Since the publication of his 1989 text Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press), Donald Preziosi has continued an internal interrogation of our discipline. After the recent appearance of a study jointly written with Claire Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; see my review in the Journal of Art Historiography 9 [December 2013]: https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/verstegen-rev.pdf), we now have another complete statement of Preziosi’s views: Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity. In this book, he repeatedly thinks about the contemporary state of globalization and the way in which fundamental beliefs about art and religion fuel our current predicament of faith, fundamentalism, modernity, and Westernization. The result is a passionate if irreverent symptomatology of the present.

It is important to make this clear at once because such a book will face a genre problem. Given that Preziosi works in art history (prehistoric Greek archaeology), we bring certain expectations to such a book. In art history we like to take our theory like medicine, with the sugar of a period focus. Art, Religion, Amnesia does not have a period focus. It is straight up “aesthetics” or even “philosophy”—if we want to classify it. It is nothing less than a discussion of how belief and religiosity are related to, or antagonistic to, art and artifice in general. For that matter, one reads in vain for a consistent platform from among the various interlocutors whom Preziosi calls forth, including Martin Heidegger, Jacques Rancière, and Giorgio Agamben. This frustrated expectation is related to the general nature of the text. Preziosi is not applying theory. He reads through what contemporary thought has to offer and crafts his own position. Indeed, a major focus of the book is revising one of Jacques Derrida’s central ideas, that a divine teleology underwrites the fine arts. The book, in effect, refuses a secondary position to art history vis-à-vis theory.

Although the problems Preziosi addresses are weighty, he approaches them modestly as exercises in “exfoliation,” “unwinding,” and “unpacking” (24). His rhetorical suspension of certainty harks back to poststructuralism, yet in his hands serves to frame rather than hedge his statements. Preziosi relies on a number of paradoxical metaphors and models—parallax, anamorphosis, knotting—that are familiar from the Lacanian toolkit. I found that I had to read this book out loud, as it is marked by many italics, double entendres, and incomplete clauses written for impact. In this, reading Preziosi is like reading Derrida. Preziosi begins in an autobiographical mode, recounting various “specters of artifice,” in a postmodern reflexive pose. But these exercises represent real dilemmas and stand in the text as “hauntings” of how we as professional academics approach problems. The wordplay and self-references are taxing but rewarding (and often hilarious). To the degree that Preziosi continually circles back to the big issues of the book, it is a staging of a descriptive relativism (as with Derrida) that is in search of its resolution.

For me, such a book represents what was valuable from poststructuralism—the kind of poststructuralism that pronounced the stakes of problem areas rather than circling around them (as in Derrida’s analysis of metaphor in “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 207–72.). It comes as art history embraces its own kind of fundamentalism, which Preziosi calls “Materiality/facticity/quiddity-haeccity/ding-an-sichness(es)” (51) and Janet Wolff has categorized under the “lure of immediacy” (“After Cultural Theory: The Power of Images, the Lure of Immediacy,” Journal of Visual Culture 11, no. 1 [April 2012]: 3–19). Holding in abeyance the yearning for materiality, Preziosi frequently relies on the trope of Derrida’s hauntology, what Preziosi calls an unrecognized or amnesic “evacuated ontology,” and this book is Preziosi’s haunting of art history. As the discipline “kicks the can” (another of his metaphors) of art and religion down the road in favor of a new theory, he challenges us to face up to our literal constitution as religiously artistic and artistically religious subjects (132).

Preziosi comes to his subject in a circuitous (or “labyrinthine”) way, but the result is put in relief soon enough: this is an essential tension between some “name of God,” signifier, presence, or immateriality, and its post-Judaic construals, re-presented, made material, signified. The former is literalist, fundamentalist; the latter is a mere adequation, constituted of artistry, artifice, and art. Time is implicated here: there is that which is timeless and that which is subject to time. Yet one is not the bastard of the other. They are “inextricable.” Because modes of religious thought cannot face the “fabricatedness of their own fabrications” (73), religion itself is by definition opposed to artifice, a fragile fiction. Artifice must be exorcised because it holds the proof of alternative accounts and possibilities, the non-timelessness of religion. Art, for its part, can only exist as a kind of idolatry of religious representation now in its commodified form. “Art permits us to see fiction as fiction; to see the fictiveness or contingency of the world” (79).

Art and religion cannot be known “except in relation to the other” (29). In a pithy formulation, “Art and religion are variant yet mutually defining and co-determined answers or approaches to the same questions of the ethics of the practice of the self” (79). The two coexist under the rule of decorum, wherein artifice labors for religion without introducing polysemy. Here, optical naturalism becomes the “visual instantiation of the metaphysical illusion of the transparency of language” (92). On the other hand, in a formulation hinted at by Preziosi but too familiar to him as a pupil of Roman Jakobson (see, for instance, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960, 350–77) to need introduction, the artistic function of art and the poetic function of language is that which draws attention to itself for its own sake.

Preziosi wants to concede something to those interested in the return to religion insofar as he accepts some criticisms of the over-semioticization of interpretation over the past couple of decades, including his own prior work. In addition to signification he presents “ostensification.” If signification is a relation of equation, ostensification covers the pole of adequation, when something is adequate to stand for something else. Ostensification, then, is opposed to signification or meaning (95). Later, he opposes the “eucharistic” and the “semiotic” (103), yet calls ostensification “an alternative mode of semiosis” (134).

Because Preziosi has worked for so long on semiotics, we want to be as precise as possible in interpreting this point in regard to his larger argument, and his apparent disavowal of a prior interpretational stance. Thus, one has to flesh out these ideas via Preziosi’s earlier discussions of Jakobson’s system, particularly the additions of imputed to factual forms of signification in Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Here, I only urge that the reader not prematurely see ostensification as some kind of anti-sign, which would be contrary to Preziosi’s whole project. Indeed, in a wider aspect it is clear that it is related to indexicality and opposed to the symbolic function, saving both as forms of signification, or else that it can function sometimes as a kind of sign (impossibly) striving to be a pure iconic or indexical “ground.”

It is here that Preziosi revisits Derrida’s statement that a “divine teleology secures the political economy of the fine arts” (“Economimesis,” trans. Richard Klein, Diacritics 11, no. 2 (1981): 3–25). These words spell the normal procedure in art history, where the (general) philosopher explains the trickle down of general metaphysics to the arts. But Preziosi forces the trickle back to metaphysics and completes the other half of the story, that “artistry secures the political economy of religion” (80). Artistry and religion are “perpetually oscillating perspectives.” They are antithetical, but only when fixated on one orientation of the Necker cube, not the illusion itself. Nor is the opposition modern, but was written into the very discovery of distinctive artistry as such.

Preziosi’s lesson for contemporary art theory is sobering. Materiality is not an escape but itself another form of artifice. Nor can we escape modernity for a state of innocence. Art, Religion, Amnesia reveals, then, an open wound in contemporary theoretical discourse. I recommend reading it with his and Farago’s Art Is Not What You Think It Is (and other recent works by Preziosi) for more hints on what to do with our conundrum. Taken alone, the book does not give us much hope for resolution. Preziosi’s bold refusal to collapse the religion/artifice paradox into the birth pains of modernity (echoed in his frequent references to the primal drama registered by Plato) seems to place the paradox outside of history or not subject to evolving political-economic realities and semiotic competencies. But Art Is Not What You Think It Is provides a larger historical matrix in which to think through these questions.

Similarly, if Preziosi’s enterprise is built on his earlier conviction that art history is founded on denying the unrepresentability of history, his echo of Derrida’s hauntology might suggest that, taken alone, Art, Religion, Amnesia is content with a Derridean anti-ontology. Political theorist Alan Norrie notes that “deconstruction does not possess a conception of absence as change, or of the tensed rhythmic process through which change operates, or of the natural and social totality in which change occurs” (Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice, London: Routledge, 2010, 189). Art Is Not What You Think It Is seems to admit this more actively, giving the lie to the claim that anti-ontology is still a tacit ontology. The “art matrix” there helps give a master key to the conditions of the suspicious evacuation of ontology, when and where it will happen.

I have dwelt on these points because I felt at times that one could easily misconstrue the point of Art, Religion, Amnesia. In the proper context, the book is challenging, and it touches “foundational” questions more foundational than we are used to addressing. In addition, it is genuinely funny, and introduces not a few pungent sayings to bring levity (and clarity) to the fundamentalist moment in which we find ourselves.