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

Image as Rend 169aims at a general and generative grammar of forms, capable of ‘‘generatingall of a culture’s characteristic thoughts, perceptions, and actions’’71 —in short, it is the functional form capable of generating allforms. So it must be greatly indebted to the ‘‘formal unity’’ of Cassirer’sfunction. 72 Which is to say, in the end, that it is an object of reason,that it has all the characteristics of the Idea, and that it subjects theworld of individual phenomena to its transcendental law. Now it isquite obvious that Freud’s elaboration constituted its metapsychologyof work and of ‘‘unconscious formations’’ precisely against the grainof such a model. It focused on the symptom as on something thatbreaks up all discursive unity, as on what intrudes upon and smashesthe order of the Idea, opens systems and imposes something unthinkable.The work of the Freudian unconscious is not envisaged througha consciousness that sharpens itself or looks for a priori principles—itrequires another position vis-à-vis consciousness and knowledge, thealways unstable position that psychoanalytic technique broaches duringsessions in the guise of the play of the transference.So Panofsky, in his notion of ‘‘symbolic form,’’ was looking for theunity of a function. What was in question was nothing less than givingform to the forms themselves: taking into account the plurality of formsthrough the unity of a single formal function, of a single Idea of reasoninexpressible in intelligible terms and even in terms of knowledge. Itwas a question, to use terms employed before him by Cassirer, offinding an ‘‘explanation and justification of the concept of representation,’’and in it, the principle of a knowledge* aiming ‘‘to subject themultiplicity of phenomena to the unity of a ‘fundamental proposition.’’’ 73 Such, then, were the stakes of the general concept of symbol.That it had been envisaged from the angle of the primacy of relationover terms and of function over objects (or substance) indicates theimportance of the road traveled, the full interest of the project undertakenby Cassirer and then by Panofsky. Today there are so manyhistorians who ignore the methodological implications of this way ofbroaching art images that it is necessary to insist again on their pertinencefrom the outset. But Cassirer and then Panofsky were deceived*connaissance.