Art History

ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 24

No. 5

November 2001 pp. 621645

Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the symptom paradigm

Georges Didi-Huberman
In 1923 Aby Warburg defined the aim of his library, but also his work in general, as eine Urkundensammlung zur Psychologie der menschlichen Ausdruckskunde.1 What else, then, is the `science without a name' invented by Warburg, if not a living metamorphosis of traditional art history this ostensible history of objects into a history of the psyche, as embodied in styles, forms, `pathos formulae', symbols, fantasies, beliefs; in short, all that Warburg intended by the term Ausdruck (`expression')?2 A metamorphosis in which `historical psychology' profoundly modifies the positivist point of view of history and `expression' profoundly modifies the idealist point of view of art. `Historical psychology'? This means that the time of the after-life is a psychic time; a hypothesis that must be situated on several levels all at once. First, the chosen motifs of Nachleben are the great psychic powers: pathetic representations, dynamogrammes of desire, moral allegories, figures of mourning, astrological symbols, etc.3 Next, the domains of Nachleben are style, gesture and the symbol, as vectors of exchange between heterogeneous spaces and times.4 Finally, the processes of Nachleben can only be understood from the basis of their `connaturality' with psychic processes in which the actuality of the primitive manifests itself. Thus Warburg's interest for the latent or critical aspects of the Pathosformel, as well as those that pertain to the drives and to fantasy. It is highly significant that Warburg undertook a vast, never finished, and never published `foundational' project on the psychology of art while working on his dissertation on Botticelli, a work through which dream motifs, themes of unconscious desire, of the erotische Verfogungscene (`erotic chase'), of sacrifice and death discretely, yet confidently, make their way. In the three hundred or so folios of this manuscript, written between 1888 (when he was just twenty-two years old) and 1905, Warburg devised an entire psychological and philosophical vocabulary (we would not want to call it a system) aimed at working out such formidable problems as `art and thought', the relationship between `form and content', the `theory of the symbol', the status of `anthropomorphism', the `association of ideas', `images of thought', etc.5 A vocabulary of `expression' remains omnipresent in all his attempts to formulate a psychology of art, continuing up to the 1927 Allgemeine Ideen.6 If all history falls within the realm of a psychology then, for Warburg, the entire history of images necessarily falls within the realm of a psychology of expression. As I
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have started to indicate, what is being formulated here is a psyche unconfined to the familiar, heroic tales of artistic `personality'. This formulation points toward a more basic and transversal, impersonal and trans-individual psyche; a psychic condition common to what we customarily call body and soul, image and word, representation and movement, and anthropologically central to what has been somewhat impoverished by classical aesthetics under the concept of imitation.7 This not only means that Nachleben should be thought of as a psychic time, it means that the Pathosformel should be thought of as a psychic gesture. Gertrud Bing recognized this fundamental trait. According to her, `pathos formulae' make visible `not a quality of the external world like movement, distance or space, but a state of the emotions'.8 Bing, the historian slightly alarmed by the swampy psychic terrain she has just touched on, concluded: `We are here treading on dangerous ground.'9 Yet, the Warburgian demand, dangerous or not, lies therein: the Pathosformel must not be translated in terms of a semantics or semiotics of corporeal gestures, but in terms of a psychic symptomatology. Pathos formulae are the visible symptoms corporeal, gestural, presented, figured of a psychic time irreducible to the simple thread of rhetorical, sentimental, or individual turns. But, where does one find the theoretical paradigm for this demand? This was Warburg's lengthy and obstinate quest. Its vocabulary would undoubtedly remain that of expression, but its point of view was that of the symptom. For expression, according to Warburg, is not the reflection of an intention, but is instead the return of the repressed in the image. This is why Nachleben appears as the time of a contretemps in history (thought of in terms of the development of styles), and Pathosformel as the gesture of a counter-movement in history (thought of in terms of the storia that an image represents). `Expression', then. But symptomatic expression. [Translator's note: The word Georges Didi-Huberman uses in French is `symptomale'. He wants to make a distinction between symptomale, which is a critical term, and symptomatic, which is a clinical term.] What kind of symptom? Symptom of what? And, above all, symptom how? Without being certain what he would find, Warburg first turned to medicine for answers. As early as 1888, it was the medical metaphor that sprang to mind when he tried to express his hope for an epistemological breakthrough, his desire to finish with the `aestheticising history of art' of connoisseurs and sogennanten Gebildeten (`so-called cultured') specialists: We of the younger generation want to attempt to advance the science of art so far that anyone who talks in public about art without having specially and profoundly studied this science should be considered just as ridiculous as people are who dare to talk about medicine without being doctors.10 When Warburg spoke of his desire for epistemological displacement, it was again medicine, along with anthropology, that would dismantle the judgements of taste proper to the `aestheticizing history of art'. He needed ethnology via his voyage to Hopi country to teach him the meaning of the primitive, and medicine to teach him the meaning of the symptom, so that traditional art history could cede to an anthropology of images capable of `organically' grasping the stylistic and symbolic phenomena of the Florentine Renaissance and the German Reformation: 622
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Amongst other things, I was sincerely disgusted with the aestheticizing history of art (der a sthetisierenden Kunstgeschichte). It seemed to me that the formal contemplation of the image which does not consider it a biologically necessary product (als biologisch notwendiges Produkt) between religion and art practice (which I only understood later) led to such sterile prattling that after my trip to Berlin in the summer of 1896 I decided to switch to medicine. I had no idea that after my trip to America the organic relationship between the art and religion of `primitive' peoples would appear with such clarity that I plainly saw the identity, or rather the indestructibility of primitive man who remains eternally the same throughout all epochs (die Unzersto rbarkeit des primitiven Menschen zu [der] allen Zeiten), in such a way that I could demonstrate that he was as much an organ of the Florentine Renaissance as he was, later, of the German Reformation.11 In fact, between 1891 and 1892 Warburg had already taken preparatory courses in psychology for medical students. It seems clear, then, that for the young historian of images medicine signified medicine of the soul above all. As nearly every connoisseur of Warburg's work would attest,12 from this moment on the question remains as to which psychological or, rather, psychopathological framework Warburg needed to found his stylistic analysis and symptomatology of renascent culture. To claim that he was trying to get at the `symptoms of a collective spirit' is far too imprecise.13 Reducing the question of the symptom to one of a Hegelian `meaning of history,' as Gombrich attempted, is even more unjustified.14 And, calling upon the obscure, if original, evolutionist Tito Vignoli as evidence for Warburg's recourse to the pyschopathological paradigm is equally insufficient.15 Only from 1918 onwards, from the very pit of his own psychological collapse, did Warburg begin to see the proximity between his intellectual project and psychoanalysis. By glossing over this episode, Gombrich effected a considerable act of epistemological censure.16 Once more, it was a question of burying the demons of the Freudian unconscious as well as of the Nietzschean Dionysiac under the ancient ramparts of a Mitteleuropa in ruins. It was a question of providing the, henceforth Anglo-Saxon, `Warburgian tradition' with the return to order of a philosophy of the faculties (Panofsky traded Nietzsche and the eternal return for Kant and the a priori), bolstered by a `positive' psychology (Gombrich traded Freud and fantasy for Popper and perception). In order to break through this censure, we must try to re-imagine the path that brought Warburg to Freud. * * *

Warburg's dreamed-of `historical psychology of expression', the theoretical foundation for his anthropology of images, was envisaged, above all, as a psychopathology. The Warburgian history of images attempts to analyse the pleasure of formal invention, during the Renaissance for example, as well as the `culpability' of repressed memory that can be manifest there. It evokes movements of artistic creation, as well as `auto-destructive' compulsions at work in the very exuberance of forms. It highlights the coherence of aesthetic systems, as well as
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1 Niccolo dell'Arca, The Lamentation of Christ, Detail of Mary Magdelene, c. 1480. Terracotta, Bologna: Santa Maria della Vita. Photo: Antonio Guerra.

the sometimes `irrational' nature of the beliefs upon which they are founded. It studies the unity of stylistic epochs, as well as the `conflicts' and the `formation of compromises' that can traverse and dissociate them. It considers the beauty and charm of masterpieces, as well as the `anxiety' and the `phobia' for which, says Warburg, they provide a kind of `sublimation'. Naturally, the theoretical archaeology of this vocabulary requires examination. It already reveals that if the symbol was at the centre of Warburg's preoccupations, it was not there as an abstract synthesis of reason and unreason, of form and matter, etc.17 but as a concrete symptom of a cleavage ceaselessly at work in the `tragedy of culture'. When Warburg rests his eyes on a pathetic Mary 624
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2 Bertoldo di Giovanni, Crucifixion (Detail), c. 1485. Bronze relief. Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Photo: the author.

Magdelene by Niccolo dell'Arca, Donatello, or Bertoldo di Giovanni (plates 1 and 2), it becomes clear that gestural `expression' is only symbolic in that it is first symptomatic. Here, the gestural formula `expresses' solely to crystallize a moment of intensity for the female saint, which appears, above all, as a veritable rupture in the symbolic order of evangelical history. It is the moment of a contretemps in which the unbridled desire of Antique maenads is repeated in Mary Magdelene's body.18 It is the gesture of a counter-movement which recalls, in Mary Magdelene's body, a paganism that is duly ignored by the entire symbolic content the sacrifice of the incarnate Word. Therefore, it seems to be a question of something like a symptom.
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One could say that Warburgian art history, in its temporal models (Nachleben) as well as in its models of sense (Pathosformel), sought to apprehend its objects from their critical effects: from Botticelli's and Polliauolo's `erotic chases' (where Savonarola justly saw the insolence of an `orgiastic desire at work')19 to the `superlatives of gesticular language' in Donatello or others where surged a `perfectly inopportune mobility of expression';20 from the irruption of Arab astrology in a fifteenth-century Ferrara fresco to the German Reformation's obscure dealings with astrological beliefs.21 Each time we witness the extent to which `the necessity to confront the formal world of predetermined expressive values whether they come from the past or present represents the decisive crisis (die entscheidende Krisis) . . . for each artist'.22 In the dance of these decisive crises, Warburg saw all of Western culture shaken by a symptomatic oscillation that he himself experienced in its full force, and at first hand: Sometimes it seems that, as a psycho-historian (ich als Psychohistoriker), I have tried to diagnose the schizophrenia of Western culture (die Schizophrenie des Abendlandes) through its images, as an autobiographical reflex. The ecstatic (manic) nymph on the one side, and on the other, the (depressive) river god in mourning (die ekstatische Nympha [manisch] einerseits und der trauernde Flussgott [depressiv] anderseits).23 Underlying critical effects is an order of causes that Warburg grasped, in 1929, using the psychopathological vocabulary of schizophrenia (a Deulezian observation, it seems, before its time) or manic-depressive psychosis (an observation, in fact, directly linked to his therapy with Ludwig Binswanger). As early as 1889, Warburg had referred to this order of causes in terms of unnatural `un-motivated ' (ohne Motivierung) movements linked to desire (Zusammenhang met dem Wunsch).24 Forty years later, just before his death, the Freudian concept of the unconscious was at the `psycho-historian's' disposal. Yet, as if he feared that the substantive notion (das Unbewute) distanced him from the dynamic he sought to characterize, he preferred, once more, to seek out the heap of moving serpents: he preferred to speak of a `dialectic of the monster' (Dialektik des Monstrums).25 The order of causes is thus the eternal conflict with a formidable, sovereign and un-nameable thing. The omnipresent themes of Warburg's last years were: the `combat with the monster' (Kampf mit dem Monstrum) in ourselves, the `psychic drama' (Seelendrama) of culture as a whole, the `complex and dialectical' (Complex und Dialektik) knot of the subject with this mysterious Monstrum, defined in 1927 as the `original causal form' (Urkausalita tform).26 To Warburg's mind, the fundamental and `uncanny duality' (unheimliche Doppelheit) of all cultural facts was as follows: the logic they set allows the chaos they combat to overflow; the beauty they invent lets the horror they repress burst through; the freedom they promote leaves the constraining drives they try to break intact.27 Warburg liked to repeat the adage Per monstra ad astra (to which Freud's Wo es war, soll Ich werden seems to offer a variant): but how are we to understand this, if it is not that one must, in any event, be confronted with the powers of the monster? Critical effects and unconscious causes: the `dialectic of the monster' describes nothing less than the structure of a symptom. For the symptom accounts 626
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simultaneously for repression and the return of the repressed: repression in the `plastic formulae of compensation' (plastische Ausgleichsformel) that barely cross the `threshold of consciousness' (Schwelle seines Bewutseins), and the return of the repressed in the `crisis' (Krisis) and the `symptomatic' (symptomatisch) figure that surge with a `maximal degree of energy tension' (ho chsten energetischen Anspannung). In 1907, Warburg compressed this vocabulary into just four lines of his article on Francesco Sassetti.28 Later, visual incarnations of the `dialectic of the monster' would be incarnated in Du rer's engraving of the eight-legged Sow of Landser or in the horrible composite figures of anti-Catholic propaganda wood engravings.29 In reference to these figures Warburg spoke of a `region of prophetic monsters' (Region der wahrsagenden Monstra).30 It seems possible to read his expression on the two levels called for by such a double-sided discipline as `historical psychology'. On the historical side, the monsters of Lutheran propaganda are `prophetic' of a politico-religious defeat of the Papacy. On the psychological side, they are unaware that they unleash an unconscious truth (Wahrheit) through the bias the visual figure of these legendary (Sage) composite-bodied monsters. This is why these are exemplary `prophetic' (wahrsagenden) objects for Warburg. It is also why art history must not only be a history of phantoms, but a history of prophecies and symptoms too.31 In any case, the Pathosformeln must henceforth be understood as corporeal crystallizations of the `dialectic of the monster'. Symptom-moments of the anthropomorphic image, the pathos formulae were envisaged by Warburg according to the dialectical perspective of repression (`plastic formulae of compromise') and of the return of the repressed (`crisis', `maximum degree of tension'). The image in movement32 to which Warburg wanted to devote an atlas, an occidental genealogical album, details nothing else but symptom-movements. But, according to what paradigm should we understand them? In Warburg's own time, attempts to analyse the pathological recesses of `movements of expression' were far from lacking: beginning with the `physiognomic mechanism' studied by Theodor Meynert in his Psychiatrie (1844), moving on to Cassirer's `pathology of symbolic consciousness' (1929), after taking in Karl Jasper's analysis of expressive disorders in his General Psychopathology (1913).33 Undoubtedly, the French psychological school could also have served Warburg's designs. For had The odule Ribot not formulated a theory of unconscious memory, a `psychological heritage' his own Nachleben of `faculties' and `instincts' by seeking all in the way into cultural history for his examples?34 And had Ribot not offered an explanation for expressive gestures his own notion of the Pathosformeln by elaborating an entire theory of the unconscious of movement, in which the psyche was to be apprehended from the angle of a `latent motor activity' that left its `motor residues' at every level of psychic life?35 However, it was above all the hysteria clinic at the end of the nineteenth century as triumphant as it was spectacular that furnished the most pertinent symptomatological model for Warburg's `dialectic of the monster'. Indeed, the expressive Pathosformeln of crisis and the Nachleben of a latent trauma that returns in the intensity of effected movements meet in the hysterical symptom (it should be noted that the participle nach of the verb nachleben can refer to
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3 Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne, 192829, panel 6 (detail). London, The Warburg Institute.

simulation, and that since the eighteenth century alienists had approached hysteria from this very angle). At the end of the nineteenth century Charcot emerged as the uncontested mastermind of the workings of the symptom, and the uncontested ballet master of the hysterical spectacle. 36 Sigrid Schade has recently defended and argued for an affinity between Charcot's conception of the hysterical body and Warburg's Pathosformeln. Aside from the fact that there were two works by Charcot and his collaborator Paul Richer in Warburg's library,37 there are several other essential links between Charcot's psychopathology and Warburg's Kulturwissenschaft. For example, both forms of knowledge present themselves as explorations of a clinical archive; both relied on an abundant use of photography; and both resulted in the creation of iconographic repertories.38 One could conceivably imagine Warburg's atlas of pathos formulae as an equivalent to Richer's famous synoptic table, created under his master's guidance, of the `grande attaque hysterique comple te and re gulie re'.39 (plates 3 and 4). According to Schade, the great virtue of this rapprochement is that it responds to a censure a `blind spot' in the Warburgian tradition.40 Indeed, art history has 628
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4 Tabular overview of the `whole and regular major hysterical fit', from J.M. Charcot and P. Richer, tudes cliniques sur la grande E rie ou hyste ro-e pilepsie, Paris, hyste 1881, plate V.

wanted nothing to do with the pathological repercussions of Warburg's understanding of pathos. It has refused to see that it owes its very status as a `humanist discipline' to Warburg's creation of something like a `pathological discipline'.41 Sigrid Schade is therefore right to speak of Charcot as Warburg's predecessor when it comes to interdisciplinarity, iconographic collection, the observation of the body during moments of pathos, of passion, and even of Dionysiac madness.42 It must also be noted that Nietzsche's allusions, in the Birth of Tragedy, to the dance of Saint-Guy and to the small possessed figure in Raphae l's Transfiguration find their exact pendants in Richer and Charcot's panels moniaques dans l'art.43 (plates 5 and 6). on the same themes in their work on Les De How, in the end, can one not be struck by the analogy between the Warburg's Dionysian Ninfa and Richer's drawings of hysterics at the Salpe trie re? (plates 7 and 8). It is tempting to claim that the regressive path adopted by Charcot's `retrospective medicine' modern hysterics, Christian mystics, Antique maenads finds its historical and aesthetic justification in the Warburgian analysis of Nachleben. However, upon closer scrutiny, it seems that the ground on which this analogy rests is not only sown with traps, but that it crumbles with each further step.
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tudes cliniques sur la 5 (left) Raphae l, Possessed figure. From J.M. Charcot and P. Richer, E rie ou hyste ro-e pilepsie, Paris, 1881, p. 29. grande hyste 6 (right) After Peter Breughel, St. Guy's Dance. From J.M. Charcot and P. Richer, Les moniaques dans l'art, Paris, 1887, p. 35. De

For Charcot, the utilization of figures always relates to a epistemic operation that aims to reduce the essentially proto-form, mutable and metamorphic character of the hysteric symptom this moving heap of serpents traversing the body to the simple level of an ordered tableau with temporal and visual force of law. Whether by recourse to hypnosis, experimentation with electric-shock therapy or through the establishment of an `iconography', Charcot's stake remained the same: he wanted to master the differences of the symptom. And this was only concretely possible by making the hysterics themselves more mad, making them conform to the images that preceded them in his `artistic iconography'. Therefore, the symptom's differences could only be mastered through the development of an historical sophism, to which was added an iconographic sophism in which real, suffering bodies were forced to create themselves in the image of figures collected in atlases as `proofs' of a definitively established clinical tableau. [Translator's note. Didi-Huberman insists on the word tableau, rather than chart or table, in reference to Michel Foucault in ologie du savoir. Foucault writes: `Aux derniers fla L'Arche neurs, faut-il signaler qu'un ``tableau'' (et sans doute dans tous les sens du terme), c'est formellement une ``se rie de se ries''? En tout cas, ce n'est point une petite image fixe qu'on place devant une lanterne pour la plus grande de ception des enfants, qui, a leur a ge, 630
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7 (right) Anon. (Greek), Dancing Maenad, Graphic rubbing from a relief at the Louvre, from A. Warburg, Bilder aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer in Nord-Amerika, 1923, (Berlin, 1988), fig. 21. 8 (bottom right) Prodromes de la grande tudes rique. From P. Richer, E attaque hyste rie ou hyste rocliniques sur la grande hyste pilepsie, Paris, 1888, fig. 1. e

pre fe rent bien su r la vivacite du ologie du savoir cine ma.' L'Arche (Paris, 1969), p. 19, n. 1.] If there is a striking resemblance between Richer's hysteric and Warburg's maenad, this is above all because Richer wanted to draw his hysterics just as an archaeologist would graphically reproduce an antique sculpture. Nothing of this sort with Warburg: the montage of the Mnemosyne atlas respects discontinuities and differences; it does not efface temporal hiatuses (for example, between an archaeological sketch and a contemporary photograph). Charcot's tableau aims at continuities and resemblances; it introduces a temporal unity within the unfolding of a `whole and regular major hysterical fit'. Accordingly, Warburg's `science without a name' subverts the entire premise of Charcot's medical iconography. For Charcot, the hysteric is a master signifier to which everything from the represented maenad to the present patient must be reduced. For Warburg, on the contrary, Ninfa remains a floating signifier traipsing from one incarnation to another without anything trying to draw her limits. In the end, it must be recognized that Charcot's and Warburg's symptomatologies oppose each other on almost every level. For Charcot, the symptom is a clinical category reducible to a regular tableau and a well-defined nosological criterion, whereas for Warburg the symptom is a critical category
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that explodes the `regular tableau' of stylistic history as well as art's academic criteria. Whereas Charcot always wanted to bring the symptom back to its (traumatic, neurological, toxic) determination, Warburg made the symptom a constant, constantly open work of over-determination. On the one hand, we have the quasitotalitarian protocol of the `complete and regular' attack; on the other, an erratic intertwining, a heap of moving serpents whose coordinates one would be hard pressed to pin down as on Charcot's tableau.44 One final remark makes the distance between these two epistemological models of the symptom palpable. In Charcot's model of the hysterical symptom, there is no place for Darwin's famous `general principles of expression', whose importance for Warburg has been noted.45 Imprinting certainly registers a traumatic memory at work in the hysterical attack, concentrated in the moment known as `passionate attitudes' or `plastic poses'.46 But what about displacement? rique: contorsions 911 Grande attaque hyste What about antithesis? The plasticity ou mouvements illogiques. From P. Richer, that these two Darwinian principles tudes cliniques sur la grande hyste rie ou E require is absent from Charcot and ro-e pilepsie, figs 39, 40 and 45. hyste Richer's conception of `plastic poses'. Displacement and antithesis appear only negatively, cast into the senseless depths of the attack during this famous, detested moment when the hysteric defies the master and when the master, overtaken by the event, can only respond with the double qualification that the hysteric is `illogical' (she is just doing whatever) and `clownish' (she is just making fun of us). This is known as the period of contortions, which Richer schematized (plates 914) because photography was often useless for capturing the blur of movements that were either too reckless, or hidden under the straight-jacket ultimately forced on the patients:47 It is, if one will forgive the vulgar expression, the period of tours de force; and it is not without reason that Mr. Charcot has given it the picturesque name `clownism,' in reference to acrobats' muscular exercises. Indeed, this period consists of two phases: the illogical attitudes or contortions, and the great movements, both requiring flexibility, agility and muscular strength such as to bewilder the spectator and which, during the time of the Saint632
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Me dard convulsionnaires, appeared to be so beyond nature's resources that only divine intervention could seem to account for them. [. . .] There, the patient assumed the most varied, unexpected, and unlikely positions.48 And here is the decisive turn: it will be Freud's accomplishment to have worked out an understanding of the hysterical symptom capable of surpassing the rigid model of the clinical tableau, capable of taking stock of the moving complexities or over-determinations, and of respecting the essential plasticity of the processes engaged. How did Freud go beyond Charcot's iconographism? Firstly by returning, as Lucille Ritvo has admirably shown, to the Darwinian principles of imprinting or `commemorative repetition', of displacement or `derivation', and, finally, of `antithesis' or the possible reversal into the opposite.49 The imprint enabled Freud to understand the ways in which the symptom actualizes an unconscious memory rique: contorsions at work. Displacement allowed him to 1214 Grande attaque hyste mouvements illogiques. From P. Richer, explain the constant interplay of figural ou tudes cliniques sur la grande hyste rie ou E entanglements and signifying metamor- hyste ro-e pilepsie, figs 43, 44 and 46. phoses: a dynamic way of envisaging the complexity of phenomena. As for antithesis, it enabled him to describe how, in the symptom, the unconscious dupes or ignores logical contradiction and the time of commonplace biomorphisms. Importantly, Freud took up the problem of the symptom exactly where Charcot had left off: in the very crux of `illogical movements' this negative moment in the `dialectic of the monster', this `maximal degree of tension' in the Pathosformeln, as Warburg might have said. * * *

With Freud, the hysterical symptom, the royal road of psychoanalysis, `formation of the unconscious' in the fullest sense,50 ceased to depend on an iconography. The hysterical symptom is neither tableau (representative or standardizing), nor `reflection' (even of a trauma). Instead, Freud developed dynamogrammes of multiple polarities heaped or erratically fitted together, sometimes swarming like serpents: touches with taboos, facilitations with defences, desires with censures,
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crises with compromises, fusions with defusions. The moment of the symptom as such appears at the dialectical crux of these polarities. Freud first observed it in a context that was likely not that of the cure (one can imagine a common room at the Salpe trie re, or even Charcot's amphitheatre): In one case which I observed, for instance, the patient pressed her dress up against her body with one hand (as the woman), while she tried to tear it off with the other (as the man).51 This simultaneity of contradictory actions serves to a large extent to obscure the situation, which is otherwise so plastically portrayed in the attack, and is thus well suited to conceal the unconscious phantasy that is at work. Admirable lesson in looking.52 There, where Richer spoke of hysterical contortion in terms of the `most varied, most unexpected, most unlikely positions' thus, as impossible to understand in an iconography Freud was able to release the formula for this corporeal pathos, the formula for this gestural chaos exploding in the attack. Freud managed to recognize an exemplary structure in this tangle of disorderly movements, in this `body transformed into image'. Pierre Fe dida uses the same expression for approaching the question of the symptom.53 This structure is worth considering in detail, for the lesson in looking goes hand in hand with a profound anthropological lesson on the `dialectic of the monster'. The visual intensity of corporeal forms and effected movements is the first element of this structure. The hysteric in crisis offers the spectator a `situation so plastically figured' (so plastisch dargestellten Situation) that the gaze is at once transfixed (captured, fascinated) and relinquished (taken aback). This happens because the `situation' figured in the attack seems destined toward Unversta ndlichkeit (`incomprehensibility'). Freud begins with an undeniable phenomenological given, as evident to his eyes but as difficult to interpret as the Dionysiac intensity of the dishevelled Magdelene standing at the foot of a crucifix was to Warburg. Let us not forget that Goethe began with the same observation with regard to the desperate gestures of the Laocoo n (plate 15): the active intensity of the sculpted group `will never reveal all its mysteries to the human mind. We view it, and it touches our soul. It speaks to our mind, yet we cannot comprehend it totally.'54 The second essential element in this structure (and the second motive for making the situation `incomprehensible') is contradictory simultaneity. Here, extreme movement becomes counter-movement. Intensity becomes its antithesis, a labour that is both organic and transgressive at the same time. What takes place? Two contradictory motions confront each other in the same body. Freud describes this dialectic exactly as Warburg would have for a Magdelene by Niccolo dell'Arca with his observation of the fate of the `accessory in movement'; that is, the robe's drapery torn by the male half from the female half, held back by the female half from the aggression of the male half. What results will be an entanglement in movement, a `dynamogramme' of mixed polarities. `The symptom,' wrote Freud in 1899, `represents the realization of two contradictory desires',55 which are reconsidered here according to terms that reveal the law of the double constitution of each formation of the unconscious a law that Warburg certainly acknowledged in the domain of images in general.56 634
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15 Anon. (Roman), after a Greek original from c. 300 BC. Laocoon and his sons, c. Marble, The Vatican Museum, Rome. Photo: the author.
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Here the Darwinian principle of antithesis is given such a radical extension that the very idea of `pathetic expression' seems to explode. Etymologically, the symptom refers to what falls away, and not what signifies.57 With the symptom, signs themselves fly into pieces: they spurt forth in sparks, and then collapse before another set of fireworks goes off. Freud had already shown this when he explained how a symptom is over-determined both synchronically (the symptom meaning several things at the same time) and diachronically (each symptom modifying itself over time).58 In short, the Freudian symptom takes into account exactly what Warburg was trying to get at in the constant oscillation between `extreme polarizations' and `depolarizations' productive of `ambivalences'. Is it any surprise, then, that the vocabulary of conflict and compromise was as necessary to the Warburgian definition of the Pathosformeln as it was to the Freudian Symptombildung? We already know that neurotic symptoms are the outcome of a conflict which arises over a new method of satisfying the libido. The two forces which have fallen out meet once again in the symptom and are reconciled, as it were, by the compromise of the symptom that has been constructed. It is for that reason, too, that the symptom is so resistant: it is supported from both sides.59 This capacity for `resistance' can also be understood as a capacity for survival, as Nachleben. The historical tenacity of Pathosformeln would thus express itself metapsychologically, through the internal entanglement of `maintained' conflicts and ever possible compromises. In Bertoldo di Giovanni's Magdelene (plate 2), the Antique maenad only `survives' as well as she does because pain and desire are maintained in their conflict, tense but tangled in a skilfully selected ambiguity, an ambiguity that makes possible the compromise between the pagan dancer in a trance and the tearful Christian saint. Freud wrote that the symptom is an `ingeniously chosen piece of ambiguity with two meanings in complete mutual contradiction'.60 This reads like a description of all that interested Warburg about the survival of antique Pathosformeln: for example, the desperate gesture of the antique Pedagog surviving inversed in the triumphant Renaissance David. Thus, the symptom plays with the antithesis: it creates `incomprehensible situations' because it knows how to impart to the most complex workings of contradictory simultaneity a plastic intensity that is, a phenomenal evidence presented in its entirety to the spectator, like a sculpture. Here, conflict and compromise, Reaktionsbildungen (`reaction formations') and Ersatzbildungen (`substitute formations') coexist and respond to one another. Here, representations that are repressed coexist and exchange with representations that repress. Freud pointed to a process in dreaming, equally observable in the symptom, which he called Verkehrung ins Gegenteil (`reversal into the opposite'): Incidentally, reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the means of representation most favoured by the dream-work . . . it produces a mass of distortion in the material which is to be represented, and this has a positively paralysing effect, to begin with, on any attempt to understand the 636
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16 Heap of serpents at Oraibi. From A. Warburg, Bilder aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer in Nord-Amerika, 1923 (Berlin, 1988), fig. 79.

dream . . . Hysterical attacks sometimes make use of the same kind of chronological reversal in order to disguise their meaning from observers.61 Now, what Freud says here about the hysterical contortion is exactly what Warburg says of figurative formulae capable of survival: their interaction with antithesis that is their insensitivity to logical contradiction, to borrow another Freudian expression simultaneously manifests their work of transformation and their tenacity, their capacity for eternal return. However, there is more: Warburg and Freud share a particular attention to what I would call the formal pivots of all of these reversals of sense.62 In his 1908 article Freud offered us another great lesson in looking when, without renouncing his quest for a structure, he accepted the complexity of the phenomenon (the heap of moving serpents [plate 16] that constitutes the `incomprehensible situation' of the hysterical attack). He did not pinpoint this structure by diminishing or schematizing what he saw, as Richer did, or even by looking for an idea `behind' what he saw. Nor would he attempt to create a structure out of iconographic detail, as Richer tried to do, which, in any case, the disorder of `illogical movements' makes impossible. Instead, he would discern suddenly a formal line of tension, a sort of symmetry in movement line, sinuous or broken with the alternately slackening or coiling body. Dancing or explosive, yet ever present in the very crux of the gestural chaos distributed by each part of its ungraspable geometry. Without a doubt Charcot's clinic where `hemi-sensitivities' and `hemianaesthesia' abounded had prepared Freud for this particular observation.
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However, all that was disorder in Charcot's eyes, the `incomprehensible' and `illogical' character of the situation, was now organized around an axis which orients masculine fantasy on one side and feminine fantasy on the other. This hinge abuts and confronts the two contradictory terms at the same time. It does not dissolve their complexity, it organizes it and diffuses it spatially and rhythmically. It is the pivot itself agitated, I insist around which all the turmoil of contortion is unleashed. This symmetry in movement offers a formula for the critical pathos exploding in the attack. How can we not be reminded of Warburg's particular way of distinguishing the structure of pathos at work in Botticelli's paintings, or Ghirlandaio's portraits? Warburg observed the structural power of visual pivots everywhere: the organic border of the body and its `accessories in movement', with Botticelli, hair or drapery and with Ghirlandaio the architectural border of the floor and basement at Santa Trinita from which the Medici children's genealogical portraits emerge so strangely.63 I would suggest that all the contradictions, all the conflicts at work in the image, dance around these visual pivots: harmonies with ruptures, beauties with terrors, resemblances with dissemblances, lives with deaths. . . . The morphological law of the heap of serpents is no doubt complex, over-determined, impossible to schematize. But it exists; it allows itself to be glimpsed. One never captures it entirely, one approaches it, one brushes against it in the very rhythm of the moving complexities issued by the image. * * *

One last remark about the visual work of `contradictory simultaneity' is called for. The source for Freud and Warburg's common intuition is to be found, once more, in Goethe's aesthetic and morphology. When referring to another heap of serpents, in the Laocoo n sculpture, Goethe insisted straightaway on the importance of antitheses: `[. . .] this work, in addition to all its other merits, is at one and the same time a model of symmetry and diversity, tranquillity and motion, contrasts and gradations. The viewer perceives these varied qualities as whole that is partly physical, partly spiritual . . .'64 Everything doubles over, clashes and melds together in the Laocoo n. According to Goethe, the sculptor has `portrayed a physical effect together with its physical cause'. We can see the three tangled figures `participating in extremely varied activities'. Moreover, `all three figures are engaged in a two-fold action,' (eine doppelte Handlung), so that all the degrees of complexity endow every level of formal organization.65 Finally, Goethe considered the very choice of the theme represented human bodies contorting under the contracting pressure of reptilian bodies an exemplary solution for representing human form. It was a matter of sculpting multiple forces and demonstrating the anthropological significance of the contortion itself (whether due to madness or pain, or in a sculptural masterpiece); that is, the knotted antithesis of movement and paralysis: The artist's choice of subject is one of the best imaginable. Human beings are battling against dangerous creatures which do not have to rely on large numbers of tremendous strength, but rather attack separately on separate 638
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fronts (als augeteilte Kra fte). Hence, concentrated resistance is ineffective; indeed, the snakes, because of their elongated bodies, are capable of rendering three people almost defenceless without injuring them. As a result of the figures' immobility, a certain sense of tranquillity and unity pervades the group despite all movement. There is a gradation in the activity of the snakes, one only coiling itself around the victims, the other provoked and causing injury.66 Driven by multiple forces, acting doubly, forming compromises, giving in to conflicts that suspend it between movement and immobility, the image becomes this ra tselhafter Organismus (`enigmatic organism') that Warburg confronted in each of his studies of Renaissance culture.67 That he was thinking of the Nietzschean Dionysiac rather than the hysteria clinic is undeniable. But, Nietzsche himself took care to define the Dionysiac using the example of `enigmatic creatures' capable of all kinds of metamorphoses, creatures capable of being moved by a variety of forces, and capable of reacting with a variety of gestures. In short, capable of knowing how to play all the roles at the same time, as Nietzsche wrote with regard to . . . `certain hysterics': In the Dionysian state [. . .] the entire emotional system is alerted and intensified: so that it discharges all its powers of representation, imitation, transfiguration, metamorphosis every kind of mimicry and play-acting conjointly. The essential thing remains the facility of the metamorphosis, the incapacity not to react ( in a similar way to certain types of hysterics, who also assume any role at the slightest instigation).68 So, an enigmatic organism. The enigma `the incomprehensible situation' of which Freud spoke stems from the symptom's third structural element: displacement. Here, Freud entirely reformulated Darwin's principle of `association'. He sought, over all, to understand why symptomatic expression as spectacular, violent and immediate as it is proceeds from a veritable work of dissimulation, from the Verhu llung der wirksamen unbewuten Phantasie (`veiling of the unconscious fantasy at work'), as Freud concluded his magisterial description of the hysterical event. The symptom veils itself because it metamorphoses, and it metamorphoses because it moves. It certainly offers itself entirely, without hiding anything sometimes to the point of obscenity but it offers itself as a figure; that is, as a detour.69 And, it is this very displacement that authorizes what is repressed to return. Where Warburg demonstrated a displacement of pathetic intensity in Botticelli's Venus, from the centre (her nude body) to the border (her hair in the wind),70 Freud will note Dora's displacement of sensation (Verschiebung der Empfindung) concomitant with an Affektverkehrung (`reversal of affect') from the bottom, the `genital mucous membrane' (embrace, genitality) to the top, `the oral mucous membrane' (disgust, orality).71 And this is how the organism becomes `enigmatic'. The symptom moves, displaces itself: it can only be grasped in the dimension of the equivocal. Such is its phenomenological basis, its `incomprehensible situation.'
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The symptom only gives us access immediately and intensely to the organization of its very inaccessibility. This inaccessibility is structural: it cannot be resolved with another `key' provided by the iconological dictionary. All it tells us is that there are numerous doors to be opened and that, if an organization exists, it must be thought of in terms of movements and displacements the migrations that Warburg considered the end of all Pathosformeln, whose moving geographies, as well as surviving histories, the Mnemosyne Atlas attempts to reconstitute.72 The symptom displaces: it migrates and metamorphoses. Is this not what Rudolf Wittkower, who thought he was taking from Warburg, called the migration of symbols?73 Not exactly, for the symptom carries within itself a condition of inaccessibility and intrusion repression, return of the repressed that the symbol does not inevitably entail. Freud established this in his short article from 1916, `A relation between a symbol and a symptom'. The symbol, ordinarily made to be understood, becomes symptom the moment it displaces itself and loses its primary identity, when its proliferation suffocates its signification, transgressing the limits off its proper semiotic field. Therefore, taking off one's hat in the street is a symbol in the order of social convention (politely acknowledging someone), or even in oniric folklore (the hat as genital organ). It becomes a symptom when, for example, the obsessive performs the casuisitry of the salutation ad infinitum, deploying a whole network of significations likely to infect displacement is a kind of epidemic everything that surrounds it, with the head itself becoming, among other things, a part that can be removed.74 In short, the symptom is a symbol that has become incomprehensible, endowed as it is with the powers of the wirksamen unbewuten Phantasie (`unconscious fantasy at work'): plastically intensified, capable of `contradictory simultaneity', of displacement, and therefore, of dissimulation. What is the work of fantasy? It consists in attracting symbols into a register that literally exhausts them; they become richer, their combination attains a sort of exuberance, but this exuberance exhausts them too. The `attraction' to which they submit amounts to their deformation, to their vocation to formlessness. Freud called this a regression of symbolic thought toward `pure sensory images' in which representation, in a certain way, returns to its `raw material'. We have done no more than give a name to an inexplicable phenomenon. We call it `regression' when in a dream an idea is turned back into the sensory image from which it was originally derived [. . .] In regression the fabric of the dream-thoughts is resolved into its raw material.75 The symptom, the symbol become incomprehensible, appears accordingly as inaccessible to `exhaustive' notation or to `synthesis', as it is to `deciphering'.76 The symptom needs to be interpreted and not deciphered (as the iconologists, heirs to Panofsky's legacy, would like to decipher `symbolic forms'). The symptom is first a `silence in the subject supposed to speak' or, put in another way, a `symbol written on the sand of the flesh'.77 Thus, a kind of paradoxical writing. Neither regression nor the sensory image prevented Freud from posing on a metapsychological level the problem of unconscious inscription and of the `mnemic' trace.78 Here we touch on the fourth structural element of the model, 640
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which reformulates the Darwinian principle of imprinting, what Warburg, for his part, would call the engramme. It demonstrates that the symptom is an afterlife, a memory formation. Perhaps this is what is most important with regard to our subject. Doesn't Mnemosyne constitute the cornerstone of the Warburgian anthropology of images? But, what about this memory? Closer to home, Lacan looked for a response to the double requisite of the symptom, and of formations of the unconscious in general, in the notion of the signifying chain combining masking effects and truth effects, forces of transformation and forces of repetition, incessant displacements and indestructible imprints. This led Lacan to bring le geste (the gesture) and la geste (the gest, or epic poem) together as a carnel immediacy, a single instant endowed with an epic depth (a long story).79 And, is this not what Rilke meant by the gesture, `this gesture that comes back from the depths of time'? Isn't this the Pathosformeln as the movement of an afterlife? Yet, how are we to understand the memory resurfaced by this gesture, this image imprinted with time to which it gives life and movement? Georges Didi-Huberman EHESS, Paris Notes
This text is a fragment of an extensive study of Warburg's notion of Nachleben: L'image survivante. Histoire mes, Paris: Minuit, forthcoming 2001. Translated from the French by Dr Vivian de l'art et temps des fanto Rehberg. 1 A. Warburg, `Souvenirs d'un voyage en pays Pueblo', unpublished notes for Warburg's Kreuzlingen conference on the Serpent Ritual (1923), trans. S. Muller, in P.-A. Michaud, Aby Warburg et l'image en mouvement, Paris, 1998, p. 265. 2 The psychological aspect of Warburg's art history has frequently been noted (but its epistemological consequences rather neglected). See C. Ginzburg, `From Aby Warburg to E.H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method' (1966) in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, eds C. Ginzburg, J. and A.C. Tedeschi, Baltimore, 1992, pp. 1759; G. Agamben, `Aby Warburg et la moire, science sans nom' (1984) in Image et Me trans. M. Dell'Omodarme, Paris, 1988, pp. 27-32; K.W. Forster, `Introduction,' in Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 51. 3 Cf. in particular Warburg, `Die antike Go tterwelt und die Fru hrenaissance im Su den und im Norden,' (1908), Gesammelte Schriften. Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike. Kulturwissenschaftliche Beitra ge zur Geschichte der Europa ischen Renaissance, eds G. Bing and F. Rougemont, Leipzig-Berlin, 1932, vol. 2, pp.
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4514. 4 Warburg, `Du rer und die italienische Antike' (1905), Ausgewa hlte Schriften une Wu rdigungen, dir. D. Wuttke, Baden-Baden, 1980, p. 130. `Du rer and Italian Antiquity', The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit. (note 2), p. 558. Warburg speaks of the problem of a `psychology of style' (stilpsychologische Frage) `that is far wider, though hitherto barely formulated: the interchange of artistic culture in the fifteenth century, between past and present, and between North and South. Not only does this process afford a clearer understanding of the early Renaissance as a universal category of European civilization: it lays bare certain phenomena, hitherto unnoticed, that cast a more general light on the circulation and exchange of expressive forms in art (ku nstlerischer Ausdrucksformen).' 5 Warburg, Grundlegende Bruchstu cke zu einter monistischen Kunstpsychologie (18881905), Warburg Institute Archive, London, III, 43, pp. 12 of typed manuscript. A variant of the title is: Grundlegende Bruchstu cke zu einer pragmatischen Ausdruckskunde (monistischen Kunstpsychologie). 6 Warburg, Allgemeine Ideen (1927), Warburg Institute Archive, London, III, 102.1. 7 Cf. E. Wind, `Warburg's Concept of

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ABY WARBURG AND THE SYMPTOM PARADIGM Kulturwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics' (1931), The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in Humanist Art, Oxford, 1983, p. 21 and 305. F. Saxl, `Die Ausdrucksgeba rden der bildenden Kunst', Bericht u ber den XII Kongress der deutschen Gesellschaft fu r Pscyhologie in Hamburg, dir. G. Kafka, Iena, Fischer, 1932, p. 1325. G. Bing, `A.M. Warburg', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 18, 1965, pp. 30910. ibid. Cf. A. Dal Lago, `L'arcaico e il suo doppio. Aby Warburg e l'antropologia', Aut aut, n. 199200, 1984, pp. 779. U. Raulff, `Aby Warburg: Ikonische Pra gung und Seelengeschichte', Wegbereiter der historischen Psychologie, dir. G. Ju tteman, Munich-Weinheim, 1988, pp. 12530. Warburg, Unpublished note 3 August 1888. Quoted from E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, London, 1970 (Chicago, 1986), pp. 3940. Warburg, `Souvenirs d'un voyage en pays Pueblo', op. cit, (note 1), pp. 2545. Cf. Bing, op. cit. (note 8), p. 303. `In the years following his university training the graph of Warburg's life shows some odd deflections. The first was an abortive attempt to study medicine. In this way he may have been yielding to a misplaced hope; what he was looking for was a key not so much to the workings of the body as to those of the mind.' Cf. also E.H. Gombrich, op. cit. (note 10), pp. 67-68. J. Mesnil, `La Bibliothe que de Warburg et ses publications', Gazette des Beaux-Arts vol. 14, 1926, p. 238. `En somme, Warburg a recherche et reconnu dans les oeuvres d'art moins l'expression d'une esthe tique que le sympto me d'un e tat d'a me collectif.' E.H. Gombrich, `In Search of Cultural History', (1969), (`Symptoms and Syndromes') Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and Art, London, 1979, pp. 479. E.H. Gombrich `The Ambivalence of the Classical Tradition. The Cultural Psychology of Aby Warburg', Tributes: Interpreters of our Cultural Tradition, Oxford, 1984, pp. 11920. Gombrich, `Aby Warburg e l'evoluzionismo ottocentesco', Belfagor vol. 49, 1994, pp. 638 and 6467. Cf. E. Wind, `On a Recent Biography of Warburg', (1971) The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, Oxford, 1983, p. 107. Cf. E. Cassirer, `La forme du concept dans la pense e mythique', (1922), Oeuvres VI, Trois essais sur le symbolique, trans. J. Carro and J. Gaubert, Paris, 1997, pp. 39-111 and `Le concept de forme symbolique dans l'e dification des sciences de l'esprit,' (1923), pp. 7-37. These two texts, published in the Studien and the Vortra ge der Bibliothek Warburg, are worth reading, to a certain degree, as `sythesizing' responses to (or interpretations of) Warburg's understanding of the symbol. I will return to them further on in the text. Warburg, `Sandro Botticellis ``Geburt der Venus'' und ``Fruhling''. Eine Untersuchung u ber die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der Italienischen Fru hlte Schriften hrenaissance' (1893), Ausgewa un Wu rdigungen, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 2021. `Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance', The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 89156. Cf. F. Antal and E. Wind, `The Maenad under the Cross,' Journal of the Warburg Institute, 1937, pp. 703. Warburg, `Sandro Botticellis ``Geburt der Venus'', und ``Fru hling'', pp. 3653. Translated from the complete Italian text by J. Hincker, `L'entre e du style ide al antiquisant dans la peinture de la Renaissance,' in A. Warburg, Essais Florentin, Paris, 1990, p. 24. Warburg, `Der Eintritt des anitkisierenden Idealstils in die Malerie der Fru hrenaissance,' (1914) Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 1736. `The Emergence of the Antique as a Stylistic Ideal in Early Renaissance Painting', The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity op. cit. (note 2), pp. 2715. Warburg, `Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara' (1912), Ausgewa hlte Schriften, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 17398. `Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara', The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 56393, and `Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,' (1920), Ausgewa hlte Schriften, op.cit., pp. 199-303. `Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther,' The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 597-697. Warburg, `Einleitung zum Mnemosyne-Atlas', (1929), in Die Beredsamkeit des Leibes. Zur Ko rpersprache in der Kunst, eds I. Barta-Fliedl and C. Geissmar-Brandi, Salzburg, 1992, p. 172. Translated into French by P. Rusch, `Mnemosyne (Introduction), Trafic 9, 1994, p. 41. Warburg, Tagebuch, 3 April 1929, quoted from Gombrich, Aby Warburg, op. cit. (note 10), p. 303. Warburg, Fragmente, 27 March 1889, cited by Gombrich, op. cit. (note 10), p. 48. Warburg, Briefmarke, cited by Gombrich, op. cit. (note 10), p. 252. Gombrich, op. cit. (note 10), pp. 2512. Aby Warburg, Allgemeine Ideen, op. cit. (note 6), pp. 1416. Notes dated 30 and 31 May 1927. Warburg, `Einleitung zum Mnemosyne Atlas,' art. cit. (note 22), p. 172, trans. cit. (note 22), pp. 401. Warburg, `Francesco Sasettis letztwillige Verfu hlte Schriften und gung,' (1907), Ausgewa Wu rdigungen, op. cit. (note 4), p. 149. `Francesco Sassetti's Last Injunctions to His Sons', pp. 223

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ABY WARBURG AND THE SYMPTOM PARADIGM 64. `We now feel why the wind goddess, Fortune, came into Francesco Sassetti's mind in the crisis of 1488 as a measure of his own tense energy: for Ruccellai and for Sassetti alike, she functions as an iconic formula of reconciliation between the 'medieval trust in God and the Renaissance trust in self.', p. 242. It is important to note that Britt's translation omits the word `symptomatisch', used by Warburg in the original German to describe how the wind goddess Fortuna functioned for Sassetti. Warburg, `Heidnisch-atike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten', art. cit. (note 21), pp. 24455, trans. cit., pp. 63241. ibid., p. 637. Cf. G. Didi-Huberman, `L'histoire de l'art a rebrousse-poil. Temps de l'image et `travail au sein des choses' selon Walter Benjamin', Les e national d'Art moderne vol. Cahiers du Muse 72, 2000, pp. 429. (Benjamin avec Warburg: `L'histoire de l'art est une histoire de prophe ties'.) Cf. P.-A. Michaud, Aby Warburg et l'image en mouvement, op. cit. (note 1). Cf. T. Meynert, Psychiatrie. Klinik der Erkrankungen des Vorderhirns, Vienna, 1884, pp. ne rale 25162. K. Jaspers, Psychopathologie ge (1913), trans. A. Kastler et J. Mendousse, Paris, 1928, pp. 227-173. E. Cassirer, `Etude sur la pathologie de la conscience symbolique', (1929), trans. A. Koyre , Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique, vol. 26, 1929, pp. 289336 and 52366. ridite psychologique, Paris, 1881 T. Ribot, L'He (re-edition 1890), especially pp. 103-118 ('L'he re dite dans l'histoire' which refers to the Medici family). Warburg was to acquire many other works by the French school concerning the question of `unconscious memory', including: P. moire. Essai de me de la me Sollier, Le Proble canique, Paris, 1900; T. Ribot, `La psycho-me me moire affective: nouvelles remarques,' Revue philosophique, LXIV, 1907, pp. 588-613; J.M. Baldwin, `La me moire affective et l'art', ibid., vol. 23, 1909, pp. 44960. F. Paulhan, `La substitution psychique,' ibid., LXXIII, 1912, pp. le de la 11339 and 26989; E. d'Eichthal, Du ro moire dans nos conceptions metaphysique, me tiques, passionnelles, actives, Paris, 1920; P. esthe moire et la notion de Janet, L'Evolution de la me temps, Paris, 1928. T. Ribot, La Vie inconsciente et les mouvements, Paris, 1914. rie. Cf. G. Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'hyste Charcot et l'iconographie photographique de la trie re, Paris, 1982. Amongst the most recent Salpe studies, cf. especially J. Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in NineteenthCentury France, Ithaca and London, 1994; J. Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in NineteenthCentury France, New York, 1994; E. Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents, Princeton, 1998. J-M Charcot and P. Richer, Les Difformes et les malades dans l'art, Paris, 1889; P. Richer, L'art et decine, Paris, 1902. la me S. Schade, `Charcot and the Spectacle of the Hysterical Body. The ``Pathos Formula'' as an Aesthetic Staging of Psychiatric Discourse a Blind Spot in the Reception of Warburg', (1993), trans. A. Derieg, Art History vol. 18, 1995, pp. 499517. ibid., p. 503. Cf. P. Richer, Etudes cliniques sur rie ou hyste ro-e pilepsie, Paris, la grande hyste 1881 (re-edition 1885), pl. V. and G. Didi rie, op. cit. (note Huberman, Invention de l'hyste 36), pp. 11319. S. Schade, op. cit. (note 38), pp. 499501, who underlines not only the influence of Charcot, but also the possible influences of Bergson, Bernheim and, of course, Freud. G. Didi-Huberman, `Savoir-mouvement (l'homme qui parlait aux papillons)', preface to P-A Michaud, Aby Warburg et l'image en mouvement, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 7-20. S. Schade, op. cit. (note 38), p. 502. die (1872), F. Nietzsche, La Naissance de la trage eds G. Colli and M. Montinar, trans. P. Lacoue tes vol. Labarthe, Oeuvres philosophiques comple I, Paris, 1977, pp. 4454. J-M Charcot et P. monaiques dans l'art (1887), eds, Richer, Les De G. Didi-Huberman and P. Fe dida, Paris, 1984, pp. 2838. Recalling the tables Warburg traced, but left undeveloped, in his manuscript Schemata Pathosformeln (19051911), London, Warburg Institute Archive, III, 138.1. See Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Chicago, 1965. rie, P. Richer, Etudes cliniques sur la grande hyste op. cit. (note 39), pp. 89116. Cf. Didi-Huberman, `L'observation de Ce lina', art .cit. (note ??), pp. 26780. rie, P. Richer, Etudes clinques sur la grande hyste op. cit. (note 39), p. 69. For an analysis of this phase and Charcot's texts, cf. Didi-Huberman, rie, op. cit. (note 36), pp. Invention de l'hyste 161162, 246272, etc. Cf. L.B. Ritvo, L'Ascendant de Darwin sur Freud (1990), trans. P. Lacoste, Paris, 1992, pp. 26473. Cf. also P. Lacoste, `Sur les the ories freudiennes se de de l'e volution,' Les Evolutions. Phylogene l'individuation, dirs. P. Fe dida and D. Widlo cher, Paris, 1994, pp. 2143. See Freud `Vorlesungen zur Einfu hring in die Psychoanalyse' as `Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis' (19161917) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols 15 and 16. Translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, reprint 1995 (first pub'd 1959) and `Hemmung, Symptom und

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ABY WARBURG AND THE SYMPTOM PARADIGM Angst' as `Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,'(1927) SE, vol. 20, p. 77. Cf. also J. minaire, V. Les formations de Lacan, Le Se l'inconscient (19571958), ed. J-A Miller, Paris, 1998, pp. 31934, 37390, etc. `Hysterische Phantasien und Ihre Beziehung zur Bisexualita t' as `Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality,' (1908) SE, vol. 9 (1906 1908), p. 166. rie, op. Cf. Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'hyste cit. (note 36), pp. 1612; `Une ravissante blancheur' (1986), Phasmes. Essais sur l'apparition, Paris, 1998, pp. 9298; `Dialogue sur le symptome', pp. 200202. In this text I will only discuss the article `Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality.' A more thorough analysis would require a discussion of the ber den following: Freud with Breuer, `U psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Pha nomene: Vorla ufige Mitteilung (1893), as `On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication, SE, vol. 2, pp. 35 and `Allgemeines u ber den hysterischen Anfall,' as `Some general remarks on Hysterical Attacks', SE, vol. 9, pp. 22934. With Breuer `Zur Theorie des hysterischen Anfalls' (1892, first publication in 1940) as `On the Theory of Hysterical Attacks', SE, I, pp. 1514. Fe dida, Crise et contre-transfert, Paris, 1992, pp. 227-265 (`Structure the orique du symptome. L'interlocuteur'), especially, p. 246. J.W.v. Goethe, `On the Laocoon Group' (1798), Collected Works in 12 Volumes, vol. 3: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. J. Geary, trans. E. von Nardoff, Princeton, 1994, p. 15. Freud, letter to Fliess, 19 February 19 1899, in La Naissance de la psychanalyse (18871902), eds M. Bonaparte, A. Freud and E. Kris, trans. A Berman, Paris, 1956 (re-edition 1973), p. 247. Freud, `Hysterical phantasies and their relationship to bisexuality', SE, op. cit. (note 50), p. 165. `Hysterical symptoms are the expression on the one hand of a masculine unconcious sexual phantasy, and on the other hand of a feminine one.' A sentence worth mulling over in today's context of gender, in which iconography is often polarised, and often trivially. Cf. Fe dida, Crise et contre-transfert, op. cit. (note 53), pp. 2312. Freud, `Bru chstuck einer Hysterie-Analyse' as `Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,' (1905 [1901]), SE, vol. 7, p.47: `[. . .] a symptom has more than one meaning and serves to represent several unconscious mental processes simultaneously. And I should like to add that in my estimation a single unconscious mental process or phantasy will scarcely ever suffice for the production of a symptom.' and `Die Traumdeutung,' as `Interpretation of Dreams,' SE, vol. 5, p. 569: `As in the case of dreams, there are no limits to the further determinants that may be present to the overdetermination of the [hysterical] symptoms.' 59 Freud, `Introductory Lectures on PsychoAnalysis', SE, op. cit. (note 50), part 3 `General Theory of the Neuroses' (1917),' and `The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms', pp. 3589. 60 ibid, p. 360. 61 Freud, `The Interpretation of Dreams', op. cit. (note 58), p. 328. 62 Didi-Huberman, `Pour une anthropologie des singularite s formelles. Remarque sur l'invention ses. Sciences sociales et warburgienne', Gene histoire vol. 24, 1996, pp. 14563. 63 Warburg, `Sandro Botticellis ``Geburt der Venus'' und ``Fru hling'',' art. cit., pp. 5463. Trans cit., pp. 13342. Warburg, `Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bu rgertum. Domenico Ghirlandajo in Santa Trinita. Die Bildnisse des Lorenzo de'Medici und seiner Angeho rigen,' (1902), Ausgewa hlte Schriften, op. cit. (note 4), pp. 76. As `The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie. Domenico Ghirlandaio in Santa Trinita: The Portraits of Lorenzo de'Medici and His Household', The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, op. cit. (note 2), p. 193: `Lorenzo's startled gesture has a different, and much more overtly surprising, motivation: the hard stone pavement of the Piazza della Signoria has opened up beneath his feet to reveal a stairway, on which three men and three children are climbing up towards him.' Here we see the relationship between the notion of the symptom and what Warburg referred to as the `the exterior cause of the image (die a ussere Veranlassung der Bilder)'. 64 Goethe, `On the Laocoon Group', op. cit. (note 54), p. 17. 65 ibid., pp. 201. 66 ibid., pp. 201. 67 Warburg, `Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bu rgertum,' op. cit. (note 63), p. 74. `The Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie,' The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity op. cit. (note 2), p. 190. 68 Nietzsche, `The Twilight of the Idols,' (1889), in The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London, 1968, p. 173. 69 This is why one must always go beyond the iconographical approach with a figural approach which takes into account the overdeterminations of sense and time presupposed by such a 'detour'. Cf. E. Auerbach, Figura (1938), trans. M.A. Bernier, Paris, 1993 and on another level, miotique M. Schapiro, Les Mots et les images, Se du langage visuel (19691976), trans. P. Alferi, Paris, 1990 (Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text, The Hague, 1973). 70 Warburg, `Sandro Botticellis ``Geburt der Venus'' und `'`Fruhling'',' op. cit. (note 18), pp. 1163. 71 Freud, `A Case of Hysteria,' op. cit. (note 58), pp. 2930. 72 Warburg, `Du rer und die italienische Antike', op. cit. (note 4), p. 130, trans cit., p. 558: `[. . .] a

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ABY WARBURG AND THE SYMPTOM PARADIGM record of some initial excavations along the route of the long migration that brought antique superlatives of gesture.' Warburg, `Einleitung zum Mnemosyne-Atlas', op. cit. (note 22), p. 173, p. 434. 73 R. Wittkower, La Migration des symboles (1977), trans. D. Hechter, Paris, 1992. 74 Freud, `Eine Beziehung zwischen einem Symbol und einem Symptom,' as `A Connection Between a Symbol and a Symptom', (1916) SE, vol. 14, pp. 33940. On the relation between this example and Panofsky's paradigm of the `removal of the hat', cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant e aux fins d'une histoire l'image. Question pose de l'art, Paris, 1990, pp. 21617. 75 Freud, `The Interpretation of Dreams', op. cit. (note 58), pp. 5423 Cf. Fe dida, Le site de tranger. La situation psychanalytique, Paris, l'e 1995, pp. 22144. ('La re gression'). J. Lacan, Ecrits, Paris, 1996, pp. 358, 372, 518, 689; and Lacan `Le sinthome', (1975), Ornicar, no. 6, 1976, pp. 3-20. Lacan, Ecrits, op. cit. (note 76), p. 280. Lacan, Le minaire, XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux Se de la psychanalyse (1964), trans. J-A Miller, Paris, 1973, p. 16. Freud, `The Psychology of the Dream Processes, On Regression,' Interpretation of Dreams, op. cit. (note 58), pp. 533-549. minaire, V. Les formations de Lacan, Le Se l'inconscient, op. cit. (note 50), p. 475.

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