrates had still been alive when I spoke,at any moment he could have become unhappy, in which case whatI said would not have been true’’). 51 So historians might have a fundamentallymetaphysical motive for wanting to make their object anobject that has passed away: I will tell you what you are, you workof art, when you are dead. Thus I will be certain of speaking the truthabout the history of art, when this history is finished . . . Now it iseasier to understand why such an end might have, secretly, been desired;why, too, the theme of the ‘‘death of art’’ has managed to lingersuch a long time in the historical and theoretical discourses aboutpainting.The second philosophical trap is of a positivist order. It thinks itcan eradicate all ‘‘loss’’ with regard to the past by answering it with adefinitive victory of knowledge. It no longer says that art is dead, it saysthat art is immortal. It ‘‘preserves,’’ ‘‘catalogues,’’ and ‘‘restores’’ it.*panneau, which, in tailoring, can also mean ‘‘panel,’’ as in ‘‘three-paneled skirt.’’