The question of human being has forms of registration within the history of art as well within both philosophy and theology. One of the most insistent forms this question takes within art history can be found in the portrait as much as in the self-portrait. Within both the self is presented. There is self presentation. With both portraiture and self-portraiture – to be more precise within these interrelated modes of self presentation – specific questions arise: who is the subject of the portrait? What does portraiture portray? What conception of self is presented in the self-portrait? The point of departure for any answer to these questions is that in the portrait the self – thus the self presentation – is defined by the face. In both painting and sculpture selves have faces. While this may seem obvious, it is still the case that the different modes of self presentation capture the complex relations between self and other as well as the divide, within the domain of the other, between what could be described as simple alterity, on the one hand, and the presence of the other as the enemy, on the other. Hence, understanding the presence of the self within art works involves following the way the complex presence of faciality is registered within art works. The faces in question will be as much of the self that is given within an overriding sense of Sameness as they will be of differing modes of alterity. Faciality is marked from the beginning therefore by an original sense of complexity. This means recognising that there will always have been more than one face. This recognition becomes the identification not merely of the face of the other – that may still be to remain with an undifferentiated sense of sameness – but what will come to be identified as the other's face. It is this latter sense that begins to approach the condition of the other as that which cannot be assimilated. (It should be clear that it is precisely this conception of the other that allows for its reformulation in terms of the enemy. Moreover, the other's face as it continues to appear here and in Dürer is painting's presentation of what has already been identified as the without relation.) Such an identification is possible even though art, in a move that reiterates in its own terms and within its own materials the process of abstraction within the philosophical, has always tried to universalise the self and thus insist on the universality of the face.
An important instance of this insistence on the process of abstraction can be found in Hegel's discussion of both painting and sculpture.1 Hegel's argument concerning the individual face, an argument that has equal relevance in relation to both painting and sculpture, has significance in this context precisely because it draws the face into the necessity of universality while at the same time linking it to the need to overcome the equation of particularity with the idiosyncratic and therefore to the non-universalisable.2 This double movement comprising universality and individuality is that which will be undone by the presence of the other's face. Part of the argument will be, however, that it is the nature of its undoing that opens up another way of understanding the presentation of the other's face and thus how to think its importantly different sense of particularity.
The other's face, a face whose actual determinations are yet to be made clear, brings an important complication into play. Even though the other's face is that which is inscribed as the other beyond assimilation, what this opens up, as intimated above, is the very real possibility that the identification of a conception of the particular, one that resists incorporation and therefore allowing for a form of affirmation, is itself an already present possibility. What this means is that the emergence of this face – the other's face – is as much a conceptual necessity, insofar as it is an already present possibility, as it is one that arises from an engagement with art works themselves.3 Alterity, in this emphatic sense, as a genuine possibility, is already there, there in the yet to be discerned other side of Hegel's face.
Sculpture and painting have an important affinity. Both for Hegel necessitate that within the single work – a work of portraiture – there is the expression of that which cannot be reduced to simple particulars. Universality as ‘spirit’ has to be present. Hence Hegel writes in relation to the painting of a portrait that
if the portrait is to be a genuine work of art (ein echtes Kunstwerk) it must … have stamped on it the unity of the spiritual personality, and the spiritual character must be emphasized and made predominant.4
Hegel continues, having made this point, to argue that the ‘face’ is central in the development of this presentation. The painter must have a determined project. The portrait is constrained – the constraint of authenticity – to present the viewer with ‘the spiritual sense and character of his subject’.5 While that is particular to a given subject, the spiritual is that which opens up the universal. Without the latter, i.e. the spiritual, having actual presence, there is only a face. Writing of Dürer in the same section of the Lectures on Fine Art Hegel argues that Dürer's portraits present the ‘whole of a spiritual life’ (ganz ein gesitiges Leben).6 As such they have the capacity to transcend simple particularity. Sculpture works with a similar constraint. It, too, must be constrained by the necessity to express ‘spirit’ (Gesit). In the case of sculpture the specificity of the medium gives that need a particular determination. In this regard Hegel argues that
although the expression of spirit must be diffused over the appearance of the entire body, it is most concentrated in the face.7
However, this concentration opens up the problem of individuality. In other words, it gives rise to the question: what stops one face from being no more than the face of a specific individual? Or, to repose the question such that that it highlights what for Hegel will be the necessity for a presence beyond particularity: how could any one face become the universal face? The answer to the latter question is that this possibility occurs by overcoming the point of individual identification, an instance of which, in the case of sculpture, is the ‘seeing eye’. As the ‘soul’ must be dispersed over the ‘entirety of the external form’ the eye must be ‘sightless’. For the eye to see or for the eye to be seen into (the eye as the ‘simple expression of the soul’) then this would entail the eye's particularity – it could only be ‘that’ eye – and as such universality would have become impossible. Hence, the sculpture remains white.8 The relief that marks the eyes – e.g. the distinction between iris, the pupil and the overall eye – while present, by resisting both colour and directionality (a resistance enacted on the level of material presence), allows them to become the universal eye or at least the one that can be absorbed into the process of what for Hegel would be the soul's overall expression and therefore not stand opposed to that expression.9 Eschewing particularity, while idealist in orientation, is nonetheless a specific material practice.
The attempt to work through the universal – to or from the universal hence the differing though necessary definitions of sculpture and painting within Hegel's Lectures on Fine Art – positions the oscillation between the individual face and the generalised face such that it allows for universal presence (or the universal's presence). The difficulty inherent in this formulation is that at work within the opposition between the universal and the particular are forms of exclusion and differentiation which, while defining moments of universality and individuality, do so without being able to be incorporated into either one of them. Incorporation of those elements can only occur therefore in terms which necessitate their exclusion from any identification with what will have already been assumed to form part of the relationship between universal and particular. That inclusion has already been identified in Pascal in terms of the logic of the synagogue in which inclusion, while necessary, had to have a specific determination, i.e. it had to be included as that which is present as the always to be excluded. What arises therefore within the set-up created by the relation between universal and particular is the possibility of a project of rethinking and thus reworking the interplay between universality, individuality and exclusion. Once that project takes hold what would emerge as a consequence – a result to be faced – is a conception of facility that works beyond the traditional configuration of these interrelated terms. Such a conception would be the other possibility within the other's face. The emergence of such a face redefines the original setting such that there are only ever other faces and thus no singular undifferentiated Other. The question that has to be addressed concerns the status of the other's face.
If there is another way in, a way providing an opening to the other's face, then, it will be argued, one of the central locations in which it can be taken to occur is the work of Albrecht Dürer. With Dürer not only is Hegel's own encounter with his paintings brought into play – an encounter in which universality in the guise of Geist is, for Hegel, apparent – what is presented is a site that can be questioned, a questioning which becomes possible precisely because with Dürer the problematic relationship between the portrait and the self-portrait and therefore the relationship between portrayed selves, the face of the other and the other's face, acquires an important and original formulation. In the context of this undertaking that beginning, however, can be given – and this is the immediate task – a different setting than the one it usually receives.10 This necessitates the constitution of this other site.
Prior to turning to Dürer therefore it should be noted that, in more general terms, the question of the self and thus the self in question has a history. Measured philosophically the self identified with res cogitans in Descartes’ Meditations differs importantly from any answer to the question of the self that accepts the distinction initiated by Freud, and subsequently worked out by the history of psychoanalysis, between consciousness and conscious life on the one hand, and the work of the unconscious on the other. That the answer to the question – who am I? – could have been faultlessly provided by Descartes becomes, within psychoanalysis, the fault that underpins the identification of the self with the ego. (In psychoanalytic terms this amounts to the positing of an identification that is in fact a misidentification.) However, what conception of the self and self-presentation occurs within both the history of sculpture's and painting's preoccupation with the self? What self is it that appears in sculpture or painting? What is faced? (Knowing in advance that answers, no matter how they are understood, will always have to engage the problem of the complex plurality – a plurality marked by the differential rather than mere variety – that delimits not just the other's face but also the material specificity of painting and sculpture.) Knowing, moreover, that by allowing for the insistence of the face the material presence of art stages its own complex relation to the philosophical. There is a further preliminary question, namely within what conception of history is that self articulated? Once again it needs to be signalled in advance that it will always be a plural sense of self and thus the history concerns selves/faces in their being presented. The presentation of self – what has already been identified as self presentation – needs to be understood as the situating of the self that while always determined will nonetheless occasion its own reworking. The self, therefore, will have always been present as an already overdetermined site.)11
An instance of this situation, one in which self and face are presented in terms of each other and thus one that complicates any straightforward history of the self and its face(s), is evident in Jan van Eyck, at least insofar as it concerns The Arnolfini Betrothal (1432) (Figure 8.1). Within that work there is the inscription of three interrelated senses of self. The connection is not simply discursive since they are interconnected by their presence within a single material frame. In the first instance there is the painting of the betrothed couple (Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Canami). Rather than an actual self-portrait the work should be viewed as the portrait of selves. Within it selves and faces coalesce as part of the painting's work. In the second, there is the inscription of the self who paints. The painter appears in the mirror positioned behind the couple being painted (see Figure 8.2). The work, to that extent, is a form of self-portrait. (The work is, after all, signed, not with a mere signature but the with the words ‘Johannes de eyck fuit hic’. The answer to the question – where is van Eyck? – is that he is already portrayed within the work. Van Eyck is present as part of the work's content.) The third sense in which there is a conception of self in the work is clearly related to the occasion of authorial presence. In other words, it is related to the painter's own self-inscription and thus self presentation. The self portrayed in the mirror is not passive. That self is an agent within the painting whose agency it is. The work is thereby identified in advance as produced and therefore as a painting. Moreover, it is possible to interpret the other figure reflected in the mirror as overseeing the work and in so doing either having commissioned or even paid for the work. The work The Arnolfini Betrothal (Figure 8.1) is doubly produced. Within it patronage and production have been provided with a framed presence.12
Figure 8.1 Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Betrothal (1432). The National Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission.
In this sense van Eyck is well in advance of the more famous instance of Velásquez's Las Meniñas (1656) (see Figure 8.3) in which the act of painting – though with an important reversal of position – is equally inscribed within and as part of the work's work,13 An event that occurs via the intermediary of the mirror (see Figure 8.3). (Mirrors figure as an inseparable part of the attempt to present a concern with self. In addition, the mirror is, for the most part, inextricably bound up with the face.14) Finally, within art's history and running parallel to the inscription of the painter as the guarantor of painting and therefore of painting's already doubled presence, there is the recurrence of the image of Pittura within the frame in order to underscore any one work's connection to Painting as a generic possibility. (A clear example here – one that is doubly interesting for a concern defined in relation the portrayed self – is Poussin's 1650 self-portrait.)
Figure 8.2 Jan van Eyck, segment focus from The Arnolfini Betrothal (1432). The National Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission.
In each of these instances the presentation of self, be it a portrait or a self-portrait, will have been implicated in the project of art work. (Art work becomes a complex site to the extent that these implications are configured as significantly different. Moreover, ‘art work’ as it will be used here is a term that allows for a general description of works of art that insist on material specificity. Work is an activity.) Selves and works are the result of work. They have been produced. What matters therefore is the operative dimension within this twofold sense of production. Within art's work therefore the self cannot be separated from its presentation as part of the work. In other words, it is not as though a produced conception of self is a mere element within a work which could be excised from a more general argument and questioned. If this were to occur then it would necessitate ignoring the presence of the self as already having been folded into and thereby forming part of a field of activity. A field, a work, here those which are part of either the history of painting or sculpture, are not to be understood individually, simply as works with the self as illustrative. This field is a site at work. Work has a dynamic quality, it is the work of an individual named work, hence work has an inherently active dimension – and therefore the self produced is already implicated within a network. It is in this precise sense that self presentation, within and as art work, has a history that cannot be reduced either to mere description or simple chronological contextualisation.
Figure 8.3 Velásquez, Las Meniñas (1656). Prado, Madrid. Reproduced with permission.
The relationship between production and implication provides a way into the position of the self in three works by Dürer – Jesus Among the Doctors (1506) in Madrid Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Figure 8.4), the Self-Portrait (1498) (Figure 8.5) in the Prado and the Self-Portrait in the Louvre (1500). As presentations they concern the complex situation that occurs when what is central is no longer an image that illustrates and which functions as a mere site of meaning but one that is produced. Production draws materials, techniques and the arrangement of paint on a canvas into play. These works are to be accounted for therefore as part of the construction of self-identity, present as self presentation, and therefore as a complex continually individuated in and as specific works. What matters is the face. The way it matters becomes a way of discerning differences between specific forms of art work.
Figure 8.4 Dürer, Jesus Among the Doctors (1506). Madrid, © Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid. Reproduced with permission.
Mattering – as the operation of matter and as such orchestrating any concern with meaning – brings the face into play. As a beginning therefore the distinction between the face of the other and the other's face needs to be developed. The former is a face that can be incorporated into a common world, a world in which commonality is far from neutral let alone benign, but within which the common as a construction of both universality and abstraction figures. To the extent that commonality is present as an abstraction it will have already been defined by a decision as to what counts as the common. The common therefore is far from benign. The second aspect – i.e. the other's face – is that which is excluded from the common while at the same time providing the common with a form of coherence. Two elements of a painting from the School of van Eyck, The Fountain of Grace and Triumph of the Church Over the Synagogue (1430) (Figure 8.6) will set the scene.15 In the bottom third of the work and thus existing in a space overseen by Christ is the Fountain of Grace dividing the Christian Church from the defeated Jews. The defeat is signalled by the presence of the blinded Synagogue among other elements.16 Before returning to the Synagogue, which itself needs to be understood as a reiteration on the level of painting of the already identified logic of the synagogue, the detail of these elements needs to be noted.17
Figure 8.5 Dürer, Self-Portrait (1498). Prado, Madrid. Reproduced with permission.
The first concerns the presence, not of Hebrew but its presence within what can be most accurately described as the figure of Hebrew that ties the words into part of the operative presence of the logic of the Synagogue. The letters secure Jewish presence on the condition that the letters are devoid of meaning. The second is the presence of a distorted face, a face, it will be conjectured, that is unable to be assimilated and thus one positioned beyond conversion. As a consequence it holds open the move to a conception of alterity in which the other figures as the enemy (Figure 8.7). These elements need to be identified because they reappear – an appearance with structuring effects – in Dürer's Jesus Among the Doctors (see Figure 8.4) (or at least this will be the argument). However, that reappearance is of especial interest as the claim is that this portrait – Dürer's Jesus, and therefore Jesus as an instance of self presentation – is in fact a self-portrait. The nature of the self in question will have been rendered complex by its dependence on the use of the figured presence of Hebrew on the one hand and facial distortion on the other. Establishing the painting as a self-portrait will be made in reference to both of Dürer's self-portraits.18 The way towards the interplay between the face of Christ and Dürer's own will emerge with greater precision once the complex play of faces in The Fountain of Grace and Triumph of the Church Over the Synagogue has been taken up.19
Figure 8.6 School of van Eyck, The Fountain of Grace and Triumph of the Church Over the Synagogue (1430). Prado, Madrid. Reproduced with permission.
Figure 8.7 School of van Eyck, segment detail from The Fountain of Grace and Triumph of the Church Over the Synagogue (1430). Prado, Madrid. Reproduced with permission.
With regard to The Fountain of Grace, it is indisputable that the figures to the right of the Fountain are Jews (see Figure 8.7). What needs to be noted is the presence of scrolls, banners and parchment covered in Hebrew's figured presence. The disorder of the texts needs to be contrasted initially with the stability of the book the Virgin is reading and the one in which St John is writing. These appear in the top third of the work. Equally, the Christians in the bottom left are content, even contemplative. The disorder among the Jews is reinforced by the chaotic appearance of text while the presence of texts in the hands of the Virgin and St John would have been clear and their content self-evident. These books do not need to be seen to be understood. A different form of the self-evident occurs with the texts of the Jews. The texts allow for Hebrew's appearance, an appearance that is sustained to the extent that Hebrew (as a living, working language) is not known. Hence they contain the words, if the text is in fact the Torah, that the blinded Synagogue had before its eyes but to which it remained uncomprehending. And yet, while there are a number of letters that appear to be Hebrew, there are also a number that bear no real relation at all. Beyond mere allusion there is nothing other than a slippage between Jews, chaos, blindness and the presence of the figure of Hebrew. The presence of the latter assumes the identification of Jews and thus the construction of the Jew occurs beyond any form of engagement with the complex pattern that defines that tradition.20 (This has been argued earlier in Chapter 1 is integral to the definition of the figure.) The presence both of this slippage and the location of the Jew outside any sense of tradition in which Jewish identity was defined by and for Jews (knowing always that there is an important relationship between this sense of tradition and the history of anti-Semitism which is itself always articulated in relation to the figure of the Jew) means that what defines the relationship between the Church and the Synagogue (the terms in the painting's title) is such that the Synagogue both founds that from which it is at the same time, and of necessity, separated. This relation of founding and excluding is the logic of the Synagogue. As has already emerged in the discussion of Pascal this is the means by which externality set the measure for the internal.
One of the figures in the crowd facing the fountain and yet having the text explained, or perhaps in discussion over its content, a dispute in which the question of Christ as the actual Messiah could have been taking place, is not just ugly, it is as though his face has been subject to a type of deformation. While most of the other faces are such that they could have been Christians this face has an almost irredeemable quality. This is not simply a Jewish face. This is the face of the Jew. On the level of the face, this is what the appearance of the figure of the Synagogue – appearing within its own logic – announces in a more generalised manner. The banded eyes and broken staff could be nothing else. They are the presentation of the other. Here, set among other faces is a face that constructs difference. What is present is no longer just the face of the other, now it is the other's face. How this occurs needs to be noted. The forehead is distorted in relation to the cheeks and the rest of the face. The area above the eyes bulges. The head is hunched to one side indicating that the head's normal position is far from straightforward. He is not obese as opposed to the person with whom he is in discussion. Nonetheless, he is distinct to the point that as a face his can be separated from the others. The texture of the skin is frayed not smooth. Were a hand to pass from one cheek to another something else would have occurred beneath its touch. The face of the other allows for a form of touch. With regard to the other's face the hand would recoil. Deformation coupled with frayed and broken skin would have made such a response inevitable, though only inevitable in its immediacy. With the other's face therefore it is as though it cannot be touched. The skin – as painted – would have refused, in advance, the hand. The face would have always held itself not just at a distance, rather it would be a distance that the hand could not traverse. This is presented in this work by a contrast, which is itself the result of the way paint works. The operation therefore is integral to the construction of a face which in rendering the possibility of touch problematic begins to take on the quality of other as enemy.
Within the painting and to the extent that there are at least two scenes of reading – the ordered reading already alluded to in the case of the Virgin and St John in addition to the group to the left in the middle third of the painting – there are also two orders of faciality, one allowing for assimilation (and thus conversion) of the face that could become Christian, and the other as inherently resistant to such a possibility, a resistance reproduced throughout the work in terms of faciality, reading, order, etc. Order does not concern neutrality. On the contrary, it is the organisation of power. Even if the conclusion to be drawn from this position is restricted, provisionally, to faciality it still means that faciality is divided from the start. The consequence to be drawn is that there cannot be a pure face-to-face, except as the result of two interrelated moves both of which give centrality to forms of presence that resist particularity. The first is a direct instance of this resistance. Within it the face-to-face would be no more than an abstract relation. However, if the abstract face-to-face is to be advanced as a possibility then it would be premised on effacing the grounding difference that this particular face stages. There can be no way around specificity except by succumbing to the idealism inherent in an abstracted sense of the face-to-face, a succumbing in which the presence of particularity would then be overcome by the introduction (after the event of the encounter of the other's face) of an idealised conception of Sameness, itself a move effacing, at the same time, the original plural event that constructed the initial setting of the interplay of faces as a complex.21
The second sense in which there could be a face-to-face would stem from the relationship between prayer and conversion. It should be noted that for the most part the Christians in the painting are at prayer. In contrast the Jews are overwhelmed by defeat or they are still disputing the text. Prayer is pitted against both defeat and dispute. There is an additional and fundamental element in the presentation of prayer. Prayer, as it occurs here, is an individual concern. Equally, it becomes the means by which a permanent and enduring sense of God appears,22 (a God accessible directly through prayer or through prayer mediated by a form of human presence and therefore not via the intermediary of a text, let alone text as law, hence the inevitable involvement of the God of Christianity). The position being maintained by the painting therefore is that instruction in prayer – a coming to be at prayer – thus having the capacity to pray is the face of Christianity. A face that is found and which has its foundation within conversion. Conversion would depend upon seeing through blindness and thus being able to face the force of revelation. The face of the Jew – not just the face open to conversion but the other as irredeemably other, the other having become the enemy – is the face of the one for whom revelation is that which cannot be faced. This is, avant la lettre, Pascal's ‘Pagan Jew’. Consequently, while assimilation and conversion are possible, it is also necessary that there be the one who visually – and it has to be visually as this is art work – resists that possibility. As has been suggested this resistance has an inherent necessity. What this reiterates therefore, on the level of the visual, is what has already been identified as the logic of the Synagogue. The history of Christianity has demanded nothing less. This demand and its articulation within an organising logic reinforces the ineliminable presence of this necessity.
Dürer's painting Jesus Among the Doctors (1506) (see Figure 8.4), a painting that has to be understood initially as a portrait of Jesus in dispute with a group of Rabbis, is also far more.23 Part of this surplus is contained in the conjecture that it is, at the same time, a self-portrait. The basis of that identification is not there in the ideational content of self presentation. It is present initially in the hair. The hair as present in both the self-portraits is gold with a reddish hue. However, more significantly, it is both long and hangs in curled tresses. The face looks out through it, while the hair frames the head. In addition, Dürer's left eye seems to be slightly raised in position in comparison with the right. There is an accord in relation to hair, the positioning of the eyes and the angle of the head within all three paintings. Hence, rather than identity on the level of the image, there is an identity that is defined in terms of other specific elements. What this means is that if Dürer is positioned as Jesus, then the question to be addressed concerns how that positioning is to be understood? In other words, what happens to the self and thus to the conception of self when there is the translation from the purity that accompanies, at least on the level of intention, the assertion that this image is a self-portrait, to another defined by a recollection of the founding self even if the propriety of the name ‘self-portrait’ no longer accompanies the work? There is a translation of names, thus a migration of defining motifs, hence the question of the status of a central element within Jesus Among the Doctors (see Figure 8.4).
It needs to be added that what follows is an interpretation of Dürer's painting in which what is central is the interconnection of a self-portrait and a fundamental distinction between the Rabbis. As will be argued it is a distinction that reiterates, on the level of painting, Pascal's two sorts of Jews. It should be noted, however, that other paintings with the same textual source do not necessarily distinguish between the Rabbis. In some works, despite the varying ages of the Rabbis, the faces are one and the same. A clear instance of this approach can be found in a painting by Giovanni Serodine (1626).24 In his painting the only discernable difference between the Rabbis is age. A more interesting example, however, is Bonifazio dei Pitati's engagement with the same topic. (His Gesu fanciullo im mezzo dottori (1520) is in the Palazzo Petti in Florence.) The interest of this work is that a number of the Rabbi's have the Law either open on their laps or are holding it. Even when the text is open their eyes are transfixed on the presence of Christ. His presence, in the context of this painting, has quite literally made not simply Judaism but its grounding in the textual presence of Law redundant. The triumph over Judaism is captured by the redundancy of the Old Testament as a source of law on the first instance, and its retention as an original site of prophecy in the second. The overcoming of Judaism in the name of abstract universality has more complex presence in Dürer's work.
Given the possible confluence between an idealisation of the self (man as God) and the humanisation of the divine Jesus as Dürer and thus as human, the painting invites commentary.25 While it is clear that the head of Jesus and his face show the influence of Dürer's encounters with Italian art, despite the Italian influence there is something distracting about the positioning of the bodies. That the bodies are positioned and thus occupy a specific place can be constructed almost as an after-effect. What holds them in place and thus that which works to position them are the hands and faces. In sum, hands, faces and, as will be suggested, the figured presence of Hebrew construct the field that holds this portrait in play. What this amounts to is the claim that the self-portrayed arises out of this network of concerns. Hence it would never be sufficient merely on its own to identify the painting as a self-portrait. Such a move positions the self in a way that it could be lifted from the work and treated on its own. While it is a self-portrait – a form of self presentation in which Jesus and Dürer have become identified – far more is implicated in the construction of that self. Self presentation is articulated within a network of relations. To demonstrate this point two aspects of the work demand attention.
In the first instance there is the book held open by the Rabbi in the top left corner of the frame. The page that is visible contains the gesture towards Hebrew that was also evident in the earlier work from the School of van Eyck, namely the figured presence of the Hebrew language. While the page that can be seen looks as though there is the Hebrew letter ‘Kop’, the link between the page and either a book in Hebrew or the sustained use of Hebrew cannot be established beyond a merely gestural connection. The structure of the page reiterates a patterning that assumes a practice of reading that begins at the left and then moves to the right. The opposite is the case in Hebrew. In addition the title of the book or chapter is given by a three letter word that apart from being Semitic, insofar as what it reiterates is the generalised constantal root structure of Semitic languages in general – as such the text could be as much in Aramaic, Syriac or even Arabic as it is Hebrew – cannot be identified as a text within that tradition. If evidence is needed to establish this point the comparison of the page structure of Elijah Levita's Hebrew Grammar published in Basel in 1527 juxtaposes the two differing forms of page structure.26 Equally the presence of the book within Quentin Metsys's The Praetor and His Wife (1514) reinforces the point by indicating the structure of the Christian bible or religious book. That Dürer must have been aware of this setting is clear from the Pages of Marginal Drawings from Emperor Maximilian's Prayer Book drawn by Dürer himself in 1515.
The second aspect to which attention should be given concerns the deformity of the Rabbi to the immediate right of Jesus (see Figure 8.8).27 To the extent that the painting can be identified as a self-portrait, this means that Jesus is present – as opposed to there being simple presence of Jesus – in a continual movement between Jesus as the Son of God, Jesus as the human face of God and Jesus as the human. Jesus becomes the human as such, the ideal human as that which positions others. Consequently, the Rabbi to Jesus’ right is not presented merely in opposition to Jesus the Son of God; rather the juxtaposition is far more exacting. The juxtaposition is between a deformed presence and an idealised form of human being, idealised in the precise sense of presenting the essentially human. The juxtaposition does not involve the intrusion of the grotesque.28 A different strategy is at work. Deformation brings the face into play. There are, however, ineliminable accompanying questions. While the face is human, a simple recourse to humanity on its own will not answer the following questions. Whose face is this? What conception of self is being presented? Humanity as an abstract generality is already refused to that face. This occurs because that generality and thus the continual oscillation between Jesus and the idealisation of human being – a co-presence reinforced by the identification of self presentation and the self-portrait – is held in the face of Jesus and is thus reflected to the faces of the other Rabbis, faces, it should be added, that in their similarity to the face of humanity already signal an openness to assimilation.
Figure 8.8 Dürer, face detail from Jesus Among the Doctors (1506). Madrid, © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Reproduced with permission.
Addressing the deformed face – the other's face – demands that the hands be brought into consideration. The left hand of the Rabbi in question is on the arm of Jesus and yet the operation of the hands, their operative quality and not just the way they are positioned as though topology were enough, cannot be reduced to the mere matter of touching, as though touching were a singular act. Indeed, once the operative is emphasised then instead of a simple site which can be allocated to isolated and isolatable moments of the painting, there is a produced image the after-effect of which is meaning. What matters therefore is the way the hands work. That work is their painted presence. When this occurs in this context what emerges is that within the frame touching does not take place. It is as though hands occupy the same space and yet the fingers are painted such that the pressure that would emerge when one hand touched another or when fingers moved across each other – perhaps when they became a caress – is not registered. Indeed, what the hands display is the absence of touch. And yet, of course, there is touch (see Figure 8.9). The deformed Rabbi touches Jesus’ sleeve. That touch, however, while occurring, is not taking place. As is clear from Jesus’ face, he remains untouched. Moreover, he cannot face the Rabbi. While his face does not hold any other, he faces them. Those faces can be traced out in Jesus’ face and his in theirs. As faces they are open. They are able to be touched. In the end Jesus – as human, a humanity recalled by the intrusion of Dürer, an intrusion that also identifies the work as painting – could face them. It is essential that the slide between self-portraiture and the human as divine work together.
Figure 8.9 Dürer, hands detail from Jesus Among the Doctors (1506). Madrid, © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Reproduced with permission.
The predicament of the deformed Rabbi is given within the frame. Moreover, the frame containing the complex presence of Jesus as self-portrait cannot be understood adequately if the effect of the presence of the deformed rabbi is overlooked. Neither self presentation nor self-portraiture stands alone. The reciprocity that marks touch cannot have been evident here. There is therefore a reiteration of the position in which removal – in the sense of the presence of that which cannot be assimilated – occurs through the exigency of precisely that presence. In other words, the deformed Rabbi is not simply there. He is produced as the Jew – more accurately he figures as the ‘pagan Jew’ – and is thus implicated in the impossibility of touch. That which cannot be touched is equally the one who is unable to touch and therefore the one that can be withdrawn from considerations concerning touch, held beyond conversion yet within the necessity of the Jew's function as the outside. This is a withdrawal occurring because of the continual slippage between subject, face and Jew. It is a withdrawal. However, withdrawal brings into play that which is there once the other becomes the enemy; the latter is a conception of the other that takes ‘nature’ as its ground and is attended continually by the possibility of violence. (The latter occurs once there is the definite repositioning of the other as the enemy.) While it is always possible to ask in response to this predicament – what would it be to touch the other's face? – it is essential to recognise that at work within that question is the possibility that what is involved will entail having dispensed with violence. In this context this would mean not just noting though refusing the realisation of violence as a possibility, it would also involve the suspension of immediacy in the name of the mediate. As such the position of the enemy would have ceded its place to alterity. The result would be the denaturing of ‘nature’ in which it would have become possible to touch without conversion.29 The latter is, of course, another formulation of what it would mean to be just to particularity. The end result is that the presence of touch would have another face.
The history of art contains intimations of this other touch. One painting which would open up precisely the possibility is Ghirlandaio's Portrait of an Old Man and a Young Boy (1490). While it can be argued that Ghirlandaio's is explicable in terms of virtue, on a more prosaic level it should be noted that physical deformation precludes neither love nor touch. Hence once this painting is juxtaposed with Dürer's – in which the ostensibly sacred would have encountered the ostensibly secular – then the move from touch to love opens the question of the possibility of love and therefore touch that is positioned, once again, beyond the hold of there being a founding need for conversion. Hence it would have become possible to touch openly.
What Dürer's Jesus Among the Doctors produces therefore is not just the impossibility of an idealisation of the face but the opposite, since that idealisation is set within a set relations. As a consequence the face – though it is inevitably faces – as the site of a set of different and divergent relations cannot be reduced to a form of pure faciality. There is always that which cannot be converted and thus which cannot be touched. The hand even in reaching out encounters a hand this is itself not outstretched. Thus there is the one who, while touching, cannot be touched and therefore the one who, when they are touched, this occurs within a hold that cannot be felt. If this is the case then the assimilationist gesture that assumed that everyone could be converted will have already been undone by Dürer's painting. A gesture dismissed by the work's retention of the Jew as produced within a logic that will always retain and exclude. And yet it is precisely this predicament that can itself be undone (recalling the moment in which Hegel's animal provides the opening to particularity, a moment in which it would be as though the animal had encountered and faced the Jew), a turning back, an undoing and thus an opening in the same way as the mediate becomes an opening in response to the already noted instrumentalisation of immediacy. The retention of a face that brings into play the question of its being touched allows for an undoing in which not only would touching the other's face – the coming into relation of that which was without relation – endure as a continual possibility, it would be a possibility that was not defined by the opposition of, on the one hand, the anthropocentrism of conversion and, on the other, the closure of the immediacy.
Jesus Among the Doctors contains therefore a founding tear. What is torn is the possibility of an original synthesis of the self. Dürer was constrained to include a face that cannot be assimilated. The logic of the synagogue demands nothing less, in the same way as Pascal was obligated to discriminate among Jews in order to identify the ‘pagan Jew’. However, both of these positions have consequences beyond what was envisaged. In both instances the questions posed concern the nature of the relations – relations that can, of course, only exist in the continuity of being worked out – that there can be to that which always stands outside assimilation, or touch (if particularity can be generalised then this is one of the forms it can take). In Dürer's painting that tear operates with a series of determined strategies and yet what the painting makes clear is that if there were to be an ethics of the face it would be given in relation to a face that could not have been initially touched and therefore to a face that fell outside any possibility that it could bear the attribution of an essential quality. The painting is open therefore to an undoing. This is why it cannot be restricted to a mere self-portrait. If the work holds open a further possibility, and as such could have a projective nature within strategies of portraiture, then it would be to a conception of portraiture in which there was an affirmation of sites marked by the original tear (an affirmation, that is, rather than the recovery of a tear). As such, it would yield a site where the tear was an opening to questions, both ethical and political, that the work staged. Dürer's painting cannot affirm one of the consequences that arise from the founding tear that is integral to its constitution, thereby opening up, as has been suggested, the question of what would be involved were a work of art to affirm the already present status of what has been identified as the other's face. How is an affirmation of a founding tear to be painted? This needs to be understood as a question posed on the level of painting that is equivalent to the one that arose in the context of the analysis of Pascal, i.e. how to be just to particularity. Pursuing that question opens a separate terrain of investigation. Were it to be followed then the preceding can be understood as setting out some of the essential criteria for judgment.
1. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Vols I and II (G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II and III, Werke 14 and 15 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986)). Future references will be to volume and page number of the English translation followed by the volume and page number of the German.
2. I have examined this aspect of Hegel's work in considerable detail in my The Plural Event (London: Routledge, 1993) – see in particular pp. 83–111.
3. While it cannot be undertaken here there is nonetheless a need to distinguish between the reiteration of otherness as a generalised structure and one that works within a founding sense of the differential that refuses, ab initio, the work of synthesis that allows for the positing of otherness in and of itself. The work of Levinas is of course central here. For an important attempt to interpret Levinas beyond the hold of a simple opposition between self and other, see William Large, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot: Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2006).
4. Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. II, p. 866 (Vol. 15, p. 103).
5. Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. II, p. 866 (Vol. 15, p. 103).
6. Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. II, p. 867 (Vol. 15, p. 104).
7. Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. II, p. 727 (Vol. 14, p.58).
8. Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. II, p. 732 (Vol. 14, p. 63).
9. For a counter interpretation see Stephan Houlgate, ‘Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture’, in Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Arts (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 56–90. Houlgate underscores the centrality of freedom rather than the relation between the individual work and the spiritual. Nonetheless, Houlgate's writings on Hegel's aesthetics are assiduous in their attempt to position Hegel's overall project within the philosophy of art in relation to contemporary art practices. See in addition his ‘Hegel and the Art of Painting’, in William Maker (ed.), Hegel and Aesthetics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), pp. 61–83.
10. The two central works on Dürer – two works to which this project is indebted are – are Joseph Lee Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) and Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). With regard to the former, while the overall argument of Koerner's concerning the development of the self-portrait is accepted and in part deployed, the position presented in this chapter is that the argument becomes far more complex and indeed takes on a different quality once the position of the Jew – positioned by painting's introduction of the logic of the synagogue – is introduced. For a further development of Koerner's work on self-portraiture see his ‘Self-Portraiture Direct and Oblique’, in Anthony Bond and Joan Woodall (eds), Self-Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2005), pp. 67–82.
11. The complex relationship between interpretation and history is brilliantly analysed by Keith Moxey in the context of Dürer and Grünewald. What becomes important is the recognition that contexualisation can be an object of study in itself and that such analyses allow for future decontextualisation of those works. As such art can be continually redeployed. What needs to be pursued in addition is that the image is capable of this movement, hence it needs to figure in any account of the ontology of art work. For Moxey's important article see his ‘Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the Study of Dürer and Grünewald’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 86, no. 1 (2004), pp. 750–63.
12. For a sustained study of this painting in which the complex role of the self is outlined see Edwin Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).
13. The crucial study of this painting is the one undertaken by Michel Foucault in his Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). The analysis is not being brought into question here. Nonetheless, what the reference to van Eyck allows to emerge as a question is whether Las Meniñas functions as the sign of a radical interruption within historical time in the way that Foucault argues. For the detail of Foucault's argument see pp. 7–36.
14. The question of the mirror warrants more detailed study than can be provided here. What needs to be noted is that the mirror's presence, whether it be pure reflection and thus as a form of self-portrait – as is the case with Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1523–4) or Rubens’ presentation of self in a mirror Venus Before the Mirror (1613–4), thus introducing questions of vanity's interplay with beauty – positions the self, be it within a portrait or self-portrait, with art work. In other words, the mirror, in doubling the presence of the self, entails that the self is always present as a representation. The self is made present to itself via an act. As such the mirror underscores the presence of the work of art as art's work. Nonetheless, while presentation, representation and art play out in relation to each other, once the produced image is emphasised such that meaning is always an after-effect of the work of materials, then the structure of representation is no longer the most apposite in order to interpret works of art.
15. Otto Pächt argues that this work is a copy of van Eyck. While Pächt offers an interpretation of the painting, he concentrates on the role of the Eucharist within the work. While not precluding the centrality of those aspects of the work the argument here is that the presentation of fundamental elements of the structure of Christianity within the work depends upon the position of the Jew and the figure of the Synagogue within it. See Otto Pächt on Van Eyck in Die Begründer der altniederländischen Maleri (Munich: Prestel, 2002), pp. 132–4.
16. While the Synagogue is retained as living and thus enduring, there are significant paintings in which the Synagogue is killed by the Cross, an important instance of which is Garofalo's Crucifix with Ecclesia and Synagoga (1523). This work was undertaken at least twice by Garofalo. In both instances the work retains the Synagogue as murdered and therefore perpetuates her presence as always in the process of being killed. What prevails, despite the change, is a form of retention. Of particular interest in this instance is that the ass on which she is riding has been wounded. Cuts are present on its arms and flanks. The killing of La Synagoga is contemporaneous therefore with the wounding of an animal. For an informative and invaluable study of the version that was originally undertaken as a fresco for an Augustinian refectory and which now hangs in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Ferrara, see Dana E. Katz, The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 69–99. For a discussion of the painting which is now in St Petersburg, see Tatiana Kustodieva, ‘La scuola ferrarese di pittura nelle collezioni dell'Ermitage’, in Garofalo: Pittore della Ferrara Estense (Milan: Skira, 2008), pp. 33–4.
17. Heinz Schreckenberg has provided a detailed set of images on the differing ways in which the Jew is presented within European art history. What needs to be noted, however, is a distinction between images of Jews within the history of Christianity's concern with the Jew and therefore with the images that such a concern necessitates and ones that may be more properly located within the history of Judaism's own engagement with the question of its identity and thus the way that engagement gives rise to own images. Schreckenberg's work is particularly valuable for the former. See his Die Juden in Der kunst Europas (Göttingen: Vadenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996).
18. The following argument builds on Koerner's though seeks to nuance the position by insisting on the structuring presence of the Rabbis in the painting Jesus Among the Rabbis. In his own words Koerner's position can be summed up thus:
Dürer's analogon is not primarily between himself and Christ, but between two kinds of pictorial representation. On the one hand there is the image of Christ's face, a visual formula that has a long and complex history and that raises essential questions about the status of pictorial representation in the West; on the other hand there is the autonomous self-portrait, a subject of painting that Dürer can be said to have invented for the North and that became in the course of the next half-millennium, one of the most representative modes of expression in European art. In fashioning his own monumental likeness after the cultic image of the holy face, Dürer makes particular claims for the art of painting. By transferring the attributes of imagistic authority and quasi-magical power once associated with the true and sacred image of God to the novel subject of self-portraiture, Dürer legitimates his radically new notion of art, one based on the irreducible relation between the self and the work of art. (79)
19. For a detailed discussion of this work as well as the Arnolfini portrait see Bernhard Ridderbos, ‘Objects and Questions’ in Bernhard Ridderbos, Anne Van Buren and Henk Van Veen, Early Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception and Research (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), pp. 4–173, in particular pp. 58–68.
20. In more general terms – and this generality is at times essential – the argument as it pertains to these paintings is relatively straightforward. Firstly, the claim is that the presentation of the Jew within the history of art, literature and philosophy (to limit the scope) is posed beyond the concerns that the Jewish tradition may have had for its own self-conception. Secondly, what is overlooked, and overlooked of necessity, is the fact the question of the Jew – or even the criteria determining Jewish identity – is itself, within that tradition, contestable. As such, one way of understanding Judaism's history is as the history of this conflict. One of the most important conclusions to be drawn is that the question of Jewish identity cannot be equated with the history of the attribution, from outside Judaism, of an identity to Jews. For an important contribution to the more general question of Judaism's complex engagements with its own identity as it pertains to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see Michael Berkowitz, The Jewish Self-Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
21. It is a plural event precisely because the faces that can be assimilated and the other's face cannot be given a synthetic unity. There is a founding difference therefore that is both original and which resists synthesis. The fact that it occurs within a painting entails that an account of its presence is the after-effect of the way painting works in the construction of these faces.
22. Hence there needs to be a relationship between prayer and memory. Prayer becomes a form of remembering. To this end see the study by Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
23. The reference for the painting is, of course, the Christian Bible: Luke 2: 41–50. As recounted within that text Jesus has come to the Temple in Jerusalem to inform the Rabbis that the Messiah has arrived. What is important is that this event inaugurates within Christianity – an inauguration positioning the Rabbis as already distanced from the event inaugurated – a structure of recognition. This structure is also evident in other Gospels. A significant instance in John concerns the Sumerian woman coming to recognise that the man (anthropos) to whom she is talking is in fact Christ (Christos), a development in which there is a type of dialectic of recognition that moves through the stages ‘man’, ‘prophet’ and then ‘Christ’.
24. Giovanni Serodine's painting is in the Louvre.
25. While it cannot be pursued here Hegel's own discussion of Dürer in the context of paintings that position the story of Jesus in relation to ‘the torment and ugliness of the world’ (Vol. II, p. 883; Vol. 15, p. 126) warrants close attention.
26. Elijah Levita lived between 1468 and 1549. The text referred to here is a page from a general work on grammar Pirke Eliyahu. The work itself consisted of four sections and the text is an example of Hebrew/Latin publication in the early sixteenth century, the first edition of which was 1520. Even though there would not have been direct contact between Dürer and Levita, Levita is of particular interest because of his connection to the tradition of German Humanism with proponents of which Dürer did have contact. This is due in part to the relationship between Kabbalah and both Christian as well as Humanist thought. The central figure in the German context was Agrippa of Nettesheim. (For a modern edition of his major work see De Occulas Philosophia, ed. Willy Schrödter (St Goar: Reichl Verlag, 2003).) Panofsky outlines Dürer's relation to Pico and Agrippa (see The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pp. 168–71). There has been a great deal of recent work documenting what texts in Hebrew are known and by whom. While concentrating on England, G. Lloyd Jones provides a good overview of current work. See his The Discovery of Hebrew in Tudor England: A Third Language (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), especially pp. 11–86.
27. Panofsky also draws attention to the contrast between beauty and ugliness in the work (see the The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, pp. 113–16). Panofsky attributes this to the influence of Leonardo's Trattato della Pittura, and thus for him the way into the work is provided by the question of whether the ‘the face of the wicked old scholar’ (p. 115) was based on a ‘prototype created by Leonardo’. What is being tested in the analysis to be developed here is the extent to which the deformed Rabbi is merely a ‘caricature’ (p. 114). While Panofsky's historicisation of the faces cannot be ignored, what is left out is its incorporation of the differing faces within the particular question of the way the relationship between Christianity and its construction of the Jew figures within painting. In addition, what is also left out is the way that reaction would then inform a more general recognition that what is at play is the relationship between self and other. While it does not concern art within the Northern Renaissance, exemplary work that takes up the figure of the Jew has been done for the medieval period. See to this end Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), in particular pp. 165–96.
28. Indeed the grotesque needs to be understood as playing a particular role within the history of art. See to this end Philippe Morel, Les grotesques (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). Morel locates the term as only having application within a defined historical period. In addition, it is also important to consult Hans Belting's interpretation of Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (see his Hieronymus Bosch: Garden of Earthly Delights, trans. Ishbel Fleet (Munich: Prestel, 2005)) precisely because it holds open a way into the grotesque or monstrous that is independent from the figure of the other's face. In other words, the position advanced here is that this conception of the face cannot be easily subsumed under pre-existing categories. This is the case, as Morel and Belting both indicate, albeit in their own differing ways, because the grotesque or the monstrous are inextricably bound with the presence of Christianity within painting. The other's face, while having a connection to that presence, is itself only ever present as the excluded other, remembering, of course, that it is an exclusion which founds.
29. I have taken up that question in a literary context in relation to Lessing's plays Die Juden (1749) and Nathan der Weise (1779) in my Philosophy's Literature (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2001), pp. 167–91. Furthermore, there are at least two further dimensions that pertain to touch. The first opening, in which it would become possible to discuss a touching, this time tinged with erotic, could begin with Carravagio's La diseuse de bonne aventure (1595–98). The second concerns the dictate that determines a great many works of art, namely Christ's ‘Noli me tangere’. For an informed and philosophically rich discussion of the utterence and its role within the history of art see Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: Essai sur la levée du corps (Paris: Éditions Bayard, 2003). In sum, therefore, any attempt to take up touch within painting would have to work through the complex notions of subjectivity that dominate once simplistic conceptions of universality are distanced.
