A Conversation with Hubert Damisch

Abstract

Denis Hollier: How would you define yourself? Historian of art? Anti-historian of art? Theorist of art? Philosopher of art? How would you define your field? Hubert Damisch: It's a field with three poles, and here my early training with Merleau-Ponty played a decisive part: question of unconscious; question of history (which I would put in third place); and something I don't know whether to call form or structure. I guess I'd say, using Wittgenstein's definition: form as possibility of structure. Why art? Because I thought that art would be medium through which I could simultaneously connect these three poles. When I was studying with Merleau-Ponty, I wanted to work on Goya in relation to something I called the perception of This interested Merleau-Ponty very much. It was idea that there was a perception of history that connects to darkness in sense in which you find this in Lucien Febvre, or initially in Michelet: l'histoire noire. It was idea that in midst of a history that was narrative, discursive, something suddenly occurred in work of Goya and especially in Black Paintings of Quinta del Sordo: a kind of silence. It would be, then, a matter not of narrating history but of seeing it. What would a phenomenology of perception of history be? You have to remember that we were just emerging from war. It was extremely important to me, idea that I had perceived history. During war as a child and adolescent this was something I saw. I remember hearing first news about war announced on radio; but I didn't really believe it until I saw facts actually written on posters. In same way, I was profoundly marked by one of first examples of what I experienced as graphic design as such: eagle and swastika on deportation notices. Yve-Alain Bois: But how did you pass from Merleau-Ponty to structuralism and what role did Francastel play there?