Trace and aura, a story of memory and forgetting

So, in the face of the image, we are faced with time: at San Vittore in Ciel d'Oro, Borromeo stands in place of Ambrose. Is this a reversed substitution? By examining Martin Raspe's hypotheses on the Borromean restorations of the San Vittore in Ciel d'Oro mosaic in the light of recent numismatic discoveries (a^7th-century lead bulla bearing the effigy of Ambrose, identified by Vivien Prigent), we question the relationship between resemblance and dissimilarity, and the snags in the transmission of the Ambrosian image. It's a way of forging a path between the lecture that's just coming to a close ("Memories, fictions, beliefs") and the one that will continue next year ("Political fictions"), by returning to the narrative challenges facing anyone wishing to tell the story of Ambrosian memory and forgetting. He would need to draw inspiration from Walter Benjamin's notion of history as the art of rapprochements, as a politics of traces that dispels aura. The lecture concludes with an ultimate return to the inaugural scene in which Augustine places himself on the threshold of Ambrose's silence: "But when he read, his eyes were led through the pages whose meaning his mind pierced, voice and tongue, on the other hand, were at rest."(Confessions, VI, 3, 3).

Contents

• There we were, in front of the image, in front of time
• San Vittore in Ciel d'Oro : Borromeo instead of Ambrose
• The embarrassments of identity according to Port-Royal's Logic
• "We are satisfied with a sufficient resemblance between two different objects that succeed one another in the same place to say that they are one and the same object" (Vincent Descombes)
• From "Souvenirs, fictions, croyances" to "Histoire des fictions politiques"?
• What Alexander of Novgorod saw in Constantinople in 1200 ("And when did you see me?")
• Iconic portraiture, likeness and self-portraiture (Gilbert Dagron, Describing and painting)
• Historein and graphein : the name, the seal, the imprint
• Words after the image(ekphrasis), words before the image(eikonismos)
• Ambroise in 1576: "He was of mediocre stature, of grave and handsome aspect, with an oblong nose, blond hair, a broad forehead, with one eyebrow higher than the other"
• Cesare Ratti's risky hypothesis and the ambo in the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio
• An upside-down replacement? Martin Raspe and the Borromean restoration of the San Vittore in Ciel d'Oro mosaic
• Transmission, snags, accidents and disagreements
• On the discovery of an^8th-century lead bulla bearing the effigy of Ambrose: an "improbable hairstyle" (Vivien Prigent)
• Hans Belting and the true image
• Georges Didi-Huberman and the Vasarian renaissance as a restart of Plinian birth
• The death of contact resemblance according to Pliny the Elder: what disappears withimaginum pictura ?
• "We too must ensure that, for one likeness, there are many dissimilarities" (Petrarch, Lettres familières, XXIII, 19)
• Still Petrarch: "He lacks the voice alone for us to see Ambrose alive"(Lettres familières, XVI, 11)
• "As soon as you are - or think you are - looked at, you look up. To feel the aura of a phenomenon is to give it the power to raise one's eyes" (Walter Benjamin, Sur quelques thèmes baudelairiens)
• "With the trace, we take hold of the thing": history as the art of approach and rapprochements"
• The trace and the aura, a political alternative
• Some narrative solutions for telling a story of memory and forgetting
• Back to the opening scene, Augustine on the threshold of Ambrose's silence: "But when he read, his eyes were led through the pages whose meaning his mind pierced, his voice and tongue, on the other hand, were at rest"(Confessions, VI, 3, 3)
• Tolle, lege, tolle, lege : Augustine's conversion, or "the strange contagion of the silence of Ambrosian reading" (Pascal Quignard)
• Close to the words, et cor intellectum rimabatur
• " Cor, in short, suggests that which, in man, is separate (from the body or its limbs); something profoundly at odds with the resonance of the tuned chorus of many consenting voices" (Marina Tasinato, L'œil du silence. Éloge de la lecture)
• The silent boat