It requires, then, a gaze that would not draw close only to discern and recognize, to name what it grasps at any cost – but would, first, distance itself a bit and abstain from clarifying everything immediately. Something like a suspended attention, a prolonged suspension of the moment of reaching conclusions, where interpretation would have time to deploy itself in several dimensions, between the grasped visible and the lived ordeal of a relinquishment. There would also be, in this alternative, a dialectical moment – surely unthinkable in positivist terms – consisting of not-grasping the image, of letting oneself be grasped by it instead: thus of letting go of one's knowledge about it.




George Didi-Huberman