L'amicizia inoperosa delle immagini. Empatia, critica, figuralità in "Documents"

As has been widely acknowledged, the magazine Documents (1929-30) encouraged new and provocative readings, but it also produced maverick readings. Indeed one of the exciting aspects of the periodical was precisely this sense of openness and experimentation, today to link with the new emphasis on embodied mind put on by the renewal of theory of empathy according to phenomenology and visual studies. According to Leiris, the journal's publicity material made its attitude clear: 'The most irritating works of art, yet to be classified, and certain unusual works, neglected until now.’ Documents would deliberately seek out the 'most irritating' material, which had not yet found a place in systems of artistic classification, or had not yet been the subject of scientific or philosophical research. To some degree, the concept of the 'irritating' piece of material as uncharted terrain and attracting attention isn’t be considerate from the point of view of taste and aesthetics but from the point of view of the body as aesthesiological unit, which is a libidinal structure, as perception is a mode of desire, not implying a relation of knowledge, but an emotional and organic relation to the images and to the pictures of everyday life. The reader-viewer’s empathetic response, namely the embodied cinematic simulation to the shapes of still pictures and photographs reproduced in the magazine, especially in Bataille’s papers, is pre-conscious, before rational awareness: the act of seeing in front of the Documents shots is a cinematic dialectic, when the categorizing functions of picture and the senses break down into a crisis of so called aesthetic field grounding in the human sensing body.