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

Image as Rend 165astrology may have been in the princely courts of the sixteenth century:an intellectual fashion, a cultural symptom. Conversely, Freudproposed his ‘‘metapsychology’’ of the depths against all ‘‘magical’’and romantic uses of the unconscious; more basically, he proposed itas an alternative to metaphysics (associated more or less with a magicaloperation), and even as a conversion of metaphysics understood—toparaphrase Panofsky himself—as analogous to the conversion of astrologyinto astrography. 62The difference between these theoretical stakes permits a betterunderstanding of what Panofsky could have hoped for or aimed forwhen he used expressions such as ‘‘unconscious’’ and ‘‘symptom.’’We will quickly go astray if we try to discern here some kind of‘‘Freudian’’ coherence or tone. For in Panofsky, ‘‘unconscious’’ and‘‘symptom’’ aim only at a world of ‘‘fundamental principles’’ susceptibleby definition to a knowledge, perhaps metaphysical (or decidedlymetaphysical). The ‘‘unconscious’’ in Panofsky is expressed throughthe German adjective unbewusst: that which is not presently in consciousnessbut which a more lucid consciousness, that of the historian,should be able to uncover, to make explicit, to know. Whereas theFreudian unconscious is expressed by the noun das Unbewusste, whichsuggests not inattention but repression or foreclosure, and whichstrictly speaking is not an object for knowledge, including the knowledgeof the analyst ...But let’s try to characterize Panofsky’s positionmore precisely. Let’s recall first the pivotal text of 1932, where heproposed a knowledge* of the ‘‘ultimate content’’ of the image—contents of knowledge† expressed in terms not of repression, butprecisely of knowledge, which is to say of a ‘‘worldview’’ (Weltanschauung).It seems to me that artistic productions, on a much deeperand more general level of meaning, beyond their phenomenaland signified meaning, are based on an ultimate, moreessential content: the involuntary and unconscious self-dis-*connaissance.†savoir.