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

162 Confronting Imagesthemselves from a central and advantageous position, the powerfulposition of the subject who knows. Historians of art have been wary ofthe symptom, because they identified it with illness—a notion toodisagreeable for so beautiful a thing as art. Or indeed, to the contrary,they advanced the specter of the symptom to disqualify forms of artthat do not enter into their schemas, all the deviations, degenerations,and other clinical connotations of words that speak of art we don’tlike ...But in both cases they turned their backs on the very conceptof the symptom, which Freud, in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, took great pains to distinguish from the illness per se. 54 Theywanted to know art,* invented art in the sutured image of their knowledge.They did not want their knowledge to be rent in the image of thatwhich, in the image, rends the image itself.Why, finally, call this power of the rend symptom? Just what are weto understand by this? Symptom speaks to us of the infernal scansion,the anadyomene movement of the visual in the visible and of presencein representation. 55 It speaks to us of the insistence and return of thesingular in the regular, it speaks to us of the fabric that rends itself, ofthe rupture of equilibrium and of a new equilibrium, an unprecedentedequilibrium that soon will break itself again. And what it tellsus is untranslatable but interpretable, and interprets itself endlessly. Itplaces us before its visual power as before the emergence of the veryprocess of figurability. 56 It teaches us in this sense—in the brief spaceof a symptom, then—what figuring is, bearing within itself its owntheoretical force. But this is a theory that is active, made flesh, so tospeak, a theory whose power happens, paradoxically, when the unityof forms, their ideal synthesis, breaks apart, and this breaking apartgushes a material’s strangeness. So symptom will be the second notmagicword, the second approximation for renouncing the idealismof the history of art—its vocation to Vasari’s idea as much as to thephilosophical ‘‘form’’ given new currency by Panofsky.This very last point might seem surprising. Didn’t Panofsky quotethe long and beautiful phrase of Heidegger, in which the problem of*savoir, and likewise to the end of the paragraph.