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Notes 301symptom and are reconciled, as it were, by the compromise of the system that has beenconstructed. It is for that reason, too, that the symptom is so resistant: it is supportedfrom both sides.’’93. See Hegel’s preliminary remarks re ‘‘symbolic art’’: G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics,trans. T. M. Knox (London and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:305–6.94. Écrits, 269 [Sheridan, 59].95. See Freud, Introductory Lectures . . . , in SE 16: 367.96. Ibid., 360.97. See Écrits, 358: ‘‘The symptom is the return of the repressed in the compromise.’’Note again the paradoxical equivalence, repeatedly underscored by Lacan, of repressionand return of the repressed in the symptom. This could be the starting point for a deeperreading of the seminar on the ‘‘sinthome’’ of 1975–76, where Lacan broached the questionof art through that of the symptom. Another paradoxical equivalence is intimated there,one according to which, with art and equivocation—both deeply implicated in the symptom—‘‘wehave only id [ca] as weapon against the symptom.’’ . . . Another way of sayingthat the work of art ‘‘makes use of ’’ and ‘‘plays with’’ the symptom as much as it‘‘thwarts’’ it. See Lacan, ‘‘Séminaire sur le sinthome,’’ Ornicar? no. 6 (1977): 6–10.98. ‘‘Just so, or even more so, has our synthetic intuition to be controlled by an insightinto the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, the general and essentialtendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts. This meanswhat may be called a history of cultural symptoms—or ‘symbols’ in Ernst Cassirer’ssense—in general.’’ Panofsky, ‘‘Introductory,’’ in Studies in Iconology, 16 (emphasis in original).99. As suggested by B. Teyssèdre, ‘‘Iconologie: Réflexions sur un concept d’ErwinPanofsky,’’ Revue Philosophique, no. 154 (1964): 328–30.100. See Panofsky, ‘‘Introductory,’’ in Studies in Iconology, 3–5, where the verb is indeed‘‘identify.’’101. It is in this sense that Daniel Arasse proposed the problems of iconographic identificationbe not wholly resolved, but rather thought iconographically: ‘‘There also exists apossible iconography of associations of ideas, and not only of clear and distinct ideas.’’ D.Arasse, ‘‘Après Panofsky: Piero di Cosimo, peintre,’’ in Erwin Panofsky, ed. Jacques Bonnet(Paris: Cahiers pour un temps, 1983), 141–42.102. Freud, ‘‘A Connection Between a Symbol and a Symptom’’ (1916), in SE 14: 339.103. Ibid.104. Ibid., 340 (my emphasis).105. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham, The PhilosophicalWritings of Descartes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2:21.106. ‘‘An analogy with which we have long been familiar compared a symptom to aforeign body [als einem Fremdkörper] which was keeping up a constant succession of stimuliand reactions in the tissue [in dem Gewebe] in which it was embedded.’’ Freud, Inhibitions,Symptoms, and Anxiety, in SE 20: 98.107. As I have already indicated (above, pages 26–28), the question posed here ismeant to challenge historical research to justify itself, and to judge itself fully, only in itsown concrete expansion.108. As I write these lines, there has appeared a collection by Louis Marin, Opacité dela peinture: Essais sur la représentation au Quattrocento (Florence and Paris: Usher, 1989), inwhich the concept of representation—admittedly, inflected by a contemporary pragmatic—isexposed in its double capacity to produce both transparency and opacity.109. Panofsky, ‘‘The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection ofthe History of Styles,’’ in Meaning, 103–4.