Maximum surface Surface as possibility of meaning: image and symptom

Abstract

The attempt of this paper is to propose a way of understanding what is seen, always, as immanent adaptation, desire and symbolization, that is, understanding it like an image. It will do so according to a concept of ‘surface’ that extends the Didi-Huberman’s reading of Aby Warburg’s concept of ‘imagesymptom’, and is supported by psychoanalytic theory, namely Jacques Lacan, in an attempt not to ruin the hermeneutic capacity of the observer but, rather, to understand the search for meaning and essence -of art, for example- as the investigation of a historical conflict of losses, crisis and memory. ‘Surface’ taken as mass of what is seen, atonic and senseless, where the eye always visions forms: seeing surface entails the eye adapting what is seen, willing to open it in its significance in a visionary way, retrieving the hidden truth but, paradoxically, closing it. Seeing images always implies loosing vision in relation to an alleged totality in which all meanings would be given in all their ambiguities and all their historical possibilities, which will knowable only in their return as a traumatic re-signification. We here postulate that the illusion will be to believe not that appearances are illusory but, rather, that beyond them there is “more reality”. This approach not only ratifies the subject’s position, inserted in a surface/ painting given-to-see, but also discovers the constitutive gap that governs him which is a “more in him” than himself.