Dancing years, or writing as a way out

This essay is concerned with the random and arbitrary nature of the relation between taste, love, desire and knowledge as the basis for disciplinary formation. As an expanded oxymoron it thinks of the constitutive irrationality of the history of art as the space in which it can be shaped politically and theoretically through contingent and singular moments. It understands the Warburgian notion of nachleben not so much as a returning figure of older affective forms as the form of the return of the incomplete in the historically inexhaustible life of images and figures, taking together merging the visible forms in Gerard David, Goya and the photograph of a 1960s tennis star.