The Unreadable Image

In one of my emails, I pointed out the necessity of understanding psychoanalytic interpretation in a special, non-hermeneutic sense:

"Hermeneutics is oriented toward meaning; in contrast, what Lacan calls interpretation 

"is directed not so much at the meaning as toward reducing the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may rediscover the determinants of the subject’s entire behavior” (212). 

That is, what signifiers are we subjected to despite ourselves? My signifier? The spotlight. The meaning of the spotlight is important, but the spotlight as image is irreducible. Here are some more useful quotes from Lacan that I think indicates how psychoanalyticinterpretation operates: 

“Interpretation is not open to any meaning [. . .] The fact that I have said that the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense, does not mean that interpretation is in itself nonsense [. . .] [interpretation] has the effect of bringing out an irreducible signifier [. . .] What is there is rich and complex, when it is a question of the unconscious of the subject, and intended to bring out irreducible, non-sensical—composed of non-meanings—signifying elements” (250)

"In so far as the primary signifier is pure non-sense, it becomes the bearer of the infinitization of the value of the subject, not open to all meanings but abolishing them all which is different. This explains why I have been unable to deal with the relation of alienation without introducing the word freedom. What, in effect, grounds, in the meaning and radical non-meaning of the subject, the function of freedom, is strictly speaking this signifier that kills all meaning” (252)." 

Thierry de Duve's essay confirms this instruction. Photography resists "reading" in the hermeneutic sense because "“a point is not subject to any description, nor is it able to generate a narration. Language fails to operate in front of the point-pointed space of the photography”; rather,  photography is traumatic in its spatio-temporal form" (57). Photography, as we said, is silent and this is why we might need some captions in a similar fashion to the photographic essay. 

For de Duve, there is a continuous push-pull between melancholy and mania in the photograph. On a pre-symbolic level, our dealing with the photograph oscillates between these two attitudes/affects: "the photography puts the beholder in contact with the world, through a paradoxical object which, because of its indexical nature, belongs to the realm of uncoded things, and in the sphere of codifed signs" (60). This paradoxical object must be held in tension, in "counterpoint" if you will, disallowing any Hegelian synthesis (dialectical resolution).