When the French edition of Confronting Images appeared in 1990,
it won immediate acclaim because of its far-reaching arguments
about the structure of images and the histories ascribed to them by
scholars and critics working in the tradition of Vasari and
Panofsky. According to Didi-Huberman, visual representation has an
"underside" in which seemingly intelligible forms lose their
clarity and defy rational understanding. Art historians, he goes on
to contend, have failed to engage this underside, where images
harbor limits and contradictions, because their discipline is based
upon the assumption that visual representation is made up of
legible signs and lends itself to rational scholarly cognition
epitomized in the "science of iconology."
To escape from this cul-de-sac, Didi-Huberman suggests that art
historians look to Freud's concept of the "dreamwork," not for a
code of interpretation, but rather to begin to think of
representation as a mobile process that often involves substitution
and contradiction. Confronting Images also offers brilliant,
historically grounded readings of images ranging from the Shroud of
Turin to Vermeer's Lacemaker.
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