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

Image as Rend 161knowledge that we nonetheless strive to retain yet a while, even toground. Lacan came up with some resounding formulations of thissituation, noting of the ‘‘sinthom’’* (a spelling that itself mimics overdetermination)that it made him ‘‘as uneasy as an apple would a fish,’’that he got tangled up in it as if faced with an enigma ‘‘such as cannowise be analyzed’’ to the end—and that the analyst could enter intothis tangle ‘‘only to recognize in his knowledge the symptom of hisignorance’’; a way of addressing to the psychoanalyst the paradoxicalinjunction of his ethic: ‘‘What you must know: ignore what youknow.’’ 52 Here’s how psychoanalysis can play the role of a critical toolwithin the ‘‘human sciences’’ generally—as their symptom, perhaps,which is to say as the return of a repressed in them—now that themastery of knowledge is attaining, even in the so-called conjecturalsciences, prodigious degrees of efficacy. Knowing† something aboutthe symptom does not require further knowledge,‡ a knowledge thatis more finely equipped: since it isn’t notable as such, it more radicallyrequires modifying once again—after the one Kant asked us tomake—the position of the subject of knowledge. 53 §Historians of art have sometimes tried to think critically, in a Kantianor neo-Kantian mode, about the extension and limits of their owndiscipline. But they have in every kind of way—and always in a neo-Kantian mode—placed themselves in the command center of theknowledge** that they produced. They have certainly sharpened theireyes, given their practice ‘‘consciousness’’ (and ‘‘conscience’’),†† refutedall that is naive, or let’s say: almost everything. In art imagesthey have looked for signs, symbols, and the manifestation of stylisticnoumena, but only very rarely have they looked at the symptom,because to look at the symptom would be to risk their eyes in thecentral rend of images, in its quite troubled efficacy. That would havebeen to accept the constraint of a not-knowledge, and thus to dislodge*sinthome.†connaître.‡savoir.§connaissance.**savoir.††conscience, whose two meanings I have unpacked above—trans.