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

Image as Rend 163interpretation was evoked in the guise not of a reiteration of the ‘‘explicitlysaid’’—namely, as Freud would say, of the ‘‘manifest content’’—butof something like a revelation of the ‘‘latent’’ orunexpressed content that the interpreter, said Heidegger, ‘‘sets beforeour eyes as still unsaid’’? 57 ...But we saw how Panofsky implicitlyrepudiated the hypothesis of interpretive violence that this passageultimately supported. Let’s go farther, however, and persist in objecting:from Germany to America, Panofsky never stopped telling usabout figurative symptoms, even the unconscious, and even metapsychology.The discretion of the references does not get us out of takingthem into consideration. For the stakes here are important: theytouch upon the very status of what Panofsky really understood bysymbolic form. They touch upon the way Panofsky envisaged the ‘‘intrinsic’’—andnot manifest—content of works of art. The expression‘‘symbolic form’’ indeed indicates to us that here, in any case, Panofskytouched upon the so important and current problem of the symbol,that it’s a matter of the problem of the symbolic—the essential andeveryday material with which all iconographers work—or a matter ofthe symbolic, in the sense of a function that is even more basic, governingthe figurability and the meaning of art images. But we stilldon’t know how Panofsky understood this material or this function,how he situated the ideas of symptom and symbol with respect toeach other.Here we must go back to some essential texts in which Panofskyintroduced this theoretical constellation. First there is his early articleon the problem of style, which closes with a call for a ‘‘scientificknowledge’’ (wissenschaftliche Erkenntnis) capable of broaching artisticphenomena ‘‘from the point of view of fundamental metaphysicalconditions’’ (von den metaphysischen Grundbedingungen). Now to qualifyin more concrete terms the act of going-beyond that is a presuppositionof access to such fundamental conditions, Panofsky introducedtwo very strong—and, in a sense, inspired*—theoretical requirements,which consisted in revealing the ‘‘metahistorical and metapsychological’’(metahistorischen und metapsychologischen) sense of the*géniales.