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Luca Signorelli. the Damned. 1499–1504

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Luca Signorelli. the Damned. 1499–1504 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00339/1754243/octo_a_00339.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Luca Signorelli. The Damned. 1499–1504. Sign/or/Sigm: Freud and the Name of Signorelli Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00339/1754243/octo_a_00339.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 HUBERT DAMISCH The following text is a version of the lecture that Hubert Damisch gave at Cornell on December 5, 1972, when he was a Fellow of the Society of the Humanities. This was his first essay addressing the Freud-Signorelli case, and it can be considered the nucleus of his article “Le maître, c’est lui (He Is the Master),” published in Savoir et Clinique in 2010, and more generally of the work that was to remain in manuscript, La machine d’Orvieto. Several parts of this text directly echo the exchanges between Damisch and Schapiro that we are publishing here. Indeed, Damisch sent a typescript version of the lecture to Schapiro on January 6, 1973, asking for his comments prior to its expected revision and publication as an article in the journal Diacritics. In spite of a certain amount of back-and-forth between Damisch and the journal’s editor, Philip Lewis, the piece was never published. The version that we publish here is the one that was corrected by Lewis and that is conserved today in the Damisch archives. All notes are by the editors. Freud’s celebrated lapse of memory on the name of Signorelli occupies a very special place in the analytical literature. On the one hand, the analysis of the forgetting of the proper name of the famous Italian painter, the exposition of the circumstances, the uncovering of the motivations of the disturbance, serve as an opening, as an overture, for one of Freud’s most important works—maybe his most popular one—The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (hereafter abbreviated PP).1 On the other hand, if most of Freud’s followers are fascinated by the lucid- ity of the analysis, as well as by its resonances and the range of its harmonics, its overtones, but also, if one may say so, its under-tones, many readers feel pretty uncomfortable with it. Merleau-Ponty, who was one of the first French philoso- phers to get deeply involved in reading Freud,2 publicly recognized, at the end 1. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1960). Henceforth SE. 2. Although Merleau-Ponty did not devote a specific study to psychoanalysis, he did approach it in various texts such as “Le philosophe et son ombre” (1953), in Eloge de la philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, collection Idées, 1965), pp. 241–87; “Le doute de Cézanne” (1945), in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 13–33; “L’homme et l’adversité” (1951), in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), OCTOBER 167, Winter 2019, pp. 130–148. © 2019 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 132 OCTOBER of his life, that he never really accepted the Signorelli “business,” which, accord- ing to him, was nothing but a pun; not even a joke, but a simple pun on words, if not on letters.3 But if one would like to measure the change that has taken place in French thought during the last ten or fifteen years, such a statement could serve as a milestone. For we are beginning to understand—I should say we are rediscovering—that a pun, a simple play on words and letters, may be a very seri- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00339/1754243/octo_a_00339.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 ous affair, that we may learn a lot from it, that it can have deep implications, not only psychoanalytical but anthropological ones, in the largest sense of the word. To sum up the aim of my investigation, I would like to use Freud’s account of the forgetting of the name of Signorelli as an introduction to the deciphering, to the interpretation, of Signorelli’s work, and more generally as an introduction to the problem of deciphering and interpretation in the field of visual art. The task is ambitious, and at this point I can only attempt to introduce the topic, I am afraid in a rather superficial way, dealing first of all with the forgetting of the name and some of its theoretical implications. Freud gave three different accounts of the incident, which occurred during the summer of 1898. The first, a very brief one, is to be found in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, dated September 22, where, in conclusion, Freud expresses his concern: “How can I make this seem credible to anyone?”4 Strangely enough, the letter does not mention a paper Freud was writing at this time, and which he sent a few days later to the editors of the Monatschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, where it was to be published under the title “The Mechanism of Forgetfulness.”5 This paper provides us with a very detailed account and interpretation of the distur- bance, as well as with a good deal of information and several remarks which are not to be found in the first chapter of the PP, which is introduced as a résumé of the paper of ’98, as we shall call it. During the summer holidays, Freud went for a carriage drive from Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), on the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic, to a town nearby in Herzegovina, the name of which we are not told. His fellow traveler was a lawyer from Berlin (Freyhau).6 During the trip, the conversation centered on the condi- tions of life in the two countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which at this time were pp. 284–348; in his preface to Angelo Hesnard, L’oeuvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde moderne (Paris: Payot, 1960); and again in Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1979). 3. Damisch was a student of Merleau-Ponty’s at the Sorbonne and could well have heard this idea expressed. 4. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1895–1904, ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985), pp. 326–27. 5. “Zum psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit,” Monatschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie 4, no. 6 (1898), pp. 436–43. English edition: “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” SE, vol. 3, pp. 289–97. 6. The typescript has “a Beilanese lawyer (Freyhan),” and this suggests that the transcription was done either from a tape recording or from a (badly read) handwritten copy. In his letter to Schapiro of December 15, 1972, Damisch mentions that he has asked for a typewritten version of his lecture. Freud and the Name of Signorelli 133 part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and the character of their inhabitants. A lit- tle later, the conversation turned “to the subject of Italy and of pictures.”7 Freud then happened to recommend that his companion visit the town of Orvieto in order to see frescoes of the End of the World and the Last Judgment—or, as he qualified them in the PP, the frescoes of the “Four Last Things”8—which decorate one of the chapels in the cathedral. But at this very moment, the name of the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00339/1754243/octo_a_00339.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 painter escaped him, and he could not recall it, although the name was very famil- iar to him. His fellow traveler was of no help. As a result of his efforts, instead of the name Freud was looking for, the names of two other painters, who he knew could not be the right ones, came to mind. In the first place, the name of Botticelli, also a familiar one, and in the second place, that of Boltraffio, a painter Freud knew almost nothing about except that he belonged to the Milanese school. Since Freud, as we learn in the paper of ’98,9 had no access to reference books on his journey, he had to put up with his lapse of memory for several days and suffer the “inner torment” associated with it, a torment which recurred at frequent inter- vals each day, until Freud fell in with a cultivated Italian who freed him from it by telling him the missing name: Signorelli. Freud was immediately able to add the artist’s first name, Luca—the proof, as he underlines it in his letter to Fliess, that “repression was at work and not true forgetfulness.”10 How Freud explained the forgetting of the name of Signorelli and its replacement by the names of Botticelli and Boltraffio is well known, maybe too well known, and in a way which could justify the feeling of uneasiness so strongly expressed by Merleau-Ponty. The idea is that the forgetting of the name was any- thing but a chance event, and that one has to recognize the influence of a motive in the process, the forgetting having been motivated by repression. Before the conversation turned to the highest levels of culture—I mean to the topic of the “voyage to Italy” and of Renaissance painting—Freud talked about some striking peculiarities of the Turks living in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as he had heard them described years before by a colleague who had lived among them as a doctor.
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