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Etre crâne lieu contact pensée sculpture
in-12, broché, 91 pp., photographies en noir in-texte. Bon état général.
- GenresArt
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1945
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About the author
Georges Didi-Huberman
204 books236 followersGeorges Didi-Huberman, a philosopher and art historian based in Paris, teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Recipient of the 2015 Adorno Prize, he is the author of more than fifty books on the history and theory of images, including Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (MIT Press), Bark (MIT Press), Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, and The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 19, 2023
Being a Box
• the scientist of bodies—the anatomist—always prefers to speak of the cranial box.
• Paul Richer’s work describes malformations and symptomatic ugliness as well as prescribe “correct forms” and ideal beauty
o His morphology of the skull: “The cranium is a sort of bony box, irregularly ovoid in shape. It stands at the top of the vertebral canal and opens into it. In fact, it has quite correctly been regarded as an enlargement of the vertebral canal. The cranium encloses the brain, just as the vertebral column encloses the spinal cord, which is itself but an extension of the brain.”
• Confronted with his cranial box, Paul Richer simply forgot the question that every magic box, that every case for a precious item, or every concave organ, or vital place poses: the question of the interior, the question of folds.
• It is significant that, within the formulation itself of the title of his work, anatomy was qualified as being “artistic” for the reason that the forms described were reduced to the
• “exterior forms” — we can almost hear within this phrase “presentable forms” — of the human body.
• But if the skull is a box, then it’s Pandora’s box: to truly open it would be to unleash all the “beautiful evils,” all the anxieties and concerns of a thought that would turn around its own des- tiny, its own folds, its own place. To open this box is to also risk plunging into it, to risk losing one’s head, to risk — from the inside — being devoured.
Being an Onion
• In da Vinci’s work: the forms in play don’t need to be “presentable forms,” and the descriptive planes are never envisioned from their “respectable distances.” Da Vinci likes to get close to and even penetrate inside the object of his curiosity
o What first of all fascinates him, inside the human skull, is what he names the “internal side”; it’s the “orbitals’ cavities,” with their hidden “depth”; in general, it’s all those “visible holes” as well as those that are harder to see than the canals whereby, according to him, tears directly rise from the heart all the way toward the eyes.
o Another thing also fascinates him: the layered, pellicular, or stratified character of the system of contact formed by the bone of the skull and by all that it contains within it — the brain mass, of course, but also the tissues, membranes, humors, or muscles that the skull cloaks and protects, and which serve as interfaces or insulation. An analogy emerges: that of an onion
o Some crop out his onion drawing: so as to get rid of the triviality — the “culinary” side — of this convolution.
• The onion is not a box. Here, the outside is nothing more than a molting of the inside. Think of the characteristic trait given within da Vinci’s description: the bone, the pia mater, and the dura mater are successively shown as both the container and the contents.
Being a Snail
• We generally assume the attention that the Renaissance artists gave to nature — their noted passion for anatomy, perspective, the theory of proportions, etc. — had as its sole purpose the proper reproduction of everything we see surrounding us.
• BUT in many cases, the anatomical excavation, the perspectivist journey, the theorization of forms, provoked nothing but destabilizing consequences: inverted or annihilated orientations, visions of things manifesting their strangeness, the never-seen, paradoxes.
o Whereby the space of familiar visibility becomes distorted and literally trans- formed into an open site, a site of openness, constructed with the materials of unpredictability and challenges to common sense.
• They lack the curiosity that unremittingly digs within the human and creates a whole network of wells, viewpoints, and trenches for the gaze
• for Dürer, form was already an organ, it was already organic
• a very complex and moving “helical line” — a veritable snail-line, like the spiral of a snail shell (Schneckelinie), that he not only then took up sketching, but also began to create and generate by way of a variety of logico-spatial processes
• So it was that the passion for morphology opened up unknown worlds, without the necessary tortuous recourse to the systematic dissection of the human head like an onion
Etre aitre
• Aristotle believed the heart was the seat of thought. Then the head was graced with this honor. Galen assigned differ- ent mental functions to different regions of the brain.12 But oh how it still remains difficult to think about (to imagine, to represent, to define, to even question) this site of thought!
• As far as endogenous impressions and kinesthetic sensations are concerned, they remain rather impoverished and merely suggest to us, as the psychologists say, “a dome or cave” that we fill in with our visual images and autoscopic inventions.
• Dürer, for example, provided a striking version of this non-knowledge and this united contact. His representation of Saint Jerome (figs. 13–14) develops a powerful trajec- tory — but such a paradoxical and reversible [réversif ] one — between a living skull, still brimming with the activ- ity of thought, and a lifeless skull whose somber cavities are exhibited in the foreground of the painting. In front of us, the thinker’s left hand is thus pointed at the object of his thought: it’s called being a skull — être crâne —vanity, humanity reduced to an empty snail shell, an instant of the soul [échappée d’âme]. In the background, within the sym- metry of the curve (the left shoulder) and a counter curve (the right hand), the thinker’s hand is placed on the site of his thought : this is also called being a skull — être crâne — la tempe soucieuse — the mindful temple — the temple of his forehead, the site of ontological questioning, the search for God — wandering within what theologians, since Augustine, have called the “region of dissemblance” — and, in the end, melancholia.
• Before the skull-sign, before the skull-object, there is there- fore the skull-site — a site which worries thought and which nevertheless situates it, envelops it, touches it, and deploys it. Sites: anatomical excavations show them in abundance,
• SITES VS OBJECTS BUT THERE IS ALSO SPACE BETWEEN***
Being a River
• Clearly, Giuseppe Penone is a sculptor of aîtres — his work becomes an interrogation of sites, and simultaneously one of being sculpted, being placed [d’être posée]. Which is to say, that from his hands, what emerges are not exactly objects, nor exactly sites. But rather sites produced in their “nascent state,” in their visual and tactile state of aître, state of being.
• Penone: It’s impossible to imagine, impossible to work the stone according to a different mode than the one the river uses. A bradawl, a pin, a gradine, a chisel, an abrasive, sandpaper, are themselves tools of the river. To extract a stone that the river has sculpted, to go backwards in the history of the river, to discover the exact place of the mountain from where the stone came, to extract the rock mass completely anew from the mountain, to reproduce within the mass the exact stone that was extracted from the river in the new block of stone, is to be the river oneself. [...] In order to truly sculpt a stone, one must be a river.
Being a Dig
• Here one must under- stand that the problematic of the “nascent state” has nothing nostalgic about it, nothing directed toward a thought origin [origine pensée] as the lost source of all things.
• To make a sculpture? For Penone, this also becomes to do a dig. To make an anamnesis out of the material retained from where one has plunged one’s hand: what the hand retains of the material is nothing other than a present form, in which all the singular times of the site, of which the material is made, from which it draws its “nascent state,” are accumulated and inscribed. Thus, for the sculptor, memory is a quality proper to the material itself: matter is memory.
Being a Fossil
• Penone takes a skull in his hands, opens it, and looks at it. Beyond any metaphysical or religious anxieties — like those belonging to Dürer, for example — beyond any anatomical curiosities — like those belonging to da Vinci, for exam- ple — Penone will question, scrutinizing the interior of this skull, a kind of tactile blindness which we rarely reflect upon: our brain is in contact with an internal face [paroi] which it knows nothing about, that it doesn’t see, and that it doesn’t even feel (to paraphrase Freud, we could say that the “psyche is in contact, and doesn’t know it”). How, then, do we re-establish to this unknown contact — which is never- the less intrinsic to the “dwellings of thought” — its capacity for ontological worry, its possible truth effect concerning us?
o The answer is SCULPTURE, namely, a technical hypothesis carefully explored, deployed, and incarnated.
• to be a sculpture is also to be a fossil: an imprint of time, whose specific space — or what I would like to call instead: its site, its aître — inverts or reverses all of our familiar orientations, paradoxically rendering the possibility of developing the intimacy of a gesture or a contact.
• Would sculpture be a site where we become capable of touching thought or a language yet to be born?
Being a Leaf
• Sculpture works with traces rather than objects
Being a Site
• “Leaves of the brain,” “closed eyelids,” “annotation of space”: sculpture would thus take on the value of skin in that it would be capable of developing (by way of contact, frottage, projective relation) a spatiality that visual experience gener- ally remains unable to grasp, to grab hold of. What strange space, what sort of site are we then dealing with?
• First of all, it’s a site for getting lost — a “path that leads nowhere.”
• Next, it’s a site for losing space — in order to refute it, to invert it at the drop of a hat, turning its usual coordinates upside down. If the skull is a sculptural object par excellence, it’s not simply because, when placed at a “presentable” dis- tance, its forms are beautiful to study or because its volumes are interesting to represent.47 The skull is a sculptural object for the more essential and organic reason that our brain is incapable of imagining its true spatiality — the “cradled ceiling” [le plafond en berceau] offering nothing more for our representation than a convenient and culturally reproduc- ible substitute.
• the scientist of bodies—the anatomist—always prefers to speak of the cranial box.
• Paul Richer’s work describes malformations and symptomatic ugliness as well as prescribe “correct forms” and ideal beauty
o His morphology of the skull: “The cranium is a sort of bony box, irregularly ovoid in shape. It stands at the top of the vertebral canal and opens into it. In fact, it has quite correctly been regarded as an enlargement of the vertebral canal. The cranium encloses the brain, just as the vertebral column encloses the spinal cord, which is itself but an extension of the brain.”
• Confronted with his cranial box, Paul Richer simply forgot the question that every magic box, that every case for a precious item, or every concave organ, or vital place poses: the question of the interior, the question of folds.
• It is significant that, within the formulation itself of the title of his work, anatomy was qualified as being “artistic” for the reason that the forms described were reduced to the
• “exterior forms” — we can almost hear within this phrase “presentable forms” — of the human body.
• But if the skull is a box, then it’s Pandora’s box: to truly open it would be to unleash all the “beautiful evils,” all the anxieties and concerns of a thought that would turn around its own des- tiny, its own folds, its own place. To open this box is to also risk plunging into it, to risk losing one’s head, to risk — from the inside — being devoured.
Being an Onion
• In da Vinci’s work: the forms in play don’t need to be “presentable forms,” and the descriptive planes are never envisioned from their “respectable distances.” Da Vinci likes to get close to and even penetrate inside the object of his curiosity
o What first of all fascinates him, inside the human skull, is what he names the “internal side”; it’s the “orbitals’ cavities,” with their hidden “depth”; in general, it’s all those “visible holes” as well as those that are harder to see than the canals whereby, according to him, tears directly rise from the heart all the way toward the eyes.
o Another thing also fascinates him: the layered, pellicular, or stratified character of the system of contact formed by the bone of the skull and by all that it contains within it — the brain mass, of course, but also the tissues, membranes, humors, or muscles that the skull cloaks and protects, and which serve as interfaces or insulation. An analogy emerges: that of an onion
o Some crop out his onion drawing: so as to get rid of the triviality — the “culinary” side — of this convolution.
• The onion is not a box. Here, the outside is nothing more than a molting of the inside. Think of the characteristic trait given within da Vinci’s description: the bone, the pia mater, and the dura mater are successively shown as both the container and the contents.
Being a Snail
• We generally assume the attention that the Renaissance artists gave to nature — their noted passion for anatomy, perspective, the theory of proportions, etc. — had as its sole purpose the proper reproduction of everything we see surrounding us.
• BUT in many cases, the anatomical excavation, the perspectivist journey, the theorization of forms, provoked nothing but destabilizing consequences: inverted or annihilated orientations, visions of things manifesting their strangeness, the never-seen, paradoxes.
o Whereby the space of familiar visibility becomes distorted and literally trans- formed into an open site, a site of openness, constructed with the materials of unpredictability and challenges to common sense.
• They lack the curiosity that unremittingly digs within the human and creates a whole network of wells, viewpoints, and trenches for the gaze
• for Dürer, form was already an organ, it was already organic
• a very complex and moving “helical line” — a veritable snail-line, like the spiral of a snail shell (Schneckelinie), that he not only then took up sketching, but also began to create and generate by way of a variety of logico-spatial processes
• So it was that the passion for morphology opened up unknown worlds, without the necessary tortuous recourse to the systematic dissection of the human head like an onion
Etre aitre
• Aristotle believed the heart was the seat of thought. Then the head was graced with this honor. Galen assigned differ- ent mental functions to different regions of the brain.12 But oh how it still remains difficult to think about (to imagine, to represent, to define, to even question) this site of thought!
• As far as endogenous impressions and kinesthetic sensations are concerned, they remain rather impoverished and merely suggest to us, as the psychologists say, “a dome or cave” that we fill in with our visual images and autoscopic inventions.
• Dürer, for example, provided a striking version of this non-knowledge and this united contact. His representation of Saint Jerome (figs. 13–14) develops a powerful trajec- tory — but such a paradoxical and reversible [réversif ] one — between a living skull, still brimming with the activ- ity of thought, and a lifeless skull whose somber cavities are exhibited in the foreground of the painting. In front of us, the thinker’s left hand is thus pointed at the object of his thought: it’s called being a skull — être crâne —vanity, humanity reduced to an empty snail shell, an instant of the soul [échappée d’âme]. In the background, within the sym- metry of the curve (the left shoulder) and a counter curve (the right hand), the thinker’s hand is placed on the site of his thought : this is also called being a skull — être crâne — la tempe soucieuse — the mindful temple — the temple of his forehead, the site of ontological questioning, the search for God — wandering within what theologians, since Augustine, have called the “region of dissemblance” — and, in the end, melancholia.
• Before the skull-sign, before the skull-object, there is there- fore the skull-site — a site which worries thought and which nevertheless situates it, envelops it, touches it, and deploys it. Sites: anatomical excavations show them in abundance,
• SITES VS OBJECTS BUT THERE IS ALSO SPACE BETWEEN***
Being a River
• Clearly, Giuseppe Penone is a sculptor of aîtres — his work becomes an interrogation of sites, and simultaneously one of being sculpted, being placed [d’être posée]. Which is to say, that from his hands, what emerges are not exactly objects, nor exactly sites. But rather sites produced in their “nascent state,” in their visual and tactile state of aître, state of being.
• Penone: It’s impossible to imagine, impossible to work the stone according to a different mode than the one the river uses. A bradawl, a pin, a gradine, a chisel, an abrasive, sandpaper, are themselves tools of the river. To extract a stone that the river has sculpted, to go backwards in the history of the river, to discover the exact place of the mountain from where the stone came, to extract the rock mass completely anew from the mountain, to reproduce within the mass the exact stone that was extracted from the river in the new block of stone, is to be the river oneself. [...] In order to truly sculpt a stone, one must be a river.
Being a Dig
• Here one must under- stand that the problematic of the “nascent state” has nothing nostalgic about it, nothing directed toward a thought origin [origine pensée] as the lost source of all things.
• To make a sculpture? For Penone, this also becomes to do a dig. To make an anamnesis out of the material retained from where one has plunged one’s hand: what the hand retains of the material is nothing other than a present form, in which all the singular times of the site, of which the material is made, from which it draws its “nascent state,” are accumulated and inscribed. Thus, for the sculptor, memory is a quality proper to the material itself: matter is memory.
Being a Fossil
• Penone takes a skull in his hands, opens it, and looks at it. Beyond any metaphysical or religious anxieties — like those belonging to Dürer, for example — beyond any anatomical curiosities — like those belonging to da Vinci, for exam- ple — Penone will question, scrutinizing the interior of this skull, a kind of tactile blindness which we rarely reflect upon: our brain is in contact with an internal face [paroi] which it knows nothing about, that it doesn’t see, and that it doesn’t even feel (to paraphrase Freud, we could say that the “psyche is in contact, and doesn’t know it”). How, then, do we re-establish to this unknown contact — which is never- the less intrinsic to the “dwellings of thought” — its capacity for ontological worry, its possible truth effect concerning us?
o The answer is SCULPTURE, namely, a technical hypothesis carefully explored, deployed, and incarnated.
• to be a sculpture is also to be a fossil: an imprint of time, whose specific space — or what I would like to call instead: its site, its aître — inverts or reverses all of our familiar orientations, paradoxically rendering the possibility of developing the intimacy of a gesture or a contact.
• Would sculpture be a site where we become capable of touching thought or a language yet to be born?
Being a Leaf
• Sculpture works with traces rather than objects
Being a Site
• “Leaves of the brain,” “closed eyelids,” “annotation of space”: sculpture would thus take on the value of skin in that it would be capable of developing (by way of contact, frottage, projective relation) a spatiality that visual experience gener- ally remains unable to grasp, to grab hold of. What strange space, what sort of site are we then dealing with?
• First of all, it’s a site for getting lost — a “path that leads nowhere.”
• Next, it’s a site for losing space — in order to refute it, to invert it at the drop of a hat, turning its usual coordinates upside down. If the skull is a sculptural object par excellence, it’s not simply because, when placed at a “presentable” dis- tance, its forms are beautiful to study or because its volumes are interesting to represent.47 The skull is a sculptural object for the more essential and organic reason that our brain is incapable of imagining its true spatiality — the “cradled ceiling” [le plafond en berceau] offering nothing more for our representation than a convenient and culturally reproduc- ible substitute.
March 28, 2020
Peu importe les sujets que GDH choisit, c'est son écriture qui prime sur tout. Sa façon de voir les choses m'étonne toujours.
February 12, 2025
Aussi prétentieux que moi au collège.
February 27, 2020
Es un libro muy inspirador para comenzar a crear. Quiero decir que, da una primera mireada al sentido del artista visual en una forma simple de analisar el campo de la creación de obra.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 28, 2023
Didi-Huberman is always a trip, always offers beautiful ways of rethinking the world through art.
August 10, 2023
''Quando se afunda a mão para extrair terra, cria-se um vazio onde a mão passou: a terra mistura-se, a escultura toma forma. O vazio da carne torna-se terra. (...) a matéria é memória.''
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews