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Probing Pictures: Carol Armstrong on Georges Didi-Huberman - Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere - Book Review
ArtForum, Sept, 2003 by Carol Armstrong
Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere, by Georges Didi-Huberman, trans. Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 385 pages. $35.
Two questions had been put to me as I set about reading Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere in translation. (It was published in French twenty-one years ago.) Why did it take so long for Georges Didi-Huberman's book to appear in English? And why had it not been more important to the relatively new discipline of the history of photography in its Anglo-American incarnation? (Or, more positively, what had its importance been?) Rather than answer those "why" questions directly, I thought I would pursue briefly the theme of translation and then look more at length at Invention of Hysteria as a book about photography as much as hysteria, such that its "photographic iconography" portion would be just as important as the headlined part of the title; such that everything said about hysteria and its invention could be translated into a statement about photography and its spread as a medium of documentation, as the modern provider of iconographies.
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The issue of translation is in fact twofold. Perhaps texts like Invention of Hysteria should remain in French. Deconstructionist formulations abound in this book which flow with relative fluidity in French but read peculiarly in English. English, with its immense, polyglot vocabulary and stress on the meanings of individual words--the relation between word and thing as much as between word and word--is simply less suited than French to that kind of play. In English, linguistic sophistication gives way to ludic awkwardness, poststructure to a kind of hysteria, even, in which language wanders, contorts itself, grimaces irrationally, sticks its tongue out, and makes itself up. Perhaps such a text cannot even be seen to be about photography in English, according to the dominant Anglo-American sense of the photograph as datum rather than a particular kind of sign, an aesthetic experience rather than a semiotics, the contested object of art history rather than of literary criticism.
Which brings us to another matter of translation: how to translate a book about hysteria into one about photography. For Invention of Hysteria is much more obviously about hysteria than about photography. Its claims about hysteria--that it was an anxious misogynist concoction; that it construed the female subject as a fundamentally pathological subject; that it did violence to the subjects that it created, objectified, and spectacularized; that as such it gave birth to Freud, the discipline of psychoanalysis, the power of the analyst, and the topic of the unconscious, out of the very regime of positivist empiricism and experimentalism that the unconscious subverts and psychoanalysis inverts--are important for the history of psychology, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic criticism, and feminism. It is as such that the book has been influential. At most, Invention of Hysteria shares some of its topical content with later classics of photography criticism such as Allan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive" of 1986. But Invention of Hysteria is not itself such a classic of new photography criticism.
Nevertheless, Invention of Hysteria is about photography, in a roundabout, subterranean way. Its view of the photograph is eminently Barthesian (which is to say Gallic, not Anglophone): the photographic punctum, the future anterior tense of the photograph, the uncanny irruption of the unconscious in the photograph, the stress on the pose, the facies, and the theatricality of photography, the emphasis on the photograph's indexically based power of certification and at the same time its illegibility, even the feminization of the photograph under the sign of the unheimlich--all of these are concepts from Barthes's Camera Lucida (1980), published just two years before Invention of Hysteria. What Invention of Hysteria gives us is the photographic equivalent of Freud's Dora: the "case" of Augustine, the prima donna of the Salpetriere. And the case of Augustine is emblematic, not only of the photogenic nature of hysteria, as Charcot directed it, but also of Didi-Huberman's theory of the hysterical photograph, which extends Barthes's photographic puncture to cover the umbilical ties between the femininity of hysteria and what we might call the hysterium (the dark womb?) of photography.
In Didi-Huberman's analysis the hysterical female body that Charcot produced with the help of Augustine and her fellow female patients at the Hopital de la Salpetriere was a photogenic version of the old conception of the nomadic uterus--the womb that wandered about the body was understood to be the cause of what was considered a specifically female malady--from which the word "hysteria" derives. That hysteria--that origin of hysteria--was invisible; Charcot's hysteria was written on the face and body, where it could be the object of the positivist experiment. Like Duchenne de Boulogne's 1860s experiments with "expressions induced with electricity" (cited in Invention of Hysteria), in which the apparatus of experimentation is often frankly visible in the photographs that render those expressions, the "photographic iconography" of the Salpetriere consists of one experiment after another in the induction of visible states of hysteria for the purposes of being watched and photographed. Sometimes the experimental apparatus is visible in the photographs, sometimes not--as, for example, when tongs were inserted into Augustine and her inmates to pinch, twist, and torture the uterus, thus reproducing the rape that may have been the origin of her trauma.
