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

The Detail and the Pan 261is the figurative paradox that Freud admirably elucidates when, confrontedby a hysterical woman agitated by incomprehensible, contradictorymovements, he manages to untangle their very articulation,and with it the meaning of this antithetical image:In one case which I observed, for instance, the patientpressed her dress up against her body with one hand (as thewoman) while she tried to tear it off with the other (as theman). This simultaneity of contradictory actions serves to alarge extent to obscure the situation, which is otherwise soplastically portrayed in the attack, and it is thus well suitedto conceal the unconscious fantasy that is at work. 55This one sentence takes us right to the quick of the problem, forit makes the semiotic specificity of the concept of symptom readilyunderstandable: the symptom is a critical event, a singularity, an intrusion,but it is at the same time the implementation of a signifyingstructure, of a system that the event is charged with making surgeforth, but partially, contradictorily, in such fashion that the meaning isexpressed only as an enigma or as the ‘‘appearance ‘of something,’ ’’ 56not as a stable set of meanings. That is why the symptom is characterizedsimultaneously by its visual intensity, its value as radiance, andby what Freud calls here its suitability to ‘‘conceal’’ the ‘‘unconsciousfantasy that is at work.’’ The symptom is, then, a two-faced semioticentity: between radiance and dissimulation, between accident andsovereignty, between event and structure. That is why it presentsitself above all as something that ‘‘obscures the situation,’’ to quoteFreud again, although it is ‘‘plastically portrayed,’’ although its visualexistence imposes itself with such radiance, such self-evidence, evenviolence. This is what a sovereign accident is.And the notion of pan finds here a preliminary formulation: a‘‘pan’’ is a symptom of paint within the picture, ‘‘paint’’ understood herein the sense of a material cause, and ‘‘material’’ understood in thesense ascribed to it by Aristotle—something that pertains not to alogic of contraries, but to a logic of desire and protension (the éphiestaïof Aristotle’s Physics). At the extreme, we might say that in the pan