Luca Signorelli. the Damned. 1499–1504

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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),

of his life, that he never really accepted the Signorelli “business,” which, according 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 disturbance, 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 little 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 familiar 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 anything 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. According to this friend, the Turks used to treat doctors with special respect, and at the same time, to quote Freud, “they show, in marked contrast to our own people, an attitude of resignation towards the dispensation of fate.”11 Here we have to observe some sort of a shift, a more or less deliberate one, in Freud’s enuncia- tion. For the Turks were not to be opposed to the Viennese people with respect only to their attitude towards fate, but first with respect to their attitude towards doctors. Freud’s readers are familiar with this constant complaint about the scornful attitude of Viennese society towards doctors, especially when they were

7. Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” p. 290. 8. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 2. 9. Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” p. 291. 10. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 326–27. 11. Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” p. 292. 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

Signorelli. The Resurrection of the Flesh. Circa 1500. Freud and the Name of Signorelli 135

Jewish and psychiatrists. But we also know of his long wait for the title of Herr Professor, which motivated numerous dreams as well as disturbances that are related in The Interpretation of Dreams and the PP.12 But let us go back to the Turks. If the doctor has to inform the father of a family that one of his relatives is about to die and that nothing can be done, the reply is “Herr (Sir), what is there to be

said? (Was ist es zu sagen?) If he could be saved, I know you would have saved 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 him.”13 The answer as it appears in the letter to Fliess differs from the one given in the two other accounts. In place of “What is there to be said?” we find: “What is there to be done?” (Was ist es zu machen?),14 which means that between the first brief account of the incident and the more elaborate one, there was a significant shift, from doing to saying, from action to speech: If there is nothing to be done, then there is nothing to be said. According to Freud, we have already met with several words and names— Bosnia, Herzegovina, Herr—which can be inserted into an associative series between Signorelli, Botticelli, Boltraffio. The link is evident for the syllable Bo. Insofar as Herr is concerned, we need a supplementary detour. For Herr is the German equivalent to the Italian signor. And here we first have to deal with that kind of pun or word game which irritated Merleau-Ponty. But we have to be very attentive and not pretend to escape the game: For the very problem of translation is of crucial importance in the matter of psychoanalysis and with respect to unconscious processes. We learn from the Studies on Hysteria that patients who do not master a foreign language are often able, during a crisis, to speak it fluently.15 The same with the dream: One may find in The Interpretation of Dreams some very striking examples of verbal or grammatical errors in dreams which are immediately corrected by the dreamer himself.16 In the Signorelli case, Freud insists, at least in the paper of ’98, that the process had been made easier by the fact that during the last few days he had been speaking Italian continuously—that is, that he had become accustomed to translating German into Italian in his head. In this regard, we may observe that a slip of the tongue, as well as a dream, appears as an enigma, condensed into the briefest moment: But this is because it is in fact a psychical product which has been prepared for a long time, precisely in the same way that Freud was prepared to repress the word signor in the name Signorelli because of the longtime associations with the coveted and respected title Herr, Herr Professor, and his constant practice of translating from German into Italian in the days that preceded the Signorelli incident. But of course there is much more in the Signorelli case than such a simple association. Freud observes that immediately after telling his companion about the

12. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE, vol. 4–5. 13. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 3. 14. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 326–27. 15. Freud, Studies in Hysteria, SE, vol. 2, pp. 4–5. 16. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. 11–12. 136 OCTOBER

Turks’ resignation toward death, he wanted to tell him a second anecdote which lay close to the first in his memory: The same Turks who accept death (at least the death of their relatives) with such resignation attach an overriding importance to sexual enjoyment, to such an extent that in the event of sexual disorders, they are plunged into a despair which contrasts strangely with their resignation towards the

threat of death. In this case the answer they give to the doctor (the doctor who 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 does not know what to do?) is anything but resigned: “Herr, you must know that if that comes to an end, then life is of no value.”17 But Freud did not dare to allude in a conversation with a stranger to this topic, this “delicate” topic, as it is termed in all the editions of the PP anterior to the one of 1924. When he remembered these two stories on his drive to Herzegovina, he suppressed the second one, in which the subject of sexuality was touched upon. But, as he pointed out in the paper of ’98, he did more: He also diverted his attention from pursuing thoughts which might have arisen in his mind through the association “Death and Sexuality,” that is, of death as related to sexuality, of sexuality related to death.18 In the paper of ’98, Freud insists that this topic was intimately bound up with trains of thought which were in a state of repression in him, that is, with trains of thought which, in spite of the interest taken in them—I would say, in spite of the interest of such a move “beyond the pleasure principle”—were meeting with a resistance that was keeping them from becoming conscious.19 In the same paper, we learn from Freud himself that he had, at that time, plenty of evidence, derived from his own self-investigation, that this was true of the topic of death and sexuality. No allusion is made to this in the PP, in which Freud only points out a further consequence of these repressed thoughts.20 On this occasion he was still under the influence of a piece of news which had reached him a few weeks before, while he was staying at Trafoi, in the Tyrol: A patient in whom he had taken a great deal of interest had just committed suicide “on account of an incurable sexual disorder,”21 apparently preferring, as a Turk might have done, death to the acceptance of such a disgrace. According to this repressed thought, the second substitute name, Boltraffio, is not to be related only to Bosnia but calls for a further determination, if not for an overdetermination: The name Trafoi was too much like the second half of the name Boltraffio not to have had a determining effect on his (unconscious) choice. We are now prepared to understand the schematic diagram through which Freud attempted to reproduce the relations he brought to light between the forgotten name, the substitute names, and the names or words contained in the repressed topic. We have to observe that we cannot draw any conclusion from this

17. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 3. 18. Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” p. 292. 19. Ibid., p. 294. 20. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, pp. 4–5. 21. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 3. Freud and the Name of Signorelli 137 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

Sigmund Freud, Signorelli diagram. 1898.

diagram concerning the second half of the name Signorelli, the syllables elli which reappear in Bottic-elli, the forgotten name being only fully obliterated with the second substitute name, where nothing remains of it, Boltraffio. But before we deal with this precise point, we must discuss the very conclusion that Freud drew from his analysis. Not so much the conclusion that he had repressed something, and that what he wanted to forget was not the name of the artist but something else. The point I would first like to discuss is the following: Can we accept Freud’s explanation according to which, in the Signorelli case, a topic that has just been raised was disturbed by the preceding one?

***

In order to discuss this point, I must now introduce a consideration, to which a prominent place is given in the account of ’98 but which in the PP was to be rele- gated to a footnote in the second chapter of the book, the one devoted to the analysis of the “aliquis” case. The fact is that when the name of the painter escaped him, Freud reviewed all the details of the day he spent in Orvieto and convinced himself that not the smallest part of it had been obliterated or become indistinct. On the contrary, he was able to conjure up the pictures with greater sensory vividness than was usual with him: “I saw before my eyes with especial sharpness the artist’s self-portrait—with a serious face and folded hands—which he has put in a corner of one of the pictures, next to the portrait of his predecessor in the work, 138 OCTOBER

Fra Angelico da Fiesole.”22 When Freud was told the name of the painter and immediately remembered his first name, Luca, soon “the ultra-clear memory of the master’s features, as depicted in his portrait, faded away.”23 In the paper of ’98, no explanation was given of the phenomenon, which is presented as a substitute memory in the PP,24 where it is introduced in a footnote in order to suggest the

possibility that the appearance of any kind of substitutive formation, be it verbal or 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 visual, is a constant sign—even though perhaps only a characteristic, a revealing, not a constitutive one—of tendentious forgetfulness motivated by repression. In the Signorelli case, we thus would have to deal with two different sets of substitute memories. A verbal one, on the one hand, the substitute names belonging to the same specific order as the forgotten name: Botticelli and Boltraffio are both names of painters, and of painters of the Italian Renaissance. On the other hand, we would have a visual substitute memory, the memory, according to the PP, not only of the self-portrait of the artist (no mention being made anymore of Fra Angelico) but of the entire set of frescoes. In the first register, the verbal one, substitution operates through displacement from one name to another in a homoge- neous denominative series. In the second case, substitution would be produced by passing from one element, from one register, the verbal one, to another one, the visual or the perceptive one. Such passing, or, in the literal sense, such a translation, such a move, implies, as we saw, an intensification of the visual memory-traces which were, in Freud’s terms, “ultra-clear,” at any rate much more intense than visual memory-traces normally appeared to him, the quasi-hallucinatory character of such a memory being underlined in the paper of ’98: “I saw before my eyes with especial sharpness the artist’s self-portrait—with a serious face and folded hands.”25 Which means that Freud, at this time, was able to observe the image his memory produced, a very strange opportunity with respect to the generally accepted notion of a mental image—even if of a quasi-hallucinatory nature. For according to Freud himself, “the most vivid memory is always distinguishable both from a hallucination and from an external perception.”26 But now we have to ask how these two series, these two registers, the verbal one and the visual one, were related, how they interplayed, how they functioned in relation to one another. The intensification of the visual memory, which lasted as long as the painter’s name remained inaccessible, is evidently to be taken as a symptom: Such an intensification, and the very fact that as soon as Freud was freed from his torment the visual memory faded away, has to be explained. According to Freud, when substitutive formation would occur in cases not marked by the pro- duction of incorrect names, it would then lie in the intensification of an element

22. Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” SE, vol. 3, p. 291. 23. Ibid. 24. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 12, note 2. 25. Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” p. 291. 26. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, SE, vol. 11, p. 20. Freud and the Name of Signorelli 139

closely related to the forgotten name. And this was of course the case with the ultra-clear memory of the painter’s features as a correlative to the forgetting of his proper name. But can we accept this as an “explanation” of the process of intensification of the visual memory-traces, of their quasi-hallucinatory character? The question cannot be bypassed, since Freud significantly acknowledged in another

footnote that he was not entirely convinced of the absence of any internal connec- 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 tion between the two groups of thoughts in the Signorelli case.27 According to the paper of ’98, “the affinity between their content—in the one case, the Last Judgment, ‘Doomsday,’ and in the other, death and sexuality—seems to be very slight.”28 But the footnote in the PP proceeds differently: “After all, if the repressed thoughts on the topic of death and sexual life are carefully followed up, one will be brought face to face with an idea that is by no means remote from the topic of the frescoes at Orvieto.”29 Death and sexuality, death viewed in relation to sexuality, sexuality viewed in relation to death, as illustrated by the Turks’ resignation towards death (“Herr, what is there to be said?”), which contrasts with their despair in the event of impotence, the opposition of death and sexuality and the final triumph of death over sexuality, or, to put it in more accurate terms, the view of life as related to sexual activity, and of death as related to the decay, the disorders of it, introduces us to a set of ideas which took an explicit form only in Freud’s later writings, but which were evidently at work, “beyond the pleasure principle,” from the very beginning of his inquiry on psychical functioning. But this remark on the topic of Death and Sexuality would also provide us with a key for the interpretation of the Orvieto frescoes, a key which has not yet been applied, not even by Freud himself. And this very fact, in its turn, is symptomatic. For if there was any relation between the repressed train of thought on the topic of death and sexual life (that “delicate” subject) and the topic of the frescoes, then the turning of the conversation between Freud and his fellow traveler to the subject of Italy and of paintings no longer looks accidental. It appears not so much as a change in the subject of the conversation as a change of field, a change of register: a shift from the ethnographic field to the artistic one, there, of course, to a field of noble sublimation (Schapiro30), but first of all, a register in which thoughts may be exposed to the same transformation to which they are submitted in dreams: the transformation, or regression, of thoughts into visual images—[through] which transformation or regression allows repressed thoughts to find their way out, to be expressed. In a way, we may say that before the forgetting of the name Signorelli took place, the first effect of repression was this move from one field, from one register, to another, and this formal transformation of a certain train of thought into a set of images, that is, into a set of visual memory-traces.

27. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 13, note 1. 28. Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” p. 292. 29. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 13, note 1. 30. Damisch is referring to remarks made by Schapiro in letter 1. 140 OCTOBER

We are now ready to accept the “ultra-clear” character of the memory-traces as the revealing sign of tendentious forgetfulness motivated by repression, but in rather a different sense than Freud. When the artist’s name escaped him, Freud was able to recollect all the details of the day he spent in Orvieto, and to conjure up the pictures with much greater sensory vividness than was usual with him. The lapse of memory did not occur on this level, in the visual order. If we were to 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 accept any internal connection between the repressed thoughts and the subject of the frescoes, we would then have to relate the vividness of the visual memory- traces to repression in a different way: in the way in which dreamwork, and first of all regression or the transforming of thoughts into visual images, is an effect of resistance which does not allow thoughts to become conscious through normal channels. During waking life, regression does not go beyond visual memory- traces: It does not have the power to return to life, in the hallucinatory mode, to perceptive images. On the other hand, visions or hallucinations are nothing but regressions, which mean thoughts, repressed thoughts, effectively transformed into images. And we may interpret in this sense the quasi-hallucinatory presence, the quasi-hallucinatory vividness, of the memory-traces of the Orvieto frescoes as the manifestation of regression, as an effect of repression.31 But if so, these are not the names—Botticelli, Boltraffio—which play the role of a substitutive formation by the very forgetting of the name Signorelli and the sustained efforts towards remembering it, rediscovering it. After all, as Freud pointed out in the paper of ’98, the best procedure for getting hold of the missing name is just not to think of it. But one knows how difficult it is, in fact, to divert one’s attention from the search for the missing name. Whereas very few people, unless specially trained, are ready to admit to having made a slip of the tongue, one always feels preoccupied with the missing of a proper name, to a degree which cannot be explained by the relative unimportance of the whole affair. And when the missing reappears, “shoots” into one’s mind, then “one cannot prevent oneself from calling it out aloud—to the great astonishment of one’s companion, who has already forgotten the episode and who has in any case only taken very little interest in the speaker’s efforts. ‘Really,’ he is apt to say, ‘it makes no difference what the man is called; only go on with your story.’”32 But what the man was called made a great difference to Freud: for going on with his story was precisely what he wanted to avoid, as well as tracing the link between the repressed train of thought and the expression it had found through regression. During the interval between the forgetting of the name and its redis- covery, a very strange interplay took place: the search for the missing name rein- forcing the stressing of the related element (the artist’s self-portrait) in the quasi- hallucinatory mode, and reciprocally, the search for the name diverting Freud’s

31. In all of this, Damisch bases his discussion upon chapters 6 and 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams. 32. Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” p. 290. Freud and the Name of Signorelli 141

mind from the thoughts related to the topic of the frescoes. On the one hand, the ultra-clear memory prevented the return of the name, the work of repression manifesting itself through the transformation (the regression) of repressed thoughts into visual images, the intensity of which was the proof that the process of condensation of the whole set of psychic connections was successful. But, on

the other hand, the desire to recall the proper name, the search for it, protected 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 Freud against the violence of the painted text, which, by being set or fixed in a quasi-hallucinatory way, by being kept mute, silent, was deprived of any access to speech, of any possibility of having an echo, a reverberation, a consequence, in the register of language: “Herr, there is nothing to be said”; which does not mean that there was nothing to be done. That device afforded Freud a protection comparable to that which he experienced on a similar occasion, in a case of misread- ing having to do with the matter of being promoted to the position of Herr Professor, when he was diverted from thinking of his brother Alexander (who received this title before him) by trying to rediscover a passage concerning Alexander the Great in a history of art.33 The device, as Freud points out, was entirely successful, as it was in the Signorelli case. But the search for the name Signorelli also responded to a cultural theme. At the time of the incident, art history was turning more and more into connoisseur- ship; it was becoming more and more involved with problems of attribution, of denomination.34 Freud was well informed on this, as we know from his essay on Michelangelo’s Moses, where he pays tribute to the “prince of connoisseurs,” Giovanni Morelli.35 (And here I would like to take note of an observation made by Meyer Schapiro in one of the many letters we exchanged on the Signorelli case: When wondering if Freud had read Morelli’s book in which the Orvieto frescoes are praised as the greatest of their kind, the name of the painter for a moment came to his mind as “SigMorelli,” a funny piece of overdetermination on his part, yet possibly significant for Freud himself.)36 In Freud’s text, it is always the “connoisseur” who speaks. The disturbance is a connoisseur’s disturbance. If the names Botticelli and Boltraffio were immediately rejected by his judgment as incorrect, that was because Freud knew they could not be the right ones; and when he learned the name from somebody else, he immediately recognized it, without any hesitation. The reference books (the art histories of Alexander’s case), the cultural apparatus, being inaccessible, he had to wait for a cultivated Italian to be freed. Immediately the first name came back, proof that it was not true forgetfulness, proof that there was no lack in Freud’s cul-

33. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 108. 34. On this question, see Damisch’s article that had appeared two years previously, “Le gardien de l’interprétation,” Tel Quel 44 (Winter 1971), p. 70–84, and 45 (Spring 1971), pp. 82–96. 35. “The Moses of Michelangelo,” SE, vol. 13, p. 222. 36. Damisch is referring here to letter 1. 142 OCTOBER

ture (Luca being associated with the German Lücke,37 which means hole, void, hia- tus, etc.). The turning of the conversation to the subject of the Voyage in Italy and to Renaissance painting allowed Freud to reintroduce the topic of death (if not of death and sexuality) as a cultural topic. It gave him the opportunity to introduce it, in the beginning of the PP, as a cultural theme, the question being, it seems, how to reduce 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 death to a problem of culture, how to conjure it away through some sort of second inscription, no longer an instinctual but a cultural one.38 But as soon as the theme was introduced, the forgetting of the name induced a new switch, from the work to the author, from images to names. A switch which is typical of our culture, a culture tied down to the order of names: When the name is given, there is no longer room for images. In the same way as visual images were first substituted for repressed thoughts, the search for the name prevented the thoughts which were latent in the painted text from finding their way out. The name becomes the index of the refusal of the text, and at the same time the index of that which, in a work of art, does not belong to the text, the distinctive mark of the individual. A derisive mark, since the connoisseur pretends to be able to identify a picture by looking at unnoticed features, such as the contour of an ear or the shape of a fingernail, in the same way as analysis proceeds from discarded details in speech or conduct. But if so, if when the name is lacking (Lücke, Luca) visual memory starts to function in a quasi-hallucinatory way, it is the sign that in the normal order of things, or, better, in the normal order of names, visual memory is restrained in its functioning: If the cultural order [is to] be disturbed through the pressure of the drive toward death as well as the sexual drive, then the search for the names is apt to prevent any further development in analysis. Something has to be done in order for nothing to be said.

***

The very idea of an opposition between visual and auditive memory-traces is to be found in another passage, which had been added to the PP in 1907, and in which Freud observes that remembering in adults makes use of a variety of psychical materi- al: “Some people remember in visual images; their memories have a visual character. Other people can scarcely reproduce in their memory even the scantiest [visual]39 outlines of what they have experienced. Following Charcot’s proposal, such people are called auditifs and moteurs in contrast to the visuals. In dreams these distinctions disappear: we all dream predominantly in visual images. But this development is simi- larly reversed in the case of childhood memories: they are plastically visual even in people whose later function of memory has to do without any visual element.”40 It is clear that the development which is reversed in dreams or in childhood memories is

37. See letters 2, 3, and 29. 38. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 4. 39. Damisch is adding the word “visual,” which is not in Freud’s original text. 40. Ibid., p. 46. Jean-Martin Charcot’s formulation of this idea can be found in his “Douzième leçon du Polyclinique du mardi 29 janvier 1889” in Leçons du mardi à la Salpetrière (Paris, 1889), p. 250. Freud and the Name of Signorelli 143

not, as suggested in the Standard Edition, the development of the distinctions proposed by Charcot, but corresponds to one of Freud’s more constant thoughts, one which is of a great interest for us, according to which “thinking in pictures [. . .] stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.”41

Visual memory accordingly preserves the infantile type of memory, Freud insisting 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 that, in his own case, “the earliest childhood memories are the only ones of a visual character: they are regular scenes worked out in plastic form, comparable only to representations on the stage.”42 We thus cannot ignore the relation between the ultra-clear character of the memory of the Orvieto frescoes and what Freud says about childhood memories. But we must be attentive to still another feature: “In these scenes of childhood, whether in fact they prove to be true or falsified, what one sees invariably includes oneself as a child, with a child’s shape and clothes. The circumstance must cause surprise: in their recollections of later experiences adult visuals no longer see themselves.”43 In his recollection of the Orvieto frescoes, what Freud saw before his eyes did not include himself as a child. Somebody else was on the stage, dressed in Renaissance clothes: the painter himself, whose self-portrait appears like a sign-ature in the corner of one of the scenes, the most theatrical one, the one of the predication of the Antichrist. Before concluding, we have to return to the series of the three substitute names (three, since now we know that even the name of Signorelli was a substitute)—not at all in order to pretend to trace in Freud’s personal history the deep- est motivations of the lapse of memory, but on the contrary, avoiding “psycholo- gy,” in order to enter the play of another text.44 Not the text of the man Freud, a man who we know had many reasons to avoid the topic of death and sexuality, but, proceeding in the opposite direction, the direction towards which the PP is orient- ed. For in this book disappears every allusion to the secret motivations of the disturbance, the evidence of which was provided by Freud’s self-investigation. If The Interpretation of Dreams was tied to Freud’s self-analysis, was the product of it, or, better—to put it in the terms of the preface to the second edition—was part of it, this was not at all the case with the PP, where Freud clearly expresses his concern in dealing with other sources of information, and more objective ones; such concern for objectivity being of crucial importance in the analysis of the lapses of memory, slips of the tongue, etc., insofar as, according to the Metapsychology, one should judge all the actions and manifestations that he cannot relate to the rest of his psychic life as belonging to another person.45

41. “The Ego and the Id,” SE, vol. 19, p. 21. 42. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 47. 43. Ibid. 44. Damisch here uses the term text in the sense that Derrida uses it in Of Grammatology (1967), corrected edition, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 158; and in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 45. Damisch is paraphrasing Freud, “The Unconscious,” in On the History of the Psychological Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, in SE, vol. 14, p. 169: “All the acts and manifesta- 144 OCTOBER

A moment ago, we played a very controversial game, when cutting the word sign-ature in two, in order to bring to light the first four letters, corresponding to the first four letters of the name Sign-orelli. But we were trained in this game by Freud himself. According to him, in the disturbance, “the name Signorelli has undergone a division into two pieces, the second pair of syllables (elli) recurring without alteration

in the first substitute name, Bottic-elli.”46 We could invoke another determination in 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 this direction: the very name of Freud’s fellow traveler, Freyhau, the three first letters of which, by the way, correspond to the three first letters of Freud’s own name. Frei hau in German would mean something like “free cutting” or “free sorting out.” But the game has to be played to its most extreme consequences, as soon as one observes—and I am surprised that it has never been recognized—that the three names: SIGNORELLI (1) BOTTICELLI BOLTRAFFIO are all names of four syllables, and first of all are names of ten letters. The observation is of great relevance for our topic, since it suggests that the entire process takes place in the literal register, dans l’ordre de la lettre: the entire process, and first, repres- sions. The recovering intervenes in the order of the letter, each syllable, each letter being obliterated in its turn, the process being completed only with the third name. Equal number of syllables, equal number of letters, but also equal number of consonants, equal number of vowels. And with this, still, that in the first and second names we have to do with an identical distribution of the consonants and vowels, as well as with an identical set of vowels, the sequence of which is nearly the same, with the exception of the reversal of the first two ones (IOEI/OIEI). But let us go on. Starting with the hypothesis that the recurring of ELLI in the second name and its obliteration in the third one have to be taken into consideration, we will play the game of free-cutting, of free sorting out, translating freely, furthermore, from Italian into German and even into Latin or Greek.

(2) SIGN OR ELLI BOTT ICELLI (The one who signs is this one [Icelli]) Elli = Egli = Ei quest’huomo = this man: used as a subject—to be still more effective, the subject has to be placed after the verb.

(3) BOTT / ICELLI Bot: past definite of bieten: to offer, to propose, to declare, to accuse. Who talked, who proposed, who declared, who accused?

tions which I notice in myself and do not know how to link up with the rest of my mental life must be judged as if they belonged to someone else: they are to be explained by a mental life ascribed to this other person.” 46. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, p. 4. Freud and the Name of Signorelli 145

This one (Icelli) or that one (or elli)? Der Bote: the mailman, the man who brings the letters.

(4) SIGN / OR / ELLI OR OR VIETO (vieto, Dante, for invecchiato, the one who has gotten old, a theme related 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 to the repressed thoughts) OR VIETATO (prohibited) OR VIETANO a charlatan’s medicine OR Pheus H (OR) a Tius OR Gasm OR Chis (testicle) OS, oris: mouth (the mouth of hell) But also: the Organ of speech (OR / A / TIO) the expression of the face, hence, the mask. (orao): to see, the look at, to understand.

(5) SIGNOR / ELLI He is the master. The ultimate master, the ultimate Herr, the master of Hell, as Orpheus invokes him in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the scene being illustrated in the decor of the chapel. But also: the one who has mastered the idea, if not the vision of death: the Turkish Father. But also: Signorelli himself, who, according to Vasari, one of his sons, the one he loved the most, having been slain in Cortona, asked the people to undress the corpse and, with extraordinary strength of mind, and without complaining or crying, started to paint him, because he wanted to see forever, through the work of his own hands, that which nature had given him and which adverse fate had taken away from him.

(6) BOL / TRAFF / IO Traf. past definite of trefen: in German— to strike, to hit the target (he is the master, but I hit the target) Meyer Schapiro observes that in Yiddish, “tref” means unclean, forbidden (vietato) food, the opposite of “kosher.” He is a master, I am unclean.

(7) SIGNOR / ELLI BOTTIC / ELLI BOLTRAFF / IO Io (I, me), in place of him (elli), him (elli) in place of io (I, me). Him or me 146 OCTOBER

(Io/or/elli). Who is to be on the stage? He or I? I or he?

(8) / ELL I (EI) / IO We are now prepared to understand that this boundary opposition played a

decisive part in the process. But in order to be persuaded of it, let us consider 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 three sets of vowels: (9) IOEI OIEI OAIO The opposition appears already at work in the first name, IO being reversed in the second (OI) and reestablished in the third where IO definitively supplants EI (elli) (IO, corresponding to the reversal from TraffOI to TraffIO). With respect to this last part of the game, we may find some support in Freud’s own dedication to the significance of sequences of vowels. In 1911, Freud explicitly approved Stekel’s assertion that “in dreams and associations, names which have to be concealed seem to be replaced by others that resemble them only in containing the same sequence of vowels.”47 To support this statement, Freud found a striking analogy in the history of religion: “Among the ancient Hebrews the name of God was taboo; it might neither be spoken aloud nor written down. This prohibition was so implicitly obeyed that to this very day vocalization of the four consonants in God’s name (YHVH) remains unknown. It was however, pronounced ‘Jehovah,’ being supplied with the vowels of the word ‘adonai’ (‘lord’) against which there was no such prohibition.”48

(10) jEhOvAh OA (bOltrA) ORAO Cf. the set of four painters who were the predecessors of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel work (as Fra AngelIcO was the predecessor of SignorELLI in Orvieto).

(11) Perug / I (n) O Ghirlanda / IO Bottic / ELLI Signor / ELLI Michelangelo (when asked to paint the ceiling of the Sistine chapel): “The

47. Sigmund Freud, “The Significance of Sequences of Vowels,” SE, vol. 12, p. 341. 48. Ibid. For Damisch, the ban is overcome by the use of the vowels in adonai, the vowels of the latter serving to supply the missing vowels in the former (the Je in JEhovah = the final I in Adonai, the other two letters are identical). But, as Schapiro points out in letter 29, Damisch is making a mistake here: “The vowels of YEHOVA are not those of ADONAI, except for the O. A look at the Hebrew signs will convince you—I refer to the Hebrew writing or printing with the vowel marks. The AI of Adonai is pronounced OI, a diphthong.” Freud and the Name of Signorelli 147

place is wrong, and no painter I.”49 “Né io pittore [sono]”:50 nor was Freud. And that was, precisely, the point. For it is tempting to trace an analogy between the topic of the frescoes at Orvieto and Freud’s own discoveries, an analogy between the decorative scheme of the chapel and Freud’s own program, as he borrowed it from Goethe: “From heaven, through the world to Hell.”51 But Freud was anything but a painter. Moreover, he 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 was anything but a visuel [visual], in Charcot’s terms. Freud always insisted that as a general rule even his own dreams were altogether less rich in perceptual ele- ments than he imagined those of others to be. Hence the unusual connotation of the memory of the frescoes, at any rate much more intense than visual memory- traces normally appeared to him. But was such a feature only a personal one, did not it have a more general value? When reading Freud’s last great work, Moses and Monotheism,52 one is tempted to give an affirmative answer, and to relate Freud’s peculiar complexion to deeper historical and cultural determinations. We read in Moses and Monotheism that “among the precepts of the Moses religion there is one that is of greater importance than appears to begin with. This is the prohibition against making an image of God. The compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see. Perhaps Moses merely wanted to be consistent: his God would have neither a name nor a countenance. But if this prohibition were accepted, it must have a profound effect. For it meant that a sensory perception was given the second place to what may be called an abstract idea—a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation, with all its necessary psychological consequences.”53 Among these consequences, the characteristic development of the Jewish nature and its inclination to intellectual interests, the Jewish advance in intellectuality. With respect to this, Freud could have felt pretty Jewish. But then, the special interest he always took in painting is to be looked at as quite significant and revealing. And so does the Signorelli incident. For what we are concerned with in this incident is nothing less than the relation between the reign of images and the reign of words. But this topic, in its turn, has to do with the topic of the frescoes. For the very structure of the decor points to the relation between poetry (in the lower register) and images (in the upper register). Images, of course, related to Holy Scripture, but to the only part of it where Revelation did not proceed through the channel of words but through the channel of images, I mean St. John’s Apocalypse. We have been formed by millen- nia of Judeo-Christianity to look at speech as the beginning of all things. This is precisely what we have to question, and the question is of special relevance to the 49. Michelangelo, Sonnet V to Giovanni da Pistoia, in The Sonnets of Michelangelo Buonarroti, trans. Elizabeth Hall (London, 1905), p. 89. 50. Damisch cites here the last words of the sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoia: “I’ ho già fatto un gozzo in questo stento.” 51. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, I, 242. The quotation is to be found in the letter addressed to Fliess on January 3, 1897, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, p. 220. 52. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, SE, vol. 23. 53. Ibid., p. 112. 148 OCTOBER

very matter of art, and art history. For we have been trained by centuries of humanistic culture to look at pictures as illustrative, as derived from speech, from literature, from poetry. A good “illustration” of this is to be found in a poem by William Wordsworth:54 Illustrated Books and Newspapers (composed 1846—published 1850: 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 Discourse was demand Man’s noblest Attribute, And written words the glory of his hand; Then followed Printing with enlarged command For thought—dominion vast and absolute For spreading truth, and making love expand Now prose and verse sunk into disrepute Must lacquey a dumb Art that best can suit The taste of this once-intellectual Land. A backward movement surely have we here. From manhood—back to childhood; for the age— Back towards caverned life’s first rude career. A vaunt this vile abuse of pictured page! Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear Nothing? heaven keep us from a lower stage!”

What we can learn from the Signorelli incident is that the relation between images and words, between painting and speech or discourse, is anything but clear. To conclude, I would like to look back to the two figures to which we allud- ed near the beginning of this essay.55 Two figures who belong to the lower register, the “poetic” register of the decor. One is the supposed figure of the poet Horace. Horace, whose famous simile Ut pictura poesis—“As is painting, so is poetry”—was interpreted in Renaissance times in the reverse sense: As is poetry, so is painting. The second one is the enigmatic figure of the pretended Empedocles, leaning backwards in order to look at the scenes of the upper register. Poetry or painting, poetry and painting, speech or images, speech and images, death or sexuality, death and sexuality, Io or elli, where he was, I must be.

—Translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle

54. William Wordsworth, “Illustrated Books and Newspapers,” in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 6 (London: Edward Moxon, 1846), p. 212. 55. Damisch is probably referring here to an interpolation that was not included in the transcription of the lecture.