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

180 Confronting Imagesits part, considered as its ‘‘theoretical’’ equivalent, and thus theorizable.99 The question comes down, yet again, to accounting for the momentin which knowledge of the symbol is traumatized and interruptsitself in the face of the not-knowledge of the symptom, which in returnopens and propels its symbolicity into an exponential spurt of allthe conditions of meaning operative in an image.Perhaps Panofsky wanted to help us, we historians of art, and tosimplify our lives by making us believe for a moment (but this momentgoes on, the inaugural example of Iconography and Iconology havingbeen taken literally) that posing our gaze to a work of art isequivalent to meeting a man in the street who lifts his hat. The famousopening pages of his introduction to the science of iconologyunfold a semiological fable in which we start out from a certainty—‘‘When I identify, as I automatically do, this configuration as an object(gentleman), and the change of detail as an event (hat-removing)’’—toarrive, in the end, at another certainty—that of the imminent symbolof the gesture of lifting one’s hat, that of the ‘‘cultural symptom’’—acertainty that it would have been impossible to attain without thepermanence and stability of the first one, in other words without theidentification, never called into question, of a man lifting his hat. 100 ... The opposite happens when I look (without encountering it bychance, which is to say for a long time) at a painting: the progressivededuction of a general symbol is never wholly possible, insofar as theimage often proposes to me only thresholds to shatter, certainties tolose, identifications to, at a blow, call into question. 101Such is the efficacy of the symptom, its syncopic temporality, thatit pulverizes the identification of symbols in order to disperse them inworrying fashion. It is perhaps useful to recall here that, in the immenseFreudian corpus devoted to the symbolic, there is a short textthat focuses, precisely, on a hat by way of broaching the nature of the‘‘connection between a symbol and a symptom.’’ 102 It begins howeverwith a term-for-term identification, ‘‘sufficiently well established’’through ‘‘the analysis of dreams’’: the hat symbolizes the genitals—‘‘most frequently of the male organ,’’ but not exclusively. 103 Nonetheless,this door opened onto the evidence for a symbolic system wouldimmediately be closed: ‘‘It cannot be said, however, that this symbol