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

Image as Rend 179As to knowing how symbol and symptom manage to find theiraptest articulation, their common element, that really isn’t somethingthat can be broached by asking ourselves ‘‘what thing symbolizes asymptom.’’ The symptom symbolizes, to be sure, but it does not symbolizein the way that a lion symbolizes strength—even if we areaware that a bull can also symbolize it. 93 The Panofskian identificationof symbolization with meaning—that is, with ‘‘intrinsic’’ meaning,linked to the famous ‘‘essential tendencies of the human mind’’—heredeserves to be left behind. The eminent symbolicity of the symptomis not understood in Freudian theory as a relation between one termand another, but as an open set of relations between sets of terms thatcan themselves be opened ...each term assuming ‘‘the minimum ofoverdetermination constituted by a double meaning.’’ 94 What, then,does a symptom ‘‘symbolize’’? It symbolizes events that have takenplace and also events that have not taken place. 95 It symbolizes eachthing and also its contrary, being ‘‘an ingeniously chosen piece ofambiguity with two meanings in complete mutual contradiction,’’ 96 asFreud wrote. And by symbolizing it represents, but it represents in away that distorts. It bears within it the three fundamental conditionsof a withdrawal, a presented return of this withdrawal, and a fraughtequivocation* between the withdrawal and its presentation: such, perhaps,would be its elementary rhythm. 97Panofsky himself, as we know, identified symbol with symptom,and both with ‘‘the manner in which, under varying historical conditions,the general and essential tendencies of the human mind [are]expressed by specific themes and concepts’’—iconology basically comingdown to transcribing the reason of these ‘‘themes’’ and ‘‘concepts’’from the perspective of a ‘‘history of cultural symptoms—or ‘symbols’in Ernst Cassirer’s sense—in general.’’ 98 In all likelihood, the historyof art will not be able to jettison the methodological weight that immobilizesit unless it undertakes to criticize the semiological foundationsof this assimilation. It’s not so much a question of trying toredistinguish the two concepts in the guise of a confrontation betweenthe symptom of an artwork’s aesthetic emotions and the symbol, for*équivoque tendue.