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

Image as Rend 167ing another man can be aware of whether and just how politelyhe wants to lift his hat, but not of what this revealsabout his innermost essence, an artist knows (to quote awitty American) only ‘‘what he parades,’’ not ‘‘what he betrays.’’64Here, then, we are on the level of the symptom. But in these samelines a second theme is interwoven, one whose function—whose effectat any rate—is precisely to hinder the questioning, to ‘‘trap’’ thesymptom in the net of philosophical knowledge, and thereby to begina veritable process of denial of the symptom as such ...Since for Panofsky,what the artist ‘‘betrays’’ is nothing other than a set of meaningsthat function here ‘‘as ‘documents’ of a homogeneous Weltanschauungmeaning.’’What does this mean? That knowledge of the symptom,in such cases, is reduced to a ‘‘general intellectual history’’ (allgemeineGeistesgeschichte) ‘‘by which the interpretation of a work of art is nowelevated to the level of the interpretation of a philosophical system.’’ 65And thus was the truth of the symptom according to Panofsky referencedto the triple gnosological authority of a ‘‘homogeneous meaning,’’a ‘‘general history,’’ and a ‘‘philosophical system’’—whereas thesymptom that Freud scrutinized in his domain and had theorized formore than thirty years was made precisely to impose on meaning theheterogeneity of its mode of existence; on all chronology of the ‘‘general’’the singularity of its event; and on all systems of thought theunthinkable of its unexpected.The symptom according to Panofsky can still be translated as amode of being more fundamental than appearance, and that nonetheless(like an Idea, perhaps) manifests itself less. It is in this sense thatthe 1932 text introduced the passage from Heidegger about the ‘‘unsaid.’’66 This, doubtless, is how the term ‘‘symptom’’ is still understood—supposingthat it is pronounced there at all—in the domain ofthe history of art: as a pure and simple dialectic of the visible and theless visible. A ‘‘simple reason’’ that amounts to making the symptomhypothetically, or rather by way of a basic premise, into an accessiblereality, accessible in any case to knowledge, on condition that it refineitself. By settling definitively on the ‘‘accessible’’ example of the man