georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

Image as Rend 159limits. What is a knowledge of the visual symptom, if the symptom comesto coil in our very eyes, strips us bare, rends us, places us in question,interrogates our own capacity to forget? We should answer this questionin at least two ways: first by searching history for the figures ofsuch a knowledge, since it would be absurd to imagine some limited‘‘modernity’’ of the symptom—and since we have always given ourselvesup to the symptom, in our own eyes as elsewhere. 44 Then bytrying to draw the methodological and critical consequences for us ofthe ones elaborated by Freud in his own field, in his own standoffwith the symptom. Concerning this last point, the situation seems asclear as it is fragile: the symptom prohibits, to repeat the above-citedterms of Pierre Fédida, all ‘‘symbolic synthesis’’ and all ‘‘totalizinginterpretation.’’ 45 Like the dream-work and the remainder-work, thesymptom offers itself only through the rend and the partial disfigurationthat it inflicts wherever it appears. And again like the dream, thesymptom envisaged as an ‘‘unconscious formation’’ prohibited fromthe outset Freud’s taking the road of an idealist, transcendental, ormetaphysical metapsychology, in other words the road of a knowledgeunified in, or by, its grounding principle. The prefix ‘‘-meta’’ in‘‘metapsychology,’’ then, should be understood in a way opposite tothe way we understand it in the word ‘‘metaphysics.’’ And first of allbecause Freud’s metapsychology developed as an insistent assertionof the flimsiness of syntheses—beginning with the very notions ‘‘ego’’*and ‘‘consciousness’’—which makes it an epistemic attitude of ‘‘resistanceto the temptation of synthesis.’’ 46The consequences of such an attitude would make any self-respectingpositivist researcher turn pale. Here we come face-to-face withthe symptom as with a kind of constraint to unreason, where factscan no longer be distinguished from fictions, where facts are essentiallyfictive and fictions efficacious. On the other hand, psychoanalyticinterpretation often does nothing other—the only possibleattitude in face of the dream-work and the work of the symptom—than‘‘strip words of their meaning,’’ advancing them only ‘‘literally to rip[them] from the dictionary and from language,’’ a way of ‘‘de-meaning’’*moi.