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

The Detail and the Pan 231say, ‘‘badly understood.’’ The ‘‘understood’’ positivism comes to usfrom faraway, it postulates that the whole visible can be described,cut up into its components (like the words of a sentence or the lettersof a word), and wholly accounted for; that to describe means to seewell, and that to see well means to see truly, in other words, to knowwell. Since everything can be seen, exhaustively described, everythingwill be known, verified, legitimized. This being a way of formulating awilled, even willful, optimism that will carry within it an experimentalmethod applied to the visible.As for the ‘‘badly understood’’ Freudism, it draws support from theroyal road opened, of course, by the Traumdeutung: the interpretationshould proceed ‘‘en detail,’’ wrote Freud, not ‘‘en masse.’’ 1 And thetwo great rules of the classic analytic contract are, as we know, tosay everything—particularly and especially the details—and to interpreteverything—particularly and especially the details. 2 But there is a misunderstandinghere, because while Freud interpreted the detail as partof a signifying chain, sequence, or thread (as I would say), the iconographicmethod, by contrast, is pleased to look for the last word of awork of art, for its signified. It will try, for example, to find an attributethat says everything about the ‘‘subject’’: a key will become thekey that exhausts the meaning of everything painted around it, inother words, about the body that we will call, clef oblige, ‘‘Saint Peter.’’Or indeed, at the extreme, one will look for a supposed self-portraitof the painter between the two panels of a door reflected in a carafeof water relegated to a picture’s darkest corner, and then ask whatmoment the self-portrait represents in the painter’s life, what word heis addressing to another figure outside the painting whose presence inthe artist’s studio and whose ‘‘humanism’’ (and thus his quality asauthor of the painting’s ‘‘program’’) is attested by a contemporaryarchival document, and at the very moment the painting was probablypainted, and so forth . . . The quest, always en abyme, for the ‘‘lastword’’ here making the painting into a veritable roman à clef—a genrefrom which Freud explicitly distanced himself at the beginning of thecase-history of Dora. 3 The picture is always considered as a codedtext, and the code, like hidden treasure or a body in the closet, isalways waiting there, somehow behind the painting—and not within