Discourse, Figure

VEDUTA ON A FRAGMENT OF THE “HISTORY” OF DESIRE

veduta on a fragment of the “history” of desire This page intentionally left blank 159 Veduta on a Fragment of the “History” of Desire 1. Neutral space and position of discourse 2.1. Figure and text in illuminated Romanesque manuscripts 2.2. Text and figure in Romanesque writings 3.2. The space of the new philosophy 3.1. Rotation of pictorial space 4. Inverse rotation The reader will have noted, or will note, that the references upon which the present reflection is based belong for the most part to a European corpus from the period between 1880 and 1930: Saussure, Frege, Freud, Mallarmé, Cézanne, Lhote, Klee . . . This corpus rests on a fractured topography that possesses, as Pierre Francastel has demonstrated in relation to pictorial space, a seismic scope and sensibility comparable to that of the Quattrocento, which is what authorizes a study of the latter. Admittedly, the relation between the two is not one of mere comparison. We are products of the Cézannian and Freudian revolution, thanks to which we may come to understand the revolution of the Renaissance. The former therefore plays, in relation to the latter, the role of an operative concept or group of concepts. This is how, in the following fragment, the categories derived from the critique of the Hegelian confusion—based on the work of Frege, Saussure, Freud, and Cézanne —will help us determine the transformation of the pictorial space of the Renaissance.The relation between the two areas is thus, foremost, that of a theory with a single field of reference.To illustrate the consistency of the group of concepts we subsume under it a fragment of “reality.” As far as this relation is concerned, the fact that reality and the concepts belong to the same history—the West’s—does not appear immediately relevant. Applying the same group of concepts to Balinese theater or Dogon masks would be no more or less convincing; it would most likely VEDUTA 160 allow us to set the limits of validity in the use of the categories, and from there, most importantly, to circumscribe negatively these expressions, in function of the specific twists they inflict on the sign’s configuration in cultural contexts alien to the area under consideration. Yet the relation between the late-nineteenth-century revolution and the Quattrocento cannot be reduced to that of simple epistemological exteriority. Renaissance space functions, in relation to us, like the mirror in which Cézannian space finds reflection. For it is with respect to the rules of the geometric inscription of representational space—laid down at the end of the first quarter of the fifteenth century—that Cézannian space fulfills its deconstructive function. Had the viewer of Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair or of The Large Bathers in Philadelphia not had in sight the virtual organization of the field of vision imposed by Alberti and his followers, the reversal contained in Cézanne’s oeuvre would have remained imperceptible. The critical function of the figural, its work of truth, comes to fruition in relation to a “script” [écriture] and consists above all in the deconstruction of this script.1 Impressionism had merely overturned the “outlines” [tracés révélateurs], the contours, by drowning them in light; Cézanne pushes deconstruction much further, dealing a blow to the “regulating lines” [trac és régulateurs],2 to the organizing forms of Renaissance space.3 This last space belongs, therefore, to the seismic upheaval that concerns us; but it does so, first of all, negatively: it is what undergoes the shock. Still more needs to be said on the subject. A third relation becomes apparent between the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century movement and that of the fifteenth century. The Cézannian crisis is reflected in Albertian space; retroactively , however, it suggests that there is no such thing as a natural organization of visual space at the scale of cultures, and that Renaissance perspective was no less shocking to those used to reading the images of the international Gothic style than Cézanne’s perspective was to those who appreciated Pre-Raphaelitism. Thus one does not understand Cézanne through Masaccio or Leonardo, but rather the latter two with Cézanne. What do “through” and “with” mean in this context? Are these epistemologically valid categories? Leonardo allows Cézanne to be understood because the former is the script the latter encounters and...