A pretty perilous and challenging exercise, especially for someone like me who indulges in thinking of himself, in a somewhat defensive and questionable way, I confess, as having no specific field or period of competence and evading any precise definition or classification in academic terms. As a matter of fact, I have been lucky enough to spend most of my life in an institution, the EHESS [École des hautes études en sciences sociales], which, in those days, having become an independent school, was open to people who refused to defer to the academic division of labor and which, under the rule of great personalities like Fernand Braudel and my friend Jacques Le Goff, would welcome young people with non-conformist backgrounds in order for them to develop their formation according to their own lines. To develop it—I wouldn't say to achieve it, for as far as I am concerned there seems to be no end to it: hence the challenge, which consists in having to look back at one's own intellectual past through the viewer and the lens of the present. Part of the picture, which happened to be of great consequence to me, was, and still is, a great freedom and encouragement to travel, lecture, teach, and study abroad, in my case especially in the States, where, for a long time, I felt much more at ease with authentic art historians and critics than I did in France, and developed some deep and enduring friendships with great individuals like Meyer Schapiro, Rosalind Krauss, Tony Vidler, Tim Clark, and Hank Millon, not to mention several artists and architects I will refer to later. Travelling: I don't claim any originality when saying that I owe to my urge to travel a large part of my formation as an art historian. I remember with emotion looking with Meyer Schapiro through his travel notebooks. I keep boxes filled with my own.

In December 1972, French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch, who was a senior fellow of the Society of the Humanities at Cornell, gave a public lecture on the Freud-Signorelli case, which is published here for the first time. Damisch discusses the theoretical montage proposed by Freud and attempts to evaluate the impact of the language games analyzed by the psychoanalyst for the study of visual objects. Moreover, the case allowed Damisch to reflect on how a work of art involves the spectator-analyst and how this relationship affects interpretation. This essay was Damisch's first to address the Freud-Signorelli case, and it can be considered as the nucleus of his article “Le maître, c'est lui (He is the master),” published in Savoir et Clinique in 2010, and more generally of a book that was to remain in manuscript, La machine d'Orvieto .

Between January 1972 and December 1973 French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch and American art-historian Meyer Schapiro exchanged forty-four letters. During this short period, the two scholars discussed many issues concerning the state of art history and its relationship to semiotics and psychoanalysis. A recurring topic was Freud's famous lapse of memory concerning the name of the Renaissance artist Luca Signorelli—what to make of the lapsus in art-historical terms and how to make use of it in analyzing Signorelli's cycle of frescoes at the Cathedral of Orvieto in Italy. Damisch was then beginning to work on a book devoted to the subject while Schapiro was writing a small essay on the topic.

Devoted to the Freud-Signorelli case, this study by French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch offers an in-depth analysis of “the implication of the subject in the various dimensions of perception, remembering, analysis, and interpretation.” To better reflect the complex relationships between art, psychoanalysis, and interpretation, Damisch's commentaries take the form of a diary. By discussing his comings and goings between the 1960s and 1990s and by making an effort to remember his own life and practice, Damisch builds a dispositif where Freud's analyses of the mechanisms of oblivion, Signorelli's painting of “the damned,” Dante's Inferno , and Primo Levi's testimony on the Shoah reverberate with each other. This study, which is one of the chapters of the unfinished book La machine d'Orvieto , was first published in French in Y voir mieux, y regarder de plus près (Rue d'Ulm, 2010).

This dossier comprises a selection of the correspondence between Hubert Damisch and Jean Dubuffet as well as six essays written by Damisch on Dubuffet between 1962 and 1985. Both the correspondence and texts are here published in English for the first time. “Jean Dubuffet and the Awakening of Images” (1962), Damisch's second article on Dubuffet, discusses the relationship between material object and idea, or painting and image, in Dubuffet's art since the 1940s. “Work, Art, Artwork” (1962) examines Dubuffet's return to figuration following his abstract works of the late 1950s. “Paris Circus” (1962) is an extended review of the recently completed series Paris Circus, and “Second Method” (1964) investigates Dubuffet's cycle of the Hourloupe in the light of questions of perception present in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's The Eye and The Mind . “DUBUFFET (Jean)” (1969) was written as an entry of the Encyclopedia Universalis . The final essay, “Starting Ground” (1985), was written at the time of the artist's death. It evokes, among other themes, contemporaneity and posterity and Dubuffet's complicated embrace of an artistic career. This essay lays the ground for subsequent texts by Damisch on Dubuffet. The correspondence, which is interspersed amidst the writings, is complete save for a few technical letters concerning the editing of Dubuffet's writings by Damisch in 1967. Damisch himself defines it as “work correspondence.” In these letters, artist and writer debate specific terms, discuss the artist's work and the writer's essays, and provide a glimpse of their complex personal relations.