【让-吕克·马里翁】塞尚的精确度.pdfVIP

t w o Cézanne’s Certitude j e a n - l u c m a r i o n Translated by Deborah S. Reisinger, with Nathan Phillips My grand principle, my certitude, my discovery. —Cézanne, Conversations avec Cézanne1 Shouldn’t we agree to refrain from speaking about Cézanne who himself warned that “talking about art is almost useless”?2 The caveat “almost” will authorize our hopes of justifying a new attempt to “converse” about Cé- zanne. But there is more: in order to have even the most banally accurate vision of Cézanne’s painting, we would have to see it as Cézanne himself in- tended for us to see it, that is to say, to see it as he painted it. Now a simple vision of this painting already requires that we not see it as those who did not paint like Cézanne saw it (or rather did not see it). And therefore, since, during his lifetime, only Cézanne painted like Cézanne, that we see in the way Cézanne explained how he himself saw what he painted, in order to succeed, always with difficulty, in making it seen. The achievement of this vision is not self-evident, because Cézanne wrote strangely, as strangely as he painted, but especially because he lacked the concepts with which to think it. Not that he thought in a confused, approximate, or naïve fashion: rather, what he attempted to say and to make seen could not be authorized by any evidence already acquired nor by any previously established aesthetic doctrine, so that he had to think with his force alone and in as solitary a fashion as he also painted. This struggle to paint was redoubled by an cé z a n n e ’s c e r t i t u d e  equivalent struggle to speak—so as to think the effort of painting. We will not attempt to speak of this or that one of Cézanne’s paintings (which oth- ers have done with greater competence), but to reconstitute the thought Cézanne had conceived of their vi