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

264 Appendix: Detail and Panto propose a semiology, not only of symbolic configurations, but alsoof events, or accidents, or singularities of the pictorial image (whichpresupposes a phenomenology). That’s what an aesthetic of the symptom,in other words, an aesthetic of the sovereign accidents in painting,would tend toward.In order to make all of these borderlines clearer, we might referencethe notion of pan to two other notions rather close to it—andon which its very existence depends—but from which it separatesitself, precisely because it risks playing on the two pictures, so tospeak, on the two faces where the symptom in Freud’s sense finds itstheoretical pertinence and its efficacy. Close to the pan, first, wouldbe the punctum, the admirable theoretical ‘‘point’’ that Barthes directedtoward the visible. The reader will recall that he did so dedicatingthe whole of his attempt to Sartre’s Imaginaire, which manifestswith maximal clarity the phenomenological exigency to which anyanalysis of the visible must pay heed; and that is why Barthes did nothesitate to adopt the point of view of a phenomenology, however‘‘vague,’’ however ‘‘casual’’—because ‘‘understood with the affect,’’he said, and in any case expressible in terms not of structure, butindeed of existence. 60Basically, the theoretical difference between the pan and the punctumdoes not reside in the fact that one of the two notions originatesin painting and the other in photography; any more than in the differencebetween the semantic constellations borne by the two words,the one tending toward the frontal zone and frontal expansion, theother toward the point and ‘‘on point’’ focus. Nor did Barthes neglectto speak of the ‘‘power of expansion’’ of the punctum. 61 The problemis that the notion of punctum seems to lose in semiological pertinencewhat it gains in phenomenological pertinence: one indeed seized herethe sovereignty of the visible accident, its dimension as event—but atthe price of both ‘‘affective tone’’ and ‘‘celebration of the world.’’Again, the world reverts to depositing itself on the image, throughthe mediation of its detail—this is the term used by Barthes—and ofits worldly temporality: ‘‘It is not I who seek it out’’; it ‘‘shoots out of[the scene] like an arrow, and pierces me.’’ 62 Then there is no moreimaging substance to interrogate, only a relation between a detail of