The Way of Seeing
Claudia Iddan
“To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something
interesting in an ordinary place [...] I've found that it has little to do
with the things you see and everything to do with how you see them.”
Elliot Erwitt
Through his way of seeing, the photographer seeks to unveil what the image hides within itself. The same goes for the apprehension of an ordinary place, by transforming it, I would say, according to the expression of Walter Benjamin, into a “dialectical image”.[1] This image serves as a reading tool for identifying the most intimate aspects of what surrounds us, of a lived situation, beyond what we see. The emphasis here is on how we see – that is, on how we read.
Laure Naveau, in her excellent text, “Beauty and Modesty,” highlighted the relationship between ethics and aesthetics coupled with “well-saying” [bien dire] in general, and more specifically with the atrocities of war.[2] “What cannot and must not be seen is nevertheless exposed in an unprecedented jouissance of transgression. There are no aesthetics in war,” she said. The place of images during a war and their visual capturing indeed take centre stage. As a result, they necessarily call for the intervention of the well-said. And veiling “what cannot and must not be seen” constitutes one way of assuming responsibility when it comes to what is said. This is also the psychoanalyst’s responsibility both in his or her own practice and on the social level, especially in times of crisis.
Well-saying therefore implies a way of seeing, coupled, of course, with the adoption of an ethical position: where the gaze is involved, it is a matter of ensuring that the obscene or the abject is separated from what is desirable – civil rights, for example. This boundary between the obscene and the desirable is established through interpretation-speech and the act in presence in order to break and thwart the fascinating capture of images.
But when we evoke the atrocities of war, we sometimes, rather than covering them with a symbolic veil, deny them, even to the point of erasing the image of the irruption of the real. Is this some kind of negative hallucination or a radical denial? I would lean towards denial insofar as the latter is intimately associated with destruction, with the death drive that elides the image, whilst also responding to an obvious way of seeing. The ideological position of negationism is a clear example of this, which is based on the mechanism of denial: “fake news” or “it didn't happen!”
Freud's own experience on the Acropolis, and his anguish at going beyond the father, can help us see negationism as precisely the opposite of the Freudian position. Freud questions himself, he is anguished. In negationism there are no questions, no anguish, only hidden terrorism. It is nothing more than a masked way of going beyond the father, nothing more than a hypnotisation under the One of a cosmovision that denies the brutal transgression that is taking place. Is this elision, which conceals the irruption of a real, just a different version of the silent sacrifice to the Dark Gods? What is the psychoanalyst’s responsibility in this regard? It seems to me that, among all the possible positions, the one that consists in remaining silent is undoubtedly the worst, and is, moreover, contrary to the heretic’s position proposed by Lacan.
REfErences
[1] Benjamin W., Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle : Le livre des Passages, Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2006, p. 478.
[2] Naveau, L., “Beauty and Modesty,” available on the Congress Blog: https://www.nlscongress2024.amp-nls.org/blogposts/beauty-modesty-naveau« Pour moi, la photographie est un art de l’observation. Il s’agit de trouver quelque chose d’intéressant dans un endroit ordinaire […] J’ai trouvé que cela a peu à voir avec les choses que vous voyez et tout à voir avec la façon dont vous les voyez. »