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

170 Confronting Imagesin their belief that, thanks to such a principle, they had definitivelygone beyond the traditional givens of metaphysics.And it would be abusive today to see in it the fundamental principleof a structuralism. If, in the structuralist hypothesis that posits thepreeminence of relations over terms, we understand by relation onlythe ‘‘synthetic unity’’ of the terms, then structuralism is either veryincomplete or very idealist. If, on the other hand, we seek to givean account of a relation that does not omit—or absorb into sometranscendental Idea—the existence of symptoms, namely intrusions,disparities, local catastrophes, then we will better understand the criticalinterest of Freudian concepts. For the model of ‘‘unconscious formations’’places us face-to-face with open structures, with somethinglike the nets of fishermen who would like to know* not only wellformedfish (figured figures, representations) but the sea itself. Whenwe draw the net toward us (toward our desire for knowledge),† wecannot help but notice that the sea for its part has withdrawn. It flowseverywhere, it flees, although we can still make out a bit of it aroundthe knots of the net, while formless algae signify it before drying outon our shore. We understand, reading Freud, that it is the psychoanalyst’sbusiness to recognize that when he draws the net toward him,the essential has still disappeared. The fish are indeed there (figures,details, fantasies such as art historians also love to collect), but the seathat makes them possible has kept its mystery, present only in thedamp glow of a few algae stuck to the edges. If a thought of theunconscious has any meaning at all, then it must be reconcilable withstructures full of holes, of knots, of extensions impossible to situate,of distortions and rips in the net.Panofsky’s attempt, like Cassirer’s, pertained then to what might becalled ‘‘pre-Freudian reason.’’ 74 It was loath to think the over-determinationof objects save under the logical—and typically Kantian—form ofa deduction. 75 There is a particularly striking example of this in thefamous interpretation of Dürer’s Melancholia I. Panofsky here evokes,*connaître.†savoir.