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

260 Appendix: Detail and Panitself in the picture, simultaneously as accident of representation (Vorstellung)and sovereignty of presentation (Darstellung).The Symptom: A Deposit of MeaningA sovereign accident is called, strictly speaking, a symptom: a wordunderstood here to have all the extension and semiological rigor thatFreud bestowed on it. A symptom—let’s take a case of figuration*that involves, from end to end, the domain that interests us, that ofvisibility—is, for example, the moment, the unpredictable and immediatepassage of a body into the aberrant, critical state of hystericalconvulsions, of extravagance in every movement and posture: gestureshave suddenly lost their ‘‘representativity,’’ their code; the extremitiesbecome contorted and entangled; the face horripilates andbecomes distorted; relaxation and contraction radically intermingle;no ‘‘message,’’ no ‘‘communication’’ can any longer emanate fromsuch a body; in short, such a body no longer resembles itself, or nolonger resembles; it is nothing but a resounding, paroxysmal mask, amask in Bataille’s sense: a ‘‘chaos become flesh.’’ 53 In the gnosologicalfield of hysteria, the classical alienists, Charcot included, referred tothis as a ‘‘cynicism’’ of the body, as ‘‘clownisme,’’ ‘‘illogical movement,’’and even ‘‘demoniacal crisis,’’ thereby underscoring the disfigured,deformed, and above all meaningless character that such bodilyaccidents present to the eye—to observation and to clinical description.54By contrast, Freud, faced with such culminating moments in attacksof hysteria, presupposed that the accident—a senseless, unformed,incomprehensible, ‘‘non-iconic’’ gesture—was sovereign: andnot only syntagmatically sovereign, so to speak, namely, that in such amoment the accident dominates everything and tyrannizes the wholebody; but also ‘‘paradigmatically’’ sovereign, namely, that such a momentconveys meaning, engages a destiny, an originary fantasy, andthus puts a structure to work. But it is a dissimulated structure. Such*cas de figure.