interpretation of the illic which Derrida attributes to every place44, but as an exclusive, stable construction of the illic, understood

as the place to which no road leads, but from whence a new speech arises. To U~vinas, rebuilding the Jewish state means overcoming a misunderstood postmodern paradigm that stylised Jewry into a force, subverting the ultimate interpretative access of the logos by letting its fundament slide within an endless play of difference that transgresses every border. Zionism thus does not prove to be just a simple denial of a conditio moderna (identified for a long time with the conditions of galut), but a political formula for turning grammatology into a philosophy of redemption. While deconstruction has detected a "beyond the meaning" within the autonomous tendencies of signifiers, U:vinas goes a step further, attempting to build, upon the beyond exposed by deconstruction, the meaning of that beyond (le sens de cet au-del:'t). In this attempt, he picks up the gesture ofRosenzweig, who closed the gates of philosophy behind him at the conclusion of his Star of Redemption by moving beyond textuality "into life". It would be easy to conclude from this gesture that the Levinasian contribution to literary theory may prove insignificant, insofar as the "monotheistic challenge", the charging of reading and writing with transcendence, ultimately leaves our last 30 years of work on text and letters behind with an unsympathetic glance. Nonetheless, it is this very gesture which may relax our preoccupation with the book, enabling a new approach towards the responsibility of the literary.

Iconology and Iconicity

Towards an Iconic History of Figures, Between Erwin Panofsky and Jean-Luc Marion

Adi Efal

I The Image: Ends and Beginnings In 1992, when William J. Thomas Mitchell announced the "pictorial turn"l, a fundamental controversy regarding the status and the legitimacy of the visual image was in full sway.2 In this controversy, it was primarily the status of painting and its possible demise that was at issue. The writers who coined the central terms of this debate were Douglas Crimp with the notion of the "end of painting"3, and Arthur Danto with the notion of the "end of art"4. These two notions were interpreted further either in the direction of the death of painting5 or in

William J. Thomas Mitchell, "The Pictotial Turn", in Mitchell, Picture Theory. Essays on verbal and visual representation (Chicago, London: Univetsity of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 11-34 [A teprint of an earliet vetsion of the essay undet the the same name, which appeared in Art Forum 30, 7 (March 1992)]. See David Fteedbetg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: Univetsity of Chicago Press, 1989); Ftedtic Jameson, "Transfotmation of the Image in Postmodernity", in Jameson, The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1993-1998 (New York, London: Verso, 1998), pp. 93-135. . Douglas Ctimp, "The End of Pain ting", in Crimp, On the Museum Ruins (Cambtidge, Mass.: MIT Ptess, 1993), pp. 84-108 [A teprint of an essay under the same name, which appeared in October 16 (Spting 1981): 69-86]. Arthur Danto, "The End of Art", in Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 81-116; see also his later "Painting and the Pale of Histoty: The Passing of the Pure" and "Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art", in Danto, After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 101-116, and 135-152. For sevetal discussions on Danto's "End of Art", see a special issue of History and Theory 37 (4) (1998). For a late elaboration of this notion see Donald Kuspit, The End of Art (Cambtidge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004). Yves-Alain Bois, "Painting: The Task of Mourning", in Bois, Painting As Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Ptess, 1990), pp. 229-244 [A reprint of an essay of the same name in Endgame: Reftrence and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture. Exh. Cat. (Boston, 1986)]; see also Yves-Alain Bois, Arthur Colemann Danto, Thierry De Duve, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit,

44

See Detrida,

"Violence and metaphysics",

pp. 144ff.

Naharaim, vo!. 1, pp. 81-105 Walter de Gruyter 2008

DOI10.1515/naha.2008.007

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the direction of the death of art altogether6 . These various possibilities of closure accompanied a more general controversy, revolving around the issue of the end of history, addressed most notably by Francis Fukuyama7. The combination of these created finally the proclamation of the "end of the history of art", both as a discipline and as an ontologico-historical entity, which was announced by Hans Belting in his essay "Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte"8 . Both the "end of art" and the "end of history" are, as is well known, interpretative notions, referring to the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel indeed spoke of a certain completion of the duties of art in the age of the advent of the absolute self-knowing of the spirit, in his Vorlesungen aber die Asthetik9, but he did not proclaim an end to any artistic production whatsoever. The notion of the end of history, in its turn, is interpretative in a similar manner, existing already in the earlier work of Alexander Kojeve, who was, like Fukuyama, less interested in Hegel's metaphysics than in its politico-economical implications. ID A noteworthy and indeed malignant nuance in this short genealogy of mourning is the turn of the discussions from the notion of "end" to the notion of "death". It was Martin Heidegger who linked, in 1926, the notions of "end" ("Ende") and "totality" ("Totalitiit"), with the notion of "death" in his discussion of Being-toward-death (Sein-zum- Tod) in Sein und Zeitll. Mfected, more or less directly, by this Heideggerian move, post-structuralist theory expressed further concerns regarding the "death of the author" or the destruction of the artwork. 12 The theme itself of the "end of painting" is not an invention of the postmodern age. One of the major consequences of Avant-Garde art, this theme appeared as the call for the liberation of painting from its traditional limitations, leading

occasionally to the proclamation of its imminent end.13 The artistic fusion of two-dimensional painting and its surrounding space, elaborated in the second half of the 20th century by Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Earth Art, created gradually, in the final quarter of the twentieth-century, the meta-medium of Installation Art, which indeed manifests the era of "the end of the history of art". Installations are conceived as spatial environments in which effectively the image cannot be separated from the organic spatial whole in which it is placed. Installation Art was backed up by the Derridean notion of "spacing" (espacement), one of the intriguing expressions of post-structuralist moves against the sovereignty of the image. 14 "Spacing" entails exactly this blurring of the boundaries between an image and its environment. The image was "spaced-out" and articulated as a continuous movement of differentiation and cavity-formation of the gesture of "writing". In the 1980's, painting once again became a leading medium, while poststructuralist Iconoclasm still served as its prominent theoretical advocate. Paintings exercising juxtaposition and pastiche, like these of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, were considered as deconstructive or deconstructed entities, as based on the plurality of differences and the dispersal of the cohesiveness of the image.15 Both this painting and the post-structuralist theories that accompanied it connected artistic production to the mournful, melancholic, and dispersed "post-modern condition". In the midst of the mourning period, however, another direction of research and theory was starting to take form and develop. This was the direction that will be the theme of the present paper: the explorations of Byzantine theutgical icons and the theories pertaining to them. Hans Belting's Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image befOrethe Era of Art (1990)16, Moshe Barash's Icon (1992) 17,Charles Barber's Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of RBpresentation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (2002)18, Michael Kelly's Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (2003)19 and significant passages of William J. Thomas Mitchell's book, What Do Pic-

David Reed, Elisabeth Sussman, "The Mourning 2003),206ff. 6

Aftet", Artftrum

International

41 (Match

7 8 9

10 11 12

Geotges Didi-Hubermann, 'Tart meurt, Lart renalt: Lhistoire recommence (De Vasari a Winckelmann)", in Didi-Hubermann, L'image Survivante. Histoire de l' art et temps des fimtomes selon Aby 'Warburg (Paris: Edition de Minuit, 2002), pp. 11-26; Fredric Jameson, "'End of Art' or 'End of History'?", in Jameson, The Cultural Turn, pp. 73-92; The Death of Art, Art and Philosophy vol. 2, ed. Berel Lang (New York, 1984); Gianni Vartimo, "The Death or Decline of Art", in Vattimo, The End of Modernity. Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988), pp. 51-64. Francis Fukuyama, "Reflections on the End of History, Five Years Later", History and Theory 34, no. 2 (May 1995), 27-43. Hans Belting. Das Ende del' Kunstgeschichte? (Miinchen: Deurscher Kunstvedag, 1984). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Asthetik, in Hegel, werke in zwanzig Biinden, ed. EvaMoldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970ff.) vol. 13, pp. 141-142. Michael S. Roth, "A problem of Recognition. Alexandre Kojeve and the End of History", History and Theory 24, no. 3 (October 1985),293-306. Martin Heidegger, Sein undZeit (Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), pp. 241-267. See especially Roland Barthes, "La mort de I'aureur", (1968) in Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue. Essais critiques IV (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1984), pp. 63-69.

13

Bois, "Painting: The Task of Mourning", pp. 236-238; Gloria Groom, Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis and Roussel, 1890-1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 1-2. Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt Press, 1996), pp. 69-73. See for example Holland Cotter, "Deconstructed Art Journal 50 (Spring 1991),79-82. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

14 15 16

painting: some younger artists in the 1980s",

Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence- A History of the Image befOrethe Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) [A translation of: Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Miinchen: C. H. Beck, 1990)]. Moshe Barash, Icon: Studies in the history of an idea (New York: New York University Press, 1992). Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, NJ: Pnnceton University Press, 2002). Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

17 18 19

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tures "Want?(2005)2 are only several examples of a field of research that is still expandingY I understand this interest in the Icon and in Iconoclasm as one of the manifestations of the controversy around the legitimacy of painting and of art and around their life, death, or end. Belting suggested the connection between the Byzantine culture of icons, the birth of painting in the Western Europe, and the employment of the image in fascist political visual culture.22 Marie-Jose Mondzain23 suggested as well a continuity between the iconoclastic and iconophilic theories of the Byzantine church and the "economy of images" today. Indeed the prism of the Byzantine Icon, an image subordinated to and standing for an infinite and exterior referent, becomes a relevant approach to the visual figure, an alternative to the regime of "simulacral" images in mass-media and cyber culture. Byzantine theory of the icon serves as an alternative model for understanding figures and especially paintings, a model that does not bestow upon the image absolute sovereignty, and nevertheless allows its legitimacy and distinction. Actually, it was already in the generation of "post-modern criticism" that the iconoclastic attitude started to arise. That was the age of a somewhat "physical" Iconoclasm, which turned violent metaphorical gestures of fragmentation and disfiguration against images, paintings, and the histories of art. Many procedures of post-structuralist criticism had iconoclastic character: the sovereign unified image was dismantled and deconstructed into a figural chain of infinite fragments. Aggressive metaphors of malady, melancholy, mourning, and torment concerning images were (and unfortunately still are) in abundance in the last two decades. For example, Georges Didi-Hubermann presented an orientation towards the "torn" and "broken" image as an alternative to the organicist and holistic methodology of art history.24 Even critical and subtle writers like Yves-Alain Bois, suspicious of the thesis of the end or the death of painting, still retained a model of mourning, though in this case a nonpathological mourning-work which is to be carried out properly and brought to its consummation.25 It was actually Bois who noticed the Historicist undertones
20 William J. Thomas Mitchell, "Vital Signs/Cloning Terror", "Offending Images", and "Totemism, Fetishism, Idolatry", in Mitchell, What do Pictures \%nt? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 5-27, 125-144, 188-196. See also Icon and WOrd: The Power of Images in Byzantium. Studies presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Antony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Negating the Image: Case Studies in Iconoclasm, ed. JeffJohnson and Anne McClanan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). Belting, "Likeness and Presence", p. 11. Marie-Jose Mondzain, Image, icone, economie: Les sources byzantines de l'imaginaire contemporain (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1996); Marie-Jose Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: the Byzantine origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Georges Didi-Hubermann, "Limage comme dechirure et la mort du dieu incarne", in, DidiHubermann, Devant L'image: Question posee aux fins d'une histoire de lart (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1990), pp. 171-269. Bois, "Painting: The task of Mourning", pp. 243-244.

of the iconoclastic26 discourse of the end of painting, and who proposed that a working-through of this mourning will also entail general and historiographical consequences for the discipline of art history.27 It is this path of the relation between the thought about the status of painting and the elucidation of the fate and of the responsibility of the discipline of the history of art that I shall take in this essay, by reflecting upon the model of the Byzantine icon. I suggest that one of the profound roots of the aforementioned acute state of affairs is to be found in the most influential, even if controversial, methodical core of art history in the 20th century, i.e. the Iconological method of Erwin Panofsky, developed between the 1920's and the 1950's. The presence and influence of the Iconological method is to be found not only in art-history research, but also in art criticism and interpretation, discourse, exhibition and practice throughout the 20th century. It's basic claim, fully concomitant with the Hegelian claim for the "end of art", is that a full and rigorous understanding (Verstehen) of the "content" (Inhalt) of an artwork is to be achieved bya diggingup of its close affinities, preferably documented and causally demonstrated, with philosophical and metaphysical tendencies of its time.28 Indeed Panofsky, in a heroic manner, was the chief contributor to the historiographical opening-up of the discipline of Art History from a science rooted in connoisseurship practice, analysis of style, or biographical explorations, to its enlarged role amongst the humanities, as eruditio29 involving the realm of Ideas, thought, and the history of philosophy. The elaboration of the Iconological method should be considered as one of the most important conceptual achievements of the 20th century. In his Studies in lconology, for example, Panofsky explored the manners in which works of distinguished Renaissance artists, such as Titian and Michelangelo, their matic delve corresponded with, or even actively interpreted, philosophical tropes of time, referring mainly to issues of Renaissance Neo-platonism.30 Enigemblems and subjects that demanded identifications lead Panofsky to into elaborated and sophisticated processes of excavation of continuous

traditions of affinities between ideas and visual marks. Most of these iconological trails drew a delicate line of survival of classical Greek art, Mythology, and

21

26 27
28

Ibid., p. 240: "[... ] as an iconoclast readymade, Ibid., p. 230.

the monochrome

[... ]."

22 23

Erwin Pan ofsky, "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art", in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts. Papers in and on art history (Garden City, N..: Doubleday, 1955), pp. 38-41. Pp. 30-39; see also William S. Heckscher, "Die Genesis der Ikonologie", in Ekkehard Kaemmerling (Ed.), Ikonographie und Ikonologie. Theorien, Entwlcklung, Probleme (Koln: Dumont, 1979).

24

29 30

See Erwin Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic in the VisualArts, p. 25. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology. Humanistic York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1939).

Discipline",

in Panofsky, Meaning

Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New

25

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philosophy into the early-modern era, thus raising moral and philological issues related with the rise of Humanism.31 Though in most cases Panofsky exhibits a remarkable ability to present and analyse philosophical systems, one of the apparent problems of these Iconological studies is that it entails a temptation to present the philosophical content in a superficial, general manner, using it merely as an illustrative tool for solving the visual "cipher". In such cases, both the critical view of philosophical systems and the singularity and specificity of the image are lost. Many other claims were raised against this Panofskyan proposition of forming a liaison between art and thought, most of them deriving from the understandable concern about the consummation of the reality of the work by the abstract reality of thought.32 Nevertheless, even for "positivistic" critics of Panofsky's Iconology; the assumption is that every relationship between art and thought, even if it is to be dispelled, is to be conceived primarily on the basis of the lconological model. Therefore a critique and rehabilitation of the Iconological method is still indispensable for any re-structuring of the science of art. Furthermore, a successful criticism and re-appropriation of the notion of Iconology could be one of the venues of engaging with the present crisis in the state of art and more specifically of painting. It may be that an enrichment of our understanding of the Iconological method by the sources of the theory of the Byzantine icon, will enable us to start a reconstruction of a cognitive-oriented history of images, or rather of figures, that will not be threatened by being consumed in the fire ofIdeas; instead, it will entail the posing of a distance between figures and ideas by retaining the sovereignty and reality of the past and the coming-into-being of a figure. In the present article I shall not present a fully developed integration of Iconology and lconicity; instead, I shall try to affiliate, and distinguish between, the two orientations, and to suggest in what way this affiliation can contribute to an engagement with the aforementioned crisis.

sis of the image and the possible attitude towards its conclusion on the medial reality of painting, has in itself a "non-Panofskyan" character, as virtually all of Panofsky's studies are indifferent to issues of the specificity and the materiality of medium. The iconological cipher can relate to any kind of medium, be it painting, sculpture, architecture, or other, and it constitutes an absolute continuity of interpretation of various forms and mediums representing the same "theme". As such, the Iconological "symbol" is considered rather as a scheme than as a specific material reality. 33 I further suggest that a rehabilitation of painting as a response to poststructuralist physical Iconoclasm, detached as much as possible from the discourse of "mourning", can be aided by a return to the theory of icons, created also in Byzantium as a response to aggressive theological gestures directed against images. Byzantine theologians formulated various re-definitions of the image that were directed to its rehabilitation. As I noted above, in the recent debates revolving around the state of the image, it was the place of painting that was underlined, and thus it is painting which must be rehabilitated today in contrast to installations, formless art, and "virtual images". Painting, beyond all other media, insists on its specific material reality, on its distinction from its environment, and on its inner cohesion. It resists the proclamations of its end. The important series of exhibitions, "The Triumph of Painting", which took place at the Saatchi gallery in London (20052007)34, points to a renewed confidence in the painted figure, a confidence which must be, however, backed-up metaphysically. Post-structuralist criticism, as we have presented its tendencies above, can no longer serve as a instrument for this backing-up and rehabilitation. The proper metaphysical basis should be located beyond the discourse of death, disintegration, rebirth, and survival. Indeed this proposition is consciously highly speculative, and it also demands that the person whose research is "solely" historical take a metaphysical stance. A starting point for this rehabilitation can be an iconic re-definition of painting, a rehabilitation that describes painting as the taking place of a dual movement: that of a restoration of an exterior reality, simultaneous with a distinction and separation from it. This movement separates by distancing. It distinguishes between the painted image and every reality it refers to, be it external reality, inner imagery, the divinity, the figure's past, or its cultural "environment". Thus, painting, as an elemental unit of the figurative, should not be located in a

11 Rehabilitating Painting: The Potentiality of the Theory of Icons As argued above, I maintain that any current endeavour to re-think the status of western art, and to look for its rejuvenated cohesion in the face of the various post-structuralist gestures of its disintegration, should be made through the return to a basic understanding and definition of painting. It is worth noting that my insistence on basing my understanding of the reality of the current cri31 32 See also most of the chapters in Pan ofsky's Meaning in the Visual Arts. See for example Michael Ann Holly, "Later Work: An Iconological Perspective", in Holly, Panofiky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca and London: The Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 159-193; Ono Pacht, "Kritik der Ikonologie" (I977), in Kaemmerling (Ed.), Ikonographie und Ikonologie, pp. 353-377.

33

34

Central examples of this tendency are to be found throughout Panofsky's Meaning in the Visual Arts, as well as in his earlier "Die Perspektive als 'Symbolische Form''', in Vortrage der Bibliothek warburg 1924-1925 (Leipzig und Berlin: Bibliothek Warburg, 1927), reprinted in Erwin Panofsky, Aufiatze zu Grundftagen der Kunstwissenschaji, ed. Hariolf Oberer (Berlin: Hessling, 1964), pp. 99-168. [Translated in to English as Perspective as Symbolic Form (trans. e. S. Wood, New York: Zone Books, 1991)]. The Triumph of Painting - Essays by Alison M. Gingeras, Barry Schwabsk (London: Cape,

2005).

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Hegelian dialectics of reconciliation and self-knowledge, understood as a Benjaminian dialectical image35, or appropriated in a Heideggerian finite history36. Instead, painting should be understood as a retroactive movement of restoration. I shall argue further that painting, as a paradigm for the figurative arts and their history, is a restoration of a change. I approach "change" from a Cartesian point of view, as a change in thought, which is the moment of "distinction" of "mental attention" (menti attenti).37 Every distinct mental attention, says Descartes, is also necessarily clear38, that is, it is present and intuitively accessible.39 But it is "distinct" only as long as it contains only what is clear, a characteristic which makes the distinct perception most precise and separated from other perceptions. As a thought can be clear without being distinct, we usually encounter figures only as clear, present to our inspection, but not as separated and precise as a distinct perception should be, that is not as exclusively clear. The task of the iconic historian would be then to restore, retroactively, a moment of distinct mental attention corresponding to the clearly given figure. Though this proposition certainly refers to Erwin Panofky's "Iconology"40, I distinguish between the Iconological and iconic history. Iconic history of figures will only start by pointing out, in an iconological manner, strong analogies between a figure and philosophical systems of its epoch, looking for a synthetic intuition of WTeltanschauung.41 Later on, iconic history will articulate the moment of the change of distinction. By posing the "ratio"42 between the figure and its historical "background" and presenting the distance between the two, it will approach, by approximation, the distinct perception of this figure. Hence I regard my proposition as "rationalising" figurative art-works. This rationalising poses thefigure retroactively as a repetition of a change in thought. The radical past, the "efficient cause" of this change43 is forever unknown and unseen: but by measuring the proportions between, in the terms of Descartes44, that which is known and that which we do not know in advance, we may approach, by a tangent, the change of distinction, which is taken as the unknown in advance,
35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), pp. 464,466,475. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, pp. 382-404. See also Jean-Luc Nancy, "I.:histoire finie", in Nancy, La communautedesa:uvree (Paris: Bourgois, 1986), pp. 235-278. Renati Descartes, Principia Philosophia (Amsterdam: Elzevier, 1644), p. 17, 45. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 45. Panofsky, "Iconography and Iconology", pp. 38-41. Erwin Panofsky, "Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsbedeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst" (1932), in Panofsky, Aufiiitze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, pp. 9395; Panofsky, "Iconography and Iconology", p. 41. See Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary fOunded on Andrews' edition of Freund's Latin Dictionary revised (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), pp. 1525-1527. Aristotle, The Metaphysics (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 115 (l013a-1014a). Rene Descartes, Regula Ad Directionem Ingenii, in Descartes, CEuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam (Paris: Vrin, 1964), vo!. X, p. 468 (Regula XIX).

and to which we can refer as the "formal cause" of our figure. Creating a series of distances, from the radical past to the change in thought, through the historical context and the accepted stories of the history of art and philosophy, finally to the figure itself, is the task of the iconic historian of figures. My propositions here are inspired by a reading of the writings of Jean-Luc Marion. Marion belongs to a generation of philosophers still working today (together with Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Ranciere) who, during the 1980s, moved away from post-structuralism, by re-reading and criticising, in various manners, German Idealism, Phenomenology, and the writings of Martin Heidegger. One of the traits of this generation is an awakened confidence in the visual image, apparent in various essays by Jean-Luc Nancy45, Jacques Ranciere46, and Jean-Luc Marion. Marion, as early as 1977, turned to the theory of the Icon and its implications for today's culture. Although Marion describes his thought as thoroughly phenomenological,47 here I will affiliate it with what I consider as the dualist temperament of the French philosophical tradition, from Descartes to Bergson and Deleuze. French dualism, I argue, is not, as is usually thought, a "mind-body" dualism; instead, it is more accurate to describe it is a dualism of change and resistance, in which change is concomitant with cognitive activity and resistance with the extended reality.48 This tradition treated the figure49 as a result of the distinguishing-movement (change) of thought, which is itself purely cognitive, unseen, and pre-existing, that can be traced only retroactively, and only by figures (numbers, symbols, words, or images). In this tradition, which generally considers thought, in Descartes's terms, as "really distinguished"50 from the resistant res extensa, figures are the place, the situation, of the two realities. The problematic status of the "crossing-point", the "pineal gland" in Descartes' thought may be overcome by defining it merely as the place of the two. As such,

45

Jean-Luc Nancy, Le regard du portrait (Paris: Ed. Galilee, 2000); Jean-Luc Nancy, Visitation (de la peinture chretienne) (Paris: Ed. Galilee, 2001); Jean-Luc Nancy, Au fOnd des images (Paris: Ed. Galilee, 2003). Jacques Ranciere, Le destin des images (Paris: La Fabrique Ed., 2003) Especially pp. 26-31; Jacques Ranciere,"La fin des images est derriere nous"; in Ranciere, Malaise dans l'esthetique (Paris: Galilee, 2004). Jean-Luc Marion, Le visible et le revete (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 2005), pp. 75-97, 165-182 On Dualism in the French tradition, see for example Pierre Montebello, La decomposition de la pensee. Dualite et empirisme transcendantal chez Maine de Biran (Grenoble: Du Levant, 1994); Frederic Worms, Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 2004). See Henri Bergson, Matiere et memoire. Essai sur la relation du corps et l'esprit (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1999), pp. 25-39, 59-69; Gilles Deleuze, 'Timage de la pensee", in Deleuze, Diffirence et repetition (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1968), pp. 169-217; for Descartes on Figures; see Descartes, Regula, pp. 412-417 (Regula XII), p. 438-454 (Regula XIVXV); for Descartes on Images see Rene Descartes, Meditations metaphysiques (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1979), pp. 156-159, 169-177; Jean-Frans:ois Lyotard, Discours/Figure (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979). Descartes, Meditations metaphysiques, pp. 172: "reali mentis a corpor distinctione."

46

47 48

49

42 43 44

50

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figures have no metaphysical status of their own, only a heuristic one. Though this statement obviously can be difficult for an art historian or for the artist to accept, as it denies the image its metaphysical priority, I suggest that this limitation of the status of the image-figure is a fruitful strategy, orientated towards overcoming the contemporary crisis of the figure and its science. In fact the art historian Henri Focillon constructed, during the 'forties, a historiosophy of figures (formes) quite close to what I have just described, and he may be regarded as a precursor of my present suggestion. 5I I read Marion's theory of the image, despite his alleged Heideggerianism, also as belonging to this distinguished tradition.

III Jean-Luc Marion's Theory of the Image and the Task of the Iconic Historian Marion's apologetics of the image saves painting from damnation, without either "killing" it or "reviving" it, and it is actually situated elsewhere than the problem of the vitality or the death of painting. Marions' apologetic argument leans mostly on the iconophilic writings of the Byzantine era, which suggested theological justifications of the use of images in the Christian theurgy. For Marion, the exterior "unseen" is that which has not yet arrived to visibility: it is the possibly visible, that cannot, however, be predicted in advance. 52This possiblyvisible has temporal as well as spatial characteristics. It is described by Marion as a void (un vide) and as depth (la profondeur).53 As I understand Marion's suggestion, we should actually distinguish two "unseens". The figure constitutes the "ratio" between these. They are: 1) the radical, actual past, the efficient cause, that-which-was, which can only be approached by a negative tangent, which is resistant to change, and which, for the iconic historian, is to be identified with the res extensa; 2) the cognitive change of distinction, equivalent to the res cogitans, which the figure retroactively restores. As we try to locate ourselves in a radically dualist frame of discussion here, it must be assumed that thought can restore or distinguish only itself It is entirely self-referential. This is why the science of history, being carried out, after all, by our cognitive faculties, can only exist as the history of thought itself In other words, every history is a history of thought. On this specific point, of course, iconic history and Icono.l0?y a?ree. The figure is necessarily restorational: it restores the change of dlstInctlon of itself, and carries with (and not within) itself a radical exteriority which is its
51 52 53 Henri Focillon, Vie desfOrmes (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1943). Jean-Luc Marion, De surcroit: Etudes sur lesphenomenessatures (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 2001), p. 131. Jean-Luc Marion, La croisee du visible (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 1996), p. 16; Je~-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford Umverslty Press, 2004), p. 4; English pages following the French ones.

not-having-been until a specific historical point. Restoring a relation between two moments, the moment of history with a certain figure and the moment "preceding" it (which "in itself" is non-articulable), is the basic ratio that the iconic history of figures searches to articulate. This ratio also necessitates a rehabilitation of the history of thought - beyond and after a description of a historical environment, or of corresponding systems of thought, according to the demands of iconological research. It does so by making changes of distinction seen in it retroactively; such changes of distinction that it was and is only possible to restore through the certain figure. Therefore, there is a close affinity between the mechanism of the figure and the mechanism of the iconic historian: they have both a historical and restorative task. It must be noted, in comparison, that Panofsky also bestowed an inherently historical nature onto the image, entailing the essential relation between the image and the past. In a way, all of Panofsky's "cases" concern the manners in which visual images take upon themselves the task of the memory and survival of forms of the ancient world. But inasmuch as the nature of the figure in iconic history is restorative, i.e. to "bring again to the crown" the two pasts considered as lost, the nature of the image for the Iconologue is conservative: i.e. its work is to retain and sustain a tradition which is always present. Returning again to the discussion of spatial parameters of the iconic situation, Marion describes the iconic image as the crossing-point between space as void ("ideal space"), which is radically external and transcendent, and space as actual phenomenon ("real space"), which is immanent to the painted reality, an actual or potential container of objects, both depicted and rea154 The crossing-over between plain reality and the never present void refers to central arguments of the Byzantine theory of the icon. The icon, as it was presented by John of Damascus, permits a "confused knowledge" of the prototype: the icon is the "type" of that which comes before the "type" - the pnito-type.55 In my view, differing from Marion, the icon is actually not a crossing-point but strictly a point, a figure which is rigorously cognitive and which allows a retroactive, heuristic situating of the figure with a specific change of distinction (a formal past). Thus, the figure is not a cohesive unit of spirit and matter, but a restoration of two intensities: the intensity of that which was, and the intensity of the change of distinction. In this way, knowledge of a figure's formal (not efficient) cause is possible: a knowledge of the change in thought it restored, one of its two proto-types, is possible by striving to restore retroactively the distinct form that the clear figure entailed. The radical past, though, like the Divinity in the thought of Dyonisius the Areopagite, can be only approached approximately

54 55

Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, pp. 15-17, pp. 2-5 Ibid., p. 125, p. 69. Marion cites John of Damascus, "Against Those who Refuse Icons", in John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, in Jaques-Paul Migne ed., Patrologia cursus completus, series Graeca, vo!. 94 (Paris: Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857-1886) co!. 1241a, 1341a.

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and in a "negative" manner.56 Nonetheless, it should be emphasised strongly that the res extensa, i.e. the radical past, as well as the change of distinction that the iconic historian restores, are not in any way "hidden", "covered", or "encrypted" by the figure. Our two prototypes, the radical past and the formal past, are just inherently non-visual. Their nature is simply other than visible. Only the figure, posited as the separating-distance (ratio) between the two pasts, has the capacity to clear visibility. It is the responsibility of the iconic historian, as of the painter, to articulate as precisely as possible this mis-en-scene. I accept Marion's supposition that the transcendent unseen is a requisite for any restoration of the status of painting and of its science today. Yet I argue further that this unseen cannot be understood for this latter as the theological gift of that which has not yet been seen. Essentially, Marion's notion of the "notyet-been-seen" maintains the structure of the TOward (Zum) of the Heideggerian systematisation of phenomenological intentionality, and has furthermore strong apocalyptic overtones. The "unseen" should instead be referred to as the pasts of the figure: the efficient cause and the formal cause; the not-having-been of a specific figure, and the change of distinction the figured restored. The question of the Icon, in Marion's writings, as in the Byzantine documents, such as those of Dionysius the Areopagite (presented in L'idole et le distance), John of Damascus, or the documents from the second council of Nice a (Presented in la croisee du visible) is intertwined with the question of the idol. There are in general three stages of Marion's discussion of the Idol: 1) In l'idole et le distance (I 977), Marion first presented a conceptual definition of the idol, issuing from a critique of onto-theology, trying to think its limits and beyond themY 2) In La croiseedu visible (I 99 1), Marion discussed the paradoxical nature of painting as idolatrous and as iconic, and suggested a continuous route between perspectival painting and the Byzantine icon. 3) In Du surcrozt (2001), though, Marion suggested a more overtly iconoclastic attitude, which identifies the painterly experience itself, at its peak moments, as idolatrous58, while iconic "experience" is possible only by the ethical recognition of the face of the Other, following Uvinas and his philosophy of exteriority59 . Marions' latest book dealing to a certain extent with visibility, Le visible et le revele (2005), abandons the notions of icon and distance and concentrates instead on the notion of the saturated phenomenon, while insisting on the phenomenological character

of his research. Here, I believe, Marion's thoughts ceases to be relevant to our endeavour to rehabilitate painting and the history of art. In all three former books, however, it is asserted that the present age is an idolatrous one. Marion identifies that which Mitchell has identified as the "Pictorial Turn" with a crisis of the image, which he terms "le desastre de l'image"6o: This is the visual regime of the idol61 in which Being is identified with "beingperceived" or "imagined"62. The universal aspiration is to be perceived as a public image, due to the fact that the invisible is considered as inexistent. Western contemporary culture contains only images of images.63 Nietzschean perspectivism64 and the declaration of the "Death of God", according to Marion, fostered the on-going self-imitation of the viewer or of the author as genius.65 In La croisee du visible, the notion of the idol is presented as pertaining to an overly impressionistic attitude towards images. In the idol, the visible, and more precisely the flat-surfaced, visible impression, is wholly exposed and offered to the viewer66. The idolatrous era makes the invisible disappear in the technology of reproduction and repetition, and thus prevents the advent of anything new. In Du surcrozt, Marion argues that the idol defines that which the viewer can support of the plenitude of phenomenality, the maximum of intuitive intensity which I can endure while gazing at a spectacle distinctively visible.67 Like Lacan's "Mirror-stage" mechanism68, the idol reflects and strengthens the self-image of the beholder.69 Idolatrous images inscribe the viewer in total visible phenomenality by achieving his total fascination.7 The notion of the idol thus presented may help to explain why we still lack a metaphysical basis for the "triumph of painting". Painting, if it is to be considered as an idol, has no need for an external bias; instead, it is seen, it is contextualised by a net of other images, and this is enough for creating an over-flowing, indulgent, and auto-idolatrous effect of ?'leaning. Henceforth even inter-textual efforts, of doubtlessly iconological nature, stating the affinities between a given artwork and similar "concepts" or "tropes", are actually, from the iconic historian point of view, idolatrous. The nihilistic visibility of our epoch is immanent to itself and has no need for any explanatory exteriority. An
60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68
69 Marion, The Crossing o/the Visible, pp. 146,83. Marion, De surcrozt, p. 71. Marion, The Crossingo/the Visible, pp. 142,80. Ibid., pp. 96, 52 See also Marion's discussion of Nietzsche in Marion, L'idole et le distance, pp. 11-49, pp. 27-

78.
56 Evidently, in Marions's writing there is no discussion of the divinity of the past. The radical distance refers always and exclusively to the Divinity. See L'idole et la distance - Cinq etudes (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1977); The Idol and Distance. Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), English pages following the French ones; Marion, The Crossing o/the Visible, pp. 144-145,81-82. Marion, De surcrozt, pp. 95-98. Ibid., p. 73 (my translation). Jacques Lacan, "Le stade du mirroir comme formation de la fonction duJe", (1949) in Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1966), pp. 93-100. See also Hubert Damisch, The Origin o/Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 116-126. Ibid., p. 73.

pp. 180-253,137-195. 57 58 59
Marion, The Idol and Distance, pp. 27-38,265-269, Marion, De surcrozt, pp. 65-98. Ibid., pp. 125-153. pp. 9-19,207-210.

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idolatrous approach to painting invites an idolatrous history of images, in which either the image is considered as the first and final object of investigation, or a net of inter-textual analogies supplies the "content" for explaining an image. In either of these cases, a self-sufficient position leaves no place for the real exteriority of the specific past For the iconic historian, who is engaged in "figuring-out" a work, even the most "contemporary" work exists as a past-phenomenon, as something which has been seen, even if only a moment ago. Thus any work of understanding, as any work of painting, i.e. any iconic-figurative act, is restorative and henceforth historical in a radical sense. For Panofsky, though, neither the absolute nor the radical past exists as such: historical time, and more precisely historical moments of simultaneity are "created not by the coincidence (Zusammenfallen) of two or more isolated phenomena in a natural point in time but rather merely by the coincidence of two or more frames of reference (Bezugssysteme) in one [... ] stretch of time."71 Fully neo-Kantian at this historiosophical point, Panofsky poses frames of reference as the absolute condition for the existence of the past as history. For an iconic historian, though, the radical past reality is prior to any set of conditions of possibility. Therefore, the iconic historian displays indeed an Iconoclastic attitude, not so much towards images, as towards the schematic sets of reference that are used to construct and reconstruct the past. Marion presents his attitude towards the contemporary state of the image explicitly as iconoclastic72. Iconoclasm, as he presents it, is an iconic attitude towards the image, a doctrine of the visibility of the image and the uses of this visibility. The icon, according to the council of Nice a II (787 AD)73 necessitates respectful veneration, but not adoration. Iconic history of figures and respectful veneration, instead of adoring the charming image for itself, rationalise the figure as standing-after its two prototypes, being itself the separating-distance (ratio) between the two: that which was, i.e. its past, and the change of distinction. This kind of respectful veneration allows the past its right to resist, exactly because it exists as excessive, always capable of being that which is re-configured retroactively by drawing attention to new changes of distinction. In an iconic position towards the figure and its historical explanation, the figure is studied as a "type" of a change implying necessarily the resistant existence of the past. Iconic art history will look for a truth that is neither an abstract nor a conceptual one. It is historical: a truth of a moment of change of distinction. Thus the "object" of the iconic historian should no longer be identified with the "painted object" itself, but with its "moment" of generation, the change it
71 Erwin Panofsky, "Reflections on Historical Time", trans. J. Baumann, Critical Inquiry 30 (Summer 2004), p. 699. Erwin Panofsky, "A translation of 'Zum Problem der historischen Zeit''', in Panofsky, Aufiatze zur Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer (Berlin: Spiess, 1985), p. 81. Marion, The Crossing a/the Visible, pp. 105,58. Ibid., pp. 107,60.

was itself a restoration of. This would entail, then, that iconic history is actually archeology, striving to distinguish the "arche" (ap)(T]), the generative beginning, of a figure.

IV Perspectival and Iconic History of Art In La croisee du visible, Marion carries out a comparative examination of perspective painting and the icon. Following his lead, we suggest then two complementary modes of art history to be distinguished from each other: Perspectival and Iconic. Perspectival History, which is closest to Iconology, explains the visible symbol by its invisible "background" which it makes, paradoxically, visible. Closer also to cultural history or visual studies, it contextualises the figure, digs up a hidden "conceptual" reality covered by the work, and may reveal strong parallels between philosophical systems or ideas and visual figures. This interpretative attitude is rooted in the Platonic and neo-Platonic theory of art, which was actually the subject of one of Panofsky's first research-projects. In his early Idea74, Panosky indeed laid the theoretical ground for his later iconological method. In this magisterial essay, Panofsky presents the genealogy of the presentation of beautiful artwork as a mimetic image (EIKWV, EIKova) of absolute and abstract Idea (noos), in a narrative deployed from Plato to Bellori (17th century). Not only the image, then, but also the scientist of images is occupied with this "Platonist-Idealist" project. Therefore in order to decipher the "documental sense" (Dokumentsinns)" or the "essential sense (Wesenssinn)" of the image75, the iconologue must synthesise his subjective "original comportment expressing a world-view" ("weltanschauliches Urverhalten") with the objective general history of the spirit ("allgemeine Geistesgeschichte").76 The'specific sense of the historical object then is to be construed from a mixture of neo-Kantian, Platonist, and "Idealistic" components. Iconic History of the figure, in its turn, with the preliminary aid of the perspectival excavation of its analogies with the "general history of the spirit", will work to change retroactively that which was by exploring the figure as a specific historical change of distinction.

74 75 76

72 73

Erwin Panofsky, Idea. Ein Beitrag zur Begriffigeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorie (Berlin: Hessling, 1975). Those two notions are taken from Karl Mannheim. See Panofsky, "Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsbedeutungvon Werken der bildenden Kunst", p. 93. Ibid., p. 95.

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1 Art and philosophy after the "End of History':' Arthur Danto Danto's declaration of rhe end of art can be understood as resting on an idolatrous conception of the image, as he argues rhar rhe original historical responsibility of painting was the cognitive development of the representation of visual reality,?? and rhat as photographic and cinematic images came into existence and the age of high modernism ended (in which the task of the visual artwork was first and foremost philosophical), visual art lost its right to insist on its historical agency and was eventually left only with the liberty of pluralism and of experiencing with endless variations.78 Belting's proclamation of the end of the history of art actually also depends on an active submission to the requisites of the pluralistic post-historical era. Marion's arguments go in the opposite direction: painting exisrs only as separate and "distanced" from the reproduction of reality. From the point of view of the iconic historian, the figure was and is always "philosophical", in the sense that it restores a hitherto un-distinguished change in thought. The figure is required (i.e. caused) as a restoration of change, i.e. of the reality of thought. The historical responsibility of painting must indeed only be ventured when it is released from its illusionistic duties in order to take on the responsibility of figurability. This latter should not take on itself again the task of technical representation, of a more powerful formalism, or of mourning for "reality". Instead, the figure always works for a historical truth. Contrary to Danto, who questions the historical responsibility of painting in today's culrure (under an essentially Hegelian definition of historical responsibility), I argue that historical reality is the exclusive reference-point of both painting and art history. And again in opposition to Danto, who differentiates between historical significance and philosophical significance, since he suggests that philosophical questioning is still possible in a post-historical era,?9 I suggest that philosophy and history are non-detachable terms, since thought exists as specific change. It is inherently historical, a fact which does not make philosophy relative or pluralistic, but indeed makes it necessarily specific. 80 In a today's culture, the icon is one of the few elements that can still demand authority and hierarchy,8l due to the fact that it exists as cohesive with its prototype. As iconic, painting has grave responsibility, that of authority. And as I suggested above, the authoritative source of a painting does not necessarily have to be understood in theological terms or in terms of the artist genius. It can also be understood as the not having been of a certain figure, i.e. the specific past of a figure. With this, a separating distance is created, one that distinguishes
77 78 79 80 81 Danto, After the End of Art, pp. 137, 140; Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p. 107. Ibid., pp. 114-115; Danto, After the End of Art, pp. 114,150. See for example Danto, After the End of Art, pp. 33-35, 114. . " See Henri Bergson, La pensee et le mouvant (Paris: PressesUmv. de France, 2003), p. 1, Ce qui a le plus manque it la philosophie, c'est la precision." Marion, The Idol and Distance, pp. 209-217, pp. 163-172.

a certain figure. The process of rationalisation of a figure distinguishes it both from its past and from its cultural "background", by seeing as exactly as possible, what, in a figure, is not commensurable with what we know of the history of ideas, and by taking this "difference" seriously, as a call for a rehabilitation of this history itself. 2 Distance and Iconicity Hal Foster ends his book The Return of the Real with a declaration of the importance of "Critical Distance" for coping with post-modern visual culture.82 For Marion, too, distance is required, but this time it is not a "critical" and "contextualising" distance, but the radical distance between the prototype and the "givens". Iconic history, in its turn, demands the acknowledgement of a radical distance between the two prototypes. The figure itself, thus, is the [traceable] distance between those two. An idol is an image that lacks distance separating the visible and the unseen, contrary to the icon which is a figure as distance. Referring to the historiography of art, a distance between the visible and the unseen, between a figure and its radical past which is sought, will not be the full, interpretative, frequently intentional-phenomenological distance between the historian and his object. All this would still pertain to (idolatrous) hermeneutics. What is required instead is a separating, distinguishing distance, opened by the figure, between its two pasts (radical and formal). The concept of distance can replace the post-structuralist physico-iconoclastic concept of "spacing" that was mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Distance and the spatial ontology of the figure take us away from the rhetoric of "spacing" , from the flat-surfaced movement of difference, because they entail the demand for depth, a depth to be found in the radical past. Thus, we can propose replacing the French term "espacement" with the neologism "espassement." Espassement denotes the existence of the past as the res extensa, existing always as seperated and distanced from the res cogitans. Marion points out another important iconic distance, which exists in every painting, between the supporting surface (i.e. the canvas or the wall) and the painted brush-stroke marks, which Marion also refers to as "ectypes"83. The ectypes, again a Catholic term, are the (re-)presentatives of the Prototype. In painting, the ectypes are the specific coloured stains; like stigmata marks, they embody the emergence of a figure out of the unseen, as well as the ascension of the unseen to the surface of the visible.84

82 83 84

Ha! Foster, "Questions of Distance", in Foster, The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 222-226. Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, pp. 75, 41. Ibid., pp. 68-73,37-39.

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The "type" stands for the figure itself, embodying the distance (hierarchy) between the prototype and the ectypes.85 As John of Damascus, Dyonisius the Areopagite and other Byzantine theoreticians of the Icon argued, the prototype is both radically exterior to and generative of the "ectypes", the visible concrete signs; and these are not mimetic replicas, but distancing gestures. In the midst of the formal existence of the surface of the ground and the surface of the paint, exists a distance, a depth, residing even in the most flat-surfaced colourfield painting, a distance which is not illusionistic but material, metaphysical, and historical, as it records the successive acts of distancing which created the specific painting. Distance, ultimately equivalent to ratio and to figurability itself, is the basic instrument of the iconic art historian. It serves both as a metaphysical presupposition and as the mechanism for pointing out changes of distinction. The search after changes of distinction requires a reconsideration of the accepted narratives relating to the history of thought and to the history of art, as well as an intervention in the habitual narrative of the "being-seen" of a figure. Iconic restoration does not "correct" reality into ideal spatiality (as in perspectival history, which fits the figure into the pre-existent ideal grid86). Instead, it works in a double gesture of distancing made by subtraction. Subtracting the "known history" from the figure and finding what is not possible explain through the given history will leave us with the formal past (the change of distinction). Then, subtracting again this time the figure from its formal past, we achieve by approximation, and not positively but as the background of a silhouette, the residue of the radical, efficient past of the figure. This process of subtraction can lead to a regressive series of distancing gestures of "figuring" the past. 3 Perspective and History A tangled and complicated meeting-point between Panofsky and Marion in our discussion would be their respective views of the perspectival pictorial scheme and its epistemological and moral implications. In fact it is from this point that we cease to view Marion's and Panofsky's alternatives as simple "opposites" and start to reconstruct an orientation reformulating iconicity and Iconology one with the other and one through the other. It is then through the figure of perspective that we suggest to take our project a step forward. First I shall clarifY what I mean by the term "perspectival history of art", referring to Marion's and Panofsky's ideas, and then I shall demonstrate its intricate position in iconic history. Marion poses perspective as a point of departure for the metaphysical understanding of western painting87. In contrast to Panof85 86 87 Ibid., pp.n, 39. Ibid., pp. 41, 20. Ibid., pp. 12-13, 19,26-27; pp. 2, 6, 11-12. In this, Marion agrees with Hubert Damisch, "Perspective, a Thing of the Past?", in Damisch, The Origin o/Perspective, pp. 22-39.

sky, who emphasised the humanistic aspects of the construction of perspective, 88 Marion sees perspective as pertaining to a substantial subordination of the human to the infinite. Perspective, according to Marion, does not adhere only to the visible; instead, it acts as the paradox of the visible: the co-existence of ideal space and real space, a co-existence existing also in the structure of the icon. The vanishing point in perspectival painting is an empty point, embodying no object, manifesting invisible ideal space in the midst of the painterly real space. In that way, conical perspective spatiality is not some artificial formalisation of seeing, but a substantial form of visuality itself, defined (also by Panofsky) as a procedure of distancing.89 But inasmuch as for Marion perspectival distancing is radical and infinite in its nature and scope, as the radical distance that the icon embodies takes us away from the subjective "Type" to the absolute "Prototype", for Panofsky, the function of perspectival construction is mainly a regulative one, embodying the idyllic equilibrium between the subject and the object achieved by Renaissance Humanism. Panofskyobserved quite sharply, that both "Subjectivism" and "Objectivism", are indeed the polar ends of the same tendency, which is the empirical one:
The perspectival view [Anschauung], whether it is evaluated and interpreted in principle, more in and the out of

the sense of rationality

and the objective, or more in the sense of contingency pictorial space [Bildraum],

subjective, rests on the will to construct

elements of, and according to the plan [Schema] of, empirical visual space [empirischen Sehraum] .90

IfMarion's distance refers to the transcendent-Infinite, then Panofsky's perspectival distance refers to the transcendental-In-finite: i.e. to the finite schemes of human experience. Correspondingly, in Panofsky's writings, we can find a strong correlation between the presentation of perspectival structure and the theme of Humanism and the Humanist stance. Humanist perspectivism, again through the neoKantian prism, acts mostly as a limitation. Panofsky writes: "Historically the word humanitas has had two clearly distinguishable meanings, the first arising from a contrast between man and what is less than man; the second, between man and what is more. In the first case humanitas means a value, in the second, a limitation."91 And he concludes:
It is from this ambivalent conception much a movement of Humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so of the dignity

as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction

of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the

88 89 90 91

Panofsky, Form, pp. Ibid. Ibid., pp. Panofsky,

"Die Perspektive 67-68.

als 'symbolische

Form"',

pp. 123-124;

Perspective as Symbolic

125-126; p. 71. "The History of Art as a Humanistic

Discipline",

p. 1.

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acceptance of human responsibility limitation

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(fallibility and frailty); from these rwo postulates

and tolerance.92

Humanism, then, and its 19th century representative, the Humanities, work actually as an Archimedean-point berween value and limitation. A humanist position then, according to Panofsky, is a regulated one. This Kantian cognitive trust in "regulative ideas" is also apparent in Panofsky's early and important essay "Der Begriff des Kunsrwollens"93, in which he suggested the fruitful notion of the "Archimedean point" of interpretation, as the basis for an examination of historical artistic phenomena.94 This Archimedean point should be found outside the chaotic and multiple "hyle" of both artistic and historical data, and should serve as a regulative point of reference to our historical, artistic, and subjective points of view. The Archimedean point exactly parallels the place of the vanishing-point in perspectival construction, as Panofsky presented it. The spatial construction of pictorial perspective requires an exterior vanishing-point, which will be the support of the "concentration" of the optico-spatial cone of rays, and which "embodies" infinite space and even infinity itself Indeed, Panofsky shows that some centralising factor is essential to all western versions of models for space-presentation, at least from ancient Greece to 18th century Europe. But even if the systematised perspectival model, in its Renaissance apex, indeed was an embodiment of the Infinite, it was nevertheless placed, located, and designed amongst the rational parameters of the conditions of this spatial construction of experience. It is "infinity not only prefigured in God, but indeed actually embodied in empirical reality."95 And thus, perspective, as Panofsky presents it, interiorises and domesticates the infinite. He stresses: "The history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as the triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control."96 The difference from Marion's point of view is apparent: Marion insists on keeping the status of the vanishing-point as standing for an absolutely and radically Other, ideal space, exterior to any positive or palpable experience, while for Panofsky it is the agent of the human capacity to organise his or her world a priori and a posteriori. In both versions, perspectival painting situates the invisible as the centre of the spatial composition. What I refer to as "perspectival history" stems more clearly from the Panofskyan presentation of perspective, but it is relevant, on a deeper level, also to Marion's Heideggerian creed. Indeed, one way to approach
92 93 94 95 96 Ibid., p. 2. Erwin Panofsky, "Der Begriff des KunsrwoIIens", in Panofsky, Aufidtze zu Grundftagen der Kunstwissenschaft, pp. 29-43. See also AIlister N eher, '''The concept ofKunsrwoIIen', neo- Kan tianism, and Erwin Pan ofsky's early art theoretical essays", WOrd and Image 20/1 Oanuary-March 2004), pp. 41-51. Pan ofsky, "Die Perspektive als 'symbolische Fotm"', p. 122; Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 65. Ibid., p. 123; p. 67.

the co~pariso~ berween Marion and Panofsky would be to present it from th~ pomt .of view. ~f their respective but different allegiances to the German phllosophlC~1 trad~t~on, from Kant to Heidegger. Both Marion and Panofsky adh:re to thl~ tradltlon: The former develops his thought from the question of the Ground (Grund), the latter, from the construction of Kantian schematism (Schematismus). But it is exactly to both these "German-idealist" orientations, that the present proposition of iconic history strives to formulate a tenable alternative. Perspectival history holds onto a spatial metaphysics of the "In", which I ~egar~ a~ s~ccumbing to the regime of Heidegger's "Being-in" (In-sein) .97 The m~lll.te IS.I~~~rio~is~~,"int~" t,~e ?ictorial :orld-space, as the meaning of the pamtlng IS mtnnslc to Its bemg-there. In perspectival history, meaning ~I?eutung), s~mehow ."dwells" (einraumt), in a dis-closed (unverborgen) status, zn-the-work . (In Heldeggerian language this can be coined the "In-dem- U7erksein.") It is not without .si?nificance: even ir disconcerting to mention, that Panofsky act~ally relate~ explICItly to Heldegger s Kantbuch when he discusses (in 1931) the mterpretatlve ch~racter of art history research, and derives from Heidegger's approa~h to Kant hiS own hermeneutical approach of trying to state and to determme not what the work says explicitly ,,[ ... ] sondern was sie als noch Ungesagtes vor Augen legt."98 The task of the art historian, parallel to that of the scholar of philosophical systems, is to state what is hidden, what is not said explicitly, in the work. Perspectival research discloses the hidden-unseen inside visuality, and thus makes the unseen in-visible. Panofsky's use of the term "I~trinsic Meaning"99 further indicates this interpretative metaphysics of the eXistence of the content "inside" the investigated object. By contrast to this Pt" . ) 100'" ,ICOlllC . h' erspec IvaI "Inness, (In h elt Istory of art maintains a metaphysics of ~eries, of. t~e "with" and the "beside". The iconic historian places the unseen besIde the vIsible, and thus makes the visible seen-again, seen-after. Michael-~n ~ollylOI has strongly argued that the discipline of art history cannot divest Itself of its essential perspectival nature. Historical research of w~stern visuality is always orientated in terms of perspective. Indeed, per~pectlval restoration of painting, or Iconology, looks at a painting as pointing bac~ards", or more precisely "inwards", toward an unseen "Idea"; it locates the vIsible around this point of idea and inside the conceptual framework issu-

97 98

Heidegger, Sein undZeit,

pp. 104-110,130-134.

Pano~!'Y' "Zum Problen; der Beschreibung und Inhaltsbedeurungvon Werken der bildenden Kunst , ~. 92. Panofskys reference to Heidegger is to the latter's Kant und das Problem der Metaphyszk (Bonn: Cohen, 1929), p. 192ff. 99 Pa~ofsky, "Iconography and Iconology", p. 40. 100 Heldegger, Sezn undZeit, p. 53. 101 MichaeI An;, H~IIy, Past Looking. Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Ima e (Ithaca' CorneII Umverslty Press, 1996), pp. 15-23,78-79. g< .

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ing from it. Here the figure is conceived as an "expression" of the idea. It reveals a "covered" "content" of a figure and locates it inside and around the visible. Panofsky himself articulated the perspectival dynamics of expansion and introversion: "Perspective creates distance between human beings and things [... ] but then in turn it abolishes this distance by, in a sense, drawing this world of things [... ] into the eye."102 Iconic restoration, as I understand it, will try to arise above this antinomy of exteriority/interiority by claiming that the arche, the Archemedean point of a certain figure, cannot be described as located either outside or inside the figure, due to the fact that the past of the figure does not exist "outside" or "inside" it, but with it, a situation which is almost impossible to describe in strict spatial terms. Iconic restoration will seek neither for an "inside" nor an "outside" to be found neither "in-front" nor "behind" the figure. Instead, it will seek to identifY a reason for the existence of the figure existing simultaneously with the figure itself Though it will use Iconological perspectivism as a required basis, iconic restoration will not only go from the figure to the "unseen idea", but will also move retroactively from the unseen back to the figure. For this restoration, though, the unseen will not be an Idea, but the dual prototype of the figure discussed above: its past(s). We can say that in iconic restoration, the "Idea" would be the figure itself with its reason (ratio). In fact this formulation comes quite close to one of the definitions of "Intrinsic Meaning" given by Panofsky: " [... ] a unifYing principle which underlies and explains both the visible event and its intelligible significance, and which determines even the form in which the visible takes shape."103 The only difference between this definition and the iconic explanation would be in the sense of the term "intelligible significance". The latter points to a cipher hidden in the visual shape and thus makes of the "visual event" an essentially communicative one. Iconic history will endeavour to present the ratio between the figure and its past as a cognitive act of distinction, inexplicable by any net or set of the given history of ideas. The ratio between the figure and its Iconological "Anschauung", as probably most historians will agree, always leaves a gap, a gap that is really a call for a rehabilitation of the history of ideas, by articulating a change which took place in this history and which was and is only figurable by the specific figure we study. This is already taking Iconology beyond its accepted limits. Moreover, this procedure will enact retroactive changes of distinctions regarding the past. Thus, the radical past is not a Kantian thing-in-itself, totally inaccessible; instead, radical past, exactly because it never changes, because it is substantially resistant, is that which is eternally and always the subject of figuration and re-figuration, eternally given to rehabilitation and restoration.

Instead of placing the Idea inside and around the figure, the iconic historian will place ideas beside it, thus unfolding a series of ratios - of distances. This supports viewing that which is specific in the figure, that which in the visible figure hangs as un-deciphered by the accepted history of ideas, and which hence requires a rehabilitation of that history, clearly and distinctively. It requires thinking, by thinking again the intellectual terms of the period, a change which is not yet known by them or by us. The perspectival iconological restorer, in order to approach a hidden "Idea", loses his object, the artwork, and "sees beyond it" into the conceptual in-visible. Iconic procedure, on the other hand, wins the figure back: only because it pre-supposes the radical past, the not-having-been of a certain figure, as its point of departure, it can aspire to achieve an articulation of the historical reality of this specific figure, that is, to restore its moment of distinction, its moment of appearance on the surface of history. The coming-beside (or rather after) the visible of the unseen is the product of rationalising, separating, and distancing the figure from the accepted systematic stories about the history of thought and their subsequent rehabilitation according to the certain figure. Figural reality helps us to notice lacunae in historical philosophical systems and in the ways we relate their stories. Retroactively, the iconic art historian restores the history of the unseen. Ar1 almost final implication of my suggestions will regard the inter-relation between History and Art History. It is generally accepted that art history is an historical discipline. Inversely, iconic history suggests considering historical documents themselves as figures, and here it is the science of history that will have to be considered under what is still known as "art historical" issues. Historical figures, that is to say, documents, textual, material, or visual, always come to us historians in some need of a restoration. Usually we fill the lacuna by using pre-existent, habitual systems of thought. Iconic history puts these into question. The historical figure does not "mimic" or "express" or complete any idea. Instead, it restores a not-yet-seen change in the history of thought. The perspectival- Iconological model of history of figures enhances and strengthens the visibility of the current history of thought. It uses what it can learn from prepared and accepted material on the history of thought analogous to the image. On the other hand iconic restoration is occupied with a double, simultaneous critique of the history of philosophy and the history of figures. It seeks to articulate the figure as a point of generation, as a restoration of a change, an articulation that will necessarily interrupt habitudes of explanations. As for ttying to define in a distinct, even if primary, manner the relationship between art history, history of philosophy, and philosophical questioning, I shall open by quoting Panofsky. In Iconological interpretation
we wish to get hold of those basic principles which underlie the choice and presentation of motifs [... ] To grasp these principles we need a mental faculty comparable to that of a

102 Panofsky, "Die Perspektive als 'symbolische Fotm"', p. 123; Perspective as Symbolic Form, p. 67. 103 Panofsky, "Iconogtaphy and Iconology", p. 28.

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diagnostician

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- a faculty which I cannot describe better than by the rather discredited term and which may be better developed in a talented layman than in an be corrected by an insight the general and essential [... ] It disciplines

"synthetic intuition"

erudite scholar. [... ] just so [... ] must our synthetic intuition into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, tendencies

of the human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts.

is in the search for intrinsic meanings or content that the various humanistic meet on a common plane. [... ] 104

Several important points arise here. First, it is obvious that there exists a close connection between the transcendental bias outlined above, and the interpretative, hermeneutical creed to be found in Panofsky's Iconology. In fact Panofsky insists that it is only when the identification of pictorial themes (Iconography) becomes interpretative, that it becomes also Iconological.I05 Secondly, Panofsky argues that the "diagnostics" of a work of art by "Synthetic Intuition" is not dependent upon accumulated knowledge, but can be performed by the "talented layman." The exact meaning of the term "Synthetic Intuition" and its relation to philosophical reflection should be explored extensively elsewhere, but what is obvious is that we are dealing here with a form of "Verstehen", (comprehending, understanding) which derives from a sort of Diltheyan Lebensphilosophie. This is an act (Akt) of grasping the complex unity (Zusammenhang) of the life of historical-cultural reality. lOG This wild "irrational" (This is Panofsky's term) capacity should be then regulated by a global knowledge of what cannot but be understood as a Universal history of ideas. Let me present, in conclusion, my arguments in a formal manner: We have this sequence interlaced by Panofsky as forming Iconological method: Intrinsic Meaning> [consisting of] Interpretation-as-distancing > [performed by the gesture of] Synthetic Intuition> [regulated by] The History of Cultures and Ideas. This chain can be put in opposition to Marion's sequence of Iconic theurgy: Exterior transcendent authority> [consisting of] Orthodox Dogma and hierarchy as radical distance> [performed by the gesture of] Faithful Subordination > [regulated by] sensual phenomenalism. Iconic history will suggest, between these two sequences, the following third: Dual arche (Radical past and Formal past) > [consisting of] Restoration as espassement > [performed by the gesture of] subtraction of accepted histories > [regulated by] the figure (real, specific, material document). Allow me to make a final remark regarding the relationship between history and philosophy. At the beginning of this essay, I highlighted the need to reintegrate the history of metaphysics into the science of history. But above all, I argue that it is the discipline of philosophy itself which in our age requires the
104 Panofsky, "Iconography 105 Ibid., p. 32.
and Iconology", pp. 38-39.

discipline of history, because the latter is the only humanistic practice which studies a specific change; and thought, is always, according to the tradition to which I adhere, a specific change.107 In contrast to dogmatic or didactic thought, the iconic historian of figures goes from the accepted to the generative form of change repeated by the figure. By this, the art historian can make a figure be seen again, restored and distinguished. He thinks with the moment of the birth of a figure, and waives the idolatrous liberty of mourning. Painters and art historians today share the responsibility for the future of thought with philosophers and historians alike. All of the themes discussed above, of course, should lead us back to the current status of painting, and to the possibility of rehabilitating painting through its strict definition as iconic restoration. I shall leave this issue for further specification, elaboration, and demonstration, while quoting the most precise and subtle words of the art historian Henri Focillon: "Lesprit fait la main, la main fait l' esprit."108

..

106 See Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt In den Gezsteswzssenschaften (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), pp. 235,255-263,277-278.

107 Alain Badiou, L'etre et l'evlmement (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1988), especially pp. 95-104, 199213,371-378; Bergson, La penseeet le mouvant, pp. 157-176,189-192,211-212; Deleuze, Diffirence et repetition, pp. 1-41, 337-339. 108 "Spirit makes the hand; the hand makes spirit", Focillon, Vie desftrmes, p. 128.