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

262 Appendix: Detail and Panpainting becomes hysterical, whereas in the detail it is fetishized. Butborrowing from the conceptual universe of psychoanalysis—this mustbe specified as regards a history of art that, even today, sometimesshortsightedly denies and rejects, sometimes blindly ‘‘uses’’ psychoanalysisin its most adulterated form, namely psychobiography—suchconceptual borrowing is meaningful only with regard to a theory offigurability such as Freud never ceased elaborating, from the dreamimageand the hysterical conversion to the metapsychological modelof unconscious fantasy.Thus to speak of the ‘‘symptom’’ within the field of the history ofpainting is not to look for illnesses, or for more or less consciousmotifs, or for repressed desires somewhere behind a painting, forsome supposed explanatory ‘‘key’’ to the image, in the sense we oncespoke of explanatory keys to the meaning of dreams; it is more simplyto strive to take the measure of a work of figurability, its being understoodthat every pictorial figure presupposes ‘‘figuration,’’ just asevery poetic statement presupposes enunciation. Now it turns outthat the relation between the figure and its own ‘‘figuration’’ is neversimple: this relation, this work, is but a skein of paradoxes. It’s here,moreover, that Aristotle’s sublogic of the ‘‘material cause’’ meets upwith, to a certain extent, Freud’s sublogic of the fantasy as ‘‘unconsciouscause.’’ 57 I speak of sublogic because, in both cases, the relationof contradiction, and thus of identity, has been definitively subverted:the image effectively knows how to represent both the thing and itscontrary; it is impervious to contradiction,* and we must always comeback to this. 58 Likewise, the example of the hysterical symptom demonstratesthe extent to which what connects event and structure, radianceand dissimulation, accident and system of meaning is preciselythe paradox of visibility presupposed by such a ‘‘simultaneity of contradictoryactions ...soplastically portrayed.’’It is perhaps when images are most intensely contradictory thatthey are most authentically symptomatic. As with the red thread andindeed the red hat in Vermeer: binding together as they do, paradoxically—butclosely—the work of mimesis and that of not-mimesis. As*insensible à la contradiction.