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‘The Theoretical Eye’,
paper presented by Anthony Auerbach
at the symposium
Hubert Damisch: Dialogues
with Others, University of Amsterdam,
29 May 2009, organised by Sophie
Berrebi and Eric De Bruyn.
A version o this paper
is published in the Journal
of Art Historiography, no.
5, December 2011 together with
my translation of Hubert Damisch's ‘L’oeil
théoricien’.
 ‘The
Theoretical Eye’ conjures
images: the shiny pupil peering
from the hole in Brunelleschi’s miniature
of the Baptistry in Florence — that
founding manifesto that designated
and masked the location of
the looker, and whose legend
announces the origin of perspective; Dürer’s
rebus-eyes inhabiting the
apex of a visual pyramid
and the spot which came to
be known as the vanishing
point; his
metal alter-ego, prosthetic
eye hammered into a wall,
displacing the human subject
that would trace the contour
of appearance, or
animating the automaton Dürer made
of Italian art theory; the
globe suspended like an inverted
balloon above Descartes’ philosophical
avatar as if he were Tantalus;
the
apparatus of the pine kernel
of the soul, rigged like
a puppeteer; the
not-image of the eye, as
alluring as it is impossible,
that Wittgenstein cited in
asserting that, ‘The
subject does not belong to
the world: rather it is a
limit of the world’ [note
1];
the watery capsule of Freud’s
anatomy of the soul in which
the components of the ‘psychical
personality’ seem
to swim; the iridescent animal
eye which appears on the
school bench for dissection
in honour of Descartes.
‘The Theoretical Eye’,
in the more personal French formula, ‘L’oeil
théoricien’, is also the headline
Damisch chose for a short essay
on an artist whose work appears
obstinately abstract [note
2].
The title by itself (the eye,
a theorist) is perhaps the shortest
possible abbreviation of Damisch’s
intellectual project. The topic,
the work of Josef Albers, epitomises
perhaps better than that of any
other artist the reflexive qualities
of artworks which Damisch has
consistently emphasised: the
artwork as the work on language. The text sets
out against Freud, with a motto from Marx, to
suggest how an oeuvre which seems so determined
to repudiate the notion of meaning that would
have been recognisable to Freud — and
to art history in so far as it
shares Freud’s
notion of interpretation — how such a
body work may nonetheless yield
to analysis: an analysis that,
like the clinical version, will
thrive on ambiguity; an analysis
that will declare its allegiance
to Lacan by displaying its debts
on the one hand to psychoanalysis, and on the
other hand to mathematics, in particular to
geometry.
‘L’oeil théoricien’,
being abbreviated, is also overdetermined,
and confronts the reader with
a tantalising locution of the
enigma posed by Albers’ work.
Whereas a retrospective reading
of the essay could amount (in
Damisch’s
words) to ‘interfering
with his own history, his own
past, his own obsessions, his
own neurosis,’ I propose instead,
and by way of a reply, to renew
the encounter with Albers.
[excerpt ends]
 ‘L'œil
théoricien’ by Hubert Damisch
...
 ...
return: Structural Constellations
...
return: On drawing
...
return: On theory
Notes
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), §5.632.
- Hubert Damisch, ‘L'œil théoricien’,
in: Josef Albers [exhibition cataglogue] (Tourcoing:
Musée
des Beaux Arts, 1988).
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