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

Image as Rend 181is at all an intelligible one,’’ writes Freud, thereby indicating how theevidence, even attested, for a symbolic code quickly becomes inoperativewhen it broaches the ‘‘work’’ itself, by which I mean the way itoperates in a fantasy or a symptom. Then there commences in Freud’stext a whole economy of trajectories along which the hat will becomea head (‘‘a prolonged, though detachable head’’), a ball or a pillow,then a pillow-organ, etc. A fantasy economy in which we pass notfrom one certainty to another, but from one symbolic displacement toanother, and endlessly:When they [obsessive neurotics] are in the street they areconstantly on the lookout to see whether some acquaintancewill greet them first by taking off his hat, or whether heseems to be waiting for their salutation; and they give up anumber of their acquaintances after discovering that they nolonger greet them or do not return their own salutationproperly. There is no end to their difficulties in this connection;they find them everywhere as their mood and fancydictate. 104The theoretical lesson of Freud’s little text is quite clear: the fartherone goes in observing a symptom, the less clear its resolution willseem. As for the reference to the castration complex (which subtendshis argument here), it indeed provides a paradigm for the interpretation,but it is not a paradigm that resolves, synthesizes, or fixes theterms among themselves: for it requires that the symbolized be thoughtwith its disappearance, with its being torn to pieces, with its incessantlyrepeated rending. Thus the psychoanalyst will fail if he tries to makean iconology—in Panofsky’s sense—of the symptom presented tohim. By lifting their hats, Freud’s obsessive neurotics no longer performclear and distinct acts of courtesy. Rather, they set disquietingdoll-symptoms within (pseudo)familiar doll-symbols . . .So an economy of doubt is put into place with the thought of thesymptom. The symptom effectively requires of me that I be uncertainabout my knowledge of what I see and what I think I grasp. Descartes,looking through his window at the hats and coats passing by, already