Paris with Ganymede: A Critical Supplement to Damisch's Judgement

Abstract

In 1998, Hubert Damisch, commenting on the work of the seventeenthcentury Dutch painter Pieter Saenredam, remarked that this artist often skewed the viewing axis of his compositions onto the bias to produce perspective views that are 'slightly awkward, slightly warped.' He continued: 'What Saenredam reveals is what I hope is in play in my own work, namely, that it only takes a slight warping, a slight displacement of the main axis, for one to be able to see things differently. In the same spirit of productive bias, and by way of tribute, I offer the following reflections ins ired by Damisch's The Judgement of Paris (1992; English edition 1996). Taking certain insights of Freud and Lacan as foundational, building methodological bridges between L'vi-Strauss' structuralist anthropology and Aby Warburg's mnemonic networks able to pierce the veils of time, this remarkable book is an investigation of representations of the title theme covering some 3000 years. In a distinctly Damischian way, it takes this judgement corpus as a composite 'theoretical object' spurring philosophical reflection.3 'How does it signify, this story; what sensitive spots in our culture does it touch, what depths does it plumb, such that even today it holds a particular resonance for us?'4 Damisch's first-line answer, his working hypothesis, is that the judgement of Paris is the preeminent western symbolic expression of the vexed cultural status of beauty vexed because of its ultimate if elusive derivation (according to psychoanalysis) from sexual pleasure a status that hinges on Paris' selection of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, as the 'most beautiful' of the three female deities among whom he must choose. Furthermore, that this status is reinforced by Paris' choice having precipitated the Trojan War, a narrative analogue for human mortality, awareness of which is a necessary prerequisite for the human capacity for the aesthetic emotion. Within this framework, Damisch compares ancient and mediaeval textual accounts with visual depictions, giving close attention to later moralising constructions as well as to analogies between the three goddesses, the Three Graces, and the three primary functions of Indo-European culture as formulated by Georges Dumezil. With purposive anachronism, he reads the celebrated print by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael (ca. 1517) through the lens of Kant's critique of taste (1790) and Manet's appropriation of a subsidiary group for his Dejeuner sur 1'herbe (1863), which art-work is then linked to the scandal it occasioned and brought to bear retroactively on the question of beauty as epitomised by the theme of Paris' choosing, the visual quotation being construed, per Derrida's gloss on Kant's parergon, as emblematic of modern art's investment in ancient art's (ostensible) supplement: colour. All of this is preceded by reflections on the book's first psychoanalytic principles in the matter of beauty, and by an attempt to think these with Kant's third-Critique premise of the 1. 'A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,' October, vol. 85, summer 1998, pp. 3-17; this quote p. 11. 2. Hubert Damisch, Le jugement de Paris (Flammarion: Paris, 1990); English edn, The Judgment of Paris, trans. J. Goodman (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1995). References are to the English edition. 3. 'A Conversation' (1998), pp. 8, 11. 4. Damisch, The Judgment of Paris (1995), p. 100.