1 [footnote 92 in source] On the mould-modulation relation, and the way in which moulding hides

or contracts an operation of modulation that is essential to matter-movement, see Simondon, Du

mode d'existence (Paris: Méot, 1958) 28-50 (‘modulation is moulding in a continuous and
perpetually variable manner’, 42). He shows that the hylomorphic schema owes its power not to
the technological operation but to the social model of work subsuming that operation (47-9).
2 [93] Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sagenése physico-biologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1964) 59. [...]
3 [95] Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic (1911) (London: Putnam, 1927) 41-2. [...]

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, extracts from A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(1980); trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2009) 449-54, 627-8.

Georges Didi-Huberman
The Order of Material: Plasticities, maldises,
Survivals//1999

In relation to material, it seems to me that the art historian is divided. On the one
hand, material belongs to an order of concrete and direct evidence, in so far as it
is the physical quality of every work of art: it tells us, quite simply, what the art
object is made of. On the other hand, this concrete evidence is already contradicted
by a spontaneous philosophy that underlies the art historian’s training without his
or her even recognizing it. Erwin Panofsky made such a philosophy quite explicit
when he subjugated the entire history of the concept of art to the authority of the
Idea. He imagined that history as a pure and simple extension of Platonic
questions: ‘It was Plato who established the metaphysical meaning and value of
Beauty in a universal and timeless way, and whose theory of Ideas has become
ever more significant for the aesthetics of the plastic arts [der bildenden Kiinste].”
No doubt Panofsky was historically correct to emphasize the character of the
matrix ofintelligibility that could be taken, throughout the centuries, as Platonism
- with its ‘metaphysics of Beauty’ and ‘theory of Ideas’ - in the development of
‘the aesthetics of the plastic arts’. But today we can ask ourselves what sort of
presupposition informs the problem, obviously crucial to all art objects, of
material itself. We can deduce from the philosophical polarity Matter/Form
(ubiquitous in Plato, revived by Kant, and no doubt necessary to the art historian
for the formulation of stylistics), or we can infer from the polarity Matter/Spirit
(ubiquitous in Plato, revived by Kant, and no doubt necessary to the art historian

42//FOLLOW THE MATERIALS

for the formulation of an iconology) - that in each case material would be, in the
best philosophical tradition, ‘secondary’, ‘potential’, or even ‘indeterminate’,
Such has been the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ of art history even at the very
moment of its origin: hadn’t Vasari spoken of matter as the ‘subject’ [sugetta] of
form, that is to say its Idea? As offering the more or less indeterminate receptacle
of drawing [disengno] and of the intellect?? Close even to the point of non-being,
of disorder, of dispersal; always waiting for a ‘form’ which could redeem it,
which alone could provide a dignified outward appearance. At worst, material
would be formlessness - an insurrection against form —at best it would be an
example of passivity, of subjection to form.
Yet when we speak of the ‘plastic arts’, we suppose implicitly, etymologically,
that the visual arts do not want this passivity which matter offers to the action of
forms. ‘Plastic art’ means first of all plasticity of material, which in turn means
that matter doesn’t resist form —that it’s ductile, malleable, can be put to work at
will. In brief, it humbly offers itself to the possibility of being open, worked,
carved, put into form.
Let us speak about wax (to reflect on ‘matter’ in general is to never understand
matter since it is to make a simple ‘idea’ into a fatal abstraction).? Why wax? First
because it is ductile material, plastic material par excellence. With a piece of wax
in the hand, the old or the philosophical question of the rapport between form
and matter - even the rapport between spirit and matter —assumes consistency
and a sort of very tangible warmth. It is not just by chance that sudden, compelling
appeals to the paradigm of wax left their mark on several significant moments in
the history of these questions. First in Plato, where it is the originary wax that
might be modelled in the same way as clay by the demiurge.* In The Laws, it is
‘soft’ virgin wax that is compared to the newborn child, whom his mother will
‘roughly form’ before the City finishes ‘modelling’ him.’ It is also the wax ofdesire
which becomes the metaphor for the danger confronting ‘the hearts of even those
who believe themselves austere’ —beneath the caresses that might make men
almost melt.® It is especially the wax of memory that appears in the Theaetetus
under the rubric of a hypothesis: ‘suppose, therefore, for the sake of argument,
that we had in our souls an impregnatable wax ...’” We know the fate of this same
metaphor in Aristotle’s hands, where memory has as its object the thing seen
through the image: it is the impression in the wax that will henceforth serve as the
operative model for sensation itself: [...].
A material fantasy of wax is here set in motion for the long term. It will
culminate in the Cartesian analysis where the piece of wax is made to illustrate
the distinction between matter and spirit,’ and at last, in the Freudian model of
the Wunderblock, the ‘mystic writing pad’, which itself contributed to the critical
reversal of this entire range of distinctions. For the moment, let us keep in mind

Didi-Huberman//The Order of Material//43

the extent to which, in the passage from Aristotle, the development of the
material image depends on an extraordinary theoretical focus upon questions of
the substratum - of the material: in material that is too runny, too quick, too
‘young’, too wet, a form will not ‘set’ - just as if ‘the movement of the seal were
to impinge on running water’. Neither will a form ‘take’, for the opposite reason,
in material that is too brittle, too ‘old’ or too dry. As usual, Aristotle has posed
here, in the very quality of his examples, the crucial question.
The question of plasticity is very much the issue here: in order that a form set
or take - so that as a rule an individuation can occur - matter must proffer that
subtle quality of being neither too dry nor too liquid, neither too hard nor too
soft. By thus introducing the evaluation of material qualities as the very
framework of his conceptual reasoning, Aristotle opens up a field that we need to
examine more closely. Which is to say that we must go beyond the metaphorical
uses of wax —without losing sight of the theoretical and conceptual foundations
of wax - so that we may study more thoroughly the problem of plasticity by
giving a voice not just to philosophers of matter, but also to technicians of matter.
Wax-workers themselves evoke many qualitative categories above and beyond
the three or four criteria put forward by Aristotle - softness and hardness,
dryness and humidity - and speak instead of far more than ‘wax’, but rather of
the dizzyingly infinite number of ‘waxes’ revealed in working the material:

Wax is not one wax alone, for there are so many waxes! ... There are hundreds and
hundreds of waxes, and they all merge into one another ... What makes the
difference between them? The way one mixes them, the way one works the
various types of wax, and the compositions one makes of them.!°

The man speaking here is Girolamo Spatafora, one of the last wax-workers of
Sicily, supplier of ex-votos and other figurines for nativity scenes, in a 1991
interview with an ethnologist. His entire discourse is suspended between, first, a _
sense of extinction - because no one seems to want these rotting, outmoded
objects, and so the very profession of wax-working is dying out —he is, he says,
forced to repair washing machines to earn a living —and second, a sense of
survival characteristic of the material itself, a durability that is due, precisely, to
the extraordinary plasticity of wax: ‘It’s marvellous. Everything can be made
from it. It even moves’ [‘Meravigliosa. Tutto si pud fare ... Si muove pure’], he
confides between two disillusioned remarks about the scarcity of orders." By
simultaneously evoking not only extinction and survival, but also the marvellous
[meraviglio] plasticity of wax —a plasticity that is the result of the manifold uses
to which the material lends itself as well as to that sort of ‘life’ it demonstrates
through its very pliability —the Sicilian craftsman articulates what is perhaps the

44//FOLLOW THE MATERIALS

 essence of the historical, anthropological and aesthetic problems raised by the
strange constellation of objects fabricated in wax. [...]
The ‘likenesses of mortals’ [...] must, of course, be understood in relation to the
Roman practice of imagines, those masks of coloured wax made by taking an
impression of the faces of the dead, and whose genealogical function emerges as
fundamental throughout the history, in the West, of the likeness of the image.!2 But
besides this radical meaning suggested by ‘similitude mortalium’, we need to
acknowledge the ‘innumerable uses’ of wax evoked by Pliny, among which we find
mixed together apiary techniques, medicinal uses, artistic works, and folk creations
such as wax models that, in merchants’ windows, represented fruit or other
perishable food products (we still find them today in some restaurant windows,
although wax has been almost universally replaced by thermoformed plastic).2
These ‘innumerable uses’ constitute an extraordinary anthropological
sedimentation of this material: magical wax (such as Egyptian dolls or figurines
of medieval sorcery); votive wax (rustic effigies from Cyprus, naturalistic
portraits from Western Europe, dolls representing children, anatomical ex-votos
such as teeth and ears, and votive representations of internal organs such as the
lungs and heart); funerary wax (such as the death-masks of Fra Angelico, who
died in 1455, or Saint Philip of Neri, who died in 1595); liturgical wax (candles
and reliquaries with Agnus dei); the wax of popular devotion (reliquaries with
statuettes, figurines under glass, little animals, pieces of wax modelled to look
like pieces of wood); artistic wax (the wax created for casting bronze, wax
usually lost but which subsists in a few examples of failed castings, the wax of
the preserved models for works by Michelangelo, Giambologna, or those of other
studios in sixteenth-century Florence); and artisanal wax, as well as anatomical
wax (which pushes to the limits the notion of the écorché; for example tracing
the analysis of a face all the way to its very decomposition, or in which the
innermost recesses of the womb are given a special exhibition value); and finally
carnival wax (after being displaced from the church, and religion, to the museum,
and art, and then to the scientific cabinet, the exhibition value of wax is ultimately
downgraded to the world of wax museums, fairs and the public boulevard).
We might add a few more items, in no particular order and without attempting
to be exhaustive —since, after all, the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert
itself acknowledges that ‘we would never be able to list how many uses have
been made of wax since the beginning of time’:'* wax for painting (encaustic
wax) and textile wax (for batik); household wax and sealing wax; shoe wax and
industrial waxes; adhesive waxes and cosmetic waxes and so on." It’s obvious: a
plasticity of material means a multiplicity of functions. More precisely, plasticity
facilitates multiplicity, sanctions it, is its very medium, and (who knows?) even
invents it. How is this so? Perhaps thanks to the absolutely extraordinary

Didi-Huberman//The Order of Material//45

accumulation of material qualities that wax, intrinsically, brings together. Given
how varied the kinds of wax seem at first glance, these innumerable uses thwart
any attempt to seek a coherence in their functions. Nevertheless, by looking at
the wax itself, we might perhaps be able to discover the underlying structure of
this multiplicity.
What does the plasticity of wax consist of? Can plasticity, strictly speaking,
consist of anything? When one reads the technical writings of people who work
with wax, one comes away with the strange impression that wax is characterized
only by being uncharacterizable: each time we recognize a material quality in
wax, we immediately see another material quality that is exactly the opposite.
Wax emerges therefore as a material that is insensitive to the contradictions of
its material qualities. Wax is solid, but it may easily be liquefied. It is impermeable,
but it may easily be dissolved in water (it takes only the slightest modification to
do so).'® It may be sculpted, modelled, or cast, and is thus insensitive to the
contradictions as well as to the traditional hierarchies in the plastic arts.’” It may
be worked either by hand or by means of all kinds of tools. It may be painted or
tinted as a block, and given either a matte or polished finish. It can be either
opaque or transparent, either smooth or sticky. Its consistency may be
transformed indefinitely by the addition of the most varied resins." It is a fragile
and temporary material, but most often used, because of the very richness of its
textures, for the fabrication of objects intended to last. In her book Wax as Art
Form (1966), Thelma Newman counted twenty-three physical characteristics of
wax, giving this conclusion of an aesthetic nature: ‘Its plasticity makes possible
spontaneous expression but also an accuracy of detail.’ This range of ambivalent
physical characteristics is first of all what the plasticity of wax ‘consists of’.'9
This plasticity itself consists, therefore, of a paradox of consistency, linked, of
course, to the fact that wax - whether it is liquid, pasty, solid, or even brittle —
remains wax. No one can ever decide which is its ‘primary’ or ‘principal’ state
(while by comparison one can say, for example, that the ‘primary’ state of water is ©
its liquid state: when water is solid, frozen, it is suddenly not water but ice). This
elementary phenomenology already gives us some information about the nature
of the paradox in question, and will allow us to begin to qualify that paradox.
In one sense, plasticity means malleability. For this reason, wax is recognized
as the exemplary material of resemblance: it is the material of ‘true forms’ and of
‘accurate forms’. Pliny the Elder tells how Lysistratus of Sicyon, the first Greek
artist to have introduced ‘the practice of giving likenesses’ [similitudines reddere
instituit], was, at the same time and in the same process ‘the first person who
modelled a likeness in plaster of a human being from the living face itself, and
established the method of pouring wax into this plaster mould’ [e facie ipsa ...
expressit ceraque in eam formam gypsi infusa].2° Wax-workers and historians alike

46//FOLLOW THE MATERIALS

insist on the natural aptitude of wax as the ‘plastic’ material that serves the
immemorial passion of human beings for fabricating those ‘things which
resemble’ which we call images.”! Not only does the pliability of the material
permit the rendering of the smallest detail, but moreover, through the addition
of the appropriate mineral solutions or colourings, its textural qualities allow the
perfect imitation of bronze, alabaster, lead or flesh.2
In another sense, inseparable from the first, plasticity means instability. There
is nothing more unstable,nothing more changeable, than the physical state of a
piece of wax: | take a brittle substance in my hand, but in a matter of seconds my
body heat renders it malleable and allows me, more easily than with any other
material, to reproduce accurately the delicate shapes of a body or face. It takes,
however, the proximity of only the smallest flame for such a ‘true’ form to melt
away, to disfigure, to liquefy. The ‘paradox of consistency’ imposed by the
plasticity of wax may therefore be understood as the possibility —inevitably
disturbing - of a coming and going between resemblance and formlessness. A
coming and going no longer linked to the world of the disegno - the drawing or
the design —and of the idea, but to the intrinsic properties of the material. When
we watch a piece of wax ‘live’, we are very quickly forced to suspect a kind of
censorship at work within the traditional hierarchies of form and matter.
Plasticity, consequently, need no longer mean passivity. The piece of wax
remains, of course, submissive in my hand. It will take the form that my ‘design’
prescribes; but it will also keep, without my even thinking about it or wishing it,
the impression of my fingers and the traces of my most unwitting movements.
The submissiveness of the material is so complete that, for amoment, it reverses
itself and becomes the power of the material. But how can we characterize it?
Maybe by means of a notion that certain modern philosophies have opposed,
and not by chance, to the old polarity of matter and form: that of viscosity. It
happens paradoxically - and we need to try to figure out why - that this notion
gained its meaning through the elaboration of the psychoanalytic field. In 1929,
Georges Bataille wrote that a relevant notion of matter could not expect anything
from scientistic ‘abstractions’ or from ‘artificially isolated physical phenomena’.
One had, according to Bataille, to look to Freud to find what matter meant, at the
very moment when Freud was trying to define his most ‘metapsychological’
concept —the drive - in the symmetrical terms of ‘plasticity’ [Plastizitat] and of
‘viscosity’ [Klebrigkeit].??
Like Aristotle’s, Freud’s theoretical
use of material qualities forces us to
implement that phenomenological attention that art historians may rightfully
call on when confronted with the objects of their study. In 1929, Aurel Kolnai, a
young Hungarian psychoanalyst and disciple of Husserl, published an essay
about ‘objectal phenomenology’ on the problem of disgust (a problematic from

Didi-Huberman//The Order of Material//47

which wax can hardly be excluded): he spoke there of materials living and dead,
of materials viscous and plastic, always conceived of as psychically sovereign.”
Bataille read this essay carefully,2> as did, most likely, Jean-Paul Sartre who,
fourteen years later, would bring together the psychical and phenomenological
theme of viscosité in a much-anthologized passage that practically concludes
Being and Nothingness. Sartre there calls ‘material quality’ as ‘revelatory of being’,
and deploys an entire network of meanings linked to the paradox of a matter
that might be neither liquid nor solid, that nevertheless haunts the psyche like a
nightmare of metamorphoses:

The viscous appears as already the outline of a fusion of the world with myself.
What it teaches me about the world, that it is like a leech sucking me, is already a
reply to a concrete question; it responds with its very being, with its mode of
being, with all its matter ... Aviscous substance like pitch is an aberrant fluid. At
first, with the appearance of a fluid it manifests to us abeing which is everywhere
fleeing and yet everywhere similar to itself ... The viscous reveals itself as
essentially dubious [louche] because its fluidity exists in slow motion; there is a
sticky thickness in its liquidity; it represents in itself adawning triumph of the
solid over the liquid ... This fixed instability in the viscous discourages possession
... Nothing testifies more clearly to the dubious character of a ‘substance in
between two states’ than the slowness with which the viscous melts into itself...
The honey which slides off my spoon on to the honey contained in the jar first
sculpts the surface by fastening itself onto it in relief, and its fusion with the whole
is presented as a gradual sinking, a collapse which appears at once as a deflation
... and as display —like the flattening out of the full breasts of awoman who is
lying on her back.
In the viscous substance which dissolves into itself there is a visible resistance,
like the refusal of an individual who does not want to be annihilated in the whole
of being, and at the same time a softness pushed to its ultimate limit. For the soft
is only an annihilation which is stopped halfway ... The viscous is like a liquid
seen in a nightmare, where all its properties are animated by a sort of life and turn
back against me ... In the very apprehension of the viscous there is a gluey
substance, compromising and without equilibrium, like the haunting memory of
a metamorphosis.
To touch the viscous is to risk being dissolved in sliminess ... The horror of the
viscous is the horrible fear that time might become viscous, that facticity might
progress continually and insensibly ... as a symbol of an anti-value: it is a type of
being not realized but threatening, which will perpetually haunt consciousness as
the constant danger which it is fleeing.?°

48//FOLLOW THE MATERIALS

There is no doubt that wax does not have the sticky sliminess characteristic of
honey or of pitch; no doubt that wax does not have the direct power of a ‘leech’
or ‘bloodsucker’ that Sartre evokes in his text. But the wax object - because of the
way it is fabricated as well as through the phenomenology of our ‘approaching
consciousness’ of it —offers just as well that unfamiliar make-up of plasticity and
viscosity that makes it ‘everywhere fleeing and yet everywhere similar to itself’,
that establishes it as ‘fixed instability’ and as a ‘substance in between two states’.
The wax object certainly offers the ambivalence of the ‘heavy flight’ described by
Sartre: both ‘visible resistance’ at the same time as the possibility of a ‘deflation’,
of ‘a spreading out’, or of a ‘flattening’, in short, an ‘annihilation which is stopped
halfway’. This is why wax, more so than honey or pitch, has been invested as
haunting, threatening, nightmarish, metamorphosing and fleeing. This is why it
is perhaps a material ‘which holds me and which compromises me’, a material
trap ‘whose every property is animated with a kind of life and is turned against
me’. This is what Freud understood so well - Sartre seems here to forget it -
through recourse to the concept of ‘das Unheimliche’, ‘the uncanny’:2” we
encounter it at almost every step of our path through the territory of wax.
What does this preliminary look at the material of wax teach us? First, that
its plasticity cannot be reduced to the canonical passivity of Madame Matter
enduring the thrusting —-
and the pounding of seals - that Mr Form would forever
subject her to.78The reality of the material proves more disturbing: it possesses
a viscosity, a kind of activity or intrinsic power, which is a power of metaporphosis,
of polymorphosis, of insensibility to contradiction (particularly to the abstract
contradiction between form and formlessness). Sartre states extremely clearly
that this activity of the viscous, this ‘kind of life’, can only be symbolized or
socialized as an anti-value. Suddenly we are better equipped to understand the
cleavage that marks the epistemic position of the art historian confronted with
the material. On the one hand, technical evidence is the business of restorers
and, more fundamentally, of a ‘science of materials’:*° no one doubts its legitimacy
or its benefits. On the other hand, the philosophical prejudice of the Idea -
invented in a Platonic context, popularized by Vasari at the very moment of birth
of the academic discourse called art history and finally transported into the
twentieth century by Panofskyian neo-Kantianism - creates an anti-value of
material in general, and particularly of that unstable material, of that ‘substance
between two states’ that is wax. Significantly, it is the museums of ‘minor arts’,
of ‘applied arts’ or of ‘decorative arts’ - such as the wonderful Victoria and Albert
Museum in London” - that have been able to escape censoring the anthropological
as well as the aesthetic value of wax.
Censorship exists only where there is also uneasiness or discontent: wax is an
aesthetically viscous material [...], it dedicates its own function of resemblance to

Didi-Huberman//The Order of Material//49

the simultaneous uneasiness of deterioration and excess. In both cases, it is disaster
that threatens the ordinary concepts of form and imitation. Wax, in the matter of
resemblance, always goes too far. It is capable of rendering the details that are ‘the
most delicate in all of nature’?! It adjusts itself malleably to the smallest recesses
of the plaster mould into which it is poured. It can express every range and every
tiny difference in texture. But it always adds a subtle and unspeakable excess —
something that arouses uneasiness, that adulterates and falsifies identity, that
suddenly seems mauvais genre, bad taste, vulgar, even criminal.
Horst Janson suggested that this resemblance through excess, linked to
‘mechanical’ procedures of casting and to malleable and tintable materials such
as wax, results in the ruin of any concept of style and even of any authentic
realism —better: artistic realism —which he called a ‘realism of animation’.” As
for Ernst Gombrich, the two lines of his Art and Illusion mentioning wax are
condemnatory: ‘before the proverbial wax image we often feel unease because it
oversteps the boundaries of symbolization’.* [...|
How can we forget that our actual wax museums - Madame Tussaud’s in
London, or the Musée Grévin in Paris - have their origin in the revolutionary
period, in those decapitations by the guillotine, which were then consciously
modelled in plaster for the making of wax effigies having the function of quasi-
relics? In which case, we have to acknowledge that wax is a psychically viscous
material. [...]
The two dismissals expressed by Janson and Gombrich do not mean exactly
the same thing. They nevertheless make up a system that seems to me
representative of the epistemological situation of Anglo-Saxon art history of the
postwar period and to what Panofsky himself called an art history of ‘transplanted
Europeans’.** Janson dismissed the loud side of ‘bad-taste’ resemblance —-the
kind represented by Madame Tussaud’s or the Musée Grévin —in the name of a
very powerful hierarchy between objects which are ‘art’ objects (objects of the
history that bears that name) and those which are not (among which are included ~
most wax objects). Gombrich, in turn, dismisses the morbid or deadening, indeed
cadaverous side of resemblance that situates itself ‘beyond the boundaries of
symbolization’. The art history extolled by Janson is therefore an art history
without anthropology, which would rather cling to marble busts and ignore the
‘dubious’ taste of works formed of polychrome, even if they date from the
Quattrocento.* The art history praised by Gombrich calls for a psychology, but it
remains an art history without metapsychology in the Freudian sense - specifically
an art history without the death drive.*° [...]
Consider then how wax itself - from the point of view of the material —not
only downgrades the academic idea of genre; it also downgrades the academic
idea of art in general. Schlosser, concerned to overturn the Vasarian ideology of

50//FOLLOW THE MATERIALS

‘progress in the arts’ and the normative aesthetics of Neo-Kantianism, could only
imagine the downgrading as a lowering of class.3? We nevertheless need to
recognize that the notion of déclassement has to break with all teleologies, even
negative ones. The royal portrait changes into the carnival mannequin, but the
great art of Edgar Degas or of Schlosser’s contemporary Medardo Rosso -
unfortunately unknown to him - was able, reciprocally, to regrade the trivial
effigy: to disorient it, to reconfigure and to open, by means of that disorientation,
the heuristic field that wercall ... modern art.

Erwin Panofsky, Idéa. Contribution a ‘histoire du concept de l'ancienne théorie de ‘art (1924), trans.
H.Joly (Paris, 1983) 17.

Giorgio Vasari, Les Vies des meillieurs peintres, sculpteurs et architectes (1550-68), trans. A. Chastel
(Paris, 1981-7) 119, 149. Cf. Georges Didi- Huberman, ‘Limage-matiére. Poussiére, ordure, saleté,
sculpture au XVI siécle’, L’Inactuel, no. 5 (1996) 63-81.
Georges Bataille characterized this as ‘idéalisme de la matiére’, a particularly stupid philosophical
position in his eyes. Cf. Bataille, ‘Matérialisme’, Documents, no. 3 (1929) 170, which I commented
upon in La Ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris, 1995) 268-80.
Cf. Luc Brisson, Le Méme et l’autre dans la structure ontologique du Timée de Platon (Paris, 1974) 54.

Bf
D
NW Plato, Les Lois, VII, 789e, ed. and trans. E. des Places, Oeuvres completes, XII-1 (Paris, 1956) 13.
Plato, Les Lois, I, 633d, ed. and trans. E. des Places, Oeuvres completes, XI-1 (Paris, 1951) 13-14.
Plato, Théététe, ed. and trans. A. Diés, Oeuvres completes, VIII-1 (Paris, 1926) 232. The passage is
commented upon by V. Goldschmidt, Les Dialogues de Platon. Structure et méthode dialectique
(Paris) 85-7. Before finishing, Plato would develop the image of wax pure or impure, humid or
dry, etc. Cf. Théététe, 192a-195a, 233-7.
[footnote 9 in source] René Descartes, Méditations (1641-42), Oeuvres completes, ed. C. Adam and
P. Tannery (Paris, 1964) (new ed.), VII, 23-4 (Latin text), and IX-1, 18-26 (French translation).
[10] Freud, ‘Note sur le “bloc-notes magique”’ (1925), trans, led by J. Laplanche, Résultats, idées et
problémes, II (Paris, 1921-38) 119-24.
[11] Rita Cedrini, ‘Il sapere vissuto’, Arte popolare in Sicilia. Le tecniche, i temi, i simboli, dir. D.
D'Agostino (Palermo, Flaccovio, 1991) 177 [...].
11 [12] Ibid., 178-80.
12 [15] Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle, XXXV,1-14, ed. and trans J.-M. Croisille (Paris, 1985) 36-
42. Cf. Georges Didi- Huberman, ‘L’Image-matrice, Généalogie et vérité de la ressemblance selon
Pline-l’Ancien’, Histoire naturelle, XXXV, 1-7, L’Inactuel, no. 6 (1996) 109-25; and L’Empreinte
(Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1997) 38-48.
13 [16] Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle, VIII, 215, ed. and trans A. Ernout (Paris, 1952) 99, also

Histoire naturelle, XX1,83-5, pages 56-7.

14 [17] Article: ‘Cire’, in Denis Diderot and J.L.R. d'Alembert, Enclyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné
des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Ill (Paris, 1973) 471. On the uses of wax in antiquity, cf. E.
Saglio, ‘Cera’, Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, 1-2 (Paris, 1887) 1019-20.

Didi-Huberman//The Order of Material//51

15 [18] The most complete inventory of wax technologies is the two monumental volumes - a life’s
work, financed by a German industrial firm —of R. Bull, Das grosse Buch vom Wachs. Geschichte
~ Kultur —Technik (Munich, Callwey, 1977). [...]
16 [19] Thelma Newman, Wax as Art Form (New Jersey: Yoseloff, 1966) 11, 99-104.
i [20] The best synthesis available is without doubt Rudolf Wittkower, Qu’est-ce que la sculpture?
Principes et procédures (1977), trans. B. Bonne (Paris, 1995).
18 [21] Cf. Vernon J. Murrell, ‘Methods of a Sculptor in Wax’, Le ceroplastica nella scienza e nell’arte.
Atti dei ICongresso internazionale, ed. B. Lanza and MLL.Azzaroli (Florence) II, 709-13. [...]
19 [22] Thelma Newman, Wax as Art Form, op. cit., 20.
20 [23] Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle, XXXV,153, page 102 (translation modified).
21 [24] Cf., notably, Jules Labarte, Histoire des arts industriels au Moyen Age et a I’epoque de la
Renaissance (Paris, 1984) 330. [...]; Gaston Le Breton, ‘Histoire de la sculpture en cire’, L'Ami des
monuments et des arts, VII (1893) 150 [...].
22 [25] Notably Samuel Anderson, ‘Basic Techniques for Modelling Plants and Animals in Wax’, La
ceroplastica nella scienza e nell’arte, II, 578.
23 [26] Georges Bataille, ‘Matérialisme’, 170 [...]. Cf. S. Freud, Introduction a la psychanalyse (1916-
17), trans. S.Jankelevitch (Paris, 1970) 389-407.
24 [27] Aurel Kolnai, Le Dégoiit (1929), trans. O. Cossé (Paris, 1997). The expression ‘phénoménologie
objectale’ is to be found on page 48.
25 [28] Georges Bataille, margin notes of ‘Labjection et les formes misérables’, Oeuvres completes, II
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970) 438-9. [...]
26 [29] Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris, 1943) 652-7;
rendered into English here largely in accord with the translation by Hazel E. Barnes (London,
1969) 606-11.
27 [30] Sigmund Freud, ‘Linquietante étrangeté’ (1919), trans. B. Feron, L’Inquiétante étrangeté et
autres essais (Paris, 1985) 209-63.
28 [31] It is a commonplace of Aristotelian embryology that the father is form (sperm) and the
mother (maternal blood) ‘coagulated’, ‘formed’ by the sperm. Cf. Aristotle, De la génération des
animaux, II, 1, ed. and trans. H. Carteron (Paris, 1926-31) I, page 49, where it is said that matter
desired form ‘like the female desires the male, and the ugly the beautiful’.
29) [32] Cf. notably the collection printed in Techné, no. 2 (1995) 29-82.
30 [33] For the collection of waxes in the museum, see John Pope-Hennessy and Ronald Lightbown,
Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 1964) Il, 417-32, 467-74,
556-60, 632-7.
31 [34] Gaston Le Breton, ‘Histoire de la sculpture en cire’, L’Ami des monuments et des arts, VII
(1893) 150.
32 [35] Horst WaldemarJanson, ‘Realism in Sculpture. Limits and Limitations’, The European Realist
Tradition, ed. G.P.Weisberg (Bloomington, 1982) 290-301.
33 [36] Ernst Gombrich, L’Artet l'illusion. Psychologie de la représentation picturale (1959), trans. G.
Durant (Paris, 1971) 86.

52//FOLLOW THE MATERIALS

34 [38] Cf. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Three Decades of Art History in the United States. Impressions of a
Transplanted European’ (1953), Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago, 1982) 321-46.
35 [39] Or the rejection, by Janson, of the celebrated polychrome bust in terracotta, called Niccolo
da Uzzano, now attributed to Donatello by a majority of specialists. [...]
36 [40] Cf. Ernst Gombrich, ‘Psychanalyse et histoire de l'art’ (1953), trans. G. Durand, Méditations
sur un cheval de bois et autres essais sur la théorie de l'art (Macon, 1986) 65-89, where he addresses
questions of ‘symbolization’ and ‘aesthetic pleasure’.
37 [58] This was understood some years later by the Russian formalists. See Boris Eichenbaum, ‘La
théorie de la “méthode formelle”’ (1925), trans. T. Todorov, Théorie de la littérature. Textes des
formalists russes (Paris, 1965) 69. [...]

Georges Didi-Huberman, extracts from ‘The Order of Material: Plasticities, malaises, Survivals’, Vortrdge
aus dem Warburg-Haus, vol. 3 (1999); trans. Jann Matlock and Brandon Taylor, in Taylor, ed., Sculpture
and Psychoanalysis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 195-204, 208-11.

Susan Hiller
‘Truth’ and ‘Truth to Material’//2003

[...] That this notion of ‘truth to material’, attributed to Henry Moore, stuck with
me may be a trick of memory or a misunderstanding on my part, or even on the
part of those who taught me. Moore was everywhere during my childhood, a
conservative, figurative artist (we thought), a sort of official artist. He was English
but his work was ubiquitous in the United States, not just in exhibitions but also
in photographs in magazines and books. Looking at reproductions of works cast
in bronze I couldn’t understand what this formulation of ‘truth to material’ could
possibly mean. I was intrigued to discover only recently that Moore himself did
not have any doctrinaire attachment to the idea and that in terms of his work in
bronze he seemed to want to free himself from any proscriptive interpretation of
it. If ‘truth to material’ was taken as the overriding criterion of value in sculpture,
he said, ‘a snowman made by a child would have to be praised at the expense of a
Rodin or a Bernini’! But the idea haunted me, quite possibly because Ijust couldn’t
understand what it meant. On the one hand, it was so terribly obvious. Naturally,
one would not try to make in stone what could be done in plasticine. [...]
Having decided I was not an object-maker I went on to study anthropology.
Here I have to acknowledge another link with Moore, and one that needs to be
explored more fully. Moore was an enthusiastic explorer in the exotic worlds

Hiller//‘Truth’ and ‘Truth to Material’//53