The Anatomy of the Image
Excerpt translated by Rainer J. Hanshe
Originally published by Le Terrain vague, 1957
IMAGES OF THE EGO
The scorpion cures the scorpion.
— Paracelsus
I think that the different modes of expression: pose, gesture, act, sound, word, graphic design, object creation... all result from the same ensemble of psycho-physiological mechanisms, which all obey the same law of birth. The primary expression, one that has no preconceived communicative aim, is a reflex. To what need, to what drive of the body, do they respond?
Among the reflexes provoked by a toothache for example, let us examine the violent contraction of the muscles of the hand and fingers, whose nails dig into the skin. This clenched hand is an artificial foci of excitation, a virtual “tooth” that diverts by luring the current of blood and the nerve impulses from the actual foci of pain so as to depreciate their existence. The pain of the tooth is therefore bisected at the expense of the hand; its expression, the “logical pathos,” would be the visible result.
Should we conclude that the most violent as well as the most imperceptible reflexive modification of the body, of the face, of a limb, of the tongue, of a muscle, would then be explicable as a tendency to disorient, to bisect a pain, to create a “virtual” center of excitation? That is certain, and it compels us to develop the desirable continuity of our expressive life as a result of deliberate transports that lead from the disquiet to its image. The expression, with its pleasure, is a displaced pain, and it is a liberation.
The strange enough formation of these virtual centers of excitation seems to be the essential factor of the expression; they should be the object of far more research. The area to explore presents itself as that of the inner perceptions, which we perceive consciously or unconsciously, from our organism and the movements of its predominant center of excitation; inscribed among these perceptions are “muscular tensions,” “spatial orientation,” “tactile sensations,” and the contributing factors of the “auditory and olfactory faculties” that are joined to them.
It appears at first glance that customary vocabulary will have trouble in adapting itself to the perpetually mobile world of these interoceptive patterns, each of which is modeled on others, and whose simultaneous description has hardly been cultivated.
How to in effect describe, without impoverishing it, the physical posture of a seated little girl who “dreams,” who leans — raises the left shoulder, stretches the arm — nonchalantly on a table, who conceals the instinctive caress of her chin between the armpit and chest, the head then adding its weight to the weight of the shoulder and the arm, therefore the pressure of its gravitational center, sliding as it diminishes along its muscles, lingers around the joint, follows the elbow, a current already weakened by the lightly raised wrist, takes one last swing in descending along the hand, to result, between the tip of the index finger and the top of the table, in the sharp accent of a small grain of sugar.
This explains quite well that a certain weariness of the child, at night, determined this attitude, for it plays upon dreams of reward, on promises, more or less understood, of the emotional and sexual order. The prohibition of pleasure is left momentarily undisputed; it follows the necessity of denying the cause of the conflict, of effacing the existence of the sex organ and its zone, of “the amputation,” the leg there included. The image nevertheless remains available, ready to find a meaning, a vacant place, to thus itself conceal a permissible reality.
As soon as, through the intuitive gesture of the chin, the analogy “sex-organ-shoulder” is established, the two images intertwine their content through being superimposed, sex-organ to armpit, the leg naturally to the arm, foot to hand, toes to fingers. It results in a strange fusion of “real” and “virtual,” of “permitted” and “forbidden,” one vaguely gains in topicality the components which the other yields; and it results in an ambiguous amalgam of “pure perception” and “pure representation,” in an iridescent contour through the slight shift of two desired contents that are converging but conflicted. The shock of confusion that is mixed with it, a certain “vertigo,” seems to be the symptom and the criterion of internal efficacy, of the probability of this solution, and, one would say: the shock accuses the presence in the organism of a spirit of contradiction, of rather irrational intentions, inclined to the absurd if not to the scandalous, a spirit that would have taken it upon itself to provide, through the realization of the impossible itself, the proofs of a particular reality.
The pose of this seated little girl and her conditions were quite normal... The game of moving, barely understood by the conscience, could not become visible in our interpretation. That is why we propose to oversee the same mechanism in a rather exceptional but conscious case, which had been noted by Lombroso in his essay “Transfers of Feeling in Hysteria and Hypnosis.”
This is a young girl, “around 14 years of age, with a graceful physique, who had suddenly grown almost 6” at the time of puberty and whose first menstruations were accompanied by hysterical symptoms. After two months came fits of convulsions and hyperesthesia, which made her mistake a wire placed on her hand for a bar of iron. The following month, after somnambulistic fits and various changes in character, she lost her vision at the same time as she acquired the power to see through the end of her nose and the left lobe of her ear, always maintaining the same visual acuity. Even the transposition of smell which, much later, travels to the heel...
These phenomena are not isolated. Another young girl of 14, also recently menstruating, had a convulsive cough, headache, swoons, spasms, convulsions of the face accompanied by singing, sleep sometimes lasting three days, and somnambulistic fits during which she clearly saw with her hand and read in the dark.”
As in the case of the seated little girl, there is an initial conflict between desire and its prohibition, but this time violent, with the crisis of puberty being the cause. Insoluble, this conflict can lead only to the repression of sex, to its projection onto the eye, ear, and nose: a projection or displacement that explains to us — at the same root of the phenomenon — the hyperbolic valorization of the sense organs, the dramatization of their functions.
But this first transfer, the supposed analog to the “sex-organ-armpit” fusion, would it not be sufficient?
To grasp the motif of the second manifest transference, that of the eye to the hand for example, it will be necessary to believe that the eye, the double of the condemned image of the sex organ, could not entirely conceal the compromising side of its supplementary content: think, without risk of grave error, that the facts of the intimate order had been seen, heard, felt — so that, under the influence of shock, of repugnance and the feeling of guilt, the transference, or simply first loss of sight means: “I do not want to see anything, I do not want to see.” — Thus the eye, the ear, the nose, exposed to measures of repression, then become each in their turn a “real foci,” which necessarily opposes — the hand, the heel — a “virtual foci of excitation.”
This explanation leads to another, more general one that somewhat contradicts and completes it. As the image of the sex organ has crept under that of the eye, there is no obstacle to sexuality (love), disguised in a visual faculty, from keeping its prestigious promises. For the feeling of inferiority, of physiological diminution, the cause and effect of the neurosis, demands compensation and, moreover, a real overcoming, which would consist of the more or less objective proofs of a supranormal capacity: “to be able to see with the hand.” And let us emphasize that this time the displacement has reached the surface of consciousness — its irrational content has become manifest.
If we could say that the clutching hand objects to the tooth, we now tend to say that the image of the tooth is displaced onto the hand, the image of the sex organ onto the armpit, that of the leg onto the arm, that of the nose onto the heel. Hand and tooth, armpit and sex organ, heel and nose, in short: virtual excitation and real excitation are confounded and superimposed.
After the preceding views, we ask ourselves if the pleasure of the arm to simulate the leg is not equivalent to the pleasure of the leg to play the role of the arm; we ask ourselves if the false identity established between arm and leg, between sex organ and armpit, between eye and hand, nose and heel, would not involve a reciprocity... So we would like to imagine ourselves as an axis of reversibility between the real and the virtual foci of an excitation, as axes that would be traced in locations, even in the field of metric anatomy, and which, given the oppositional affinity of breasts and buttocks for example, of mouth and of sex organ, would pass horizontally at the height of the belly button.
Hans Bellmer, Child and Seeing Hands, c. 1950. Pen and brown ink, gouache, and watercolor on paper; 23.8 x 28.5 cm.
Notes. — The known movement which, in inflating the chest and hollowing out the back, emphasizes the breasts, is naturally accompanied by an analogous movement, in the opposite direction, of the lower part of the torso, emphasizing, as a counterweight so to say, the hind breasts.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud remarks that “the dream excels at uniting contraries and in representing them in a single object. It also often represents some element by its contrary so that we cannot know if a dream element is susceptible to contradiction, betrays a positive or negative content in the thought of the dream.”
Notes. — “I have found in a work by K. Abel, Der Gegensinn der Urworte, a surprising fact for me, but confirmed by other linguists: primitive languages are expressed from this point of view like dreams; they have at the beginning only one word for the two opposite points of a series of qualities or actions (strong–weak, near–far, bound–separate). The special terms for designating the contraries appear only later, through slight modification of the original term.” On the same subject, Freud recalls the existence of words of the same signification, whose sequence of characters have been reversed: pot-Topf, Ziege-Geis.
The languages that we speak have long since attained their maturity. But the taste for the reversibility which is present at the origin of words and which gives them their vibrant ambiguity, this taste remains; it becomes visible again when it comes to automatic verbal formations that want less to communicate something than to experience the pleasure of being born, to give free play to an instinctive impulse to “create thought in the mouth” (Tristan Tzara).
Everyone is aware of the disposition and surprising facility of a category of children, if not all, who speak in reverse: Uoy era diputs..., etc. This same reversal reflex is naturally found in genuine cases of automatic writing and language: “During ‘psychographical experiences’ we often encounter examples of mirror writing in which the medium wrote the words in reverse, so that the message can only be read easily by reflecting it in a mirror; which is explained psychologically through the reversal of nerve currents in the motor centers of written language; but this explanation does not hold when it comes to the reversal of syllables. On the other hand, it would be absurd to suppose that it was the deceased who expressed it this way. The phenomenon of the reversal of syllables was undoubtedly the work of the unconscious cerebration of the medium; that is all that we can affirm without fear of error; as to the cause that determines the phenomenon, it remains psychologically inexplicable” (Ernest Bozzano, La médiumnité polyglotte).
This evidently does away with inversion: the actual reversibility presupposes — the reversed sentence — that sense, sound, and form are rigorously identical to that which they were before:
Léon Emir cornu d’un roc rime noël
[Leon Emir with a rock horn rhymes Xmas]
— Charles Cros
L’âme des uns jamais n’use de mal
[The soul of some are never weakened by evil]
— Victor Hugo
Ein Ledergurt trug Redel nie
[Redel never wore a leather belt]
— Anonymous
Rather rare equations of this kind have a singular tenacity to become embedded in our memory, without our first knowing why. They do not seem to bear, at first sight, any communication of great emotional appeal. However, the brainwave that wanted to find, on the left or the right, the same sequence of characters, the same meaning — this miracle confers to the content something steadfast against, immune to, for sure, any future reversal, and is committed to lending it a particular signification.
Notes. — Why was I incapable of forgetting this sentence: “Ein Ledergurt trug Redel nie” that was told to me around 1910? It was only in May 1942, while “tarnant” in the Tarn, that one day I thought and found its meaning: the word “Redel,” a proper name, plays upon both “Redlich” (honorable), on “Rädelsführer” (chief of insurrection), and on “Rädel” (a small, easily eclipsed wheel); so that the whole “Roulette, Honorable Chief of Insurrection never wore a leather belt” undeniably conceals an anti-militarist meaning.
Hans Bellmer, The Articulated Hands, 1954. Color lithograph, ed. 32/59; 27.5 x 37.5 cm.
The pleasure of language in creating or retaining such formulas is certainly not the sole echo of the “reversibility” that we observe in psycho-physiological behavior. Along the way, we begin to sense a principle, through which the opposition of real and virtual elements appears to be the condition of a law, which remains to be specified.
To this end, we will conclude the present series of observations, which started with the reflex that bisects the pain of an agitated tooth. Theoretically, the ultimate case would be the one wherein the whole individual should consider as the foci of pain that which precludes a virtuality, this time externalized, in the form of a hallucinatory double. A clinical observation indeed affirms this: “This projection in the double of the feeling experienced by the subject whose consciousness seems to emerge from itself is sometimes accompanied by an equally strange phenomenon: the externalization of movements and of attitudes and strengths imposed by the epileptic seizure, thanks to which the image of the double is agitated, convulses exactly like an epileptic does, without our subject making any abnormal gesture.”
In closing on such a demonstrative fact, the series of our examples leaves no doubt that the simple expressive reflex, defined as the bisecting of a foci of excitation, does not bear in itself the seed of a bisecting of the whole individual, and that it does not lead straight to that maximum, what psychology calls the scission of the ego.
If the terms “real” and “virtual” do not lead to misunderstanding, their meaning is being determined experimentally, it is, by contrast, indicated by taking terminological precautions when it comes to knowing between what the ego and what the other ego is given in the scission. In accordance with the nature of the reflex, we propose to conceive of the opposition in question as that of the principles of sensitivity and of the motor skills, as a scission between the ego that undergoes an excitation and the ego that creates an excitation.
Certainly, the bisecting process of the ego should only be understood in the guise of a primordially unique phenomenon on a lower plane, which is divided by passing onto a higher plane of consciousness where it tends to remake the synthesis of opposites and ends in a superior modality of the ego, of its maintenance, of its reality.
This movement of decomposition and synthesis — of simultaneous bisecting and fusion — either of self-consciousness, or its image-content, is also easily achievable in effigy and in support of our purpose, if indeed it is the fascination of the optical experience, which we include below, can only be attributed to that which concretizes the very obscure feeling that we have at the crux of our operation:
You put an unframed perpendicular mirror on a photograph of a nude and, always retaining the 90° angle, you make it progress or rotate, so that the symmetrical halves of the visible whole diminish or expand in a slow and steady movement. — The whole is born without stopping, in protuberances, in elastic skin which, in emerging through swelling, emerge from the slot rather than out of the theoretical axis of symmetry; or again, if you execute a reverse movement, the image fatally diminishes, its two halves drawn together by an irresistible nothingness — like a candle placed on a heated stove, which shrinks as it liquefies silently at its base, which is also the thought of its double reflected in the melted wax. Faced with this abominably natural event that monopolizes all of our attention, the question of the reality or of the virtuality of the halves of this moving unity pale in consciousness, fades to the thresholds of memory.
The experience is absolute; a demonstration is made of the presence of an incomplete reality to which its image is opposed by the intervention of a motor element condensing the real and the virtual into a superior unity.
Whether it involves the emergence on stage of the mirror and its movement, of the thread spinning the top, or the expressive reflex of the organism, we seize on the same law, which is condensed in this ancient formula:
OPPOSITION IS NECESSARY
SO AS TO MAKE THINGS
AND FORM A
THIRD REALITY.
Hans Bellmer. Study for l’anatomie de l’image, 1950. Pencil on paper; 46.5 x 29.5 cm.
Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer. His novels are: The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012). He has translated books, including Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2017; 2020), Belgium Stripped Bare (2019), and Paris Spleen (2021). In 2016, he published the hybrid book Shattering the Muses (2016), a collaboration with visual artist Federico Gori. Hanshe is the founder of Contra Mundum Press and Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. He is at work on a new book called Closing Melodies.
