Lecture 8 - Georges Didi-Huberman
Bataille on Nakedness
For Didi-Huberman, nudity gets under our skin.
Nudity is not only about what is revealed at the surface of the skin, but what lies underneath it.
These insides both repel us and fascinate us (think of how everyone slows down at a traffic accident involving death to catch a glimpse of the gory detail).
Horror reinforces attraction rather than simply repelling us.
Didi-Huberman on Cruelty
Didi-Huberman argues that artists such as Botticelli reveal that nudity has a darker dimension, it is not simply about eros, but also about death and cruelty. He thinks most art historians pass over this darker dimension.
He links nudity to cruelty because the naked body is also the body that can be opened, that can be cut, and reveal its sticky insides.
Etymology of cruelty: from Latin crudus, ‘rough; not crooked, raw, bloody’ and cruor is the blood that flows from a wound.
He quotes Georges Bataille’s Madame Edwarda (a fictional short story): “nakedness calls for the butcher’s knife”.
In sum, nakedness suggests not only understanding of the body as something beautiful (think Scruton), but the body as meat (butcher).
Georges Bataille, 1897-1962
French Philosopher and fiction writer who wrote about the links between eroticism and health.
La petite mort = ‘little death’ in French, meaning orgasm.
“inevitably linked with the moment of [sexual] climax, there is a minor rupture suggestive of death; and conversely the idea of death may play a part in setting sensuality in motion” Bataille’s Eroticism
We are discontinuous beings bounded by time, space, by our bodies, by other people, but we can lose ourselves in sex (the annihilation of the self) and achieve, if only momentarily, a death-like continuity (the annihilation of the self).
Bataille on Nakedness
“Nakedness itself, which we understand to arouse us insofar as it is beautiful, is also one of the softened forms which suggest, without unveiling entirely, its sticky insides which horrify and fascinate us. Nakedness is opposed to the beauty of faces or of modestly dressed bodies in its proximity to the repugnant centre of eroticism. It slips into obscenity. This slippage is difficult to grasp because nakedness is the least well defined thing in the world.”
Bataille on the Proximity of Horror to Art
On enjoying art that does not put you into mortal danger, but that makes you enjoy feeling as if you are in mortal danger.
“The painter is condemned to please. By no means can he transform a painting into an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds from the field where it is planted, but the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors…”
“Art, no doubt, is not restricted to the representation of horror, but its movement puts art without harm at the height of the worst and, reciprocally, the painting of horror reveals the opening onto all possibility. That is why we must linger in the shadows which art acquires in the vicinity of death.”
Didi-Huberman vs Kenneth Clark
Didi-Huberman argues against Clark’s idea of the nude, and Clark’s distinction between the body as a design and living organism.
“The last item of clothing is that of ideas, woven, in this case, from quite philosophical concepts. It is perhaps more like a screen: the symbolism of the nude screens the phenomenology of its nakedness”
(French does not make a distinction between nude and naked, so Didi-Huberman uses these interchangeably)
For Didi-Huberman, Clark’s notion of the nude is an idea that clothes nakedness, that veils it, the nude is on the side of “disincarnation” rather than incarnation.
Disincarnation: something embodied treated as disembodied.
Recall Clark’s distinction between treating the body as a design (form of art) rather than a living organism (subject of art). Didi-Huberman takes this logic to be one of disincarnation.
“This [idea of disincarnation] would mean that one could, faced with any nude, preserve one’s judgement and forget one’s desire, preserve the idea and forget the phenomenon, preserve the symbol and forget the image, preserve the drawing and forget the flesh.”
In sum, Clark forgets that nudity gets under our skin.
Didi-Huberman insists that nudity is carnal, that it is messy and involves more than the body as a design (the nude) - it involves the sticky insides (living organism).
We must understand Venus from the inside and not simply from the surface.
Botticelli
Scenes from The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, 1483
This series consists of 4 pictures, 3 of which are now in the Prado.
They illustrate the fifth day of Boccaccio’s Decameron (completed in 1353) and the story of one young man’s (Nastagio) unreciprocated romantic feelings (which we might read as an incel story nowadays?)
The Encounter with the Damned in the Pine Forest
The Infernal Hunt
The Banquet in the Pine Forest
The Wedding Banquet
Sigmund Freud, 1856 - 1939
Originator of psychoanalysis and famous for arguing that dreams follow a certain logic.
Didi-Huberman will use Freud to show that one of the most powerful links between eros and death is touch and that Botticelli’s pictures follow dream logic.
That touch is what links eros and death together.
Freud and the taboo on touching
Touching is associated with aggression (the blow) and loving (the caress).
Eros requires physical contact, but so does physical harm.
“Eros desires contact because it strives to make the ego and the loved object one, to abolish all spatial barriers between them. But destructiveness, too, which (before the invention of long-range weapons) could only take effect at close quarters, must presuppose physical contact, a coming to grips. To ‘touch’ a woman has become a euphemism for using her as a sexual object.” - Freud (Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety)
Venus - The touch of Eros and the touch of Thanatos
Thanatos - Greek personification of death
“In Venus herself, we find the trace of this hidden pivot, the troublesome point at which the touch of Thanatos meets that of Eros. This is the insensible and nonetheless wrenching boundary where being touched (being moved by the beauty of Venus, attracted to and caressed by her image) becomes being touched (wounded by the negative aspect of this same image). Nakedness goes along with desire, but also with cruelty.” - Didi Huberman
The Knight’s story to Natagio
[Didi-Huberman citing Boccaccio’s Decameron]
“Because she had sinned by her cruelty and by gloating over my sufferings, and was quite unrepentant […] she too was condemned to the pains of Hell. No sooner was she cast into Hell than we were both given a special punishment, which consisted in her case of fleeing before me, and in my own of pursuing her as though she were my mortal enemy rather than the woman with whom I was once so deeply in love. Every time I catch up with her, I kill her with this same rapier by which I took my own life; then I slit her back open, and (as you will now observe for yourself) I tear from her body that hard, cold heart to which neither love nor pity could ever gain access, and together with the rest of her entrails I cast it to these dogs to feed upon.”
“Within a short space of time, as ordained by the power and justice of God, she springs to her feet as though she had not been dead at all, and her agonising flight begins all over again, with the dogs and myself in pursuit. Every Friday at this hour I overtake her in this part of the woods, and slaughter her in the manner you are about to see.”
“Applying all his strength, the knight plunged the rapier into the middle of her breast and out again at the other side, whereupon the girl fell on her face, still sobbing and screaming, whilst the knight, having laid hold of a dagger, slashed open her back, extracted her heart and everything else around it, and hurled it to the two mastiffs, who devoured it greedily on the instant.”
“But before very long the girl rose suddenly to her feet as though none of these things had happened, and sped off in the direction of the sea, being pursued by the dogs, who kept tearing away at her flesh as she ran. Remounting his horse, and seizing his rapier, the knight too began to give chase, and within a short space of time they were so far away that Nastagio could no longer see them”
The Infernal Hunt
“In the foreground in the centre, the young woman has fallen forward; the knight has skewered her back and plunges his hands into the open wound. We realise with horror that, on the right side of the image, what the two dogs are devouring is none other than her insides, her entrails - her heart, perhaps.”
“It is the bare nakedness - terrified and martyred - of this beautiful victim which, in the midst of the Florentine Renaissance, implodes the nude as ideal genre of fine art.”
An effigy that you want to touch
Made by Clemente Susini in 1781-2, housed in La Specola in Florence.
“This waxen Venus, extraordinary realist[ic] - down to the glass eyes and pubic hair - adorned with cosmetics and a real pearl necklace, sensually stretched out on a silk sheet, could be dismantled. The researcher or student could peaceably and methodically break open the boundaries of flesh, open her heart, open up the secret of her womb and arrive at the formless apparition of her entrails.”
Criticism: misreading Clark?
Didi-Huberman is perhaps guilty of misreading Kenneth Clark’s emphasis on ideality.
Didi-Huberman reads Clark as someone advocating that the nude as an “ideal form” desexualises the human form.
However, remember that for Clark, “even when most unlike one another they [Venus I and Venus II] partake of each other’s characters”.
For Clark, ideality is not asexuality, and Clark explicitly discusses the eroticism of the nude.
In fact, Clark states that since it is so often said that the nude should not arouse desires in the spectator that he will say, on the contrary, that “it is necessary to labour the obvious and say that no nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though it should be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals. The desire to grasp and be united with another human body is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as ‘pure form’ is inevitable influenced by it” (Clark)
We might still agree though that Clark does not see nudity as connected to what gets under out skin - the sticky insides, and that it is not an accident that he does not discuss Scenes from the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti, even though he regards Botticelli so highly.