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

Image as Rend 177at a contracting fist: a hand has closed, convulsively, and because itcloses it delivers nothing but the symptom of its withdrawal, whosesecret will remain concealed in the hollow of the palm. Now if wepose our gaze to this obfuscated* facies that refuses to face up to us,we suddenly experience that the melancholy of the Christlike gesturealso fixes a stupefied gaze:† for the gaze of God turns away from men(his executioners, the subjects of his tenderness) only to become lostin, to plunge into an infinite contemplation of his own secret—whichis not an Idea, but the hollow of his palm, in other words the openingof his own flesh, his stigmatum, the symptom of his mortification.Symptom of a flesh delivered up to the unhappy autoscopia of its ownwounds, its own suffering whose depths will remain inaccessible tous: for the pain of Christ must be unfathomable. It was necessary(faith required) that his flesh be a flesh of the symptom, raised, sad,and beset with holes—a flesh summoning the dimension of the visualmore than that of the visible, a flesh presented, open, and withdrawn,like an immense fist that has been wounded.We understand better now, perhaps, the great distance that separatesthe ideal model of the deduction from that, symptomal, of overdetermination.The first cut the image short so as to give it meaning,and polarized it over the unity of a synthesis; it saw in the symbol akind of intelligible unity or schema between the general rule and thesingular event. The second does not deny the symbol, it simply specifiesthat the symptom delivers its symbolicity ‘‘in the sand of theflesh.’’ 88 Which clearly changes everything about the way we thinkabout the symbol itself. Panofsky thought of it as a function that couldbe taken into account, at last resort, in terms of its meaning, which isto say its signified content,‡ even its Wesenssinn or ‘‘essential meaning.’’The symptom, by contrast, is thought in psychoanalysis as a workthat we are constrained to take into account, at last resort, in thecrude and material terms of the signifier,§ which has multiple effects:*obombré, from the Latin obumbrare, ‘‘to obscure,’’ ‘‘to obfuscate’’; and umbra,‘‘shadow.’’†un regard médusé.‡contenu de signification.§signifiant.